The twenty-fifth of November. Eight in the morning. The twenty-fifth had become today, and the head cell of the roster was full.
The department code, half-read the night before, had filled all four digits through the evening. 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 its head, stood the name of the department where I sit. The roster I had sent from the sending column all winter was the archive's own.
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 pared from the archive. In spring a single seat had been 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 a single seat. I was the hand that sent the roster, and at the same time one of the department the roster pared away.
I sat in that seat and turned over the five nights. The first day I pressed the sending column for the first time, and where I pressed, a tomorrow-date rose. The second day the line I had sent arrived on tomorrow's date. The third day a line I had not sent came attached, as a price, to the one I had. The fourth day I sent with the receiver's seat empty; the fifth, a single line became a roster of eleven. Each of the five nights had seemed its own separate matter, but this morning I watched them close into a single sentence. Answering was sending. To sit before the sending column and lay a fingertip down — that was answering, and answering was, at once, sending.
And sending was becoming a sender. I knew the four phrases set down in Do-gyeong's journal, having read them across the five bundles. Measure it and it deepens, let it rise and it fills, read it and it spreads, answer it and it sends. The first three were the roads the surveyor, the lighthouse keeper, and the librarian had walked; the last cell was Do-gyeong's. Do-gyeong answered, and in answering 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 vanish. The telegraph operator received the tomorrow-date and vanished; Do-gyeong answered, became the one read to the end, and vanished. As I had come into the seat where Do-gyeong vanished, into the seat where I vanished someone would come next.
That was what I learned today. I was becoming a sender, and once I became one my own number would stand somewhere in the roster I sent — the four digits that spelled the archive told me so that morning. All winter I had read the rosters as others' and sent them. Companies' numbers, people's numbers, numbers with half-known faces. But once the head of that roster became my own department, some line beneath it was no longer only someone else's. That the seat that sends and the seat written in stand on the same form, I had read in the five bundles; but reading it and having it arrive as my own department's code were different weights.
What called what, on the sixth morning too I could not tell apart. Whether the archive had risen onto the roster because I sent it, or the sending column had read in advance an archive already bound to rise. That question had gone unanswered through five nights, and would go unanswered today. But what I learned today lay outside the question. What it called I did not know; what I was becoming I could. Summoning or foreseeing, I was already a sender. To know what answering is did not require knowing whether that answering had called or read. The seal stayed as a seal, and the knowing came as knowing.
All morning the head archivist and the two assistants worked as on any other day. The head archivist picked out boxes past their disposal term; one assistant copied index cards over; the other wound microfilm. That they were people who held archive numbers I counted, that morning, for the first time. How many of the four stood among the eleven lines I did not know, and to find out 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 once she had, she filled another seat to empty his. Since I had resolved not to walk that road, I kept the four faces apart from the roster. Only, that they worked the whole day not knowing which line of which roster they were, and that the eye which read that roster first each morning was the only one in the room, sat unusually heavy today.
Why not simply stop, I had thought many times over the five nights. But that stopping too is an answer, Do-gyeong's journal had already set down. Even with no hand laid on the sending column the roster filled over the night, and by day the seats were pared away. Whether or not I sent, the archive's seats would shrink; I would only not be laying one over the other. Withdrawing from the seat that lays one over the other did not erase the roster. Stopping was not to unmake the roster but to not look at it. Not looking was itself an answer, and so I could not stop. From a seat where I could not stop, the one thing I knew clearly was what I had become.
In the evening the sending column raised the twenty-sixth. The rising of the next date no longer startled me. What startled me was elsewhere. Beneath the twenty-sixth was still empty, and yet my hand had gone one joint toward the sending column. I had no memory of pressing. Until yesterday I had read what the sending column raised and sent it; this evening my hand had reached that place before the column raised anything at all. It was not the posture 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 it. Learned or not, my hand was already shifting 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; left where it was, my own hand would write that roster. Either way, tomorrow was coming.