The twenty-fourth of November. Eight in the morning. The twenty-fourth had become today. Looking beneath the date, I stopped my hand a moment.
For the past four days, beneath the date, one line had filled. A single number. Today it was not one line. Under the date, numbers ran down several lines deep. Counting, there were eleven. Each a different leading digit, each a different ending. They lay side by side, top to bottom, forming a single mass. Not a loose number, but a bundle of numbers. I knew that shape. What I had drawn from the boxes all winter had that shape. It was a roster.
The sender field raising a roster was the first time. Until yesterday it had been one a day, and one came at noon as one. Today eleven hung at once. The two last digits that had risen faintly in the empty receiver column last evening had, over the night, climbed to the topmost cell of the roster. What had been the receiver's seat was now the head of the roster. What kind of roster it received, that head cell seemed to want to say, but with only two digits yet I could not read which department it was.
At noon a roster came down. Not a disposal sheet. A roster of people. The company's second-round restructuring dismissal list was going through the department heads' hands, circling the hall. What had happened once in spring had come again in winter, and this time the width of the cut was said to be broader than spring's. Since the roster was a circular, I too received a sheet for the archive's share and read it. On the paper, names and numbers stood side by side. What I had seen in the sender field that morning was numbers only, but I had memorized those eleven endings.
I laid them over. Running my finger down the paper roster's numbers from the top, I matched them against the morning's eleven lines. Not all overlapped. The paper roster was far longer, dozens of names written across departments. But the eleven lines that had risen in my sender field that morning were, each one, somewhere in that long list. Neither leading digit nor ending was off. The eleven I had read at eight were the eleven of the dismissal list circling at noon. Numbers that had come loose now came in a bundle, and the bundle matched its seats to the actual roster.
Spring's Do-gyeong received a tomorrow-dated roster and read it. I sent a tomorrow-dated roster from the sender field. That what he received I send, I had learned four days before, but its weight differed when it was one person and when it was several. When it was one, I could send it not knowing that one. When eleven rose as a single mass, I saw on the paper that the eleven were seats each with a name. From a seat where one company was disposed, to one person, to several people, the unit of the sender field narrowed and grew exact. The narrower it grew the more exact the seat, and the more exact, the nearer to a face.
One of the eleven numbers was familiar. Not that I knew the name, but I had seen its leading digits several times on the supply-office circulars. It might have been the person who always sat in the same seat in the basement canteen and ladled the broth twice, or the one who pressed the floor button for me in the elevator. I did not know for certain who he was, and had I known for certain I would have held the paper longer. I knew only that his number had passed through my sender field that morning. A number I did not know was a figure; a number I half-knew was not a figure. From the narrowed seat, for the first time, I felt as weight that the sending was heavy.
Whether it became a roster because sent, or an already-drafted roster read in advance, on the fifth day too I could not part. The paper roster would have been drafted before dawn, from above. Management would have set a headcount per department, and to that headcount chosen names. That work would have been done in a meeting room, by human hands, apart from my sender field. If so, I had only read in advance, at eight, a roster already set. Yet the sender field had raised that roster tomorrow-dated, and I sat before it with my fingertip laid on. If it was a set order, it would have been the same had I not sent. If it was a sending, my hand would have lengthened that roster by a line. The two were opposite over the winter of eleven people, yet on the sender field they showed as the same eleven lines.
I did not do as Do-gyeong did. Do-gyeong chose and emptied Kang Min-seok's surround, and to pull one person from a roster filled another line in his place. What he paid for it, I knew, having read the five bundles to the end. Even when the department code filling the roster's head cell looked, in its leading digits, the same as the archive's, I did not carry my hand to the roster. To read and to rewrite were different acts. I chose to remain the one who reads. Even remaining the one who reads was, in this seat, a choice; but at least it was not the road Do-gyeong had already walked once.
In the evening the sender field raised the twenty-fifth. And two more digits filled the roster's head cell. Half the department code was read. The seat that had been two digits in the morning was four by evening, and tomorrow that seat would say in full which department's roster it was. It was yesterday that the receiver's seat had stood empty; today that seat was furnishing itself with a name. I looked a long while at the half-read code. Whichever department, at the end of that roster there would be one person who had read that department's seat and sat before the sender field. That the seat which reads a roster and the seat written into a roster sit on the same form, I had already read in the five bundles. Only, this time it was filling in with the code of my own department. I did not know what number the remaining two digits of the code would fill with over the night, and not knowing, I rose from the seat and turned off the light. Only the sender field's glow blinked alone in the dark, and beneath it the roster waited, unerased, for tomorrow.