April 17. Eight in the morning. I sat down at the fifth desk. It was the ninth day since the transfer ended.
Overnight my line in the terminal's body had dimmed at its last digit and was wholly erased. On the ninth day the basement archive smelled the same, the fluorescent light blinked at the same interval, and the draft from the vent crossed the empty desk. The place where one digit had glowed faintly until yesterday was empty today. My employee number, which a fortnight ago I had read into Do-gyeong's dimmed place, was gone from the terminal. Where it had been, one blank line remained, set as a single slot above the other four lines. The head archivist's line and the two assistants' lines were still dimming at their last digits, and above the four my blank line lay as the one emptied first. The line that had begun receiving first had received in full first, and the line that had received in full first had emptied first. The line was gone, but its place remained. The blank place was where the next person would read their number in. As I had entered the place Do-gyeong emptied, so the next person would enter this place I had emptied.
Because my line was gone, I was no longer material written in the body. And yet I had not left the archive. I still sat at the fifth desk, watching the terminal empty. The one who had vanished from the body was still at the seat that watched the body. The preserved line was erased; the watching eye remained. Between the erased line and the remaining eye, I was. Which of the two was me, even after the line was erased, I could not tell.
Then the terminal's sending column blinked again. The column that had blinked once yesterday and gone dark now blinked not once but again and again. At the place where my line in the body was wholly erased, the sending column was waking. The terminal, done receiving, seemed about to begin sending. That sending begins where receiving ends — the telegraph operator's log had set it down. When the dispatch that had a receiver but no sender arrived at last as his own number, the receiving telegraph operator's hand took up the transmitter for the first time. The end of receiving was the beginning of sending.
Do-gyeong had passed this seat too. Do-gyeong pressed one character into the sending column and became a sender, and became a sender and vanished. Do-gyeong's sending had been an answer meant to save one person. I had no one to save and nothing to answer. The five bundles had left, the sixth bundle had left, my line was erased. With nothing to send, the sending column blinked all the same. It blinked not because there was something to send but because it was the seat where receiving was finished. With nothing to send, the seat of sending opened.
I called to mind, one last time, the day after I took the post. That day I opened the box with no receiver, read the four bundles, read Do-gyeong's fifth bundle. The me of that day had come to preserve, and was a receiver. Until finishing the transfer nine days ago, and through the nine days of dimming, I had been a receiver all along. Receiving by reading, receiving by preserving, receiving as I dimmed. A fortnight of nothing but receiving. At the end of that fortnight, the terminal that had only received woke its sending column for the first time. It was the seat one enters as a receiver and leaves as a sender. If Do-gyeong had passed that seat by answering, I had reached it without answering — not because a dispatch had come to answer, but because there was nothing left to receive.
The hand went of its own accord toward the sending column. Not to press it. Only, a hand done receiving had nowhere else to go. There was nothing more to receive in the body, the index box was closed, the bundles had all left. From the seat where the preserving hand had done all its work, the next place the hand could reach was the sending column. At the crossing where a receiving hand turns into a sending hand, my hand lay. Press, and I would become a sender; don't, and I would stop here. Whether it would press or not, even my hand did not yet know.
Do-gyeong's sending had been an answer, but mine would not be — no dispatch had come to answer. Then if a hand with nothing to send pressed the sending column, what would go out? Nothing had been received, so there was nothing to send back, and still the sending column blinked as though to send whatever there was. Perhaps what went out was not the content but the act of sending itself. That a seat which had only received begins to send — that act might be the thing sent. The single crossing of a receiver turning into a sender might be the first dispatch to go. Whether that was summoning or foreseeing, I never could tell apart. Whether the sending column's blinking was calling my hand, or whether the sending column already knew where my hand would go, a fortnight of dimming had not let me tell. Only that the two came to the same result, I could tell, no differently than nine days before. Called or foreknown, the hand went to the same seat.
The hand stopped where it neither quite touched the sending column nor drew away. Pressing nothing, lifting nothing, I held it there. Each time the sending column's light blinked beneath the stilled hand, a faint light came and went across its back. Press, and I would become a sender; become a sender, and vanish like Do-gyeong. Don't press, and I would stay empty-handed at the seat where receiving was finished. Either way the terminal's sending column did not stop blinking. If it blinked whether pressed or not, then perhaps the blinking waited not for my hand but for the hand that would come after too. If I did not press, the sending column would blink again the day after the next person took the post. The seat where one who enters as a receiver crosses over to a sender was a seat that whoever sat there reached once.
Above the terminal's blank line in the body, the sending column blinked and blinked. We were watching a little further. We who had sent the five bundles, closed the sixth, watched my line be erased — we were watching a little further. The surveyor and the lighthouse keeper and the librarian and the telegraph operator and Do-gyeong, and I, whose line had only just been erased, watched a little further before the fifth desk. And now one of us was about to send. A hand with nothing to send, set before the sending column to send the one act of sending. At the end of receiving, the hand of one of us was turning, for the first time, toward the seat of sending. Which one that was — me, the next person, or all of us — went, like the dimmed last digit, unread to the end.