April 13. Eight in the morning. I sat down at the fifth desk. Five days had passed since the transfer ended.
The sixth bundle had been boxed and sent up to headquarters five days ago. To enter a bundle that had already left seemed, at first, backwards. But it was the bundle that had left; what stayed was the bundle's record. For every material it sent off, the archive left behind, in the index box, a record of what that material had been. The bundle went up to headquarters; its index stayed here. The card I made yesterday was the last index of the departed sixth bundle. The bundle was gone, but indexing its final line was still work left in my hands. The index was how the archive kept its hold on a material even after it left.
I opened the index box and found the slot for the sixth bundle. It was the oldest piece of furniture in the archive, and when I pulled the drawer the cards all slid forward at once on a smell of dry wood. The indexes of five bundles were already filled: the surveyor, the lighthouse keeper, the librarian, the telegraph operator, and Do-gyeong. Five slots stood closed in turn, and only the sixth bundle's slot still had one last place empty. Slide yesterday's card into that empty place and the sixth bundle's index would be full. I slid it in. The cardboard whispered against the card in front of it, and once it was in, the sixth bundle's index closed. Closing a bundle was finished only after the bundle had been sent away. To close what had gone was the last task left to the hand that sent it. The departed bundle was somewhere at headquarters, opening now in someone else's hands; but closing the record of what it had been could be done only here, in the archive, at the seat that had sent it.
Do-gyeong had done the same thing. Entering her own log as the fifth bundle, she had closed the fifth bundle's index. She had left the receiver cell blank and written the next recorder there, and the next recorder was me. I had opened the fifth bundle, read Do-gyeong's last index, and at the end of that reading begun the sixth. Now, closing the sixth bundle, I wrote the next recorder in the receiver cell. At the seat where Do-gyeong had called me, I called the next person. As the five slots closed and the sixth closed with them, the index box never lost a slot; it gained one each time. The surveyor closed, the lighthouse keeper closed, and every closing brought one more slot into being. Closing did not subtract slots but added them, and the moment the sixth closed, the place for a seventh appeared. The index box was a box that grew thicker the more of it you closed.
What it meant to leave the receiver cell blank I looked at again, once I had written it. To leave it blank was not to write — and yet the unwritten cell, staying empty, also meant it was waiting for the next person. An empty cell was not empty but a place to be filled. As the cell Do-gyeong left blank had been filled by me, the cell I left blank would be filled by whoever came next. The emptiness was not an ending but a seat, and the seat belonged to the next person. To leave the cell blank was to make ready the next person's seat. Had I written a name in the receiver cell, the material would have become something closed to one person. Left blank, it became material whose receiver was not yet fixed, open to anyone. Emptiness was the opposite of closing. The closing index stayed open through that one blank cell, and that one open cell carried the chain onward. Let a fully closed line keep just one cell empty, and through that one cell the line went on.
With the sixth bundle's index closed, there was nothing left on the desk to close. Five bundles gone, the sixth gone, its index shut. There was no material left to preserve. From my first day after taking the post I had done nothing but preserve, and today, for the first time, I sat at a desk with nothing to preserve. An empty desk. The spot where the bundles had sat, the spot where the box had sat, all bare — the desk looked as wide as it had the day I first arrived. Only, unlike that day, now I knew, for each bare spot, what had left it. The empty desk on my first day was a desk that did not know what was coming; today's empty desk was a desk that knew what had gone. The same empty desk stood once at the beginning and once at the end, with a fortnight held between them.
But an empty desk was not a desk where the work was over. The terminal was still on, and my line in the body field held there, dimmed now to the third digit from the end. There was no material left to preserve, yet the material being preserved was still there, inside the terminal. That the preserving was over while the being-preserved was not — that was today's seat. The hand that had been preserving was finished; the line that had been preserved was still dimming. Within one person, a hand done with its work and a line still going dim stood together.
I wondered whether the line inside the terminal was the last material I had to preserve. I had indexed it on a card yesterday, so the terminal's line was already indexed material, and indexed material was material whose preserving was done. So the line in the terminal was no longer waiting to be preserved but waiting, its preserving finished, to leave. As the sixth bundle had left boxed, the terminal's line too would leave for somewhere. Where it would leave for I did not know, but that it would leave I could tell. Going dim was one way of leaving. Some material left in a box; some left by growing faint. My line was leaving not by box but by fading. The line, dim to the third digit from the end, began to fade toward the fourth.
Watching the fading line, at this seat where the five bundles and the sixth and all their indexes stood closed, I reckoned what I would leave behind at the last. What I would leave was a single card. A card with the receiver cell blank. It would stay in the index box, and the next recorder, the day after taking the post, would open it. They would read the faded employee number on the card, and read the words the next recorder in the receiver cell, and — never knowing that those words pointed at their own seat — would preserve the card as one piece of material. Just as I had read Do-gyeong's card. Reading it, they would watch their own line begin to fade, and then make a card of their own and close the seventh bundle's index, and leave the receiver cell blank again to call the one after them. I would never see that person, yet I already knew everything they would do — because it would not differ by a single character from what I had done. The hand that closed the sixth bundle was leaving the first place of the seventh bundle empty. That one empty place was the last material I preserved. Not a material but a place, not a filling but an emptying — that was what I left at the last.