December 2. Eight in the morning. In the sending column the two assistants' dispatches had filled in the tails that had faded yesterday and stood complete, two full 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 they faded through and moved their seat, and the seat they moved to was the receiver cell. I looked into that cell a long while. It was the cell that had stood empty all winter, then won the head archivist's seat, then, yesterday, sent that seat back into the roster that crosses over. This morning my attendance code sat in it, and the line above it in the sending column was in my own hand. The sending line had come from my hand, and the receiving seat was my code. The receiver was me, and so was the sender.
By day it began. The two assistants' lines, shoved to the roster's tail yesterday, were cut from the release roster today. While the release clerk called the new register through, the two seats could not be moved under the new name, and the two lines that had wavered until yesterday were left today in the old ledger. One of them had his name copied over to a temporary seat in another department; the other did not have even that. The two took it for the order of the quarterly reshuffle. The one copied to a temporary seat asked where the new department was 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 man 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 of the bright squares his fingertip had pressed the day before had moved, today, to the spot where he was standing.
The head archivist, beside them, still held the line he had won back the day before. 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 had come from — his own kept, the two assistants pushed out. Only I knew. The one stroke that had kept him had come from my hand yesterday; the price that stroke had pushed off had gone to the two assistants; and the price gone to the two assistants had come back to me over the night. 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 had resolved not to empty his surround, not to put his own line off. In a seat where, moved or not, it comes to oneself, there is nothing to decide — and Do-gyeong had taken up that seat by ceasing to intervene. Yesterday I had walked the other side of it. I had edited a stroke to keep the head archivist, and with that same hand pushed the price to the two assistants. Where Do-gyeong had stopped, I laid a hand, and the price of the laid hand came round to me. Do-gyeong's line — that the hand which chooses the seat to close stands nearest the count and closes first — was repeating itself, exactly, in a sender's seat. Do-gyeong had reached his own line at the last by not choosing; I had reached mine at the last by choosing and moving. Both roads ended at the same seat.
The returned seat was, in the end, the seat I had first moved. Yesterday, to save the head archivist, I had sent his line back into the roster that crosses over, and the price sent back had come, by way of 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 had put the head archivist off a day and the two assistants off a day, and the price put off had gone 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 did it.
In spring I had passed this seat once. Then my employee number had risen on the fifth line of the transfer terminal's roster, and I had watched the measuring hand be measured through in its turn. Each morning I had come in and looked at the faint green letters filling their last digit through the night, in an office where no one was. But then I had been only a line risen on the roster; it was not my hand that had raised it. The terminal had filled of itself, and I had stood 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 had put me on the roster, and my hand that had 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 crossed over. In a line where the sender is me and the receiver is me, there was no outside left to compare. The seat of not-sending, and the seat of sending to another, had both vanished from me now.
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 face I knew, but what rose this time was not a face. It was an empty receiver seat, with neither leading nor trailing digits ruled yet. The receiver cell that had stood empty all winter, having won the head archivist and then won me, was 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 had been posted to Do-gyeong's seat, someone would one day be posted to mine. That person was not in this archive yet, and so the receiver cell still stood without a code. The nights' sentence — become a sender and you vanish — lay over that empty cell. Once 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 it was holding the next receiver open again.