The twenty-sixth of November. Eight in the morning. The twenty-sixth had become today, and beneath the date was empty.
It was the first time in days. A morning with no number filled over the night. On another day I would have read it as relief. Nothing to send today; today no number dims. But I could not feel relieved. The hand that had gone one joint toward the sending column last evening, I had not yet drawn back. It had stayed there through the night into the morning, and the emptiness beneath the date seemed to be not because the sender field had raised nothing, but because my hand had not yet written.
When I laid my fingertip on the sending column, strokes began in that place. They were strokes I knew. It was my handwriting. For four days the terminal had shown numbers risen with others' leading digits, but what filled that place today was not a printed figure but a figure written by hand, and that handwriting was the one I use when I sign my name on the attendance sheet. I had only laid my hand on it, yet the strokes ran on. Each figure carried my own habit exactly. For a long time I have curled the last stroke of a four inward, and drawn the crossbar of a seven unusually long. The strokes ruling into the sending column did just that. To watch an unfamiliar number written in a familiar habit of the hand was unlike watching someone imitate my writing. An imitation would have gone wrong somewhere, but here not one stroke went wrong. The first digit ruled, the second ruled, and until all eight were ruled, I never had the sense that I was choosing the number. I did not choose, yet the hand wrote. What wrote was surely my hand, but what to write was not mine.
When all eight digits were ruled, the hand stopped. In the sending column stood a single number in my handwriting. I read it. The leading digits were unfamiliar, seeming to belong to some company transferred in winter. A few days ago this number would have hung printed in the sending column over the night, and I would have read it and sent it. Today nothing hung there, and instead my hand had written it. In the seat where I read and sent, there was now a hand that writes and sends.
Do-gyeong's journal held the story of the operator's hand. Before the operator wrote anything, the terminal's body cell was already full of his handwriting, it said. As if his hand were taking down what someone, somewhere, was calling out, the writing had come ahead of his will. Do-gyeong wrote it down as a pre-existing hand. Writing already there. I had read that passage many times, but when I read it I had thought it only the affair of one who receives — that tomorrow comes in advance in his hand. What my hand did today was the far side of that. It did not come in advance; it went out from my hand. Yet, far side though it was, it was the same. As his hand took down, my hand too wrote, and neither hand owned what it was to write.
I tried stopping the hand. I lifted the hand that had ruled the strokes from the sending column and set it on my knee. The sending column filled no further. Stopped, it stopped. For a moment I leaned on that stopping. But while I opened a box and matched an index, the hand had gone back to the sending column. When it had risen from my knee, I did not know. I could stop, but the stopping did not hold. Each moment my attention went elsewhere the hand returned to its place, and its place was now the sending column. The reading hand came when called and stayed on the knee when not; the writing hand was at the sending column whether called or not.
By day that number's matter came. Though it was a number my hand had written, not one printed and risen in the morning, the noon disposal sheet held the company of those leading digits. The line the hand wrote was no different from a pressed line. Read and send, or write and send, what came at noon was the same. I confirmed it, and from that confirmation I knew one more thing. Until a few days ago I chose whether to send what the sender field raised. While choosing, there was something I did. Today there was nothing to choose. The sender field raised nothing, the hand wrote of itself, and what it wrote came at noon. The seat of choosing had vanished. To become a sender was not to become one who chooses what to send, but to become one from whose hand the dispatch goes out without choosing.
Whether I write, or something writes through me, I could not part. Onto the summoning-or-foreseeing I had not parted in five nights, today one layer was laid. If it was surely my hand that wrote, I was one who writes; if what to write was not mine, I was one who takes down. As the operator took down, I too might be taking down. Only, his came to the receiving column and mine went out the sending column, so that even the same taking-down was, for one, a coming, and for the other, a going. Between the taking-down that comes and the taking-down that goes, the hand, asking neither side, made ready the next stroke.
Below the eight digits, the hand broke the line. A ninth stroke began. I watched it. It would not end in one line. The hand had finished the first line and descended to the second, and when the second was ruled it would descend to the third. What yesterday the sender field had done — swelling from one line to a roster of eleven — today it was not the sender field but my hand that did. I did not bring the hand back to my knee. Bringing it back would be brief, and in that while the sending column would be empty, but as I opened a box the hand would rise again and finish the second line. Before night came, I thought I would see, in the sending column, a roster in my own handwriting. Whether I read that roster or wrote it had passed into a place where asking no longer served.