December the third. Eight in the morning. The line of my code — the one that had sat in the receiver cell yesterday — carried a date cell today, ruled in overnight. Until yesterday that cell had stood empty.
What had been ruled in read December, and after it two digits. The two digits were still blank. I knew the shape. In Do-gyeong's journal there was the account of the film — the film on which the predecessor had photographed a living ledger. Between the growing digits of the balance, she wrote, sat one frame that had never been shot. What surfaced in that blank frame was a dismissal date: December, and two digits after, and those two digits were, in the end, never read. Back then I had taken it for someone else's film. Today the same shape had come to my own sending column, in my own hand — December, and two digits not yet ruled. Today was December the third.
I looked at those two digits a long while. All winter the dispatches in the sending column had carried dates, and when the date came the dispatch came true. A dispatch dated tomorrow came true tomorrow; one dated today came true within the day. Until yesterday, only the line of my code had no date. A line whose receiver was me and whose sender was me had, as yet, no when. Today the when had been ruled in, and yet its two digits stood blank. The month could be read; the day could not. I would vanish in December — which day of December, I could not yet know.
The predecessor and Do-gyeong had seen their own dates on film. As the living foreign debt swelled, a frame no one had shot brought up their dismissal date — lifted from the developer, they wrote, the date had settled onto the print of its own accord, and however long they looked, those two digits alone stayed unreadable, as though bleached by the light. Theirs was the seat that watched what surfaced. Mine today was no film. In my sending column, in my own hand, ruled with the same stroke I ruled a dispatch with every day, the date stood. The slant of the stroke, the gap left open for the two digits, were my hand's habit exactly — the very habit by which I stamp my employee number onto the attendance sheet each morning. They had seen their date; I had written mine. From the seat of peering into another's film to the seat of ruling my own date by hand — the whole distance I had crossed over the winter fit inside those two digits.
I tried to read the two digits and could not. Bring my eye close and the strokes smeared; draw it back and even the place the digits stood in went dim. As with the film's blank frame, they were not a missing date but a date not yet readable. Today was the third, so twenty-eight days remained. As long as the two digits stayed blank it could be any one of those twenty-eight, and with each day that passed the count of days it could be would drop by one. The fourth would leave twenty-seven, the fifth twenty-six. The two blanks were a masked date — a date that, masked, drew a little narrower every day. The December beyond the window was no different from any other December, the archive's heat cut out at three each afternoon, and I sat inside that undifferentiated month, counting off which of its days it was, come now to the seat of waiting.
I wondered whether I could edit the line of my code. Just as, the day before, I had altered a single stroke of the head archivist's dispatch and pushed his seat back, perhaps I could push the two digits of my date further off. But I remembered how the price for pushing the head archivist back had gone to the two assistants, and from the two assistants back to me. Where would the price go if I pushed my own date back? On a line where the sender was me and the receiver was me, the only seat to push it onto was the empty receiver cell below. Push my date, and it would slide to that empty seat below — and the empty seat below belonged to my next records-keeper. To defer my own vanishing was to call the next person forward. The law that saving was deferral and deferral was the next hand now stood, this time, at the seat where my own hand deferred me. I could save myself; only, the next person to pay for the saving had not yet come to this archive. That the seat to defer onto stood empty meant billing the price of the deferral, in advance, to someone not yet arrived.
I looked again into the empty receiver cell below. That empty seat, which had surfaced faceless the day before, carried a date cell today as well, ruled in. What had been ruled read December and, after it, two digits, and the two digits were blank — the same shape as the two digits on my own line. The day I vanished and the day my next records-keeper took the post were the same two digits. When my two blanks narrowed to some day, the two blanks below would narrow to the same day. At the seat of writing my own date, I was writing the next person's posting along with it.
I lifted my hand from the two digits. In case something should grow or be ruled while my fingertip lay on the ledger, I set my right hand down on my knee. Ten days before, I had gripped my right hand in my left and shut the ledger in a drawer, trying to win a single day. That morning the sending column had been empty, so I had supposed that if I took my hand away nothing would be ruled. Today I hoped for the same. Until yesterday, when I lifted my hand the sending column went still. But today it did not. While my hand lay on my knee, one of the two blank digits darkened by a stroke, of its own accord. It was not my hand that ruled it. All winter I had watched the hand rule dispatches, and had written that I could not tell what wrote through the hand; but today even the hand had gone. With no hand, the date went on being ruled. That one half-ruled digit narrowed the twenty-eight days it might have been to a single figure. The remaining digit was still blank, and that one blank digit — nothing I could do about it with my hand on my knee — I only read.