The twenty-fourth of November. Eight in the morning. The twenty-fourth had become today. I looked below the date and my hand went still.
For the past four days a single line had filled in below the date. One employee number. Today it was not a single line. The numbers ran down below the date, line after line. I counted eleven. Each with a different leading digit, each with a different tail. They sat one beneath the other, aligned into a single block. Not a number on its own, but a bundle of numbers. I knew the shape of it. It was the shape of everything I had lifted out of the boxes all winter. It was a roster.
It was the first time the sending column had raised a roster. Until yesterday it had been one a day, and the one had come at noon as one. Today eleven hung there at once. The two last digits that had surfaced faintly in the empty receiver cell the evening before had, over the night, climbed to the topmost cell of the roster. What had been the receiver's seat was now the head of the roster. That head cell seemed to want to say what kind of roster it received, but with only two digits so far I could not read which department it was.
At noon a roster came down. Not a disposal sheet — a roster of people. The company's second-round dismissal list was passing through the department heads' hands and going round the hall. What had happened once in spring had come round again in winter, and this time, they said, the cut ran wider than in spring. Since the list was a circular, I took a sheet for the archive's share and read it too. Names and numbers stood side by side on the paper. What I had seen in the sending column that morning was numbers only, but I had those eleven endings by heart.
I laid the two together. I ran my finger down the numbers on the paper, top to bottom, matching them against the morning's eleven lines. Not all of them met. The paper list was far longer, dozens of names across every department. But each of the eleven lines that had risen in my sending column that morning was in that long list somewhere. Not a leading digit, not an ending, out of place. The eleven I had read at eight were the eleven of the dismissal list going round at noon. The numbers that had been coming one loose sheet at a time now came as a bundle, and the bundle matched its seats to the real roster.
In spring Do-gyeong received a tomorrow-dated roster and read it. I send a tomorrow-dated roster from the sending column. That what she received I send, I had learned four days ago; but the weight was different when it was one person and when it was several. When it was one, I could send it without knowing that one. When eleven rose as a single block, I saw on the paper that the eleven were seats, each with a name. From the seat where one company had been disposed of, to one person, then to several people, the unit of the sending column narrowed and sharpened. The narrower it grew the more exact the seat became, and the more exact, the closer to a face.
One of the eleven numbers was familiar. Not that I knew the name — I had seen its leading digits more than once on the supply-office circulars. It might have been the person who always took the same seat in the basement canteen and ladled the broth twice, or the one who reached over and pressed my floor in the elevator. I did not know for certain who they were, and had I known for certain I would have held the paper longer. I knew only that their number had passed through my sending column that morning. A number with a half-known face was on the list, and I had already read that number at eight. A number I did not know was a figure; a number I half-knew was not. From the narrowed seat, for the first time, I felt the weight of the sending as weight.
Whether it had become a roster by being sent, or was an already-drawn roster read in advance — on the fifth day too I could not tell the two apart. The paper roster would have been drawn up above, before dawn. Management would have set a headcount for each department and chosen names to fit it. That work would have been done in a meeting room, by human hands, with nothing to do with my sending column. If so, all I had done was read a settled roster early, at eight. And yet the sending column had raised that roster tomorrow-dated, and I sat before it with my fingertip resting on it. If it was a settled order, it would have come out the same had I never sent. If it was a sending, my hand had added a line to that roster. The two ran opposite over the winter of eleven people, and yet on the sending column they showed as the same eleven lines.
I did not do as Do-gyeong had done. Do-gyeong picked out and emptied the seats around Kang Min-seok, filling another line in their place to lift one person off a roster. What she paid for it afterward I knew, having read the five bundles to the end. Even when the department code filling the roster's head cell looked, in its leading digits, the same as the archive's, I did not bring my hand to the roster. To read and to rewrite were not the same act. I chose to stay the one who reads. Even to stay the one who reads was, in this seat, a choice — but at least it was not the road Do-gyeong had already walked once.
In the evening the sending column raised the twenty-fifth. And two more digits filled the roster's head cell. Half the department code was readable now. The seat that had held two digits in the morning held four by evening, and tomorrow it would say in full which department's roster this was. Only yesterday the receiver's seat had stood empty; today it was furnishing itself with a name. I looked a long while at the half-read code. Whichever department it was, at the end of that roster there would be one person who had read that department's seat and sat down before the sending column. That the seat that reads a roster and the seat written into a roster stand on the same form, I had already read in the five bundles. Only this time it was filling in with the code of my own department. I did not know what numbers the remaining two digits would fill with over the night, and not knowing, I rose from the seat and turned off the light. Only the glow of the sending column blinked alone in the dark, and beneath it the roster waited, unerased, for tomorrow.