March 30. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk.
The five bundles had gone up to headquarters yesterday, so only the sixth bundle and the terminal were left on the desk. The place the bundles had filled was wide now, and the desk looked as empty as on the day I first took the post. Only, unlike that day, the terminal was on. It was the terminal that had turned itself on the day I took the post and that I had not once been able to turn off since. I had never set the way to turn it off, so I could not turn it off either.
In the body field was my employee number. The day after I took the post, when I read my own last digit into Do-gyeong's dimmed last seat at the end of the fifth bundle's final line, that line had run on into the body field and stayed there ever since. This morning, below that number, one more line had come. Not had come, but was coming. Character by character, characters I had not typed were arriving in the body field.
The terminal was a credit-rating terminal. A machine that reads and shows a rating, not a machine that receives anything. There was no line coming in and no frequency tuned. And yet a line was arriving. It was reception with nowhere sending. When one character was added to the body field, a long while later one more was added. Not at an even interval, but at the interval of a hand somewhere groping to send one character at a time. Whose that groping interval was I tried not to ask, but even trying not to ask was counting the interval.
I called the telegraph operator's log to mind. The bundle had gone up to headquarters yesterday, but the log I had read to the end the day after I took the post was vivid enough to rise without the paper. His law was that sentence written in Latin beside the company motto. What does not sound is heard. He received tomorrow's dispatches on an empty frequency. They were dispatches with no sender. Dispatches that had only a recipient and no sender, he received every day. At first he thought it a misreceived signal, then thought someone was sending them as a prank, and in the end, his log wrote, he knew there was no separate sending hand. Then one day the dispatch he received was his own employee number. He received his own number, which he had not sent. The dispatch with nowhere sending had a recipient, and that recipient was the sender. Only, he had no memory of sending, so he learned that the sender was himself only after receiving it.
I watched the line arriving. It was digits. An employee number filling in one character at a time. I waited for it to fill, then matched the risen field against my own number. The leading digits were the same. The middle was the same. Reaching the last digit, I knew that the one character was the seat I had read into Do-gyeong's dimmed place the day after I took the post. It was a seat I had read out, not written. Not writing was not sending, and what was not sent was now arriving. The seat I had read out had come back as reception. That day I read that seat on the pretext that to preserve I had to read to the end, and since the one character I read in had not stayed as a memory of writing, I too, as the telegraph operator had, was now receiving a number I had not sent.
Without the bundles, I called to mind in order how the four hands had closed their own logs and laid them side by side. The librarian's collation happened now not on paper but in my head. Though the bundles had left, the four closings had not left. The surveyor closed with depth. The last sounding of a shaft that deepens the more it is measured was his end line. The lighthouse keeper closed with a date. The last field of a tide that is already written when pointed to was his end line. The librarian closed with a syllable. The last single syllable of a word that loosens when read was her end line. The telegraph operator closed with an employee number. The one line in which his own unsent number arrived as reception was his end line.
I laid the four closings over my own preservation procedure. The hand that measured the bundle's thickness had become depth, the date I wrote in the preservation log had pre-existed, the characters with which I wrote the preservation description had split into syllables, and now the terminal was receiving my employee number. Depth, date, syllable, number. The four seats each of the four hands had closed were all reproduced inside one person's preserving procedure. The four laws had not entered four separate outside things — shaft, tide, character, frequency. One law wore four faces, and I was the place where the four faces gathered.
The one who measured had become the depth. As the hand that measured a shaft's depth becomes that depth, the hand that measured a bundle's thickness became that thickness. The measuring and the being-measured met in one place. The place that read the four hands from outside had moved over to the place where the four hands had closed. I had thought I was the fifth hand reading the four logs, but since reading was itself entering that seat, I was not the fifth.
I thought of Do-gyeong's log. Do-gyeong had answered by pressing one character into the sender field, and by answering had begun to become a sender. What she did was sending. Sending had a pressing hand, and because there was a hand, she could stop, or could at least try to stop. But the seat I had entered was not the sending seat but the receiving seat. I pressed nothing. Though I pressed nothing, the terminal received the line. If Do-gyeong's answer was a single act, my reception was not an act. I had only preserved, and the line grew; I had only received, and the number arrived. Answering had a stopping button; receiving had none. So if Do-gyeong's turning was a road walked one step at a time, my turning was a road that arrives while I sit still.
I tried to turn the terminal off. I looked for the off button, but it was a machine that had turned on but had never turned off, so I could not tell where the off seat was. The line arrived without stopping. Since there was nowhere sending, there was no line to cut. To cut it I had to stop receiving, but receiving was not what I did — it was what the terminal did. As in the librarian's law even the thought of stopping was reading characters, in the telegraph operator's law stopping reception was not a seat I could lay a hand on. The receiving seat, unlike the sending seat, had no stopping button.
The arrived line blinked with one last digit left empty. It was not a filled number. The last digit had not yet come, and that seat blinked in the same shape as Do-gyeong's dimmed last seat. As I had read my last digit into Do-gyeong's dimmed seat, into this line's empty last seat too someone's last digit would come. Only, that seat was not the sender's seat but the recipient's. The one blinking seat was not waiting for a number to send but waiting for a number to receive.
As each of the four hands had a seat that closed it, so I, in whom the four seats had gathered into one, would have a seat that closed me. I counted the four hands. The surveyor, the lighthouse keeper, the librarian, the telegraph operator. And Do-gyeong of the fifth bundle. Five hands. The blinking last seat the terminal had left empty was the sixth seat, and I was reading out that sixth seat as, the day after I took the post, I had read out Do-gyeong's seat. The seats where five hands sat had a sixth chair, and that one blinking seat was the number of the sixth chair. A number waiting not for the sending hand, but for the receiving hand.