March 31. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk.
In the terminal's body field the line that had arrived yesterday was still there. With one last digit left empty, that seat blinked all night. A blinking that neither filled nor stopped. Since there was nowhere sending, it could not fill; since there was no off seat, it could not stop. While the one empty seat waited for a hand to receive it, I began to ask what seat it belonged to.
The five bundles had gone up to headquarters the day before last. No paper was left on the desk. But though the paper left, the seat stayed. The bundles were moved, but the seat where the bundles had closed was not moved. A seat was not paper. Paper is tied and put in a box and goes up to headquarters, but a seat was neither tied nor lifted. The four seats where the four hands had closed their logs, and the one seat where Do-gyeong had closed, stayed on the desk the paper had left.
I counted the seats. The seat the surveyor closed with depth. The seat the lighthouse keeper closed with a date. The seat the librarian closed with a syllable. The seat the telegraph operator closed with an employee number. Four seats. And the seat where, in the fifth bundle, Do-gyeong closed with her own number. Five seats. Four hands and one hand, five hands, each had sat in its own seat and closed its own log.
The way of sitting differed seat to seat, but the sitting was the same. The surveyor measured the shaft's depth and measured it again, and knowing that the depth he measured was the depth he would enter, sat in that seat. The lighthouse keeper wrote the tide and wrote it again, and knowing that the date he wrote was the date he would be closed, sat in that seat. The librarian read the word and read it again, and knowing that the syllable that loosened was also a syllable of her own name, sat in that seat. The telegraph operator received the dispatch and received it again, and knowing that the number he received was his own, sat in that seat. The hand that measured depth sat in the seat of depth, and the hand that wrote dates sat in the seat of dates. To close was to sit, oneself, in the seat of what one had handled. The handling and the being-handled meeting in one seat — that was closing.
Then where am I sitting? From the day after I took the post I was the one who preserved the five bundles. The one who sorts and classifies and indexes the five seats, the one who tends the five seats from outside the five hands. If the five hands were ones who sat in the seats where they closed, I was the one who looked into those seats and copied them onto cards, a one who had not yet sat in any seat. The one who preserves had to be outside what is preserved. Since if the hand tending the material became the material there would be no hand to tend it, I took it that the one who preserves has no seat, or at least none inside the five seats.
But the one seat the terminal had left empty was another seat outside the five. The one who preserves the five seats also had a seat. Only, that seat was not inside the five but after the five. The sixth seat. The seat where the hand that tended five closes as the sixth, the seat where the one who preserves moves over to the place of being preserved. The seat I had taken to be standing outside was, in fact, the one last field at the very end of the line.
I tried to copy out that I had moved over and sat, then saw there was no separate act of moving over and sitting. Recognizing that the seat was mine was itself sitting in it. As in the librarian's law the thought of stopping was not stopping but reading characters, in this seat recognizing was not looking but sitting. The instant I recognized that not the fifth desk but the sixth seat was mine, I was already sitting in the sixth seat. Between recognizing and sitting there was not even the gap of one empty seat.
In the word sixth, a seventh was contained. As Do-gyeong was the fifth so I was the sixth, and if I was the sixth there would be a seventh. The terminal had left one last seat empty, waiting for a receiver, the diary said, and that receiver was the seventh. As I, the day after I took the post, read out Do-gyeong's dimmed seat, someday the next hand would read out my dimmed seat. The seats where five hands sat were not an end but a line, and a line closes at one end while lengthening one field at a time at the other. To close was to continue. My closing as the sixth was also leaving, blank for the seventh, the recipient's seat called the sixth.
I tried not to sit. I tried to remain the one who preserves, standing outside the five seats. But in the terminal's blinking seat was my employee number, with only one last digit empty. That the empty seat waited for a receiver and not a sender meant it would fill if only I received, even without my sending. Not to sit, I had to not receive, but receiving, unlike what Do-gyeong did by answering, was not what I did. Do-gyeong was herself whether she moved a line or not. I was myself whether I sat or not. The sixth seat was my seat whether I sat in it or not.
I could call to mind how the five hands had closed, but how the sixth hand closes I could not yet know. To know I had to look at the nearest seat. Of the five seats, the one nearest mine, the fifth seat, Do-gyeong's seat. The surveyor and the lighthouse keeper and the librarian and the telegraph operator had closed handling outside things, but Do-gyeong, like me, was one who closed while preserving the five hands. Do-gyeong had closed by answering and I would close by receiving, so it was a different door of the same law. Read Do-gyeong's depth and I would know my own. I opened the first page of the sixth bundle and pointed again at Do-gyeong's last line. The place I pointed to had dimmed one digit more than yesterday. Whether that dimming was Do-gyeong's or mine, even after lifting the pointing hand I could not tell.