April 2. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk. And did nothing.
I did not pick up the pen. I did not take out the ruler. I did not open the sixth bundle. Since wherever the preserving hand touched grew or deepened or dimmed, I thought that if I did not lay a hand on it, that work too would stop. That Do-gyeong had once done so I had read in her log. To see whether it would stop if she did not copy, Do-gyeong had copied not a single number for one day. Like Do-gyeong that day, I decided to try stopping the preserving hand.
I sat for an hour with my hands on the desk. The fluorescent tube blinked at an even interval, and the draft from the vent passed between the papers. The bundle stayed unopened at one end. I gathered my hands on my knees and kept them from touching anything on the desk. Since touching made things grow, I did the work of not touching for an hour. If not-touching was also work, that was the one preservation task I did that day. While I did not touch, that at least by my own hand I had made nothing grow was, for a while, a comfort. Since I did not measure depth there was nothing to deepen, since I did not write dates there was nothing to bring forward, since I did not copy descriptions there was nothing to split. Stop the hand and the law seemed to stop too.
But the terminal did not stop. The line in the body field arrived one character at a time even while I kept my hands still. Reception was not work my hand did, so reception did not stop when the hand stopped. The last digit that had been empty and blinking yesterday was half full this morning. While I did nothing through the night, the receiving had gone on by itself. The only thing I could stop was the work I did, and receiving was not work I did.
I opened the preservation log. I tried not to, but it seemed I had at least to write down that I had stopped preserving today. Opening the log, on the April 2 line the processing was already written. Preservation continued, it said. In my hand. My hand, which I had not written. As the lighthouse keeper's tide table was already written before it was pointed to, the preservation log wrote preservation continued even on the day I stopped preserving. Regardless of my having stopped my hand, the log recorded that preservation had gone on. What had stopped was my hand; as not-stopped the record stayed.
Then who preserved. In place of my stopped hand, had someone preserved, so that the log wrote preservation continued. I thought of the day Do-gyeong did not copy one number. To see whether it would stop if she did not copy, Do-gyeong left one line blank, but that number did not stop. The next day the blank place was filled, and it was not Do-gyeong's hand, the log said. Leave it blank and it does not stay blank; another hand fills the blanked place. The uncopied number too was copied, only the copying hand was not Do-gyeong's. Absence too had its price. That price was not that someone did in my stead what I did not do, but that even without my doing it, the thing got done. The unpreserved place too does not stay unpreserved; it grows unpreserved. Non-preservation was not the opposite of preservation but another name for it. That the hand which filled Do-gyeong's one line was "we," Do-gyeong never managed to write, and whose the writing in that blanked place was, I could now guess.
With my hand stopped I looked at the bundle. The thickness of the unopened sixth bundle looked one page thicker than yesterday. Since I had not measured, I had not measured it. But the eye saw it thicken even unmeasured. The surveyor's shaft did not grow if unmeasured, it said, but that was the story while the measuring hand was still outside. After the measuring hand had already become depth, the depth increased the depth even unmeasured. I was already inside the seat of preserving, so even unpreserved the preserved grew. Stopping from outside and stopping from inside were different. From outside, lift the hand and that was that; from inside, the hand to lift was already part of the seat. Lifting the hand was lifting it from the material, not lifting me from the seat that had become material. A hand that had become depth could stop measuring but could not stop being depth. What could be stopped was measuring; what could not be stopped was being depth. I had stopped measuring, but being depth I could not stop.
In the afternoon the head archivist came down. The footsteps coming down the stairs arrived first through the papers. He asked the preservation progress. I went to answer that I had not preserved a single page today, but the head archivist first leafed through the preservation log and said it was going well. Since the log read preservation continued, to the head archivist preservation had gone on. Even if I said I had stopped, the log wrote that it had not stopped, so my words were only words at odds with the log. I went to say I had stopped, then stopped. If I opened my mouth the words might split into syllables, and above all, even the words I had stopped would not overturn the preservation continued the log had written. Words were weaker than the record. Do-gyeong too, knowing of the suspension ahead, never managed to tell her colleague. That dead end where a warning held neither by mouth nor by paper nor by phone, I met again at the seat where my one word stopped could not beat one line of the log.
That I could not stop, I knew only after trying to stop the hand. Do-gyeong could stop copying, and that one stopped day stayed in the log as a stop. Do-gyeong had a hand to stop with, and a place where the stop would be recorded. But for me the hand to stop with was part of the seat, and in the place where the stop would be written, preservation continued was written first. There was no separate act of stopping preservation. Even stopped, preservation was written in the log, the bundle thickened, the terminal received. Between the act of stopping and the act of not stopping there was not even the gap of one line of the log.
I laid my hand back on the desk. If it could not be stopped, not stopping was the more honest. I took up the pen and began, below the preservation continued the log had already written, to write the material preserved today. As I began to write, the half-full last digit of the terminal filled one character more. Whether that one character filled because I wrote, or would have filled even unwritten, this time too I could not tell. Only one thing had become clear. By stopping preservation I could not get out of this seat. Stopping was not a door but the confirming that there was no door. If there was a door out, it was not in stopping but in some other seat. But where the other seat was, today, having tried stopping, I could not tell. As he turned to go, the head archivist said that headquarters would come tomorrow to confirm the transfer complete.