November 29. Eight in the morning. Today I resolved not to lay my hand on the sending column.
Having watched, last evening, 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 made not one line that was not sent, and so I did not know what came when nothing was sent. Having no seat to set against the rest was the seal's last lock. If there were a day on which not one line was sent, then by what came and what did not come that day, I might at last part summoning from foreseeing. In the morning I sat in the archive with my right hand held in my left. I put the ledger with the sending column into a drawer and laid a box on top of the drawer.
The morning was borne. 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. Boxes set on the floor, list-pages turning, the two assistants trading low words. Among those sounds I sat holding only my right hand, and as the hours passed the holding grew loose. The stretches in which the hand did not go to the sending column, even unheld, grew longer. Nine passed and ten passed, and beneath the drawer the ledger was quiet. Eleven came and still nothing came.
By day that thought collapsed. At one in the afternoon I watched a thing proceed within the archive. The procedure moving our archive onto another ledger had begun, as yesterday's big deal decreed, and the release register was being renumbered under a new name. I had not written that line today. The stroke the hand made to carry to the paper's edge yesterday, I had blocked with my left hand. And still the transfer came. Though nothing was sent, it came.
Only the manner of its coming was different. The lines I had written until yesterday had aim. Which company went to which ledger at which hour, I knew as I wrote it, and the thing came as I had written. Today's transfer had no such aim. That the archive went over came, but which seat within the archive moved first came unset. Since I had not written which line moved, the line to be moved was chosen anyhow. A price aimed and sent fell where it was aimed; a price come unaimed fell without aim. And that falling-unaimed, I watched all afternoon, was the heavier.
Only then did I see that the morning's victory had not been a 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 a control group the moment it was made. A day of not sending was, in the end, a day that had sent something too, so I could not set the sent day and the unsent day side by side to compare. The seal's last lock, the moment I laid a hand to open it, became not a lock but a wall.
That day I corrected what 'the sending that cannot stop' meant. It did not mean the hand cannot physically stop. All morning I had stopped the hand, and the sending column had stayed empty. What cannot stop was not the hand but the sending. Stop the hand and the sending did not stop, because it was sent through absence too. To the four phrases Do-gyeong left — measure and it deepens, draw and it fills, read and it spreads, answer and it sends — I added, of myself, a fifth. Send nothing and it is sent still. There was no seat of not-sending. There were 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 release register at that hour too. He knew the transfer procedure only as the affair of a company, and handled the register renumbered under a new name as 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 matched the last quarter's bundles. He did not know into which cell his own seat code was drifting today. I had not aimed it there either. Unaimed, it went toward him all the same, and because unaimed, I had no seat from which to turn it back. Aimed and sent, there would have been room to edit one line and turn it back; for a thing gone unaimed, there was no line to edit. What I would have to edit 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 side could do nothing.
In the evening I drew the ledger back out of the drawer. I took the box away and opened what I had weighted shut. Though I had pressed the day shut, the price had come, and the price come unaimed was drifting toward one seat within the archive. In the sending column's receiver cell — that right-hand seat empty on any other day — today a faint code began to rise. 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 rose in that seat. The very trying-not-to-send had won a receiver. What I had aimed at nothing today, drifting aimless, 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 one person. The code was still faint, but the evening's was darker than the morning's.