The twenty-first of November. Eight in the morning. The tomorrow that had risen in the sending column yesterday was now today.
I had not been able to erase the date overnight. I didn't know which key would erase it, and I had no authority to erase it anyway. The fifth desk was no longer mine, but I sat at it through the night. The sending column's light never went out; it burned steady, and at its center the eight digits from yesterday still stood. Through the night the first six of them stepped over a day and now pointed to today. I sat and watched yesterday's tomorrow become today. The date turned itself over by a day. I had not turned it.
And beneath the date, a line had filled overnight — the place that had stood empty the day before. Yesterday I had seen only the date and written that the roster was blank; today an employee number sat in that blank. Eight digits. I read it. Not mine. Not the head archivist's, not either assistant's. The leading digits were unfamiliar — the number of someone who had never worked in this archive. It had come, surely, from the transfer material that poured in by the boxload once winter set in: some fallen company, some person shaken loose from it.
Who the person was, I had no way of knowing. The boxes that came that winter ran to the dozens, each box to dozens of ledgers, each ledger to hundreds of numbers, and one of them had climbed to the sending column overnight. Why that number, why that person — the sending column didn't say. In a fallen company's ledger a number loses its name and keeps only its digits. A number stripped of its name comes down to this basement, and from this basement climbs again to the sending column. All I knew was that a person had once stood behind it. Whether they had lost their work in spring or in autumn, where they were wintering now — or whether they were wintering at all — the number alone couldn't tell me. What had risen to the sending column was not a person but the number of the post they had left behind.
I hadn't copied the number from anywhere. I hadn't read it out of the receiving column and set it in the sending column either. My fingertip had only brushed the lit cell the day before, and while the night passed the number had come into that place. It was just as the telegraph operator's log had set down. The operator was one who received tomorrow's dispatch; the roster of a day not yet arrived reached his receiver first. Being a receiver, he took it in and read it. Now I was reading it from the sending side. The tomorrow-dated roster the operator used to receive was coming out of my sending column. What he had received, I was sending. Only the direction was reversed.
I lay awake turning that reversal over. A receiver takes in what has not yet come and knows it, and knowing, changes nothing. The operator read his own tomorrow ahead of time, and reading it could not step out of its way. Was the sender any different? If I sent what had not yet come, could I change it by sending? Or was sending the same as reading — sending it and still changing nothing? The night went and I never knew. Only that the number in the sending column stayed where it was all night, and turn it over as I might, it neither dimmed nor grew. As if it were waiting for the sender's hand. As if it were waiting for morning.
By day the number's business arrived. In the afternoon a disposal-classification sheet came down from headquarters: an order to pick out, from the material transferred over the winter, whatever had passed its preservation term, and dispose of it. The company at the head of the sheet was the company of the number that had risen in my sending column that morning. Its last ledger went into the disposal class, dated today. The number I had read in the sending column in the morning and the company I read on the disposal sheet at noon were one and the same. The tomorrow I had sent in the morning arrived, unchanged, by noon. Or — had the morning's thing summoned the noon's, or had the noon's thing, on its way, simply surfaced first in the morning? Again I couldn't tell them apart. Come because sent, or sent because coming. Whether the sending column raising that number in the morning was a summons that called down the disposal, or a foreseeing that had known in advance what would be disposed. The result was the same. That company's ledger was disposed today, and the number was now preserved nowhere.
A winter earlier Do-gyeong had received a tomorrow-dated roster, and that roster was the country's defaulted companies. This winter I sent tomorrow-dated numbers, and those numbers were people about to be disposed of. What she had received were companies about to fall; what I sent were people about to be erased. As the scale narrowed from company to person, the sending grew more exact. A single person erased showed clearer in the sending column than a whole country falling. It wasn't that the large came first and the small later; the smaller the thing, the later it came — and the more sharply. That winter the sending column was accurate down to the single person.
I didn't stamp the disposal sheet. That was the head archivist's work. But since the sending column had raised the number first that morning, stamp or no stamp, I had already laid a hand on the disposal. As Do-gyeong had called down a price by rewriting a single line, perhaps I had hurried a disposal along by sending one. Only, she had rewritten to save someone, and I was trying to save no one. My fingertip had merely touched the lit cell, the night had passed, and in the morning the number was there. With no wish to save and none to destroy, I was sending a person's last line on ahead. A dispatch without intent was no lighter for being without it. To her answer a saving price had attached itself; to my sending no price attached at all — and still the disposal came, exact.
The number's last digit began to dim. The number of the disposed material blurred from its tail, like a receiver's mark. What went unpreserved dimmed, and what dimmed passed over to the receiver's side. The number I had sent in the morning had become, by evening, a dimming line. What was sent was coming back as what is received. And beside it, in the light of the sending column, fresh eight digits rose again. The first six were not today's, this time either — not the twenty-first but the twenty-second. No sooner had yesterday's tomorrow become today than today's sending column put up another tomorrow. Once a place has begun sending, it doesn't stop at one. Sending is the same as receiving: once it starts, it runs on. While tomorrow became today and today called down another tomorrow, the sending column's light did not go out once.