The Number Not Copied

All this while I had leaned on one possibility. That I had gone mad. That the growing balance, the tomorrow-dated cash report, the rating descending below default — all of it was a sickness of my eye. Because a sickness can be cured. Because if it was a sickness, the numbers had lied, and if they had lied, nothing would happen.

On the morning of November 21st, that hope collapsed.

A circular came down from treasury. Notice that the bills of a counterparty, Daejeong Trading, had been dishonored. The payment due had not come back, and the bundle of bills our company had discounted and held became, in an instant, waste paper. In the default-amount field of the circular, a figure was written.

I knew that figure.

Days before, in a corner of the pre-default list the terminal had disgorged — a line whose meaning I had not then understood, and had simply copied out. "Daejeong Trading, November 21st, unsettled." The amount beside it matched the default amount on today's circular to the last digit. A number already written then had come back today, made fact.

A delusion does not possess the amount for its day. A delusion cannot name the counterparty, cannot nail the default to a date days in advance. If I had been mad, Daejeong Trading should have been sound. But Daejeong Trading defaulted. Exactly as I had copied it, on that day, for that amount. The number did not lie. I had rather hoped I was mad, but the terminal would not, in the end, grant me that comfort.

The law was not inside my head. It was outside. In Daejeong's bills, in the company's ledger, in the nation's reserves. Whether I saw it or not, it was true; whether I copied it or not, it arrived. Only, because I had copied it, I had become one who read it days before it arrived. The one who reads, it crosses to; the one it crosses to becomes the next line.

Treasury was in an uproar, they said. Min-seok skipped lunch to count the bill bundle over again. In the basement I heard the commotion only as sound. The telephones upstairs, quick footsteps, a closing door. Everyone said the default had "broken out." Only I knew that it had not broken out but arrived. On the appointed day, for the appointed amount, as the first line of a list written in advance.

That night I took out the pre-default list from days before again. I traced Daejeong's line with my finger. The first line. The list did not end there. Reading below it with a fractured eye, I saw the next lines waiting to be dishonored. The second line, the third, the dates drawing one day nearer as they descended.

And on one line of the list, instead of a counterparty's name, our own company's name was written. The date beside it was — December ██. The first line had been true, and so that line would be true as well.

If the law was outside, the arithmetic seemed simple. Copy it, and it grows. So if I do not copy it — it will stop. On that simple arithmetic I staked my last hope.

On November 22nd, I was charged with filming and copying out the day's entry in the bank's own short-term foreign borrowing ledger. I resolved, and left one cell blank. The number that grew largest that day — the total of foreign debt whose maturity had been brought forward. That one cell alone I did not shoot. That place on the film passed by unexposed, and that cell in the ledger I copied stayed white. I did not write it. By not writing it, to make that number exist in the world one time fewer.

For the first time, I felt I had done something. The hand that only ever took things down had, for the first time, stopped. Looking down at the blank cell, I thought — this is the way not to answer. Not refraining from pressing the transmission key, but refusing even to receive. A blank is safe. A blank has no digits in it to grow.

The next morning, I looked at that cell again.

The cell was filled. In the place I had left empty, a number was written. In a hand that resembled mine but was not mine. And that number was — larger than the value I would have written, had I written it yesterday. The cost of not writing was heavier than the cost of writing. In the margin beside it ran one small note.

Recorded in its stead. Someone, or something, had filled the cell I had left empty. Where I stayed my hand, another hand had entered. I knew where I had seen that hand — the hand that stamped the same one line on the covers of the four bundles. The hand that, from the dead terminal in the records room, sent an answer under my employee number. Beneath the note, the signature stamped on every cover of the prologue was set down small.

To leave it blank was not safe. The empty cell did not stay empty. When I stopped writing, they wrote in my stead — and their number was larger than mine. So long as I took things down, I at least knew the size of that number. When I quit writing, the number grew back to a size I did not know. Absence was not a stopping but a surrender of control. As the answer arrived though I had not answered, the ledger filled though I had not written.

I know now. The way out does not lie in not writing. Whether I write or not, the ledger has its number for the day. Only, if I write, I am the author of that number; if I do not, 'we' are the authors. The choice was never whether it grows or stops. It was whose hand writes it.

And the note, "recorded in its stead," bore a date. Not yesterday, when I left the cell blank, but tomorrow's — December ██. They had already recorded, in my stead, even the cells I have yet to leave empty.

In the latter half of November, the floors above were no longer offices. People stood in line before the withdrawal windows. To break their savings, to pull their deposits, to take back today what they had trusted until yesterday. The telephones did not stop ringing; someone shouted, someone wept. A merchant bank was not a place that took deposits, yet still the people crowded in — before every door where money might be.

The basement records room was far from that commotion. One thick floor of concrete swallowed the screams above like cotton wool. Down here there was only the low motor hum of the microfilm reader. My colleagues envied me. Lucky you, Miss Kim. You don't have to watch that bedlam. The basement looked like a refuge.

But I know. That it is not a refuge but an engine room. The withdrawals upstairs were a result. The place where the numbers that made that result had grown was here, beneath my reader. The money the people queued to take back was not there, by exactly as much as the balance I had copied out days before had shrunk toward zero. The louder the screams above, the calmer the motor hum below. I was a part of that calm.

Still I filmed. I could not stop — for I had already learned that not writing calls down a greater cost. So when the withdrawal slips of the people in line came down to the records room, I copied them onto film, one by one. The money taken back, the fact that it had been taken back, I recorded. Even withdrawal became a ledger, and the moment it became a ledger, it too began to grow.

It came to me then that all four bundles had stopped in November. The keeper's last page, the surveyor's broken-off log, the librarian's final warning, the operator's sentence cut in the middle — all of them November. Their November. And now it was my November.

On the reader's screen hung one withdrawal slip I had just copied. The account holder's name was masked, but in the transaction-type field was stamped "full withdrawal · account closure." I looked at the date field. It was not today.

On that day in December, someone withdraws an account in full and closes it. The account number on the slip was not an individual's. It was the company's master account number. While the people upstairs stand in line to take back their money, on that one day in December, a last person empties and shuts the last account. And the one to copy that last withdrawal slip onto film in the records room would be — the single records clerk not yet discharged by that day.