The twenty-fifth of November. Eight in the morning. The twenty-fifth had become today, and the roster's head cell was full.
The department code that had been half-read overnight had, through the evening, filled all four digits. I read the four. There was nothing to read. It was the code I stamp on the attendance sheet every morning. The archive. Until yesterday the roster had been eleven lines belonging to no one I knew; this morning, at the head of that roster, stood the name of the department where I sat. The roster I had been sending from the sender field all winter was the archive's roster.
How many of the eleven lines were archive numbers, I did not count. There was no need. If the head cell was the archive, the lines beneath it were seats to be taken from the archive. In spring one seat was cut from Do-gyeong's archive, and I came into that vacancy. In winter the archive was thinning again, and this time it seemed it would not be one seat. I was the hand that sent the roster, and at once a person of the department the roster thinned.
I sat in that seat and turned over the five nights. The first day I pressed the sender field for the first time, and where I pressed a tomorrow-date rose. The second day the sent line arrived on tomorrow's date. The third day, to the one line sent, one line unsent attached itself as a price. The fourth day I sent with the receiver's seat empty, and the fifth day one line became a roster of eleven. The five nights had seemed each a different matter, but this morning I saw them close into one sentence. Answering was sending. To sit before the sender field and lay a fingertip — that was answering, and answering was, at once, the act of sending.
And the act of sending was the act of becoming a sender. I knew the four phrases written in Do-gyeong's journal, having read them in the five bundles. Measure and it deepens; draw and it fills; read and it spreads; answer and it sends. The first three were the roads walked by the sounding-clerk, the lighthouse-keeper and the archivist; the last cell was Do-gyeong's. Do-gyeong answered, and having answered, became a sender. Now I knew what came after that last cell. Answer and you send; send and you become a sender; become a sender and you disappear. The telegraph operator received tomorrow and vanished; Do-gyeong answered and became the one fully read and vanished. As I had come into the seat where Do-gyeong vanished, into the seat where I vanished someone next would come.
That was what I learned today. I was becoming a sender, and that becoming a sender means my own number will lie somewhere in the roster I send — the four digits, the archive, told me so this morning. All winter I had read rosters as others' and sent them. Companies' numbers, people's numbers, numbers of half-known faces. But once the head of that roster became my own department, some one line beneath it was no longer only another's. That the seat that sends and the seat written in sit on the same form, I had read in the five bundles; but to read it, and to have it come as my own department's code, were different weights.
What called what, on the sixth morning too I could not part. Whether the archive rose onto the roster because sent, or the sender field read in advance an archive bound to rise. That question had not answered in five nights, and would not answer today. But what I learned today lay outside that question. What it calls, I did not know; what I was becoming, I could know. Summoning or foreseeing, I was already a sender. To know what answering is, it was not necessary to know whether that answering called or read. The seal remained as a seal, and the knowing came as knowing.
All morning the head archivist and the two assistants worked as on any day. The head archivist picked out boxes past their disposal term; one assistant copied index cards over; the other wound the microfilm. That they were people who held archive numbers, I counted, that morning, for the first time so. How many of the four were within the eleven lines, I did not know, and to know it I did not set the roster against their faces. To set them together was the road to becoming Do-gyeong. Do-gyeong had matched Kang Min-seok's number to a face, and after matching it, filled another seat to empty that one. Since I had resolved not to walk that road, I kept the four faces apart from the roster. Only, that they worked all day not knowing which line of which roster they were, and that the eye which reads that roster first each morning was the only one in the room, was, today, unusually heavy.
Could I not simply stop, I had thought many times over the five nights. But that stopping too is answering, Do-gyeong's journal had already written. Even with no hand laid on the sender field, the roster filled over the night, and by day the seats were thinned. Unsent by me, the archive's seats would still shrink; I would only not be laying one over the other. To withdraw from the seat that lays one over the other did not erase the roster. Stopping was not to unmake the roster but not to look at it. Not looking was itself an answer, and so I could not stop. From a seat where I could not stop, I knew clearly only what I had become.
In the evening the sender field raised the twenty-sixth. I was no longer startled that the next date rose. The startling thing was elsewhere. Beneath the twenty-sixth was still empty, yet my hand had moved one joint toward the sending column. I had no memory of pressing. Until yesterday I had read what the sender field raised and sent it; this evening my hand had gone to that place before the sender field raised anything. It was not the seat of a reading hand but of a hand that means to write. On the evening I learned what answering is, that answering had not waited for me to learn. Learned or unlearned, the hand was already moving to the sender's seat. I looked at that hand a long while, and did not draw it back. Drawn back, the roster would fill over the night; not drawn back, my own hand would write that roster. Either way, tomorrow was coming.