December 2. Eight in the morning. In the sending column the two assistants' dispatches had filled the tails that faded yesterday and stood complete in two lines, and in the receiver cell below them sat a familiar four digits. It was the code I stamp on the attendance sheet each morning.
Yesterday the tails of the two assistants' dispatches had been fading toward my four digits. Over the night the tails faded through and moved their seat, and the seat they moved to was the receiver cell. I looked at that cell a long while. It was the receiver cell that had stood empty all winter, then won the head archivist's seat, then, yesterday, sent that seat back into the roster that goes over. This morning my attendance code sat in it, and the line in the sending column above it was in my own hand. The sending line came from my hand, and the receiving seat was my code. The receiver was me, and the sender was me.
By day it began. The two assistants' lines, pushed to the roster's tail yesterday, were today cut from the release roster. While the release clerk called the new register, the two seats could not be moved under the new name, and the two lines that had wavered until yesterday were today left in the old ledger. One had his name copied over to a temporary seat in another department; the other did not even have that. The two took it for the order of the quarterly reshuffle. The one copied to a temporary seat asked the new department's location and began to pack; the one with no seat stood by the release clerk, calling his own code twice, waiting for some seat he might be copied into. The clerk turned the register back and forth and shook his head. Neither asked why his seat had been left in the old ledger, and the one who had counted the empty places on the shelves on his fingers yesterday did not yet know that today his own name had become one of those empty places. One bright square his fingertip had pressed yesterday had today moved to the spot where he stood.
The head archivist, beside them, still held the line he had won back yesterday. Yesterday's ease still on his shoulders, he took the two assistants' displaced seats for a common thing of the quarter and turned the register. He did not know where the order came from — his own kept, the two assistants pushed out. Only I knew. The one stroke that kept him had come from my hand yesterday, the price that stroke pushed off had gone to the two assistants, and the price gone to the two assistants had over the night come back to me. From the head archivist to the two assistants, from the two assistants to me, the price had gone once around the archive and come to stand before the hand that first moved it.
I thought again of Do-gyeong's journal. Do-gyeong resolved not to empty his surround, not to put his own line off. In a seat where, moved or not, it is oneself, there is nothing to decide — and Do-gyeong took up that seat by ceasing to intervene. Yesterday I walked the other side. I edited a stroke to keep the head archivist, and with the editing hand pushed the price to the two assistants. Where Do-gyeong stopped, I laid a hand, and the price of the laid hand came round to me. Do-gyeong's line — the hand that chose the seat to close stands nearest the count and closes first — was repeating itself, exactly, in a sender's seat. Do-gyeong reached his own line at the last by not choosing; I reached my own line at the last by choosing and moving. Both roads ended at the same seat.
The returned seat was, in the end, the seat I first moved. Yesterday, to save the head archivist, I sent his line back into the roster that goes over, and the price sent back came, past the two assistants, into my receiver cell. If to save one person was not to send them out of the chain but to push them to the next cell, then the pushing had an end, and that end was the seat the pushing hand reached again. I put the head archivist off a day, and put the two assistants off a day, and the price put off went once around the archive's narrow ring to the hand that put it off. To save was to put off, and the end of putting off was the seat of the one who put it off.
In spring I passed this seat once. Then my code rose on the fifth line of the transfer terminal's roster, and I watched the measuring hand be measured through. Each morning I came and looked at the faint green letters filling their last digit through the night in an office where no one was. But then I was only a line risen on the roster; it was not my hand that raised it. The terminal filled of itself, and I was in the seat that watches the filling. Today was different. Today, above my code in the receiver cell, stood a sending line in my own hand. It was my hand that put me on the roster, and my hand that set me as that roster's receiver. From the measured seat to the sending seat, from the sending seat to the seat that sends to itself, I had moved across. In a line where sender is me and receiver is me, there was no outside to compare. The seat of not-sending, and the seat of sending to another, had both now vanished from me.
Below my code in the receiver cell, as evening came, a second line began to rise faint. I looked into it, wondering whether it too was a known face, but what rose this time was not a face. It was an empty receiver seat, neither leading nor trailing digits yet ruled. The receiver cell that had stood empty all winter, having won the head archivist and won me, was now opening an empty seat again below. That empty seat was the receiver after me, and by its holding no code yet, it was the seat of someone not now in this archive. As I was posted to Do-gyeong's seat, someone would one day be posted to mine. That person was not in this archive now, and so the receiver cell stood still without a code. The nights' sentence — become a sender and you vanish — lay over that empty cell. When I had sent to myself, below my vanished seat that empty receiver cell would wait for the next hand. The sending column, with no receiver all winter, had now won a receiver, and below that receiver was holding open the next receiver again.