April 14. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk. It was the sixth day since the transfer ended.
The recipient field of the card I tucked into the index box yesterday was, overnight, still blank. The blanked field stayed blank. The log and the card, which something wrote ahead, did not write the recipient field ahead. Every other field was written before the writing, but the recipient field alone was blank. The hand that wrote ahead left that field blank too. Leaving it blank was a thing that could not be written ahead, or leaving it blank was that field's being written. The blank was the content written in that field.
I recalled the day after I took the post. That day I opened and read the five bundles, and at the end of Do-gyeong's fifth bundle saw the blank recipient field. In that blank Do-gyeong had written the next recorder. Not knowing the blank pointed at me, on the pretext that to preserve I had to read to the end, I read to the end, and at the end left the sixth bundle's recipient field blank. The field I left blank that day was, today, still in the index box. Then I did not know why I left it blank. I just did as Do-gyeong had. Only today did I know what that blanked field was.
That blanked field was the next person's seat. The recipient field I left blank the day after I took the post was, then, blank, but a field the next recorder would fill when he took the post. Had I not left it blank, had a name been written there, the next person would have had no seat to enter. Because I left it blank, the next person could enter. The blank was the work of calling the next person. Do-gyeong blanked it and called me, and I blanked it and called the next person. At each blanked field one person was called, and a filled field called no one.
That the emptying was a filling, I knew so. A filled field was a closed field, and a blanked field was an open field. A closed field ended there, and an open field carried on to the next. To write a name in the recipient field was to fill but to close, and to leave it blank was to empty but to fill the next seat. That the last preservation I did was an emptying was because emptying was the only way to carry on without closing. Leaving one field blank in a fully closed bundle was opening the closed bundle to the next.
That this law was the same shape as the law of growing, I knew after looking a long while. A number grew the more it was written, and a seat filled the more it was emptied. Both were in reverse. In ordinary reckoning, write and it lessens, empty and it is empty, but in this archive, write and it increases, empty and it fills. As writing was making grow, emptying was filling. Growing and emptying were two faces of one law. As the number beneath the ledger swelled the more it lessened, the seat at the chain's end carried on the more it emptied. All this while I had looked only at the growing side and feared it, but the emptying side I did not fear. The same reverse, and one was fearful and one was not. Growing was fearful because I tried to block it, and emptying was not fearful because there was nothing to block.
If emptying was filling, whether my dimming too was a filling, I thought. My line had dimmed from the end, and now the last five digits were empty. To dim was to be emptied, and if being emptied was filling, then my dimming too was filling something. My dimmed place was the next person's seat. As Do-gyeong's end line dimmed and I read my number into that place, when my end line dims the next person will read his number into that place. My dimming was making the seat for the next person to enter. Vanishing was calling.
Then Do-gyeong's vanishing too was a calling of me. Had the last digit of Do-gyeong's fifth bundle not dimmed, I could not have read my last digit there, and then the sixth bundle would not have begun. Because Do-gyeong dimmed, I entered. Do-gyeong's vanishing was my taking the post. On the day of taking the post I knew Do-gyeong as the vanished predecessor, the one who left an empty desk. I even grieved for her. But her empty desk was my desk, and her dimmed last place was the seat I would sit in, so without her vanishing there was no me. The empty place I grieved was the place that made me be. A place that lost one person was a place that let one person in, and losing and letting-in were the same one field.
The next person to enter the place I dimmed, I would not see. As Do-gyeong did not see me. But unseen, what he would do I knew. The day after taking the post he would open my card in the index box, see the words the next recorder in the blank recipient field, and, not knowing the blank was his own seat, read his last digit there. The moment he reads it, my dimmed place fills with his first place, and the seventh bundle begins. The place I emptied would be filled so. That the emptying is a filling pointed at that one moment. I would not see that moment, but for it I was leaving one place blank.
In the afternoon, the last five digits of my line dimmed all the way, and only the first two were left. On the screen my line was now almost a blank line, and the longer the blank grew, the rarer the blinking. Soon the first two digits would dim too, and then my line would be wholly emptied. That a wholly emptied line was not an end but the next person's first place, I now saw without fear. The blank that frightened me the day after I took the post had become, six days on, the blank I leave. What frightened me and what I leave were the same blank. Only, then I did not know the blank pointed at me, and now I knew the blank pointed at the next person. The blank I received unknowing, I was leaving knowing. Do-gyeong too must have known and left it. On the last page of her log there were no words saying the emptying is a filling, but in the touch that left the recipient field blank that knowing must have been there. Only one who knew could empty exactly one field so. The place Do-gyeong knowingly emptied I received unknowing, and the place I knowingly empty the next person will receive unknowing. The knowing was in the emptying hand, and the unknowing in the receiving hand. Knowing when emptying, unknowing when receiving. The chain was a line where knowing emptyings and unknowing receivings carried on by turns.