December 2. Eight in the morning. In the sending column the two assistants' dispatches had filled in the tails that had faded yesterday and stood complete, two full lines, and in the receiver cell below them sat a familiar four digits. It was the code I stamp on the attendance sheet each morning.
Yesterday the tails of the two assistants' dispatches had been fading toward my four digits. Over the night they faded through and moved, and where they moved to was the receiver cell. I looked into that cell a long while. It was the cell that had stood empty all winter, then won the head archivist, then, yesterday, sent him back into the roster that crosses over. This morning my attendance code sat in it, and the line above it in the sending column was in my own hand. The sending line had come from my hand, and the receiving slot held my code. The receiver was me, and so was the sender.
By day it began. The two assistants' lines, shoved to the roster's tail yesterday, were cut from the release roster today. While the release clerk called the new register through, the two could not be moved under the new name, and the two lines that had wavered until yesterday were left today in the old ledger. One of them had his name copied over to a temporary post in another department; the other did not have even that. The two took it for the order of the quarterly reshuffle. The one copied to a temporary post asked where the new department was and began to pack; the one with no post stood by the release clerk, calling his own code twice, waiting for some post he might be copied into. The clerk turned the register back and forth and shook his head. Neither asked why he had been left in the old ledger, and the man who had counted the empty places on the shelves on his fingers yesterday did not yet know that today his own name had become one of those empty places. One of the bright squares his fingertip had pressed the day before had moved, today, to the spot where he was standing.
The head archivist, beside them, still held the line he had won back the day before. Yesterday's ease still on his shoulders, he took the two assistants' displacement for a common thing of the quarter and turned the register. He did not know where the order had come from — his own kept, the two assistants pushed out. Only I knew. The one stroke that had kept him had come from my hand yesterday; the price that stroke had pushed off had gone to the two assistants; and the price gone to the two assistants had come back to me over the night. From the head archivist to the two assistants, from the two assistants to me, the price had gone once around the archive and come to stand before the hand that first moved it.
I thought again of Do-gyeong's journal. Do-gyeong had resolved not to empty her surround, not to put her own line off. Where, moved or not, it comes to oneself, there is nothing to decide — and Do-gyeong had accepted as much by ceasing to intervene. Yesterday I had walked the other side of it. I had edited a stroke to keep the head archivist, and with that same hand pushed the price to the two assistants. Where Do-gyeong had stopped, I laid a hand, and the price of the laid hand came round to me. Do-gyeong's line — that the hand which picks who closes stands nearest the count and closes first — was repeating itself, exactly, on the sender's side. Do-gyeong had reached her own line at the last by not choosing; I had reached mine at the last by choosing and moving. Both roads ended in the same place.
What came back was, in the end, what I had first moved. Yesterday, to save the head archivist, I had sent his line back into the roster that crosses over, and the price sent back had come, by way of the two assistants, into my receiver cell. If to save one person was not to send them out of the chain but to push them to the next cell, then the pushing had an end, and at that end the pushing hand reached it again. I had put the head archivist off a day and the two assistants off a day, and the price put off had gone once around the archive's narrow ring to the hand that put it off. To save was to put off, and putting off ended at the one who did it.
In spring I had passed this way once. Then my employee number had risen on the fifth line of the transfer terminal's roster, and I had watched the measuring hand be measured through in its turn. Each morning I had come in and looked at the faint green letters filling their last digit through the night, in an office where no one was. But then I had been only a line risen on the roster; it was not my hand that had raised it. The terminal had filled of itself, and I had been the one watching it fill. Today was different. Today, above my code in the receiver cell, stood a sending line in my own hand. It was my hand that had put me on the roster, and my hand that had set me as that roster's receiver. From the one measured to the one sending, from the one sending to the one who sends to himself, I had crossed over. In a line where the sender is me and the receiver is me, there was no outside left to compare. Not sending, and sending to another, were both gone from me now.
Below my code in the receiver cell, as evening came, a second line began to rise faint. I looked into it, wondering whether it too was a face I knew, but what rose this time was not a face. It was an empty receiver slot, with neither leading nor trailing digits ruled yet. The receiver cell that had stood empty all winter, having won the head archivist and then won me, was opening an empty slot again below. That empty slot was the receiver after me, and by its holding no code yet, it belonged to someone not now in this archive. The nights' sentence — become a sender and you vanish — lay over that empty cell. As I had been posted to fill Do-gyeong's place, someone would one day be posted to mine. Once I had sent to myself, below the place I had vanished from that empty receiver cell would wait for the next hand. The sending column, with no receiver all winter, had now won a receiver, and below that receiver it was holding the next receiver open again.