April 9. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk. The box had left yesterday, and the desk was empty.
On the emptied desk only the terminal remained. Where the bundle had left, no dust had settled, so the spot stood out square, and inside that square it was a little brighter than elsewhere. In the body field my number and the head archivist's number appeared side by side, and below them two more lines began to fill, one character at a time. The two lines rose at once. Their leading digits differed by one place. They were the numbers of two people who had joined the same year or a year apart. The numbers of the two assistants who had worked under the head archivist in the archive.
The two assistants I knew. The two the head archivist directed, who had helped bind the sixth bundle into the box and carry the transfer slip. They had touched the material directly. Binding and carrying were touching, and the touching entered the processing history, and the processing history became the preservation order. As the head archivist entered the order by only pointing, the two assistants entered the order by only helping. Helping too was engagement.
In Do-gyeong's log were those two people. At the last Do-gyeong decided not to empty her surroundings, and by not emptying she did not close the two people in her surroundings. The blocking hand closes one more person before being closed; the emptied hand does not, Do-gyeong's log wrote. The two who had been in Do-gyeong's surroundings were the two archive assistants. The two who survived because Do-gyeong did not empty, who stayed working in the archive not knowing why, were the two now on my terminal.
The seat Do-gyeong had saved had come to me. Do-gyeong, so as not to close those two, did not empty her surroundings. Emptying could have won three more days, but knowing that the seat left alone at the end of emptying would become yesterday's Kang Min-seok seat, she decided not to empty. It was a last choice to save. But that choice did not save the two forever. The two Do-gyeong did not close, the preservation order passed to the next recorder. The seat Do-gyeong saved was not a vanished seat but a deferred seat. The deferred seat came to my terminal, next in turn.
In the chain, saving was not saving but deferring. When one hand saved, that saved seat became the next hand's seat to close. Do-gyeong's not closing the two was not taking them out of the chain but moving them one place down the chain. Since there was no door out of the chain, to save someone was to push him to the next place. The two Do-gyeong pushed had come to my place, and if I saved someone again, that person would go to the next recorder's place. Saving was not a cutting of the chain but a continuing of it. The warmest hand was the longest-continuing hand.
In the morning the two assistants came down to the archive. They said the head archivist, the transfer being done, had told them to sort the remaining shelves. Passing the terminal, they did not see their own numbers up there. As the head archivist had not, the two assistants did not. The body field was visible only from my seat. I sat at the seat that saw four people's numbers, and the four worked not even knowing their numbers were up. That the seeing seat was mine alone was the heaviest. To tell them I could not, and only the seeing was my share.
One of the two, stopping work, counted something on his fingers. Lately empty seats keep appearing in the archive, he said to the other. He seemed to count who had quit and who had moved departments. Someone above went to another branch, someone at the next desk quit, he said, pointing at each empty desk. In Do-gyeong's log, Kang Min-seok too counted the empty seats around him on his fingers like that. And stopped at his own seat. That the center might be not luck but last, Kang Min-seok knew only after counting. One of the two assistants too did not know the seat he would stop at counting might be his own. But he did not stop and kept counting, and counted leaving out his own seat. While he counted leaving it out, his number on the terminal filled one more character. The counting was a counting of empty seats, and while he counted them his own seat drew nearer to being an empty seat. The counting hand was the hand filling his own seat, but he did not know it.
Whether Do-gyeong saving those two had been in vain, I thought. It was not in vain. Thanks to Do-gyeong not emptying, the two lived not three days but a season more. From the end of last winter to this spring, the two lived and worked. Do-gyeong's empty hand had won that much. Only, what was won was not an end but a while. Not forever but for a while. In the chain saving was not saving forever but saving for a while, and when the while ended it passed to the next hand. The while Do-gyeong's choice gave the two, I was now at the seat to end. The time Do-gyeong had won, I was, in effect, closing.
Whether, if I like Do-gyeong did not empty my surroundings, I could save these two a while longer, I thought. But I had no surroundings to empty. Do-gyeong's surroundings were a seat Do-gyeong chose, but the lines appearing on my terminal were a seat the preservation order chose. The order I could not change, and I had no surroundings to empty, so what Do-gyeong did I could not do. Do-gyeong had at least a hand to save with, but I did not even have that hand. The chain reduced hands the lower it went. Do-gyeong could choose, I could not choose, and the next recorder would perhaps not even be able to see. The chain's first hand was a choosing hand, the next a seeing hand, and the one after that a not-knowing hand. With each place down, one thing one could do dropped away. What remained at the end of the dropping was a hand that, able to do nothing, was only closed. I was one place below Do-gyeong, so I could not do the one thing Do-gyeong could, and the next recorder would not be able to do one more thing I could not.
I looked at the four lines again. My number, the head archivist's number, the two assistants' numbers. All four had their recipient fields blank, and all four were filling from the end. Yesterday one line became two, and today two became four. How many lines tomorrow, how many seats the terminal would receive, I could not tell. The seats in the preservation order were as many as there were hands that had touched. The pointing hand, the helping hand, the binding hand, the carrying hand. Every hand that had touched the material even once entered the order, and every hand in the order rose onto the terminal. To stop I had to stop the order, but a way to stop the order was nowhere. That every blocking road was blocked, I knew before the terminal where four lines filled side by side.