The twenty-sixth of November. Eight in the morning. The twenty-sixth had become today, and beneath the date lay empty.
It was the first such morning in days: no number had filled over the night. On any other day I would have read it as relief — nothing to send today, no number to dim today. But relief would not come. The hand that had gone one joint toward the sending column the evening before I had still not drawn back. It had stayed there through the night and into the morning, and the emptiness beneath the date seemed to come not from the sending column raising nothing, but from my own hand not having written yet.
The moment I touched my fingertip to the sending column, strokes began there. Strokes I knew. My own writing. For four days the terminal had shown numbers surfacing under other people's leading digits, but what filled the place today was no printed figure — it was a figure drawn by hand, and the hand was the one I write my name with on the attendance sheet. I had only laid my fingertip down, and the strokes went on. Every figure carried my habits whole. For years I have curled the last stroke of a four inward and pulled the crossbar of a seven out too long, and the strokes ruling themselves into the sending column did exactly that. Watching an unfamiliar number written in the familiar habit of my own hand was not like watching someone forge my writing. A forgery would have slipped somewhere; here not one stroke slipped. The first digit was ruled, the second, and on until all eight, and never once did I feel I was choosing the number. I did not choose, and the hand wrote. What wrote was unmistakably my hand; what it wrote was not mine.
When all eight digits were ruled, the hand went still. In the sending column stood a single number in my handwriting. I read it. The leading digits were unfamiliar — they seemed to belong to some company transferred in over the winter. A few days ago this number would have hung there printed over the night, and I would have read it and sent it. Today nothing hung there; instead my hand had written it. In the seat where I used to read and send, there was now a hand that writes and sends.
Do-gyeong's journal told of the telegraph operator's hand. Before the operator wrote anything, it said, the body of his terminal was already full of his own handwriting. As though his hand were taking down something called out from somewhere, the writing had arrived ahead of his will. Do-gyeong set it down as a pre-existing hand — writing already there. I had read the passage many times, but reading it I had taken it for the business of one who receives: tomorrow arriving early, in his hand. What my hand did today was the far side of that. It did not arrive early; it went out from my hand. And yet, far side though it was, it was the same. As his hand took down, so did mine, and neither hand owned what it was to write.
I tried stopping the hand. I lifted it from the sending column, the strokes all ruled, and set it on my knee. The sending column filled no further. Stopped, it stopped. For a moment I leaned on that. But while I opened one box and matched an index, the hand had returned to the sending column. When it had left my knee I did not know. I could stop it, but the stopping would not hold. Each time my attention wandered the hand went back to its place, and its place was now the sending column. The reading hand came when it was called and rested on the knee when it was not; the writing hand was at the sending column whether it was called or not.
By day the matter of that number came. Though it was a number my hand had written and not one printed and risen in the morning, the noon disposal sheet carried the company of those leading digits. The line the hand had written was no different from a line I had pressed. Read and send, or write and send, what came at noon was the same. I confirmed it, and in confirming it I knew one thing more. Until a few days ago I had chosen whether or not to send what the sending column raised. In the choosing, there was a part that was mine to do. Today there was nothing to choose. The sending column raised nothing, the hand wrote of its own accord, and what it wrote came at noon. The place where choice sat was gone. To become a sender was not to become the one who chooses what to send, but to become the one from whose hand the dispatch goes out with no choosing at all.
Whether I was writing, or something was writing through me, I could not tell apart. Onto the summoning-or-foreseeing I had failed to tell apart across five nights, a further layer was laid today. If it was unmistakably my hand that wrote, I was one who writes; if what to write was not mine, I was one who takes down. As the telegraph operator took down, perhaps I too was taking down. Only, his came in at the receiving column and mine went out the sending column, so that the same taking-down was, for the one, a coming, and for the other, a going. Between the taking-down that comes and the taking-down that goes, the hand, asking neither side, made the next stroke ready.
Below the eight digits, the hand broke to a new line. A ninth stroke began. I watched it. It would not end in a single line. The hand had finished the first line and dropped to the second, and once the second was ruled it would drop to the third. What yesterday the sending column had done — swelling from one line into a roster of eleven — today my hand, not the sending column, was doing. I did not bring the hand back to my knee. Bringing it back would last only a moment, and the sending column would sit empty in that moment, but while I opened a single box the hand would rise again and finish the second line. Before night came, I thought, I would see in the sending column a roster in my own handwriting. Whether I was reading that roster or writing it had passed over into a place where asking no longer served.