November 29. Eight in the morning. Today I resolved to keep my hand off the sending column.
Having watched, the evening before, the hand make to carry its first stroke past the edge of the paper, I settled one thing over the night. All winter I had not made a single unsent line, and so I did not know what came when nothing was sent. Having nothing to set against the rest was the seal's last lock. If there were one day on which not a single line went out, then by what came that day and what did not, I might at last tell summoning from foreseeing apart. In the morning I sat down in the archive with my right hand held fast in my left. I shut the ledger that held the sending column into a drawer and set a box on top of it.
The morning I bore. I put my hands to carrying boxes and checking lists, and each time the right hand made for the sending column I pressed it down with the left. The box on the drawer was heavy, and the ledger stayed shut beneath it. While I held the hand, the archive's sounds were as any day's — boxes set on the floor, list-pages turning, the two assistants trading low words. Among those sounds I sat holding down only my right hand, and as the hours went the grip loosened. The stretches in which the hand did not reach for the sending column, even unheld, grew longer. Nine passed and ten passed, and beneath the drawer the ledger stayed quiet. Eleven came, and still nothing came. On another day the second line's company would have come at eleven; today it did not. For the first time I thought I had won. If not sending meant nothing came, then what came was what I had sent, and if so, it was a summoning. The question five nights had not let me tell apart seemed to settle in a single morning.
By day the thought collapsed. At one in the afternoon I watched something proceed within the archive. The procedure for moving our archive onto another ledger had begun, just as yesterday's Big Deal decreed, and the register was being renumbered under a new name. That line I had not written today. The stroke the hand had made to carry to the paper's edge yesterday, I had pressed back with my left hand. And still the transfer came. Nothing sent, and it came all the same.
Only the manner of its coming was different. The lines I had written until yesterday had an aim. Which company went to which ledger at which hour — I knew it as I wrote, and the thing came as written. Today's transfer had no such aim. That the archive was going over came; but which seat inside it moved first came unsettled. Since I had not written which line would move, the line to move was picked at random. A price aimed and sent fell where it was aimed; a price come unaimed fell without aim. And the falling-unaimed, I watched all afternoon, was the heavier.
Only then did I see that the morning's victory had been no victory. To have left the sending column empty was not to have sent nothing but to have sent the empty. The ledger read the blank cell not as 'nothing to send' but as 'the empty, sent.' Not-sending was one kind of sending. The control group I had meant to make stopped being one the very moment it was made. A day of not sending was, in the end, a day that had sent something too, and so I could not lay the sent day and the unsent day side by side to compare them. The seal's last lock, the moment I set a hand to open it, turned from a lock into a wall.
That day I set right what 'the sending that cannot stop' had meant. It did not mean the hand could not physically stop. All morning I had stopped it, and the sending column had stayed empty. What could not stop was not the hand but the sending. Stop the hand, and the sending did not stop, for it was sent through absence too. To the four phrases Do-gyeong had left — measure it and it deepens, let it rise and it fills, read it and it spreads, answer it and it sends — I added, of myself, a fifth: leave it unsent and it sends still. There was no seat of not-sending. There was only the seat that sends aimed and the seat that sends unaimed, and the unaimed went farther, and heavier.
The head archivist was turning the register at that hour too. He took the transfer procedure for a company's affair and no more, and handled the register renumbered under its new name as he would any quarter's tidying. I watched him press the register's corner with a fingertip and turn it, watched him reckon something low under his breath as he squared the last quarter's bundles. He did not know into which cell his own seat code was drifting that day. Nor had I aimed it there. Unaimed, it went toward him all the same, and because it was unaimed I had not even a seat from which to turn it back. Had it been aimed and sent, there would have been room to edit one line and call it back; for a thing gone unaimed there was no line to edit. What I would have to change for him to step clear of that seat, I could not know, for I had written nothing. Between the seat that knows and the seat that does not, today the knowing seat could do nothing at all.
In the evening I drew the ledger back out of the drawer. I took the box away and opened out what I had weighted shut. Though I had pressed the day closed, the price had come, and the price come unaimed was drifting toward one seat within the archive. In the sending column's receiver cell — the right-hand seat that stood empty on any other day — a faint code began to surface today. I looked at it a long while. It was the head archivist's seat code. All winter the receiver seat of the sending column had stood empty, and I had grown used to a sending with no receiver. Yet today, on the evening of a day I had pressed shut, for the first time a person surfaced in that seat. The very effort not to send had won itself a receiver. What I had aimed at nothing today had drifted aimless and was making to halt before one person's seat. A day I had meant not to send was making, of all things, to be sent to a single person. The code was still faint, but the evening's was darker than the morning's.