Do Not Answer

The night the rate became a tide that would not ebb and pooled in its cell, I went back to the box. This time I opened the third bundle. The surveyor's shaft log.

I no longer read these bundles out of curiosity. I read them to confirm the shape of the law. The shaft deepened the more it was sounded. The rating descended the more it was read; the rate rose the more it was written. Depth, grade, water — the directions differed, but what grows at the touch of a hand was the same. Yet in the log of the surveyor Paek Nam-su there was one line I had not yet laid over my own.

More lines than surveyors. I laid my hand over that sentence and stayed there a long while. In a shaft that grows in depth, the number of lines cut into the wall was always one greater than the number of surveyors who had been assigned. And that one line was empty. Paek Nam-su knew whose that empty line was — the next man to go down. He could not bring his log to an end beside that empty line. Because the next empty line was his own.

From the records-room cabinet I took the personnel file. To count the discharge lines of those who had passed through this clerk's post — this desk where I now sit. My hands were cold. One line, one person. What Paek Nam-su had done on the shaft wall, I was doing in a personnel file.

The clerks before Do-gyeong. Han Seong-█ — my predecessor. Five above him. And more above those. Tracing the lines down, I counted the people. Six had vanished or been discharged from the records-room desk. But the discharge lines were seven. There was always one line more than people. As on the shaft wall.

The seventh line was empty. The name field, the reason field, all blank. Only in the discharge-date field was a date faintly stamped. I brought it close to the lamp.

The day the reserves reach zero. The rating review date. The day the film wrote between the digits. And now, the discharge date of the seventh person to pass through this desk. As the forty-eighth line on the shaft wall was Paek Nam-su's, the seventh line in the personnel file was — empty, waiting for me. By counting, I had added that one line, and the line I had added was my own.

I remembered that the motto on the credit terminal had also been the motto on the surveyor's machine.

Count six people and seven lines come out. The reckoning was not wrong. The shaft always scored one line more than the surveyors assigned; the personnel file took six away and drew seven lines. The one line of excess was not an error but a law. The one who reads, who counts, who writes — is always that next one line.

I looked again at the name field of the seventh line. In that field, which had been blank, fractured letters were surfacing one apart from another. They had not yet gathered into a single name, but the order of consonants and vowels rising was familiar. It was the order of the three syllables I write each day in the approval box.

To read the shaft was to become the shaft's next line.

The night my name surfaced in the seventh line of the personnel file, I opened the fourth bundle. The one I had put off to the last. The wireless operator's log.

Sin Gyeong-ha. In the autumn of 1937, he kept the night watch alone at a wireless station on a remote headland of the East Sea. His log differed from the other three in one respect. The lighthouse keeper, the surveyor, the librarian — they measured, they wrote, they read. They were on the receiving side. But the operator could send.

In the margin of his handover papers was a single line his predecessor had left.

Do not answer. I looked at those three words a long while. It was a rhyme I had seen before. On the last page of the librarian's log, the warning Father Duncan had left — do not read to the end. The two prohibitions sounded in the same cadence. Do not read. Do not answer. Stop at receiving. Do not lend a hand.

I had already broken the first. In early November I read the librarian's log to the end, and from that day the syllables began to arrive apart. Because I read, it crossed to me. Then the second prohibition — I had not yet broken. The tomorrow-dated cash report the terminal printed, the downgrade that arrived before its announcement, I had only taken down. I had not sent them up, had not corrected them, had sent them to no one. I had not answered.

Sin Gyeong-ha answered. The back pages of the bundle recorded the result. He could not bear the tomorrow-dated dispatches the empty frequency sent. One night he pressed the transmission key. And the answer he sent came back to him, the next day, from that same empty frequency. From the moment he answered, he was not the one receiving but the one sending. The one who transmits tomorrow. The sender on the empty frequency was himself.

A line had been engraved on the nameplate of the wireless set, the predecessor had noted.

What does not sound is heard. A dispatch not yet sent is received. A downgrade not yet announced comes as a notice. A key not yet pressed returns as a sound already rung. I knew it was the same saying as the work of my terminal. My terminal printed tomorrow. Numbers I had not yet entered. What did not sound was already being heard.

Then the temptation was plain. To answer. To send the figures up myself and stop them, so the tomorrow-dated report would be made a lie. To correct the downgrade. To return the breaking exchange inside its dyke. To lend a hand and set all of this right. To one who only takes things down, it was an unbearable temptation — to be told to know, and stay still. Sin Gyeong-ha must have pressed the key for that reason. To stop it. But the answer did not stop it. The answer only made him the sender.

I resolved not to answer. To close the bundle and go back to the post of one who only takes down. Just then the records room's old internal terminal, though I had left it switched off, rang once. A receive indicator lit. From an extension with no sender, a one-line dispatch had arrived.

The dispatch was short. ··· Thank you for the answer. And in the sender field were stamped my three-syllable name and my employee number — when I had not yet pressed a single key.

The next afternoon, Kang Min-seok, an assistant manager from the treasury department, came down to the records room. He came on the pretext of approval papers, but he set the papers on my desk and did not leave for a long while.

"You're down here in the basement, Miss Kim, so you wouldn't know," he said, lowering his voice. "Upstairs it's all anyone talks about. Suspension of business. They say our company will be on the list too."

I set down my pen. Min-seok had joined the company the same year I had. His employee number differs from mine by only two digits. Unlike me, posted to the records room, he had gone to treasury, and so he always breathed the air of the upper floors first. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. He had married last year, his child was born in the spring, and in the autumn he had taken out a loan and bought a home. He said those three things in a single sentence — as if by now they were not three but one weight.

"They say the merchant banks will be suspended one after another. One gets blocked, then the next, then the next. As though the order were already fixed." He gave a hollow laugh. "Doesn't it seem as if someone wrote the list out in advance?"

A list written in advance. The words ran cold down my back. He had said it as a joke, but I was one who had seen that list. The tomorrow-dated cash report, the downgrade notice before its announcement. The order was already fixed. One gets blocked, then the next, then the next — exactly as the surveyor had written it. The next line to wear away always stands empty, waiting for the next man. In the shaft it was a miner; in the personnel file it was me; in the list Min-seok was speaking of now — each company was one line.

And Min-seok was trembling, not knowing where on those lines his own name stood.

"Aren't you afraid, Miss Kim?" he asked. "It's so quiet down here. Upstairs the phones are ringing off the hook."

I could not answer that I was afraid. What I feared was not what he feared. He was afraid the company would be on the list. I was afraid because I knew who was writing the list. And now, looking at his face, I could not stop my eyes from doing their work — I was reading him as a line not yet drawn. The next line to wear away. The more he spoke, the more he seemed to me already faintly stamped in some cell of some ledger.

"I am afraid," I said in the end, only that. It was not a lie.

He smiled, a little reassured. That there was someone who feared the same thing. He left the papers and went up, and I listened to his footsteps on the stairs to the very end. After the footsteps faded, I picked up the approval papers he had left. It was a treasury-department headcount roster. A tally of staff by division, drawn up against the suspension.

I looked at the date it was drawn up, at the top.

It was tomorrow's date. A headcount drawn up on a day I had not yet lived. I looked at the treasury total. And against the count circulated yesterday for today, I compared one figure. The treasury headcount on tomorrow's roster was exactly one fewer than today's.

The law was no longer confined to my desk. The seventh line in the personnel file was a records-room matter. But this roster was a treasury matter, and tomorrow-dated, and one person was already gone from it. I could not find in the roster who the missing one was. Only the total was one less; no name had yet been erased.

But a moment ago, I had listened to the footsteps going up the stairs, to the very end.