December the sixth. Eight in the morning. The line that had stood in the one cell the evening before was still there this morning, in the same place. I looked at it again, and knew the hand for my own.
The strokes of the eight digits had come from my own hand. The slant of them, the habit of bearing down at each place — they belonged to the same hand that stamps my employee number onto the attendance sheet every morning. Yet I had no memory of writing that line. When it had risen in the one cell the evening before, I could read it neither as one I had sent nor as one that had come to me. The seat of sending and the seat of receiving had become one the day before, so I could not even ask whether the line had gone out or come in. The question that rose before it this morning was not when, nor where. It was: who sent this. And I saw that the question had no place to stand.
I looked a long while at that hand. I took out the attendance sheet and laid the line beside the employee number I had stamped that morning. Where the strokes began, the way the second figure thickened under the press, the slight trailing-off at the close of the last — all of it matched. No one had copied it. This was a line my own hand had written. Yet I could not remember the time of writing it. When it had risen the evening before, I had been sitting in front of it, and had not once seen my hand rule it. It was not that the line lay where my hand had passed; the line was there first, and only the hand was mine.
This misalignment was one I already knew. The predecessor's log carried such a story. On the film with which the predecessor had photographed the living ledger, they wrote, a frame that had never been shot held their own face, already sitting there in advance. They looked into that frame again and again, reckoning whether they had ever stood in such a pose, and in the end could not remember. In Do-gyeong's ledger, a line never transcribed held a transcribed self. Do-gyeong too knew the hand of that line for her own, and knowing it, had nowhere left to draw back to. The three hands differed in their medium. One was film, one a ledger, and today's was the sending column. But in all three, the result stood before the hand. The predecessor's face was taken in advance; Do-gyeong read a self set down in advance; and I received a dispatch already sent before I sent it. As the medium passed from film to ledger, and from ledger to the sending column, that one thing never changed. The seat had made the hand what it was. As the measuring seat had made the one who was measured, the sending seat made the one who was sent.
Then who sent this. The hand being mine, had I sent it? But writing and sending were not the same act, and sending and intending were not the same act either. My hand had ruled it, yes, yet I had never meant to rule it and did not remember doing so. If the law had borrowed my hand to write, then the sender was the law and the hand alone was mine. I could not call the line mine, for I had no memory of writing it. Nor could I disown it, for the hand was mine. From that seat — where I could name it neither mine nor another's — I only looked at it.
There the question fell one layer further. To ask who sent it, there had to be a separate seat of sending. Something must go from this side to that side, and on this side a sender must sit, for the question to hold at all. But the day before, the line that divided this side from that had vanished. The seat of sending and the seat of receiving had folded into one cell, so there was no this-side for a sender to sit on. Who sent it was not a question without an answer but a question without a seat. Failing to find the answer and having no place for the question to stand were not the same. While I failed to find the answer, a question at least remained, and I could hold the seat of one who waits for an answer to come someday. When the question had no place to stand, that seat too was gone. I had not lost the answer; I sat in the seat where the question itself was lost. That what had kept me all winter was not the answer but the question, I understood only once the question was gone.
The seal had covered one more axis. As the winter deepened I had been losing my directions one at a time. First I lost before-and-after: whether the thing had happened and I had sent it, or I had sent it and the thing had happened. The day before, I lost left-and-right: whether the line was sent or received. Today I lost the seat itself: whether the one who sent it was me or the law. No before-and-after, no left-and-right, and now no one at all. What remained was the single fact that the line was there in one cell, and before that one fact the words I could still ask grew fewer by the day.
I looked again at that subjectless line, and saw that four of its eight digits were the attendance code I stamp each morning. The line was mine. My employee number was in it, so it was mine, and yet there was no one who had sent it. To ask who had written me into that line was, all the same, to find no seat for the question. If the hand that set down my vanishing was my own hand and yet outside my memory, then my vanishing had no sender. It had been sent by no one and was already sent all the same, simply there in one cell. Beneath a question with no place to stand, my four digits lay.
Until evening I labored to raise that question, and it would not rise. And when I gave up raising it and lifted my head, one more line had appeared in the one cell. It too was in my hand, and it too I had no memory of writing. Only one thing set it apart from yesterday's line. Yesterday's had risen only once evening came; today's had already risen before evening arrived. While I could name no sender, the lines I could not account for were multiplying at intervals shorter than a day. A sending that no one sends, with no one to slow it, was quickening. When there had been a sender, the line was held back at least by the moment that hand hesitated; with no sender, there was no hand left to hesitate.