April 15. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk. It was the seventh day since the transfer ended.
My line in the terminal's body field had only the first two digits left. Dimming inward from the end, now only the leading digits, showing the year of joining, were faintly lit. The basement archive smelled the same on the seventh day, the fluorescent blinked at the same interval, and only the terminal screen emptied one place a day. Those two digits too would soon dim. When they dimmed, my line would be wholly erased from the terminal. That the wholly erased place became the next person's first place, I had known since yesterday, so I watched the erasing without fear. With no fear, I could look at the dimming line a long while. While I looked a long while, whether I was looking at the line or the line was looking at me blurred.
From the day after I took the post I knew myself all along as one who preserves. One who looks into material, who tends material from outside it. I sorted the five bundles, preserved the sixth, closed the index box. While doing all that, I took myself for not the material but the hand that handles material. The hand had to be outside the material. If the preserver were inside the preserved, there would be no hand to tend it. So I always took myself for standing one step outside.
But there was no place of one-step-outside. Looking in was going in, and the tending hand was the tended material. Watching my line, up on the terminal, dim side by side with the other four, I was not one standing outside but one line among five. I had thought I was the eye seeing the other lines, but I was one of the lines seen. That I took the seeing seat and the seen seat to be separate was, from the day after I took the post, a fortnight's — a week's — illusion. The illusion cleared today. Cleared, the place called outside had never been there from the start. A place that was never there, I had taken myself to be standing on for a week. With no place stood on, there was nothing to fall from, yet I had spent a week striving not to fall. Blocking, telling, saving were all hands stretched from that nonexistent outside toward the inside. With no outside, there was no hand to stretch toward the inside either. The hand was inside from the start, and inside only touched inside.
Do-gyeong too must have taken herself to be standing outside. But Do-gyeong went inside by answering. The hand that pressed the sender field became a sender, and the sender was no longer one who watched the ledger but one written in the ledger. Do-gyeong lost the outside by becoming one who answers. I did not answer, but I lost the outside by preserving. Do-gyeong went in by becoming a sender, and I went in by becoming preserved material. The entrances differed. Do-gyeong's entrance was active, and mine was passive. Do-gyeong went in by doing, and I went in by becoming. Do-gyeong went in by one press, and I by a fortnight of preserving. Do-gyeong's entrance was narrow and a single moment, mine wide and slow. But the two entrances opened onto the same inside. Active or passive, a moment or a fortnight, once inside, both were one line. Among the five dimming lines on the terminal, the line that came in active and the line that came in passive could not be told apart. The dimmed place kept no shape of the entrance.
That there was no outside seemed at first a being-shut-in, but watching, it was not only that. One standing outside could see the inside but could not touch it. One who had gone inside could not leave the inside but touched the other lines inside. That my line was one of five meant being shut in, but also meant being in one place with four lines. The surveyor and the lighthouse keeper and the librarian and the telegraph operator and Do-gyeong were not the outside material I had watched but five neighbors dimming in the same place as me. The material I had preserved was, it turned out, neighbors. At the seat that lost the outside, I was, for the first time, in one line with them. The day after I took the post I called them four hands, five hands. I called them hands because I saw them as working tools, as material that had passed through the law. But the hands were people's hands, and the people were people who became a line measuring a shaft, writing a tide, reading a syllable, receiving a dispatch, copying a ledger. Five people doing five works reached the same seat, and at that seat I reached sixth. That the five I saw as material began to look like people was a thing that happened only after losing the outside. Outside they were material; inside they were neighbors.
That I was in one line with them took the week's fear away at the last. The day after I took the post I saw the four bundles as strange material, Do-gyeong as a vanished predecessor, the terminal's number as a frightening forecast. A week on, those four were neighbors who had passed the same law first, Do-gyeong was the one who emptied the seat I entered, and the terminal's number was not a forecast but my seat. Everything frightening was a seat. One who feared seats, having sat in the seat, found nothing to fear. There was something one knew only by sitting, and the seat dimming from the last two digits was a seat only one who had sat could know. In the week of watching five lines from outside I did not know, and only when I became the sixth line beside the five did I know. To know was the same work as losing the outside.
In the afternoon, the first two digits began to dim. My line was almost wholly erased from the terminal. Watching the almost-erased line, I thought of the next hand. What I saw from inside, having lost the outside, the next hand would come in not knowing. He would begin preserving, thinking he stood outside, and a week later know there was no outside. As I had. But that week, if I wrote it down, he might fumble less. Writing it down would not remove the coming-in, but the path coming in could be written down once. Do-gyeong could not write that path down. Do-gyeong's log broke off at the seat of answering, and what came after the break Do-gyeong could not write, and was closed. So I fumbled a week from the day after I took the post. The path Do-gyeong could not write, I, having come all the way, could write. Thanks to coming in passive and not active, I could look at the fortnight while coming in, and had time to write what I looked at. If Do-gyeong's single moment gave no time to write, my fortnight gave time. For the next hand, to write down the law I saw from inside was the last thing left to do.