Fiction

Brown Sugar Candy

The reason I saw my grandmother in my dream last night was probably because of what Sangwoo told me. The day our entire family gathered and went to visit her grave ahead of the fourth anniversary of her death, I heard a shocking story about her from Sangwoo, my younger brother. “Nuna, remember that old man?” It was a Saturday afternoon awash in autumn light, and dragonflies flitted leisurely throughout the cemetery park. My young nieces and nephews were shouting and running around, and the tombstones gleamed in the sun. In so many ways, it was the perfect day to pay a visit to Grandma for the first time in a while. “What old man?” I asked.“You know. Back in France, there was that old man who lived on the first floor. The tall one who wore a hearing aid.” While the other adults and my sister-in-law sat around on the grass chatting once we had finished tending the grave, Sangwoo and I had walked down to the lakeside, which was where he brought up the old man. “Ah, Monsieur Brunier? That was his name, right?”“Was it? I can’t remember.”“I’m pretty sure. Or was it Monsieur Bruno? Anyway, why are you suddenly asking about him?” Our family had lived in France from the time I was thirteen until I was sixteen, already nearly twenty years ago. “Grandma was dating that old man, wasn’t she? I just thought of that.”I turned to him, eyes wide. “What in the world are you talking about?”“You didn’t know?” Sangwoo laughed, amused.“Of course not—that’s why I’m asking what the hell you’re talking about.”“Actually, there was this one time,” he said, “when I saw them at a park near our house in France, sitting on a bench and holding hands.”  That night after we all parted ways, I went back to the house where I lived alone and took out the large boxes of my grandmother’s belongings from the depths of my wardrobe. The overwhelming majority of the space inside one box that held things like her norigae ornaments and gold rings was taken up by dozens of volumes of her diaries. There were notebooks of all different shapes and sizes, each labeled with the year according to both the Dangun and Gregorian calendars: D. 4283 and G. 1950, D. 4293 and G. 1960, and so on. I couldn’t bear to throw them out when I’d gone through her things, so I decided to take them all, even the ones where she had recorded in minute detail things like “nylon socks” and “a 500-hwan bill” she was gifted at her children’s doljanchi celebrations. But until then, out of respect for her privacy, I had refrained from reading through a single one. My grandmother, who used old-fashioned spellings, writing today as to-day, tomorrow as to-morrow. Among her many diaries, I found the one where she had recorded her day-to-day life during the time our family had spent in France.  *  I was five and Sangwoo was three when Grandma started living with us. When our grandfather died after a prolonged illness, our two aunts—Grandma’s daughters—thought she might get lonely living on her own and proposed that she move in with their eldest brother’s—our uncle’s—family. Grandma immediately shot down the idea, snapping, “Now that I’m finally free, you want me to go and spend the rest of my life walking on eggshells around my son and daughter-in-law?” But what ultimately made her decide to come and live with her younger son’s—our father’s—family was the fact that in July the year I turned five, our mother suddenly passed away in a car accident. “Your father came all the way to my house and got down on his knees.” A long time ago, when I asked Grandma why she had decided to raise us, that was her answer. I couldn’t picture my father, a big man built like a mountain, kneeling in front of her. In any case, that fall, she packed her things and came to live with us. I can’t quite say that she “moved in,” because Grandma, thinking she would stay with us only until Sangwoo started elementary school, brought most of her belongings to our place but didn’t sell her house. Several times a month, she went back to the 20-pyeong apartment where she’d lived with our grandfather to sweep and mop, and it wasn’t until I was nine and Sangwoo was seven that she finally sold the house and took up full-time residence with us. What was it that had made our grandmother, who’d held that house close to her heart for so long, suddenly change her mind? Now that I think about it, I never once asked. Maybe it was my own way of protecting myself. I knew that at any moment, she could pack her things and go, and there was always this fear huddling in some corner of my heart that she might leave us behind and disappear. It wasn’t that I thought she didn’t love us, my little brother and me. The affection she showed us was special, and I firmly believed she had decided to live with us because she didn’t want to be apart from us for even a moment. I thought that was undeniable. But now I also know that, more than anything, the single most crucial reason for her deciding to do away with her own home and come to live with us was because we needed her.  Grandma was born in a port city during the Japanese occupation to parents who ran a large Western-style dressmaking shop. She was the eldest daughter, with three brothers born before her and two sisters born after. A long time ago, I saw a photo of her as a little girl in a sailor-style school uniform standing in front of a wall somewhere. The face of the little girl in the photo, who looked to be only eight or nine years old at most, already showed glimmers of her outlook on life, things like her unwavering confidence and curiosity. All six children in her family were able to receive a modern education thanks to their cultured and financially well-off parents, but the fact that—unlike her siblings, who were content just to finish high school—Grandma was the only one who convinced her parents to let her enroll in college reveals a key aspect of her personality. When my grandmother passed away, the people who came to the funeral mostly remembered her for being “that type”—some said “stubborn,” others even used the word “vain.” “Aigo, that woman sure did whatever she wanted in life.” Every time one of those people sitting in front of their bowls of yukgaejang that had gone cold and dried-out slices of pyeonyuk spoke about Grandma as if they knew everything about her, I felt myself growing more and more upset, but I didn’t know why. I must have taken offense to the notion of “a woman who did whatever she wanted in life,” which seemed innocuous on the one hand but also seemed to hide something pointed and sharp within. The fact that Grandma was the only one of her siblings to go to college became a huge talking point, but no one seemed to remember that even before the war broke out, she’d had to drop out of the university she so badly wanted to attend. To me, Grandma was the sort of person who had to have known the rules for attending a women’s college at the time—students were required to withdraw once they were married—yet, less than a year into her studies, still allowed her parents to set her up with a man who would bore her for the rest of her life.  My grandmother, who maintained a height of 5’2 and a weight of 108 pounds for decades, who kept her white hair in a neat bob. It always made me proud when I was younger, the fact that she was so different from other grandmothers. She was fluent in Japanese, made her rolled omelets and steamed eggs a little sweet the Japanese way, and could sing “Edelweiss” in English. Because Grandma was highly educated, unlike most grandmothers, my brother and I felt the absence of our mother relatively less growing up. Until we graduated from elementary school, she looked over the notices in our notebooks and packed the supplies we needed, made boxed lunches for us with consideration for nutritional balance, and taught us things like addition and subtraction and our times tables, the way other children’s mothers did for them. Grandma, who had dreamed of being a pianist and was briefly enrolled in the music department, even taught me and my brother to play using Beyer’s instruction books. Her straight back and the curve of her arms as she showed us how to play songs like “Daddy and Crayons” or “The Orchard Trail.” While other grandmothers had barely finished elementary school, ours had always been a vision of sophistication and elegance. I looked up to her with wistful eyes. When we were little, Grandma was the one who tucked us into bed instead of our father, who was constantly busy with his architecture work. At night, we lay side by side on three separate blankets on the floor. Grandma was always in the middle, with me on her right and my brother on her left. While my brother was fast asleep almost as soon as he lay down, I struggled to drift off, so Grandma would tell me all these once-upon-a-time stories. She had a real talent for taking familiar tales and shaping them into something new whenever she ran out of material. Of the countless stories she told me, the one I remember to this day was about Little Red Riding Hood being eaten by a tiger. In Grandma’s story, Little Red Riding Hood had an errand to run. She was to cross several hills to bring a basket of rice cakes to the neighboring village, but on every hill she crossed, she encountered a tiger. “Little girl, little girl, give me your rice cakes,” the tiger said. Little Red honored each of his requests—first for the rice cakes, then the basket, then her red cape, then her shoes, until finally the tiger swallowed up the girl herself. “Grandma, this story is too scary,” I insisted the first time I heard the tale, burrowing into her chest. Imagine, a little girl devoured whole after giving up everything she has. It made for a truly terrifying story. Grandma smiled, brushing down my bangs with the back of her hand and whispering so as not to wake my brother. “No. This isn’t a scary story,” she said. “It’s a story about a very brave child who survives even in the belly of a tiger.” Unbeknownst to anyone, the girl in Grandma’s story had been clutching a tiny shard of obsidian in her fist when the tiger swallowed her, and with it, she slit the tiger’s stomach open from the inside and escaped.  Wouldn’t Grandma’s last chance to live apart from our family have been around the time our father’s transfer to France was finalized? The evening our father gathered the whole family to tell us that he was being sent to Paris on an assignment, the first thing Grandma said was that she wanted to stay in Korea. “The church I go to for worship every week is here, and so is the community college where I take classes twice a week, and my high school reunion every month,” she said. But in the end, she boarded the flight bound for France with the rest of us. “It’s not right for the kids to be without me.” Whenever she told people that she was leaving, rather than mention the anxieties and fears she had about life in a foreign country, Grandma simply said, “Thanks to my devoted son, I get to live abroad.” She didn’t know how to share her weaknesses or woes and openly declared that she would rather die than seek sympathy from others. She had a terrible relationship with our grandfather until the day he died, yet she still accompanied him to gatherings where she would put on a smile and use honorifics to address him. Of course, none of this meant that Grandma was entirely opposed to the idea of going to France. Until then, she had never been to a Western country, and France was the birthplace of many of the artists she had long aspired to emulate. She was ready to take in sights like the Eiffel Tower or Montmartre whenever she pleased. For the first two weeks after we arrived in Paris, while my brother and I were still in the process of transferring into our new school and our father’s work assignment hadn’t yet begun in earnest, it wasn’t me or my brother—both too young to harbor any fantasies about France—but Grandma who was utterly enraptured as she placed flowers on Chopin’s grave and asked to have her picture taken at the Mirabeau Bridge on the family outings led by our father. Truth be told, France was nothing more to me at the time than the country that had snatched me away from my peaceful life. I was ready to be disappointed by everything Paris had to offer, and the Seine which seemed so drab compared to the Han River, the elevators as narrow as coffins, and the foul-smelling passageways in the metro stations did little to change my mind. That was why, in every photo taken during those first few months—most of the photos of me, my brother, and Grandma standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Palace of Versailles, taken by our father—I was sulking as I stood next to my beaming grandmother in a wide-brimmed cap and ever-cheerful little brother. Back then, I felt a strong urge to punch people right in the nose when they said that living abroad at a young age was a privilege, and I couldn’t hide my frustration with my father for completely uprooting my life. The humiliation I felt sitting in classes where I didn’t understand a word that was said. The mortification I endured every time I was teased for not being able to express myself, all while hoping this time in my life would soon be over. The innocent pranks of children who had not yet learned that racism was wrong could be so cruel. After classes, I always rushed home as if I were fleeing something. To me, our house—where Grandma was waiting, boiling potatoes or making snacks like syrupy deep-fried sweet potatoes—was the safest place in the world. I bet it was the same for her. She couldn’t go anywhere on the metro aside from the Japanese grocery store that sold East Asian ingredients, and she spent most of her time in the house cleaning and doing laundry while waiting for me and my brother to get home. When we got back from school, we would eat the snacks that Grandma had set out for us before taking our seats beside her on the sofa to watch TV. There were times we watched incomprehensible French dubs of Japanese animated movies or American movies whose plots we roughly knew since they had also been broadcast in Korea—and lots of the ads on French TV featured nude women, so whenever one came on, we would gasp in shock and change the channel—but most times we watched Korean dramas recorded on videotapes that Grandma rented in bulk every Sunday when she went to the Japanese grocery store. Miniseries and weekend dramas that we watched over and over until we had memorized the lines, to the point where our father would come from work and ask, “Did you at least do your homework first?” The three of us shared a certain something at that time. If I had to put it into words, maybe it was like the sweet, cozy camaraderie that formed among castaways on an island isolated from the world. But time went by, and after about a year, my brother and I had moved beyond the stage of rejecting our unfamiliar surroundings and had entered an era of trying whatever we could to adapt to our new lives.  How did Grandma fill her ever-increasing alone time? In the beginning, if she still had time to spare after finishing all the house chores, she would brew herself a mug of green tea, sit at the kitchen table, and read the Bible she had brought with her from Korea. Once she grew bored with being at home all day, she started going for walks nearby. She was afraid of getting lost if she tried taking the subway on her own, but she seemed fine wandering the neighborhood on foot. She would pack the dark blue pocket map our father had bought her in her small purse and set off for somewhere a little farther from the house each day. When one of her walks led her to a park that she loved, she marked it with a little circle on the map so she could find it again. Unlike my brother and me, who eventually became quite fluent in French, Grandma’s language skills didn’t improve in the slightest. Now and then, she would take out one of the basic French textbooks from our bookcase and leaf through it, but the only French she seemed to remember were a few greetings and rudimentary phrases like I’m from Korea and I don’t speak French. Considering how easily she had mastered Japanese and English during her school days, the fact that her French wasn’t getting any better made Grandma feel helpless. Not being able to converse in French meant that she had almost no one to talk to when she left the house. I don’t know whose fault it was, but that was around the time my brother and I, who once got along so well, started yelling and arguing constantly over petty things like who got to pick the TV channel. So we were too busy crying and screaming to have a proper conversation with our grandmother, and even in France our father was often away at company dinners or on business trips. In those days, cyber communication was already starting to catch on in Korea, but in France, there were still tons of people who didn’t know about even the concept of the Internet. Grandma sometimes called our aunts or her friends back home, but she was so worried about the cost of making international calls that she would hurry off the phone before she got to say everything she wanted. One time, our father even looked into a social gathering for expat wives to recommend to Grandma, who was clearly feeling bored. All the young wives in that group, who took turns hosting each other at their homes, were friendly but overly polite, and Grandma realized she was nothing more to them than an old woman who was difficult to manage. As time went on, her loneliness heaped up inside her, soundlessly, like snow. At first, it was a thin layer that seemed like it might soon melt away. But before long, it became a mound thick and solid enough to reach up to her waist. I was so busy trying hard not to seem like a typical Asian girl, overly serious with no sense of humor, in the eyes of the few friends I had managed to make in France that I didn’t realize Grandma had gone to the supermarket to buy pads for me because I’d just started my period only to wind up standing dumbstruck in front of a display case lined with nothing but tampons, not knowing what they were, or that she’d started visiting the Japanese grocery store hoping to find someone to talk to after a long and tedious day at home only to end up feeling both proud and humiliated every time she spoke fluently to the store’s Japanese owner.   Grandma became acquainted with Monsieur Brunier at some point in our second year of living in France, after many more such days. M. Brunier lived on the first floor of our apartment building, but we’d hardly ever run into him. The building manager told me that was because M. Brunier had been spending most of his time in a villa in Bordeaux since his wife passed away, leaving their Paris home empty. The building manager was an immigrant from Portugal, and she was kind to us as we were the only other foreigners in the building aside from her family. Once I could speak a bit of French, whenever I went to pick up parcels sent from my friends in Korea, I would end up listening with rapt attention as she told me stories about the people in our neighborhood. I would bring a little note that said a package had arrived when I went to the building manager’s apartment. Then I would ring the doorbell and wait for the door to open slowly and Madame Selina’s face to appear in the gap. Her resting face looked quite stern, but the moment she opened her mouth, her gaze softened. Whenever we blew a fuse or the power went out in the house, she would listen to my ridiculously long-winded and inarticulate explanations all the way through, then teach me the French word for whatever I’d been trying to explain. Why can I still remember things like that, and her voice as she gently pointed out, “You can say ‘short-circuit,’” after all this time? Now I suppose I should explain the layout of the apartment complex where we lived. It consisted of four buildings surrounding a rectangular yard. Our building was the farthest from the main road, which meant that when we wanted to go out, we had to cross that yard and leave through the main building, which was opposite ours. The building manager’s apartment was on the first floor of the main building. And M. Brunier lived on the first floor of one of the buildings that connected directly to ours. All this is to say it was inevitable that our grandmother would pass by M. Brunier’s apartment at the start of spring that year. She had long grown stifled from staying at home all day and was headed across the central yard to embark on one of her walks when she stopped in her tracks. She heard someone playing a piano. The pianist had clear talent, and the sound was coming from somewhere incredibly close by. The source of the piano melody was M. Brunier’s house. Grandma could see him, a gray-haired man hunched over at his piano, through his wide-open window. Liebestraum No. 3 in A♭ major. Ah, it’s Liszt. As soon as the title of the nocturne came to mind, Grandma suddenly remembered the day she had played this song for the first time. On the black Yamaha in her high school music room. And in an instant, the feeling of the keys under her fingers came back to her in time with M. Brunier’s playing. It was surprising and unexpected, like an electric shock. That was why Grandma stood there outside M. Brunier’s drawing room window, the sill of which was lined with three flowerpots of geraniums, until the performance ended. Until M. Brunier noticed her, approached the window, and greeted her, “Bonjour.” That night, Grandma knocked on my bedroom door. “Yeah?” I said, sticking just my head out. At some point, I had started shutting and locking my door, believing privacy to be of the utmost importance.“If you’re not using your radio, let me borrow it,” she said. While I searched for the Walkman I had left neglected in one of my desk drawers, the door opened a little wider. “What’s a school-aged girl doing with all this nail polish?” Grandma tutted, spotting the many colors—a pearlescent pink, a shade of sky blue—sitting on my desk next to a bottle of nail polish remover. “Everyone wears it here,” I snapped irritably, handing her the Walkman and shutting the door again. Everyone is like that here had become something of a magic spell that rendered my grandmother weak, and at some point, I had started to enjoy using the phrase. Grandma went back to her room, sat on the edge of the bed, and turned on the radio function on the Walkman. With much patience and after a long time spent adjusting the dial just so, she managed to find a station that played nothing but classical music. She couldn’t understand a word of the DJ’s comments between one song and the next, but she had no problem at all listening to the music itself. Keeping the volume at the lowest it could go so as not to wake up anyone else in the house, Grandma pressed the radio to her ear, and as she willed herself to sleep, forgotten memories washed over her in bed like a flood tide. The creaking of the old wooden floor in the music room where she stayed behind to practice after school, the copper kettle on the wood-burning stove, the rattle of the kettle lid as water boiled inside, and the endless silence outside the music room window, the golden light of the sunset pouring over the evergreen trees. The next day, Grandma was on her way home from a walk when she spotted M. Brunier from a distance, seemingly on his way back from buying baguettes, and a few days later she saw him from behind at a newspaper stand. Seems like every old person with time to spare ends up in the same places, she thought. She likely could have run into M. Brunier in the past, but there had never been any reason for her to notice his existence until then. Now, though, he stood out wherever they were. Every time she saw him, Grandma thought of his side profile as he sat at his piano, and every time she crossed that yard, she stopped outside his window, hoping to hear a melody. As the days grew balmier, M. Brunier spent more time playing with the window open. Did he know Grandma was listening? He must have. Sometimes when she was standing out in the courtyard, he would stop playing, head over to the window and strike up a conversation with her out of the blue, startling her. “I can’t speak French,” she blurted out whenever it happened, one of the few French sentences she knew. Then she scurried off, shyly, vowing never to stand by his window again. But the sound of the piano stopped her in her tracks every time without fail, and she was overcome with the desire to play. Flowers were in full bloom all around, and Grandma and M. Brunier began to take notice of each other. On days when they ran into each other on the street by chance and ended up walking back together, M. Brunier would walk more slowly, matching his strides to hers, then hold the main door open for her until she was inside. He was always the first to greet her initially, but Grandma soon started to think it was rude of her never to greet him first, and one day when she ran into him by the mailboxes, she mustered the courage to say hello before he did. Once, on the way back from grocery shopping, Grandma ran into M. Brunier, who took the handle of her wheeled shopping basket and brought it from the main entrance all the way to the elevator for her. Sometimes when Grandma and I were coming home from an outing or else leaving to go somewhere together, we would run into M. Brunier at the entrance. When that happened, he would ask us all sorts of questions or tell us stories about himself, having picked up on the fact that I knew French. Now that I think about it, he probably wanted Grandma, not me, to hear everything he was saying. But I had no way of knowing that then, and I couldn’t even begin to guess why every time we parted ways with M. Brunier, Grandma would ask me, “What’d he say?” I summarized it all as concisely as I could—“He asked if we were Vietnamese”—or else omitted much of it—“I don’t know. He was just rambling”—before returning to my own little world.  It rained for ten days. We had been living in France for three years, but Grandma still hadn’t gotten used to the springs there, fickle and gloomy as they were. Because of the lack of postnatal care she had received, her wrists and knees ached terribly when it rained, so for ten days, she refrained from going outside and stayed in the house. At the first sight of sunlight, she went out to the park and sat on a bench looking up at the trees, wishing that the blindingly bright summer would come soon. In summer, stark naked children splashed around in the park fountain, laughing out loud. What a beautiful sight that was. Children’s bodies, soft and sweet-smelling. Grandma unclenched her fists and studied her hands. Her skin had lost so much of its elasticity that when she pinched the back of her hands, it took a long time for the flesh to return to its original state. Grandma spotted M. Brunier entering the park as she was sitting on that bench, listening to music on the Walkman and crocheting. He was wearing beige corduroy pants and a brick-red shirt. How old might he be? Grandma had a hard time telling white men’s ages. It was probably the same for him when it came to her. M. Brunier was strappingly tall, but he had a slight stoop, as was natural at his age, and his gait was a little crooked. Oh, he couldn’t possibly be coming toward me, could he? When their eyes met, M. Brunier gave Grandma a slight smile and started walking toward her, which set off her nerves. She thought he would continue on after just exchanging greetings, but he gestured to the space beside her on the bench and asked if he could sit with her, which made Grandma’s heart pound and dulled her senses. He said something else to her. Helplessly, she repeated her usual “I don’t speak French.” M. Brunier pointed to the Walkman and enunciated one word, slowly: “Beethoven.” Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor was playing on the radio. “Ah, Beethoven.” Grandma nodded in understanding. After that, whenever they met in the park by chance, they would sit side by side on that bench. Because they couldn’t communicate in words, they simply sat there. Sitting with M. Brunier and listening to music together made Grandma’s heart flutter, but she couldn’t tell whether it was because she was with a man she barely knew or because she felt such a strong urge to play the piano in those moments. Every night before she went to sleep, she would listen to the classical music station on the radio and think, Tomorrow, I should ask him if he’d let me play. But to do that, she would have had to ask me or my brother or even our father to translate and write out the question in French for her. For some reason, she didn’t want to tell anyone about M. Brunier and the piano. What on earth would I do that for? she thought, pressing the Walkman to her ear. What a strange idea.   “Can I play your piano?”About two weeks had gone by before Grandma gathered the courage to ask M. Brunier the question in English. At one end of the grass field in the park, children were having some kind of birthday party, and someone had strung up several pastel balloons in a tree. The balloons were swaying in the wind. Each time a breeze kicked up, the gust grazed the hem of Grandma’s favorite floral-patterned skirt as well as her bare calves. M. Brunier, who didn’t speak a word of English, stared at Grandma as if to ask what she was saying. As if she’d expected as much, she reached into her purse with a slightly proud look on her face and took out the thick Korean-French dictionary she had made sure to pack for the occasion. Then, with M. Brunier watching her with wide and curious eyes, she searched for each word one by one and showed them to him as she found them. “I,” je. “Want,” vouloir. “To play,” jouer. “Your,” vous. “Piano,” piano. M. Brunier patiently read each word, and at last he seemed to understand what she was asking. His blue eyes gleamed behind the lenses of his reading glasses. He smiled and said, “Ah, piano!” That was how Grandma ended up in M. Brunier’s home that afternoon for the first time. Visiting the home of a man who lived alone—a French man, at that—was a definite first for her, and as M. Brunier turned his house key in the lock, she briefly wondered if she was doing something incredibly foolish. She was about to remove her shoes at the entrance, but seeing M. Brunier step onto the carpet with his shoes on, she paused in shock. He’d left all the storm windows closed while he’d been out, so the house was dim, but the moment he opened the windows and curtains, the shapes of the various objects that had been crouching in the dark came into view, one by one. Antique furniture in the Louis XV style. Wallpaper patterned with illustrations of birds and flowers. An armchair covered in fabric and a grandfather clock. Several large ceramic flowerpots sat atop the marble fireplace. They were empty now but had probably been filled to bursting with flowers when his wife was still alive. As Grandma stood in a daze in the drawing room, M. Brunier took her coat and hung it up for her. “Puis-je vous offrir une tasse de thé?” he asked, but Grandma didn’t understand. She took out the dictionary from her purse again. M. Brunier found the entry for “thé,” tea, and showed it to her. She realized that he was asking if she wanted some tea. “No, thank you,” she said, shaking her head. She had her sights set only on M. Brunier’s grand piano—a 1930 Pleyel—sitting elegantly and ostentatiously by the drawing room window.   Grandma sat on the piano bench. It had been adjusted to the perfect height for her, and even her foot’s distance from the pedal was ideal. Feeling the firmness of the bench underneath her, Grandma opened the lid and gently rested her thumbs and forefingers on the ivory keys. Do, re. The keys were cold and sleek. All she’d done was press her fingers to them, but immediately the sense of wonder and rapture she had felt the first time she laid eyes on a Christmas tree at church as a girl burst out from somewhere deep within her. Grandma used to teach me simple pieces on the piano until I was ten, so it had only been about five years since the last time she had played. But that day, playing M. Brunier’s piano, she was consumed by the feeling that it had been a long time, that she was touching the keys again after an eternity. She leafed through her memory and started playing the second movement in Schumann’s Kreisleriana, a composition she had loved. At first, she was a bit rusty and couldn’t will her hands to move the way she wanted them to, but soon, to her surprise, her body remembered the familiar motions that had once been habit, and her fingers slowly began to glide over the keys. As she played, M. Brunier sat beside her, watching with a slightly dumbstruck expression. He had probably never seen an Asian woman playing the piano before.  As Grandma’s recital went on, M. Brunier’s gaze shifted from a blend of surprise and confusion to one of gentle warmth and anticipation, but Grandma had, for a moment, forgotten he was there at all. That was because, in the flurry of her excitement, the person who came to mind was her music teacher from her high school days, a married man she’d had an unrequited crush on. “Nansil, you have a special talent for music, so you have to listen to lots of it,” he’d told her. He taught young Nansil to play the piano after school at a time when record players and pianos themselves were rare. One day, just so that she could listen to the music she always yearned to hear, he secretly slipped her the key to the music room that had a record player inside. Those were the days when none of her friends could even dream about something like love, all girls who averted their eyes and whose faces burned red if they ran into the boys from the nearby school at the bakery they stopped by on the way home after classes for mochi bread. But Nansil was different. What had she longed for? Something special, something edifying, something that would transport her to another world. The letters she exchanged with her music teacher. The ones they secretly stashed and retrieved from inside the instruments. What kept her up at night were the stories of lovers like Yun Sim-deok and Kim U-jin, or Clara and Robert Schumman. She had no doubt that the life that lay ahead of her would be one full of surprises, and she believed she had an obligation to make hers into an extraordinary narrative.  After that day, Grandma would regularly visit M. Brunier and play his piano. She would show up bearing fruit and juice as a sign of gratitude. Unaware that people in France didn’t bring such things when visiting others’ homes, when she filled a bowl with apples or melons and presented them along with bottled orange juice to M. Brunier, she couldn’t understand why he would regard her offering with a bewildered look before bursting out laughing. In the beginning, she would simply play for a while before getting up to leave, but slowly over time, she began having tea with M. Brunier in the drawing room. At first, when he asked her if she would like some sugar or milk or perhaps a slice of lemon in her tea, she hadn’t understood. She found his tastes so bizarre—who put milk in their tea! But soon she came to accept the tea he served with a splash of milk and two sugar cubes. They didn’t share a language, but as they sipped, they made plodding attempts to converse through the dictionary. They did away with things like articles and adverbs, stringing together a conversation with verbs and nouns and, later on, one or two adjectives. Because these conversations centered around a dictionary, no matter what they said, the verbs they used were tenseless, only ever in their base forms. But one day while looking up a verb, Grandma suddenly realized that most of the omitted tenses were past tenses, and that there was almost nothing she could express using future tense verbs. That was how she came to learn that M. Brunier’s wife—her name was Éliane—had died four years earlier from cancer; that he himself had been wealthy for most of his life and had never held a proper job; that he’d once lived in Vietnam, a former French colony; and that his given name was Jean Paul. In turn, M. Brunier came to learn that Grandma’s name was Park Nansil, that she was Korean, and that her day-to-day life was incredibly lonely. They conversed in the drawing room, sometimes going out for walks together on nice and sunny days, but most often when she went to M. Brunier’s house, Grandma listened to Bach or Mozart on his CD player. Whenever he put on a CD and steeped some tea, he and Grandma would sit a certain distance apart in the drawing room chairs, listening to the music and carrying out their respective tasks until the song ended. As that went on, old memories would crop up out of the blue, and Grandma entrusted her body to the music, allowing it to guide her as she set off on a journey somewhere far away. The evacuation route taken by refugees during the Korean War as they listened to the faint sound of shelling in the background, the flames visible in the distance from where she stood in a field somewhere and the black smoke blocking out the sky overhead, what looked like a parade of people walking like ghosts with bundles on their backs—she thought of these scenes that, even in the moment she first saw them, she knew would be imprinted on her mind forever. But even trivial memories from the past, ones she didn’t even know she had stored somewhere, suddenly unfolded before her eyes. Things like the feel of the white jeogori on her bare skin and the pale foam-like patterning on her lace veil on her wedding day—at the time, Grandma didn’t know what she stood to lose or gain from being unable to deny her parents’ wishes until the very end—or the raindrops she had seen on a day long ago, back when every restaurant had to thin out its rice with at least 20 percent mixed grains. One day in the midst of her suffocating life, where every day was exactly the same as the one before, Grandma had asked her neighbors to look after her still-young children and raced downtown to see a movie, either The Last Days of Pompeii or Miracle in the Rain, at the Jungbu Theater. She wasn’t sure which movie it had been, but the memory of the sensations she had felt that day was still uncannily clear. She had left the theater and set off on her own, ducking underneath an awning to wait for the downpour to pass, when the smell of grilled fish wafted toward her from some restaurant or other. The feel of the humidity on her cheeks and the roar of the pouring rain. The sensation of being alive and, at the same time, the feeling that she had already grown so old. Ah, how can one’s memories remain this vivid when so much time has passed? Looking back, Grandma was stunningly beautiful then. She started wearing the makeup she had abandoned since coming to France again, and I even caught her sometimes sneaking spritzes of the perfume in my room—a Calvin Klein fragrance I had begged my father to buy me for my birthday—but that wasn’t all. “Grandma, has something been going on with you lately?” It must have been one of those days when I paused as my brother and I had been doing our homework peacefully side by side at the dining table to ask Grandma a question. But she simply scoffed, “What would be going on with me?” and didn’t say anything else, so I turned back to the dictionary open on the table in front of me to finish my assignment.  It happened one afternoon in winter. Grandma was sitting in M. Brunier’s drawing room, and Brahms was flowing from the CD player. The afternoon sunlight danced over her hands as she crocheted, and Grandma looked up at M. Brunier sitting beside her. He had been so quiet, she thought he might have dozed off, but to her surprise, he had his sleeves rolled up and was stacking sugar cubes like a tower. He looked serious, intently focused, like someone carrying out an extremely important task. What on earth was he doing? This inscrutable man who constantly spilled food in his lap whenever he ate and occasionally took part in completely baffling behavior. Grandma studied M. Brunier’s arms as he stacked the sugar cubes; like hers, his were mottled with liver spots, but also covered with silver hairs, unlike a Korean man’s. As she watched him, it dawned on her that she would never understand M. Brunier, and that he would never know certain things about her. To her surprise, she felt a pain inside her chest at the thought. Ages ago, when she felt she was too old but was still in fact quite young, Grandma thought that aging meant the body and the mind degenerating at the same rate. Desire and yearning atrophying at the same pace as the body was stiffening. But now she knew. That it was only the body that deteriorated. Whenever such thoughts occurred to her, she invariably wondered if God had made humans age to punish them for the sins they had committed over the course of their lives. Was there any punishment more terrifying than having a heart filled with pulsating desire while the body refuses to cooperate? What a terrible kind of retribution—being confined to a body that could not move an inch. As she grew older, the thing that scared Grandma the most wasn’t dementia or the catheter bags she might someday end up wearing and filling with piss. No, the fear that haunted even her nightmares was the thought of what would happen if she were to spend the rest of her life like the stroke patient she had once seen at the nursing home where her husband had been hospitalized—fully conscious and wailing in anguish even as her entire body was paralyzed. But on that winter afternoon, as she gazed at the gentle sunlight dancing on the crown of that old man’s head while he concentrated wholly on the useless, silly task of stacking his sugar cube tower like a child as she sucked on one of the cubes as if it were candy, Grandma was once again overcome with a yearning for life and an anticipation for the future, and she had no way at all of stopping the flood. What was there to anticipate in life? Was that an incredibly foolish thing to do? Spending your whole life being betrayed. Even though she had given up her youth to raise her children, her daughters would take turns accusing her of hurting them, saying she doted only on her sons all their lives, and the sons would scream at her whenever they’d had a bit to drink, saying they had been made to feel cowed all their lives in the presence of their mother, who looked down on them for not turning out as well as their older sisters had. “You take issue with everything the men in this house do, down to the way we breathe!” No doubt her grandchildren, too, would come to hound her like creditors someday. She was lost in such thoughts until she realized that M. Brunier was there now, and while Grandma believed that there was something between them—whether empathy, understanding, or the tenuous solidarity and friendship forged between people who had been pushed to the margins in life—it occurred to her that M. Brunier might not attach any meaning at all to the time he spent with her. Who knows? Maybe he had other friends with whom he could communicate. Maybe he even had a lover. “Nansil!” Grandma had been so consumed by these thoughts that she didn’t notice the music had stopped playing and was startled when M. Brunier suddenly called her name. When she opened her eyes, she found a tremendously tall tower of sugar cubes on the table. A high sugar cube tower stacked painstakingly layer by layer. “Wah!” Grandma exclaimed. Like someone witnessing such a marvel for the first time in her life. Excited by her reaction, M. Brunier took the sugar box he had brought from the kitchen at some point and very carefully poured the remaining sugar cubes onto the table. Little brown sugar blocks spilling across the tabletop. Looking at the sugar cubes, Grandma picked up the one nearest to her and placed it in her mouth. Aiee, that’s sweet. What a pure sweetness, too. She decided to roll the sugar cube around with her tongue, slowly spreading the sweetness, and memories from when she was very young sprang up in her mind.That day in early spring when she sat on the dirt path outside the tailor’s shop and wept after being scolded for something or other, and the elegant purple cloche hat that one of the women customers had worn. The woman had gotten down from a rickshaw and pressed a brown sugar candy into the palm of Grandma’s hand. The splendid sweetness which she was tasting for the first time ever. It occurred to her then that this was another memory she would never be able to tell M. Brunier about. Grandma’s life had been one where even when she was with someone, she felt as if she had washed ashore on a strange island all alone. One where, as the days dragged on, she begged God to just kill her, yet where she would never be able to speak of the immense fear that inevitably followed trying to imagine what would come after death. But what could she do? Funnily enough, she suddenly felt as though it didn’t matter, either way. The delight that came from the unexpected. The particular joy that could be found only in the moment when the best-laid plans gave way. The moments of happiness that suddenly fell from the sky like shooting stars in midsummer when she thought she had lost everything. Grandma stood up then and placed one more sugar cube on top of the tower with M. Brunier. Then another one. And another. They did that until the tower collapsed. Until the sugar cubes scattered in all directions, and Grandma and M. Brunier clapped their hands, howling with laughter.  This relationship with M. Brunier lasted nearly a year. Until our family unexpectedly ended up returning to Korea earlier than planned due to sudden financial troubles at our father’s company. “So they were dating.” If I’d said as much to Grandma after listening to the whole story, she would have waved my words away, tutting, “Dating, my foot.” But Grandma never once told me anything about M. Brunier. Not only throughout my teenage years, during which time she consoled me and kept me on the straight and narrow while I was so consumed with resentment toward my father for not giving us any say at all in coming back, asking him if he knew how painful it was to be separated from my friends yet again when I was just beginning to adjust to our new lives. And not only throughout my brother’s struggle with depression due to the other kids bullying him whenever he failed to conform to Korean middle school culture and accusing him of showing off that he’d had a taste of life abroad thanks to his rich parents. But all throughout my adulthood and my brother’s, throughout our relationships and heartbreaks, she never said a word. Which is why the story I’ve been telling up until now is one I merely imagined while reading through her diaries.  In my mind, the farewell scene between Grandma and M. Brunier goes like this. They’re in the park on a spring day when gladiolus flowers are abloom in all sorts of colors, and they’re holding hands. In silence. All around them is the smell of fresh grass, and as she’s holding this man’s warm and wrinkled hand for the first time only when they are about to part ways forever, Grandma thinks. About what an arrogant thought that was. About how the life of an elderly person is not much different than that of a stroke patient with paralyzed limbs. Grandma lives this way, and her body lives this way, feeling everything vividly. According to her diaries, on that last day, M. Brunier searched in the dictionary and said his final words of farewell to her. Regarding what exactly he said, Grandma wrote only that the phrase consisted of two pronouns and one verb, so I don’t know what the words hidden therein might be. They could have been “Je vous attendrai,” I’ll wait for you, or “Vous me manquerez,” I’ll miss you. They could have even been the words I was imagining, “Je vous aime,” I love you. But now I have no way of ever knowing the truth of what was said.  All I know is this. It has to do with the dream I had last night, where Grandma visited me. She didn’t appear to be suffering the way she had been right before her death but instead appeared as the healthy woman she had been in her seventies, wearing gorgeous clothes and enveloped in the faint light of early dawn. I was probably a little girl in that dream world, so happy to see my grandmother after all these years that I ran to her in a single bound and embraced her. But then—what was that smell? As soon as I hugged Grandma, I caught a whiff of a strong, sweet aroma coming from somewhere. But I couldn’t find the source of the scent, not in Grandma’s hat or skirt or anywhere, and I got anxious. “Grandma, Grandma, look at me.” At the sound of my urgent pleas, she turned to me, and I suddenly noticed that she had her fist clenched tight. “Grandma, open your hand,” I nagged. Over and over again. I knew that if I started crying, she would give me whatever it was that I wanted. I was sure of it. But in the dream, Grandma said in a gentle yet firm tone, “No.” She looked slightly pained and, at the same time, as if she weren’t in any pain at all. Clenching her fist even tighter, she added, with the same resolve in her voice, “This is mine.”

Fiction

Lucky Clover

The first thing Jayeong did when summer arrived was go to the dance hall and talk everyone’s head off about her plum orchard. The venue was cramped, and tipsy patrons were dancing to Tempalay. The plum orchard that Jayeong was going on and on about was nothing more than an empty field, a destination for the neighborhood kids, lured by the smell of rain and pesticides, to spend a grand old time waving their hands in the air while staring blankly ahead.  But that didn’t mean (just because it was a refuge for the unwell, where all sorts of smells intermingled and the fruit struggled to ripen) that Jayeong’s plum orchard was all bad. After all, it did produce fruit, though not much; clean water pooled in the numerous holes she’d dug around the property; and the land was expansive enough for any animal to race across it gleefully. “I’ve been taking care of the orchard this whole time,” Jayeong said. Jayeong’s colleagues, who’d been listening to her with a burnt cinnamon stick in each of their mouths, nodded. “Yes. That’s right. You’ve been taking care of that orchard this whole time.”Jayeong was satisfied with her colleagues’ response, and she was satisfied with her colleagues as well. They were all farmers. Every so often, they would meet at a restaurant or bar and order a variety of dishes to share. Cheeks full of food, they would sit outside and watch the shifting sunlight during the day or venture indoors and stare at the flat glow of an establishment’s neon sign at night. It was six o’clock in the morning. Dawn was breaking. The weekend was still a long way off. Soon everyone in the dance hall would go home, splash some water on their faces, throw up a little, and head to work. The owner always saw off her customers one by one. “Get home safe. And remember, we’re closed tomorrow. The water cooler is broken beyond repair.”Everyone understood the owner’s plight. Jayeong wondered: If a single malfunction could shut down an entire establishment, could something similar happen to her orchard as well? But it wasn’t as though the orchard had a thick curtain to block the entrance with or a heavy security shutter Jayeong could roll down from the ceiling. Most importantly, as far as Jayeong could see, her orchard never broke down past the point of repair. A sturdy orchard. My sturdy plum orchard.Jayeong smiled wistfully.How to smile wistfully: Smile wistfully. Jayeong wrote in her notepad as soon as she arrived home. She liked to scribble whatever words came to mind on the first line of each page (How to smile wistfully: Smile wistfully) and write out her to-do list underneath (Clear out sacks, pull weeds, open windows, watch birds, make money). This summer, Jayeong planned to bring in some income by holding a Pick-Your-Own event for customers. A thriving orchard could yield approximately twenty boxes of plums per tree, but Jayeong’s decidedly not-thriving orchard would likely yield, at most, four to five small boxes per tree (she guessed). Even that was a generous estimate. “But that’s good enough,” Jayeong said.And she was right. That was good enough. Jayeong turned her head and peered out the living room window. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass, she could see the tall church steeple off in the distance, as well as the surrounding mountain ridges and her plum orchard. She had a clear view of the orchard from her house, a prefab home built on a raised foundation of earth and stones. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It was also prone to the occasional wildlife attack—geese, a herd of goats, roe deer and the like—so Jayeong had to keep a hunting rifle outside the front door. She’d never actually shot an animal, nor did she have any intention of doing so. It was just an intimidation tactic. Hey! Get away! Far away, you hear? That’s my orchard, don’t you dare mess with it . . . The one time she did try to shoot something, Jayeong was knocked back by the recoil. Her ears rang from the deafening sound and the billowing gunpowder caused tears and snot to stream down her face, and yet she was enthralled, a full-throated laugh bursting out of her. What had Jayeong tried to shoot that day? The half-visible fog, or perhaps night itself. Why had Jayeong tried to shoot this that day? To prepare for an even greater darkness, or perhaps she was afraid?She couldn’t be sure.  Jayeong pulled on her work boots and walked over to the orchard. She gauged that day’s wind speed by observing the shape of the clouds and the morning dew on grass. The wind was adequate. The sky was clear, the air pristine. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the weather would remain nice all day. Jayeong decided to weed and level the soil before the heat grew unbearable. All the shaded patches under the plum trees were over-grown with weeds. Jayeong had learned that if left to run unchecked, weeds would rob the trees of the soil’s essential nutrients. The malnourished trees would then wither, no longer able to bear flowers or fruit. “You can kiss the orchard goodbye at that point,” Jayeong’s mother had once said. “Not all fruit is created equal. You must snap off and throw out the ugly ones right away. Only then can you be a healthy farmer with a healthy farm.” The plum orchard had been passed down to Jayeong by her mother. Her mother had passed down an orchard full of plum trees to her, then left. Jayeong had no way of knowing where her mother had gone—if on a whim she’d run off to manage some other person’s farm, or if she’d chewed her own wrists to death somewhere. From time to time, Jayeong imagined her mother out there in the world—dipping her fingers in holy water before making the Sign of the Cross, or sitting somewhere silently, or stumbling around in an inebri­ated state. Jayeong’s thoughts would sometimes reach all the way to a snowy winter day, and she would imagine her mother showing up out of the blue after all these years and walking toward her, saying, It’s snowing. White, round snow­flakes. Coarse salt. Silvergrass-shaped eyebrows. A lungful of air, a nativity scene, an owl’s hoots. “Sweetheart, you really mustn’t leave that area so disheveled. It’s been long enough. It’s black and ugly, what an eyesore.” Jayeong walked with long strides around her property. Just as her mother had pointed out, the branches she had trimmed over the winter were piled dark and high like a burial mound.“I don’t see the problem,” she muttered. “What’s so ugly about that?” Jayeong rolled down the top of a burlap sack and pushed it around with her foot. Trowel in hand, she pulled the weeds. She leveled the soil. It was close to noon when she completed her tasks. She went to the shed and opened the window. Then, she leaned against the busted doorway and watched a nearby bird. She didn’t wonder what kind of bird it was. She simply picked up a fallen plum, split it in two, and gave half to it. The bird trod all over the soil, wandering near the ditch. One bird, one human. Dozing off, Jayeong accidentally stamped her feet twice. The startled bird flew eastward, but I won’t follow. I’ll stay right here, my hands are just so sticky . . . A lukewarm breeze came blowing through, lightly sweeping away the bird’s footprints when, behind the brambly hedge that surrounded the orchard, eight Clover Soldiers showed up in formation. They were white and resplendent.The sunlight made Jayeong dizzy.Before she could think, They’re back, she had the urge to feign ignorance and ask instead, Who are you? Then the eight Clover Soldiers would respond, We’re friends of Jayeong’s. Then I’ll be able to start anything anew, as if it were fresh. Friends of Jayeong’s? How nice to meet you. So you’re my friends, I see. I’m Jayeong. I look after the orchard. See? All this land, it’s mine. With awe and fear, we would exchange pleasantries. It would be our first meeting, after all. We would be unfamiliar with one another. That’s what a first time is all about. Not knowing. Not being tired of each other. Being able to betray each other easily. But none of this is possible. To be honest, I don’t enjoy new things. Maybe my brain does, but my body is set in its ways. I already know you, and you already know me. Still, not well, right? I’ll keep taking what comes, closing my eyes each night, waking up in the morning. I’ll dream of crabgrass cutting up my arms and legs, and patches of soil coming alive. Jayeong quickly put an end to this spiral by telling herself that they were back because, as always, she was having difficulty turning off her thoughts.They’re back.Jayeong didn’t let her mind go there again. Because she had to stop herself. That was why.  The eight Clover Soldiers were squat and stocky sentinels. They came up to Jayeong’s knees, but aside from that, they looked nearly identical to her. Their clover-shaped heads, which appeared as though someone had taken a bite out of each side, and their chlorophyll-green skin, however, were in stark contrast to Jayeong’s head and skin. When Jayeong first discovered them by a tree stump, they couldn’t walk or run, nor were they carrying tree branch guns the way they did now—they were simply docile and two-dimensional, like, well, a leaf. They came into this world together, as a unified cluster, right where the white whirling butterfly blossoms bloomed and withered.And now, the eight Clover Soldiers charged straight at her. They walked in formation, then ran, then scattered. Nine is too many and ten is too few Then how about eight? Eight is plenty No that’s not enough either How about the firstborn lead the way up front Good, where’s the firstborn? Firstborn, go over there and stand tall Hold your head up high I’ll take your picture What’s with the tone, how rude Is now a good time to sing Goodness no, my mood will sour . . . Who did you just call Firstborn? The firstborn is me, myself, and I. They all wanted to be the firstborn, but of course nobody knew who had been born first.“Left foot, left foot, left foot, form a circle, mark time, halt!”Each time the soldiers moved their feet to execute a close-order drill, the formation descended into chaos. “If we go out to battle like this, we’re all goners!”“I read about something like this in a book once. We’ll be dead meat, that’s for sure!”“But we can act alive, even if we’re dead.”“But we’ll still be dead. It’ll be all sorts of painful. I’m scared.”“What do you think?”“What are you asking that for? I’m scared. Of course I’m scared.”“That’s it? What’s with the face?” Jayeong often regretted teaching the soldiers human language. This was one of those times.“Be quiet, for the love of God,” she snapped. “One more word, and I’ll kick you all out.” The soldiers closed their mouths. And then, they started to laugh. Their low chuckles mingled with the sound of the wind blowing in from the woods and the water rushing through the four streams of the river down below the valley. Jayeong glared at the soldiers. Sweat trickled down her forehead, stinging her eyes. The soldiers swayed merrily in the breeze as they collected pebbles to place in their pockets to weigh themselves down, so they wouldn’t fly away. “But Jayeong,” they said. “You can’t kick us out.”Indeed. The clouds swept past the sun. The soldiers’ wide-open eyes soaked in the sunlight. They sparkled freely, and they were beautiful. Jayeong’s muttered response of I know, the soldiers’ fleshy ears that didn’t hear her response, peach fuzz, eight heads. A hunting snare. Balloon string. A carrot stick. Bird traps. A bomb shelter. A dried-up well. Clusters of grapes in the vineyard across the street. Angels. Everything was bathed clearly and brilliantly in the scorching midday sun. The eight Clover Soldiers began marching along the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust. From one sunlit patch to another, their shadows, as sticky as tar, avoided being swallowed up by the shade of the trees, alive.She could bear this. That was the only thought in her head. And that thought made her feel as though something was missing. Shall I make things bad for them, Jayeong pondered. Bad, harmful, unbearable.But how? she asked herself. But as she well knew, Jayeong’s perspective had already been so accustomed to this set of conditions that there was nothing she could make worse. Her question waited for her briefly, then stopped in its tracks. “No, there’s got to be a way.”Jayeong hadn’t said a word, but the soldiers came over and responded. “There’s got to be a way, Jayeong. A way for you.”A way for me. When Jayeong was a child, she loved attending the Vacation Bible School her local church held each summer. She liked memorizing the books of the Bible in order, and she enjoyed the taste of the orange juice they handed out before morning calisthenics. She loved sleeping in the same room with all the other girls, lying there under the covers in the middle of the night, eavesdropping on people’s conversations and wondering what sorts of things lay waiting in her own future. Jayeong believed in a higher power, and she’d started attending church because someone had told her that was where God lived. But whenever she thought about this entity called “God,” she couldn’t help but think, Just one? Jayeong believed there were three or four gods, not one. Maybe it was similar to holding three or four feelings at once. Perhaps that was why, when after many years had passed and Jayeong was now a VBS counselor teaching middle schoolers about the majesty of God, despite having been asked to start with His sublime sacrifice and deliver the short, simple, and predetermined message of the Gospel, oh wait, it had totally slipped her mind, and she instead went on and on about the concept of sublimity. “Sublime means lofty, grand, or exalted in thought, expression, or manner. It holds absolute value, so we humans can’t help but admire the sublime, to want to emulate it. It points to the sheer will of people to continue living, instead of taking the easier path of death. That’s what they say, anyway, and I agree. But these concepts of crudeness and nobility, good and bad, living despite thinking life’s not worth it—if we look at these things from a lens of absolutism, what could I possibly tell you guys for sure? Nothing, that’s what. Besides, it’s not like dying is easy. Dying is hard. So let me ask you, kids. What could it possibly mean for something to be ‘sublime’? Would we even be able to tell?” “I think we can.”“How?”“Because someone told me so.”“Who? God?”“My parents.” Just then, a golf ball came hurtling through the air and shattered the classroom window. What Jayeong could remember was that the window shattered because someone had shattered it, and in the hustle and bustle (thankfully no one was hurt), she could hear someone playing the piano. It was a plain walnut upright, and someone had scribbled “motherfuckers” on the rightmost pedal. In a dedicated area within Jayeong’s memory lived broken glass, a tiny “motherfuckers,” the sound of piano music, and the banner for that year’s VBS. The banner had always flapped peacefully in the wind outside the now-broken window, and Jayeong had gotten a good look at the Bible verse printed on it. Guard the good treasure that was entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us. What had she seen next? Her memory was blurry. A few scenes almost reemerged, only to recede again.  But when it came to a Tuesday like this, or a Thursday or a Sunday, any day when the soldiers appeared out of the blue really, Jayeong remembered everything clearly. Enough for her to recall certain memories instantly, even through the shimmering haze of the past. Because that’s what Jayeong wanted. That’s what she wanted to want, and was able to want. Right. I wanted this . . . “What are you thinking about?”The eight soldiers’ specialty was appearing. Reappearing. Accomplishing the act of appearing. Also: Helping or not helping Jayeong, chasing off beetles, rearranging items, gazing at the sun, etc. Jayeong couldn’t say they did nothing, and one January they even brought her some homemade alcohol they claimed warded off evil, telling her to give it a go. This was why, though they were so tiresome at times that she wanted to pinch the palest and most delicate parts of their flesh, or even wished they would disappear altogether, she didn’t actually want any of that to happen, and sometimes she even waited for them to appear all the while thinking, Something doesn’t add up here about the way I’m feeling. “Anyway.”“We have to get going,” the soldiers said, playing with the wounds on each other’s hands and feet.“Pay attention to your surroundings today, alright?”“When did we ever not pay attention?” The soldiers called protecting the orchard from outsiders “eyes front,” and this was the duty they took most seriously. It was very important to them that they stand guard, observing neighboring areas for suspicious boxes, plants, charcoal lumps, or rumors. They appeared ready to attack anyone who got in the way of this very important duty, but of course, nobody ever got in the way. Jayeong joined them this time. She suggested she join them, and the soldiers agreed. Jayeong and the soldiers patrolled the area, drawing a circle around the orchard. The soldiers tried to walk in formation but this didn’t go well, perhaps due to this new variable that was Jayeong. The soldiers discussed the lovely weather and tried to fathom the severity of the hail or earthquakes or ocean tsunamis this long-awaited lovely weather was sure to eventually cause as they stroked the forget-me-nots that had bloomed along the side of the road. Their fingers turned bright blue. “If hail falls from the sky, if an earthquake occurs, if a tsunami strikes, we’ll secretly lay down our roots next to a kind-hearted tree. Hey, why isn’t this coming off?” As the soldiers perspired and rubbed at their fingers, Jayeong peered wordlessly at the sky. A little while later, the soldiers also peered up at the same sky that Jayeong was peering up at. “What are you looking at?” They stood under the clear and high sky and bared their faces. A young traveler wearing a rucksack passed everyone just then, heading toward the forest, and Jayeong and the soldiers withdrew their faces from the sky and went on their way.Patrolling the area around the orchard took approximately fifty minutes. Discovered a new toad. Saw people of yore (they were referring to elderly people) looking at the sun halo. They claimed to have lost their eyesight due to the sun. Premises secure. Neither good nor bad? Both good and bad. On the way back, the soldiers took out and unfolded a map. On it was a point marked with a mountain symbol (△). It was the area above the orchard, near the dried-up well. “We didn’t inspect this zone earlier, so as not to rouse suspicion,” the soldiers said. “But there’s something there. We don’t know if it’s flora or fauna, but it could be lying in wait for the right time to strike. It’s a threat to the orchard, whatever it is.” They nodded, as if seeking assent. They proposed they return after nightfall. “Alright, let’s do that then,” Jayeong agreed. She almost asked, But what’s the plan if we really do find something there? but didn’t. Instead, she asked if they could go back to the orchard and harvest the plums together, as nobody had signed up for the Pick-Your-Own-Plums event. “I’ll take the top area, you guys take the bottom.” Plums had to be harvested within a two-week window, starting right at the onset of summer. After that, the trees dropped all the fruit on their own. “You want to go back to the orchard and pick plums together?”“Yes.”“But that’s your job. Why are you asking us to help? Don’t you see how hot it is?”“You’re asking why? I’ve never thought about the why of it all.”“We don’t want to. That’s not our business,” the soldiers said.“You could make it your business,” Jayeong said.“We won’t do it, we won’t. Just let us be. We’re allowed to not do something we don’t want to do.” So Jayeong let them be. As soon as they returned to the orchard, the heat radiating from the layers of smoldering dirt hit them square in the faces. Jayeong mixed some fertilizer into a bucket of cold water, filled a sprayer, and hoisted it onto her back, adjusting the shoulder straps. She then went around to every corner of the property, drenching the plum tree branches and their fruit, the dead trees and their dead fruit, severed stems, bottles of vinegar, some tissue paper, a bag of bean chips, and the soil and atmosphere that had nurtured it all. This was Jayeong’s specialty, the work that had been ingrained within her. The strong and steady stream of water glimmered in the midday sun. The soldiers chased the stream, basking in the cold drops that scattered in the air. Annoyed, Jayeong aimed the hose directly at the soldiers, sending them tumbling, feet entangled, into a puddle. “It hurts, it hurts!” they yelled. Jayeong blasted them again. “Stop that! You’re bigger than us. No fair! Stop bullying us.” The soldiers grimaced as if in pain, but there was a clear vitality to their wet faces. The soldiers showed Jayeong multiple flourishing life forces.Jayeong stopped, her back to the sun. So . . . She stood, suddenly unsure of what to do next.  “Why did I do that? I have no idea myself. I’ll probably never know. My thoughts are fuzzy, and I don’t try . . . Why did I do that?” Jayeong repeated the same thing again and again, so as not to blurt out everything in her head at once. She figured out what she needed to do next and got to work picking plums, muttering, “What the, who knows.” She sprayed pesticides every season, so there weren’t many worm-eaten plums. Still, there weren’t many edible ones, either. As always, making her way from one end of the orchard to the other, Jayeong stooped and straightened, ascended and descended step­ladders, and gazed off into the distance, all in the sweltering heat. The midday heat returned day after day. Gigantic plums and itty-bitty plums and even the rare perfectly ripe plum mingled together in a plastic crate like balls in a ball pit. Yellow and red and green, they were Jayeong’s plums that Jayeong had picked. Seeing them together like that, Jayeong smiled proudly. This time, the soldiers watched in silence. There was no hint of anything, no sadness. Just pride and joy. A bright smile. That was it.Jayeong stacked the full crates on one side of the field, then grabbed a few thin glass bottles from the shed, washed them, and laid them out in the sun to dry. Each year, she gathered the edible fruit and threw together the correct proportions of plums, sugar, soju, vinegar, and flavor enhancers to make homemade plum wine. She kept a few bottles for herself, but she sold most of them at a local market whenever it opened. When the weather cooled down, she even sold some bottles out of her truck by the side of the road. Whenever a driver would roll down their window and pick a fight (usually a young woman or man around Jayeong’s age), she would pretend not to see them or move to a different location out of fear of being reported. On one of these days, Jayeong was not with the soldiers and all alone. A man exited a sedan and approached her, calling, “Excuse me,” so Jayeong climbed down from her truck to greet her customer. But instead, he said, “Oh, I’m not here to buy. I bought a bottle from you earlier but it made me sick.” “But I haven’t sold a single bottle today,” Jayeong replied, to which he said, “I didn’t mean earlier, I meant recently.” He seemed quite new to lying. Still, she didn’t want to accuse the man, so she stayed quiet. After a while, however, the way he was standing there, so stubborn, began to grate on her, and she said, “So what? You have something to say?” “I’d like my money back.” The man showed no signs of backing down.“There hasn’t been a single person who’s gotten sick from my wine.”“Yes, there has. Me.” Well that’s true, Jayeong thought. You say you did, and you’re standing right here. She decided to play along and gave him 10,000 won in cash. She waited for him to say something to the effect of, All this over a measly 10,000 won. Why are you selling this crap, anyway? Just give it up. It’s a waste of time. Nobody needs this weird homemade wine. At which Jayeong would, her hands trembling with rage, hit the man with her truck. She even thought of what she would say to him, this man who would be crumpled on the ground by then, as she took the 10,000 won note back out of his wallet: So what? I did my best, okay? Do you know what that even means? To try your best at something? But the man just took the money, climbed back into his car without a word, and drove off. “A con artist for sure. A bottle is 15,000 won, yet he took the 10,000 won and didn’t say anything. He didn’t even know how much each bottle costs. I can’t believe I returned money that he’d never paid in the first place,” Jayeong muttered. More than anything else, she couldn’t forget the image of the man’s two hands as they politely accepted the money. Unlike Jayeong’s calloused, dirt-caked hands, his were clean and soft, with elegant fingers and clean nails. This son of a bitch, how much do you make conning people with those delicate hands of yours? Jayeong calculated the possible amounts in her head as she walked away from the road. She bought some gum and water from a vending machine in the underpass and strolled past a green barley field dancing in the breeze. After that, she returned to her truck and took a quick nap in the driver’s seat. In a dream, Jayeong learned that the man from earlier had just been released from prison. “Everyone who meets me says there’s something ominous about me,” he said in her dream.Was that true? Did he really hear that from everyone he met? Jayeong woke up and thought about this for a while. For starters, I never said that to him. Nobody could peek into her dreams, so she had to come to her own conclusions. Could go either way. Jayeong retrieved her notepad from her pocket and wrote down her conclusion. On the radio, which had been on the entire time, the DJ offered tips on residue burning and summer wildfire prevention. Jayeong started the truck. The fresh scent of greenery and the smell of hot asphalt wafted in and out through the open window. Three crape myrtle trees. Stone embankments. A faucet. The sound of footsteps tracking a flock of birds. The sound of a Coca-Cola can opening. The smell of dry ice. The smell of sulfur. Feathers. Bones. A shadow shaking its head. A cluster of kids, who’d been waiting for a snake in the middle of the road to move along, fidgeted and looked at Jayeong’s truck.  After nightfall, the wind suddenly picked up and it started to pour. Jayeong brought the soldiers a tarp. Unfazed, they installed a tall tent and waited out the storm. They waited with their bodies bent awkwardly, as if they were prop chairs in a play. Being a small chair. That’s what Jayeong called this awkward slouching, and as always, she sat in each chair, one by one. The soldiers’ bodies were neither cold nor hot, just soggy. A lantern shone dimly on the wet soldiers’ forms. Nobody spoke; it was completely silent, making the rain and breathing sound like a lullaby. Unlike during the day, the orchard felt listless and drained. Jayeong leaned toward the chair soldiers and waved. Whenever she waved slowly at them, as if greeting them happily or seeing them off, she would feel them slowly drift off to sleep. Jayeong had never learned this but she knew how to do it, and she didn’t hate it. The shower didn’t last long, but the wind was still strong so they continued to wait. Jayeong didn’t wake the soldiers, only sprinkled some powdered incense around the tent so unknown souls couldn’t enter without permission (not that she knew any souls to begin with). She killed the remaining time by drawing mountains on the ground with the leftover powder. A group of children big and small came rushing onto the field, dashing around but taking care not to step on the incense on the ground. They then whispered amongst themselves before running off. Am I happy? the children asked themselves. They answered themselves, too. I can’t sweat the small stuff. “Why did they come here, anyway?” she muttered, watching them leave as quickly as they’d come. She recalled the map from earlier in the day. The area above the orchard, near the dried-up well. Her mother’s corpse could be there. There were always people who were attracted to black water, after all. People who, entranced by the black water, threw themselves into a deep, dark well only to find there wasn’t a drop of moisture within and cracked their heads open on the hard floor. Pop, their heads went. Whenever Jayeong heard rumors of someone being swept away in a strong current or someone’s small spark nearly causing a massive forest fire in this imagined small town, she would visit the place to confirm if these things really did happen or not. If they were real or not. This was important to Jayeong, and this importance was virtuous. And this virtue was what saved Jayeong from time to time. “In that case, we should really go check it out. Don’t you think?” the soldiers said, waking from their slumber and rubbing their eyes.It was so pitch black outside the tent that it looked the same whether they opened their eyes or not. The darkness buzzed around them, and they traversed the buzzing darkness and traveled upward. Jayeong adjusted to the absence of light quickly, listening to the soldiers’ footsteps draw nearer or farther as she imagined herself walking alone. She could now hear the crickets chirping, and though she could make out what was around her, there was nothing particularly interesting to look at. “About earlier,” the soldiers said. They claimed that they’d had a dreamless sleep in the tent, but if they were being honest, there was a dream they’d wished they’d had. “It would’ve been an interesting one. It would’ve been about us losing you.” “If we had a dream like that, we would stop moving, and time would keep flowing. Of course, you would have to keep moving. Because it wouldn’t be your dream. Then if we happened to have a dream about finding you again, we would start moving again, moving toward you, but by then you’ll have become a person of yore.” Jayeong asked about the meaning of that dream.“We don’t know. Meaning can just appear out of nowhere. If it does, we’ll know.” Jayeong didn’t know what they meant by this, but she also kind of felt like she knew. There were simply some things like that in the world. Just as she knew how to put the soldiers to sleep despite never having learned, the soldiers knew how to rouse Jayeong without ever having learned. Jayeong and the soldiers marched on, alternately taking the lead. No one would ever mistake them for just one person. The dappled shadows of nearby tree branches retreated from her face, and the full moon hung low in the sky, bathing the area in a fractured white glow. With the light and wind in her face, Jayeong watched as the soldiers’ heads bobbed with each exhale. Their spiral cowlicks bounced up and down, small and adorable. They were alive. They appeared alive. “But what if we don’t find anything?”“Then we don’t find anything.”“I hope we find something. Anything.”“I hope I’m the one who finds something first.”“Boo! Boo! Boo!”“Or I hope I’m the one who’s found first.”“Alright, then. Clasp your hands together and say a prayer.” Jayeong nodded halfheartedly, saying, Yes, yes, and walked with them for a long time. Yes. I hope she’s there, dead. I hope she’ll give me an ending. Then I’ll forgive her. 

Fiction

Moüan

Moü, nature repeats herself. Just when she seems to perish, she feeds on her husk and revives, restores, regenerates. Her time differs from ours. Only humans live within temporal frames, having lapsed from infinite nature. The union dissolved when humans, wielding language, imposed names on all things. Humans exiled themselves from the natural order, forever estranged.  Moü’s teacher refused to adopt a call-word. He answered only to his role: teacher. Prior to that, young man, student, and at times, being. He paraded this seeming sacrifice as proof of his deeper resistance to fixed words. To Choü, he was no different from others. He, too, had a word that referred to him, except that it changed over time. Noēphon, their mode of communication, had its limits. Not even the most highly sensitized among them could single out a recipient for their noēphon. All messages were shared, inadvertently. No, inevitably. Whether intended or not.  The same held true for him and his desire for Choü’s flesh. Whenever he stood nearby, his lust unsettled her senses. The primal appetite surfaced first in his body. It throbbed against his thick lower garment made of single-horned northern goral hide. Choü would look the other way, only to have his lust leech onto her skin. She abhorred the sensation. He would have detected that abhorrence and known what it meant: rejection. Choü had repelled him before he could make his feelings known. The humiliation stoked his fury, though not without reason, leaving Choü to shudder under the weight of his tangled emotions: dregs of desire, shame, and faintly murderous, fitful rage.  As members of the same tribe, they could hardly avoid one another. Others sensed Choü’s discomfort. He sensed it too, unconcerned. He took cruel delight in her unease and the disturbing effect of his presence. He went out of his way to loiter in her path. He leered, desensitized to her distress, while Choü’s resentment roiled.  As tension thickened in the air and pressed upon the villagers, Gorusin sent for Choü. When Choü noēphoned, (Would it be better if I disappeared?) Gorusin shook her head. A simple gesture, noēphon withheld, indicating a firm no. Ro. (You’ve done nothing wrong.) The guttural noise lent weight to the message.  Huduseu. (It’s a matter of the heart. He needs time to let go.) Gorusin kept circling back to the same sentiment. The noēphon overwhelmed Choü’s senses. Her stomach lurched and her mind reeled, but she could not make it stop. She lacked the power. The right. The justification too. The susurrus of Gorusin’s thoughts coiled through her consciousness: you must understand, you must be patient, you must accept it as a matter of the heart.  Choü left, heading toward the northern lake. A low mountain range cradled the vast lake, its waters drawn from ancient ice that once crowned the planet’s highest peaks. Whenever her nerves frayed, she floated on its surface, imagining the ice-capped summits. Alone on the expanse, none of her thoughts would reach anyone. Though it was sheer distance that severed the connection, part of her wanted to believe the mountains stood as a barrier. Choü tried to distill her thoughts, to trace the outline of an emotion stirred by Gorusin’s insistence. It took an unfamiliar, unfathomable form.  Clouds mirrored on the lake slowly blanketed Choü. Their currents tingled against her skin. Eyes closed, she savored the sensation. She turned her thoughts back to Gorusin and the weight of responsibility cast upon the elder’s shoulders. Choü’s mother had left a hundred and thirteen years ago. They had walked along the lake, hands clasped, the day they parted. A low whistle was their only farewell. (We no longer look like mother and daughter. I’ve set you free in my heart. There is nothing left to say.)Choü had noticed their reflection in the water. There stood not parent and child but two long-time friends. Could they not live as such? Choü’s noēphon vanished into silence, lost on her mother. It had to be a pretext, a convenient excuse to leave. Before departing, her mother entrusted her to Gorusin, who gladly befriended the daughter of an old friend. This gave Gorusin a complicated place in Choü’s life. Choü heard a cry—a baby’s cry. She jolted upward, only to sink beneath the surface. She thrashed her arms and legs, shattering the crystalline lake. Shards of white spray splintered. The cry cut through the splashing. Choü emerged, her bearings restored. She scanned her surroundings. The cry echoed against the mountains, but her senses pointed westward. She swam to shore and sprinted straight into the woods. She stumbled as her heart rushed ahead. The forest darkened with startling speed, as if racing Choü to sunset. Yet the baby kept crying, pulling her onward, guiding her way. I’m here, the baby wailed, without deceit or disguise, disarming in transparent honesty. The wails pierced her skin, coursed through her veins, and struck the chambers of her mind. The shock sent shivers down her spine. Choü trembled. Her body shook as she chased the cry. A singular sensation, unlike the loathsome shuddering he had stirred in her. She sprinted on, even as sharp leaves slashed at her limbs. No matter if a beast was luring her in, or a young cub. Not now. She had to reach it before the crying stopped.  Mother, it’s called fate.  In the woods, she found a human baby—not a cub or a starving beast. The ear-splitting cries cut off the moment Choü appeared. Eyes still wet, the baby gazed upon its finder. Face to face, Choü wondered for the first time how many years had passed since she herself had been an infant. A modest celebration had marked her fiftieth birthday, but she had lost track of time since then. However many years had passed, Choü still retained the body of a teenage girl. Humans had evolved beyond physical aging. New cells proliferated by feeding on the old, a survival mechanism dating back to a desperate era, when all life had teetered on the brink of extinction. The species had found a way to survive without increasing its numbers. Biotechnology had likely contributed to the process, but none of the records remained. Humankind now differentiated adolescence from adulthood not by the body, but by the mind. As they aged out of adolescence, humans developed an urge to protect the young and the weak. That protective instinct signaled the start of adulthood. Choü realized she might have crossed that threshold. She lifted the baby into her arms.  What was I like? Back then.Warm and soft. Eyes, jet-black. Hair standing up like a horn, making me smile. But most of all, soft and warm.And the sound you made to me?  The baby pressed its palm against Choü’s heart, breaking into a smile as a larger hand closed over hers. The tiny fingers curled over Choü’s as if accustomed to the touch. Choü brushed them with a kiss. Without resorting to noēphon, she surrendered herself to the currents around her—wind, sky, sunlight, grass, dew, insects, lake-soaked body, tiny hand, warm breath—and let them burst forth in sound.Moü.  Why?It emerged.And its meaning?Moü—it has none. Everything around me brought forth the sound. All that cradled you gave you the call-word.  The tribe set aside a single month for adopting new members. During those thirty days, they observed twenty-hour fasts and communal baths in the lake. The rituals expressed gratitude: for the finite resources that sustained them, and for the bodies tasked with enduring infinite time. Whoever joined during the ritual month was considered a fellow tribesperson, bound to shoulder the sins of civilization together. Newborns were no exception. The tribe accepted infants only when born during this period. All others were cast aside—or expelled with the humans who created them. Excess could only breed disaster. A tribe swollen in numbers would give way to codes and signs. Down that treacherous path lay language. Their greatest threat. Choü hid by the lake to care for Moü, waiting for the ritual month to arrive. With Moü swaddled on her back, she spent the first few days trying to build a hut. To last five moons in hiding, they needed some form of shelter. Unfortunately, the woods surrounding the lake sat on damp soil. Whenever the villagers built their homes, they mixed mud with straw and laid it in the sun to cure. The mud blocks would otherwise crack and crumble within days. Choü’s mud walls caved as she stacked them. Trees towered overhead, blocking the sunlight, but had she dried the mud blocks by the shore, she would have risked discovery. Choü carried Moü into the woods instead. Whoever left Moü must have taken a path that led beyond the mountains. The woods closed in, growing darker with every step. The dense brush offered little footing. Moü did not cry. She held onto a lock of Choü’s hair and gazed upward. Like reflections rippling across the lake, her jet-black eyes mirrored the flickering shadows of the trees.  (Beautiful eyes) Choü noēphoned.Moü stayed still. Other infants, especially the more sensitive ones, sometimes burst into tears, but Moü did not so much as blink. Choü noēphoned again. Nothing. Were her senses underdeveloped?Huya. As Choü voiced a sound, Moü stirred and glanced up. Her primitive senses seemed stronger than her transcendent ones.Huswi. Ho. Swahari. Hira. Choü let out raw sounds without noēphon. Moü hung on the syllables, giggled as though to a story, and listened again. Then she threw her head back. A beam of sunset ran down her throat and across Choü’s chest. Choü traced the stray light to its source, looking up with Moü. Her eyes landed on a jagged cliff face, where the rock had fallen away and exposed six iron pillars. Concrete clung to the skeletal frames like strips of flesh. From the gaps spilled the light. An earthquake from a few days earlier had collapsed the cliff, laying bare a colossal ruin. Choü stood before the monumental remains of a structure that had once denied the planet its night. It dated from a bygone era of possibility, discovery, and accelerated speed. The era had also expelled the impossible, the dark, the unknown, and all things slow—committing and condoning acts of violation and extermination. It punctuated fifteen thousand years of human history as a brief interlude: the nightless age. Concrete blocks and iron pillars, blackened as if they had devoured the dark, shrieked that the era had existed. The clangor of steel laced the shrill cries.  What was it like?Vexingly beautiful.Which part?The carvings . . . on the wall. Scratches without any pattern or meaning I could see.Mother, that was language.  The pillars and concrete provided a sturdy refuge. They sheltered Moü from the harsh sun, gales, torrential rain, and famished beasts. The concrete even tamed the midday heat. Choü braided straw into a snug bed and wrapped Moü in tanned goat hide. Moü took to the gruel she made from foraged grains, ground into a mash. They had little left to fear, provided no human or beast stumbled upon them. Provided Moü stayed alive. Choü spent more than half of each day watching over Moü. Sometimes, she went days without returning home. Moü grew with miraculous ease, as if she needed no protection. Whenever Choü shielded her from danger, Moü seemed to soothe her in return. The baby would brush Choü’s forehead when she nodded off and smile when her eyes blinked open. Moü gurgled, and Choü longed to reciprocate. She asked if Moü was hungry or sleepy, sang her lullabies, and called her name, but none of the noēphon reached her. She responded only to raw sounds—empty spurts that scattered without meaning, uttered only to vanish without trace. Lying beside Moü and staring up at the ceiling, Choü could make out faint marks etched into the ashen concrete. Choü found herself tracing their forms and patterns. Whenever a curve, line, or shape stood out with clarity, a migraine would hit like a hammer, sending her spine into a spasm. Her heart raced, bringing with it the uncanny sensation of blood surging through every vein, pulsing through every fiber of her body. One day, after several moons, Gorusin halted her work gathering tree sap and drew Choü toward a secluded edge of the forest. Choü did not ask any questions. The worry welling within the elder passed through the hand that clasped hers. Gorusin halted near the volcanic crater known as the Judgment. She surveyed the area multiple times to ensure they were alone yet still took precautions. With Choü’s hand in hers, she sent the faintest silent noēphon. (Where are you? Doing what? He—no, people talk. They suspect. No more secrets. There are none. There must be none. Talk. To me, at least. When the time comes, then I can help.) Gorusin noēphoned in a frantic scramble.  (Your house sits empty. You don’t return. Even at dawn. I lie for you. The gravest sin. Do not conceal. Do not tempt your fate. What is it? What is happening to you? Choü, lay your thoughts bare. Let me see them.)Alarm gave way to fear, which curdled into suspicion and uncertainty. Secrets were forbidden. To conceal was to invite the unforeseen. Humans no longer wished to keep watch over darkness—so they evolved. Fear, once a means of survival, had mingled with greed and propelled the world toward obliteration. When fear became their undoing, evolution changed course. Whatever lacked certainty was deemed dangerous and discarded, including imaginations of the future. Choü noēphoned back to calm her.Naho. (You’ll see, soon enough. No secrets. No worries.)Choü intended to bring Moü into the tribe and did not consider this a lie. She sensed Gorusin’s relief. If only the exchange had ended there. Nohago. (Have you ever seen language?)Choü blurted the question, and Gorusin could not hold back—a scream.  Muum was the eldest being—the first seed of their evolution, the Immortal of current humankind. No one worshipped Muum, as worship was forbidden. Yet Choü knew the ban was not perfectly obeyed. Tribespeople merely contained their reverence. Muum’s preternatural senses set her apart. Sensitivity to noēphon varied from person to person. Some struggled to discern it, whereas Muum perceived minds without it. Nothing stayed hidden from Muum. All was laid bare. To avoid the barrage of sensations, Muum lived away from the village. At Gorusin’s insistence, Choü went to meet her. She found Muum waiting at the door. (You did well to protect the child. I believe so.) Muum noēphoned without so much as a glance, then disappeared into the house. Choü sensed the command to follow.Inside, Muum’s paintings covered every wall. Each one featured rectangles of varying shades and sizes geometrically arranged. Choü paused before a particular painting. Muum noēphoned with her back still turned.(I finished it yesterday. The paint is still wet, but you can touch it.) Muum knew exactly which painting.Kiho. (You see without looking?)Choü noēphoned deliberately with sound, as a warning: do not invade my mind. Muum smiled, bemused by the defiance. Her skin glowed in the shadowed space. Only after sitting down did she face Choü. All tribespeople appeared young, but Muum, especially so. Her face never creased. Sunlight slipped through a crack in the wooden wall and settled on her. Covered in downy hair, her skin shimmered like a sandy beach. Muum, it seemed, was evolving into something beyond their species.  (All language has failed. Do you not agree?) Muum noēphoned.Kasak. (You must noēphon with sound. You yourself set the rule.)(Language will destroy the senses we acquired. Language flattens sensation. It binds thought and judgment to form.)Mun! (Answer me!)(I did. You asked me later how language would change us. The language you saw was an illusion. Empty lines.)(Stay in the present. I will not be mocked.)Choü sent a silent noēphon so as not to yell, but rage flooded her senses. (Choü, do not be deceived. All that fails has a cause. Look to evolution and what humanity once called progress. Language enabled categories and institutions—and passed them down. The world marched toward war, poverty, destruction, slaughter, and ruin. Human vision narrowed, and senses dulled. Surrendered to language, humanity doomed itself to extinction. Our brains have evolved since then by discarding language, reawakening what it suppressed—the senses of our prehistoric ancestors. Our sounds resist language. We defy its oppression. Defend our way.) Muum rose to her feet and came closer. Her hair gleamed like the iridescent scales of a carp, and the fingers that stroked Choü’s cheek were warm and gentle, like hands coaxing milk from a ewe. Muum whispered. Domdureusamasiheu. (We cannot speak of good or beauty in language of the condemned, language stained with blood. The child is welcome. It is already done.)  *  Once Moü entered school, she got scolded for repeating the same sounds.It happened again the day Choü learned Moü was unwell. Moü’s friend Blong came running to the riverside, where Choü was mending a fishing net. Moü had been called out of class, she noēphoned. Choü brushed it off—(The same as always). Blong clutched her chest. She noēphoned again, this time with a wail. It was serious. Choü threw down the net and raced to the school. He was the schoolteacher in charge. Perhaps his fury toward Choü had been redirected toward Moü. When Choü first presented the child, the tribespeople sensed his agitated accusations: there had been someone all along, she had hidden it to play with his feelings, she had feigned purity while indulging her desires. He sulked as if dealt an irreparable wound. The villagers knew that Choü had never been pregnant. Her body never swelled, and no one sensed another life inside her. Then where had the child come from? She arrived during the ritual month, but the villagers hesitated to welcome her. He fueled their fear with his slander. Umsasiheuraha. (It is evil. I sense evil in that child. Our noēphon does not reach it. It must be a monster or a witch.)Choü insisted on the child’s innocence, but he refused to back down. His vilifications carried enough force to slowly sway the villagers. Had Muum not come to the rescue, had she not cradled Moü in her arms and noēphoned a welcome, he would have turned the people against her and driven her from the village. Muum allowed Moü into the fold. He alone withheld a welcome. Over time, the villagers no longer recalled Moü’s mysterious origins, but he did. He never stopped doubting and despising her. This, Choü believed, was why he seemed especially harsh on Moü. Children naturally enjoyed repeating sounds. Surely not only Moü. Surely not. When the teacher asked, Syureuha, Moü replied, Jya. He asked again, Bido. His utterances accompanied the same noēphon question: had Moü understood? Moü replied again, Jya. The teacher erupted in a mangled burst of rage. His noēphon lashed the children’s nerves like a whip: (Do not dare repeat sounds!) Several began to cry. When Moü repeated Jya a third time, they squeezed their eyes shut and wrapped their arms around their heads, bracing for the shockwave to follow. Blong noēphoned the terror of that moment, raising the hair on Choü’s arms. Moü stood in a corner, trying—and failing—to look sorry while digging up damp soil with her foot. Not wanting him to notice, Choü grabbed Moü’s hand and scuffed the dirt back into place. His fear and chagrin were laid bare. Gogaraswi. (She repeated sounds.)Uno! (The same sounds!)Uwano. (Make her stop.)Nakahaeum. (She must not repeat. She must not make meaning.)Choü replied, Nyuhokeuduheu. (There is no meaning. Moü is only playing with sound.) He pressed a hand to his forehead. His refusal to communi­cate any further bore down on Choü, like a lump of iron settling into her skull.As she turned to leave with Moü, he muttered. Kuulla. (She is unworthy. Dark and evil. Full of secrets. She will bring a curse on us.)Choü glowered, imagining her fist in his face. She did not act on the impulse, but her hatred and fury were enough to leave his face burning, as if from a blow. At the Planegg Crossroads, Choü turned west. The road stretched away from the village toward the lake. Moü followed in silence without projecting any noēphon. No questions, no resistance. Choü looked back. Moü became inscrutable at times, unsettling Choü. His warning echoed in her mind. (She will bring a curse on us.) Did he truly believe one person could curse an entire village? She did not. The two arrived at the ruins. Like humans who lost the use of language, the ruins had lost their artifice and reverted to nature. Moü had made it her fort, painting the ash-gray walls with mineral and berry pigments and draping the metal frames of furniture with patchwork leather. Choü sat Moü down on the bed layered with sheepskins. She then knelt down in front of her, clasping her hands. Choü had a habit of kneeling to look up at Moü. Though hardly any years apart in appearance, they were separated by two and a half centuries in actual age. It seemed increasingly unnatural to raise the child at eye level. Choü was beginning to understand why her own mother had chosen to leave. Choü stroked the backs of Moü’s delicate hands and brushed them with a kiss. Without that touch, Moü often failed to receive her noēphon. She was only slow. Not dark, evil, or full of secrets. Swihoroamusaha. (Do not take his rudeness to heart. But tell me the truth. Why did you do it? Why did you repeat those sounds?)Moü replied, still struggling to project her voice with noēphon.Ma . . . wa . . . ho . . . u . . . a . . . (Mother, what is language?)Choü dropped Moü’s hands. Gahu! (You must not ask! Ever! Not a soul. Have you? Have you asked Blong?)Mo . . . ha . . . u . . . (I just want to know. About sounds with meaning.)Sasiki. (It belonged to a failed civilization. Language sealed their judgment and caused their doom. Do not seek it. It is forbidden.)Ma . . . (Mother.)Nireu! (Do not ask anyone again. Promise me!)(Then why do we make sounds at all?) Moü noēphoned in silence, prompting Choü to extend her sounds. Inagoumamupgasamunagaemenagorialleu. (To guard ourselves. To keep our sounds free of meaning. We must stay on guard. So practice. You will learn.) Choü’s senses seemed to spiral—no, they spiraled. Cold air swept through the concrete, stinging her cheeks and grazing her ears. Dust blurred her vision, and even Moü’s faint breath frayed her nerves. She plunged into hypersensitized agony. The turmoil would have transferred to most others, but Moü stayed impassive as she watched. Choü gripped the child’s shoulders.Musya! (Moü, you must feel this! My noēphon. My emotions.)Ma . . . (Mother, tell me.)Ruswia. (Feel this. Language will dull and flatten these feelings. It severs us from nature. Once we name, define, differentiate, those things become our limits. We will know only through language. And language will so often deceive and fail.) Choü wrapped her arms around Moü and pulled her close. She tried to transfer her feelings and project her noēphon. Moü’s body remained deadly still. Ma . . . (Mother, look at me—the wrinkled eyes, the dry skin. I eat half as much as I used to, but it takes me longer to digest the food. My hair is thin and gray . . .)(Enough!)(My body is aging.)(Nonsense!)(Mother, please. Look at me.) Moü pulled away to meet her mother’s gaze. She cupped Choü’s face. Choü tried to look away, but they both knew it would not last. Moü waited. Quiet. The light spilling through the concrete cracks crimsoned as she waited. Patient. With a sigh, Choü raised her eyes to meet Moü’s. The sunset blotted out perception, darkness descended as an interlude, and moonlight unveiled the truth, long hidden by the sun. A day of judgment, followed by three millennia of punishment. Humans evolved in its wake to preserve their species without multiplying their kind. Language had created order and disorder, tolerance and aversion, just and unjust laws, salvation and despair, faith and mistrust, parades and military marches, medicine and murder, security and peril, mobs and masses, humans and nonhumans—together breeding chaos. (Humans evolved by discarding language) Muum had noēphoned, (reawakening their senses. The ones we use now). Once humans abandoned the language that severed them from nature, they returned to a natural state of being. They fed on husks, restored and regenerated. Freed from time as conceived by language, they entered eternal life. As eternal beings, their senses encompassed and commanded all matter. Thus did Choü believe that Moü was as ageless as herself. Thus did all the villagers believe.With her perception shattered, Choü faced a strange woman. (How?)(Do you see me now?)(You are not the Moü I know . . .)(Mother, my body has been aging. Slowly, steadily.)Sound abandoned Choü as she surrendered to noēphon. (Moü, sometimes I wonder if you rose from a chasm. Days before you cried out, the earth had quaked. Violently, as if setting things right. Villagers gathered in the field for silent noēphon prayer. The last prayer had been held 64,240 days before, after a 247-day spell of drought. We did not ask for forgiveness. We only prayed that we may slowly pay the price for sins. Our sins. Sins against the planet. Sins against each other. Our species will never be washed of sin. The species may perish, but not the stain. But no, we will not be allowed to die. We have evolved to pay the price, in undying penance, with senses attuned to all sins . . .) (Look at me, Mother. Do not be afraid.)(I am not afraid.)(But you are. Look at me. What do you see?)(Do not ask me this.)(Mother, I am still alive, but I have begun to flow. Time flows through me. I feel it, the fine threads. Finer than spider silk. I will wrinkle as it brushes past.) (Wait. We will tell the villagers, and they will help find a way to make it stop. Nothing is beyond healing. We must simply find a way. Every effect has a cause, and every cause a solution. No more worries, Moü.)(Mother.)(Yes.)(Mother.)(Yes. Go on.)(I heard the sounds of language. Now I sense the time it weaves.) But then, beyond the broken walls, Choü recognized a murder­ous hostility. She wanted to hush Moü, but it was too late. He had sensed their noēphon. His malice mingled with relish; Choü’s dread turned into terror. She rushed out and found him already there. For a moment, he feigned surprise. His lips curled up.  How did you feel? When it happened?I needed the right language . . . to express that feeling.  Bihagassu! (This child knows language!)He hollered. Moü stood tied to a wooden pillar in the village square. He ripped the sack from her head, unleashing a deafen­ing noēphon.Yanomasiamadiaratyusyu! (Behold the child who dared to deceive! Behold the true face—not of a child, but of a witch! A face defiled by language!) Horror and panic shot through the village. The current surged, reaching Choü, who had been locked in her home. She sprang up from the corner and rushed to the door. She wrenched at the handle, but it would not budge. She pounded her palms against the wood, pouring out noēphon. Hoping it would reach someone, anyone passing by. Her palms split open, gushing blood. Then—scalding heat. A ravenous frenzy engulfed the house. The heat rose from torch flames, not feelings. Choü stopped pounding and glanced around. Could anything extinguish the fire? The eastern well lay too far away. She spotted a knife—a curved blade used for drawing tree sap.  As she grasped the knife, the door swung open. Moonlight spilled in, pooling against Choü’s legs. Muum stood in the door­way. Before Choü could beg for help, Muum stepped aside. As if urging her to run. To hurry. With no time for questions, Choü dashed out. The blaze had billowed, the heat ready to reduce the village to ashes. Flames flickered toward the moon. Choü sensed a warm wind behind her, carrying an unfamiliar image: Muum holding a baby wrapped in leaves, a newborn yet to open its eyes. Muum whispered to the baby, her lips pressed against its ears. Choü paused. She turned back, but Muum was nowhere to be seen. She had vanished, as though erased from existence. At the village square, Choü gripped her knife. She took in the scene: him, gloating with a torch in hand, and Moü, tearless despite the flames at her feet. Choü wielded her knife against the fire. Blood, hotter and brighter, doused the flames. The blade had sliced through his stomach and cut through the cords binding Moü. Choü’s skin seared, the creases reminding her of Moü’s wrinkles. The burning pillar collapsed over a house. Walls of grass and mud crumbled and fed the flames. A body caught fire. The pain transferred through noēphon. Everyone writhed, except for Moü. She embraced her anguished mother.(We must go to the forest . . .) Moü took Choü’s hand and began to run. Moü’s hand was thin and weathered, all bone and tendon beneath the skin. Yet warm as damp earth and soft grass.The two ran toward the ruins. Murderous noēphon pierced Choü’s back. He was close behind. Choü wanted to flee beyond the forest with Moü, to enter the world she had never known. But Moü, with her weakened lungs and joints, could not keep pace. She guided Choü to their refuge.Ha. (He will find us here. He will arrive. Soon.) Choü tried to warn her, but Moü insisted on taking shelter.(He will not know. He will not detect any noēphon.) Moü sat Choü down on the bed.(But he will not give up. Not until he drives a knife through you. Listen to what I tell you, Mother. You must remember. And record. Never forget the danger. Someday, you must stab him again, all the way through. You must stop his breath. For now, he must not sense where you are. You must guard your thoughts. Let none escape. I will repeat the sound you heard the moment you saw me. It carried your yearning—and I gave it meaning.) Moü embraced her mother. Choü could see Moü’s draw­ings on the wall. Only then did she notice their patterns, like the shapes of language.(Mother, Moü means . . .) “Life.”The spoken word seared Choü’s senses. It dried her blood.“The finite breath I gift to you.”Choü did not fully grasp the sounds as language, as carriers of meaning. Yet they reached her all the same, passing through her eyes, ears, and skin. “Now that you know language, you will live as I do in its flow of time. Where beings weaken with age, slowing, receding, dwindling. It is a curse. Nature’s curse, pulling humans back into earthly existence. You will no longer know without speaking, but no speech will ever be complete. You will wander the laby­rinth of language, isolated and alone. And yet, I wish you this life.”Moü stroked Choü’s cheek. Then she whispered in clear noēphon. (Mother, nothing lasts. Look through the veil. Humans have not evolved. He is right. I am a curse. Because I am, I can inscribe our story in language. For everyone to see. I will start with your words.)  Moü, nature repeats herself . . .

Fiction

Deviation Day

She’d had hope, at least until her husband made up his mind. His resolution concerned what they called “conscious emas-culation.” More specifically, the effects upon the wife of her husband’s voluntary shrinking of his ego.  Unju and Gyeongsu, wife and husband, were forty-three years of age—an age as significant as the age of twenty-seven. Forty-three, a time when old age leapt early upon them. At twenty-seven, Unju had told people she was thirty. Today, at forty-three, Gyeongsu sat among the fifty- and sixty-somethings at the urology clinic telling people he was “coming up on fifty.” So afraid of old age, Unju and Gyeongsu attempted to age early to forget the terror of aging. No different from the trembling children who lined up first to get their lashes over with. Though they seemed indifferent to aging—at least compared to their peers, who were the picture of fortysomethings trying to look younger—the midlife crisis descended on Unju and Gyeongsu as well. But their responses were rather unusual. Attending the reunion concerts of their favorite bands from the Hongdae live clubs twenty years ago and diving into the slam zone only to stagger back with a broken wrist or two in a bid to resurrect the past like their friends was not their chosen way, however. To relive their youths, Gyeongsu went to the future and Unju to the past. That is to say, they traveled into the past, each using a different passage: change and memory.  The previous year, Gyeongsu had signed up for a public lecture and seminar curation service. Unlike private lectures, these events were either free of charge or no more than five thousand won per session, but it was always the same familiar faces filling the seats. At the independent bookstores, at the local co-ops, and at the National Assembly’s rented lecture halls, it was only the last empty row of chairs that ever filled with newcomers, and the result was not the democratization of knowledge and the expansion of forums of discourse, but commercialization. It would be clichéd to call it ironic, but this was the means by which many dreams came true. Yes—the curation service discovered a way to generate profits from these lectures and seminars. They charged users a monthly fee to organize events catered to their interests into a monthly schedule. The schedule boasted a deliberately tacky design modeled on old elementary school timetables. Its title read—instead of “Afterschool Programs”— “Afterwork Programs.” A marriage of culture and nostalgia. The service offered the real benefit of cultural refinement along with memories of a younger age, when everyone walked alone across the dimming schoolyard at twilight. The very recipe that for a time had delighted Kumon’s sales department as adults returned to the old workbook programs, which proved itself a fad quickly replaced by the rising star that was the public lecture and seminar.  Hey, dancn_histrynrd! Here’s your afterwork program schedule for the week! Stay radical! · Monday, 20:00: John Ross and the Development of the Early Modern Korean Language Textbook (Offline only; No charge) · Wednesday, 19:30: Solidarity Meeting for the Condemnation of the Genocide in Gaza (Online and offline; Free to members, non-members pay 5,000 won) · Saturday, 14:00: Cars in Movies – the Classic Cars in Once Upon a Time in America (1984) (Online and offline; No charge)  Acutely aware of the final destination of capitalism, the curation company collected not only money, but people. Subscribers who attended the same lectures were bundled together into afterparties. As a result, the people who went to the Gaza genocide seminar on Wednesday, instead of attending the Free Palestine rally on Saturday, would gather at a wine bar in Namyeong-dong slurping lemon cheese pasta (22,000 won) to debate Netanyahu and the Nakba. Yet even among those gray crowds, some blossomed into color—like Gyeongsu. Following his subscription, he became a changed man. Gyeongsu never called himself a feminist, but as far as Unju could tell, he became one, which made life together uncomfortable. She was fine with him sitting down to pee, but when he apologized for every droplet of piss he’d splashed and offered to repent by going out to buy her pads, opening up the bathroom cupboards to take accurate stock of her usual brands, she felt a surge of irritation. But later, as her husband remembered to regularly fill the compartment next to the towels with period panties, she came to be grateful. “Don’t feel grateful,” Gyeongsu advised. “You need to practice entitlement. Don’t thank me for every little thing.” A little before the holidays, he called his parents and yelled into the phone, saying they couldn’t—wouldn’t—go visit, that Unju had no reason to answer their summons and that Mother and Father had to wake up and get with the times. One day, when a friend asked over drinks what buying period products for his wife had to do with feminism, Gyeongsu nearly blushed and replied, “Well, I’m still new to this whole ‘good spouse’ thing.” Then who the hell does he think he’s been living with these past ten years? Unju wondered. When she watched her husband prostrate himself at her feet, she felt as if she’d spent their entire marriage making concessions to him. The life of an open palm, which allowed itself to suffer as it exalted the husband seated upon it. A life of sacrifice and obedience. Me? Unju had been a rough-and-tumble child. She hadn’t sniffed glue like some of the other kids, but she was almost sure she’d been an alcoholic in her teens. She had started drinking in junior high school, and downed two bottles of Toad Jinro every other day. She had opened up the fridge and pissed in the produce drawer. She had gone all the way with a girl in fifth grade, and with a boy in her third year of junior high school. And now her naive little husband was apologizing? To her? If anything, Unju was the one who needed to make apologies. She didn’t want to be apologized to. And that meant society had indoctrinated her to feel that way, her husband would say, humbly making use of the new vocabulary he’d learned at his lectures. Every night, Gyeongsu attended online self-flagellation sessions with his lecture buddies from his room. They were mocked from every which way—Losers chopped off their own balls, They’re just doing this to fellate themselves—but persecution only made them stronger. Determined to transform themselves, they exuded a grave but sweet energy. Pointed as the beak of a pelican, there was something moving about their efforts. Gyeongsu drank nonalcoholic beer in his room as he engaged in a deep heart-to-heart with his allies, laughing and crying out loud until the meeting ended and he burst from the room to declare that his family did not need honorifics. They should no longer be called “sidaek,” but simply “siga,” he insisted with such determination that Unju found something squeezing at her heart, the contraction traveling lower and lower until it was down below. “Okay, what is it this time?” she asked.Gyeongsu knelt. “I have this friend in South Chungcheong Province called Uje. He’s a civil servant there.”“I know Uje.”“You don’t know him, because he’s a changed person. Uje’s a vegetarian now. He saw them slaughter farm animals during the big foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, and now he can’t eat meat. Physically. Some things just change you forever. Like, you think in your head that you can do it, but your body refuses. It’s happened to me, too.” Unju remembered Uje. Every summer, he insisted on eating boiling-hot goat soup and raw, wriggling octopus chop, all in the name of health. “I was watching this drama the other day, and I threw up at the kiss scene. The guy thrust his tongue into the girl’s mouth, and I felt sick to my stomach. He didn’t do it against her will, but hear me out. This whole . . . penetration thing, putting something of mine into someone else, it’s disgusting. I can’t watch another kiss scene again. And I’m swearing off penetrative sex, too. For good.” “This is getting out of hand,” Unju said through gritted teeth. “The more I talk to the others, the more I’m aware of how much I’m asserting myself into you. You’d be reading, and I’d order you to get me a glass of water—and you’d put down your book and get me that water. I can see as clear as an X-ray all the awful things I said to you, the looks I gave you, the passive-aggressive commands, all festering inside you like parasites. And all those parasites broke your will, made you give up your dreams, and made you subservient to me. And it drives me crazy, thinking about that. But I don’t have time to mope around feeling guilty, do I? I need to make amends, starting right this second. From now on, I’m going to assert no influence on you whatsoever. I won’t assert myself on you, starting with the easiest thing—I won’t penetrate you anymore.” Unju didn’t recall Gyeongsu ever making her get him water. Who was this mystery woman he’d been exploiting like a slave? This created wife sculpted by each act of desired exploitation? Definitely not herself, Unju thought. “Are you seeing some other woman?” “I can still massage you. Just on the surface,” Gyeongsu said, opening a jar of spicy massage oil. At three o’clock that morning, Unju contacted Seonsuk, her friend from junior high, and asked if she could crash at her place for a few days to get away from her husband. They hadn’t spoken in five years. She wanted to throw off this mantle of the exploited woman Gyeongsu had thrown atop her. She was being rude, and impulsive. And youthful, she thought. She wouldn’t still hit people, would she? Not now that they were over forty, she thought only after she’d sent the SOS. Seonsuk had beaten her once, over winter break in their third year of junior high school—an unusual privilege, considering how much she beat up everyone else. A token of affection for her best friend. Almost immediately, a speech bubble appeared in the chat window, indicating that a reply was in progress. Then Unju regretted reaching out, because this was going to be a bother, and was about to block her—OMW to work. Come to my place.  *  Back in graduate school, Unju came across a map of Seoul in the school library that used dots to indicate neighborhood population density. It was in one of the western neighborhoods, especially packed with dots, that Unju and Seonsuk went to junior high school together. The dots had nearly blocked out the map in that area because of all the public housing apartments, where families of three or four stuffed themselves into three hundred square-foot units. But as far as Unju remembered—Unju, who often skipped class and spent her afternoons romping from one classmate’s tiny apartment unit to another—the neighborhood was dense with foliage, but not people. They ended up going to different high schools: Unju to a standard school, and Seonsuk to a vocational school. They were still joined at the hip. Everyone said that Seonsuk dragged Unju around after Unju’s parents overextended themselves to move into a more “decent” neighborhood, but that wasn’t really true. In 1989, the Roh administration announced plans for lifetime public rental housing. Half a decade later, those large public rental apartment complexes were completed and allocated. New junior high schools were built to accommodate the flood of teenagers who now filled the blocks. They started school as soon as construction was finished, taking up only half the classrooms with the rest furnished but left empty for the students to come. And they would come, moving into the many private-sector condo complexes that would be ready in a few months. Six months later, the school saw half a dozen transfer students a day, until by the end of the term, the school was composed half of students from public housing and half of students from private-sector condos. Unju’s school, constructed last-minute for the influx of newcomers, wasn’t even completed until she moved out of the neighborhood, with the left side of the building still only skin over a skeleton, cloth feebly covering the bones. Students showed up in the morning alongside the construction workers. They arrived at school to the rhythm of the hammer and witnessed clouds of dust rising from the building.  The incompleteness was only more evident when she stepped inside. A thick, translucent plastic cover took the place of a wall at the end of the hallway, showing only the silhouettes of the laborers slowly passing by. There was something magical about the half-obscured construction site behind that veil, and she sometimes imagined it was a portal in space-time to another age . . . But everyone said that if you went back there, you’d get beaten up. That was where the “old locals” like Seonsuk took the transfer students who pissed them off and beat them to a pulp. It almost never happened, really. It had in the other neighborhood. A transfer kid had mumbled under his breath about people making noise in the classroom, and the old locals tortured him with a pair of pliers. Pliers. Instead of smacking him in the face, they stuffed his fingertips between the pliers and pressed. The transfer student was traumatized, and wandered the school in shock with his hands held up like a surgeon prepared for an operation, and still haunted the halls to this day . . .  The other neighborhood probably said it happened in our neighborhood, Unju thought. Later, when she learned the term “social mix,” she considered why the tool of torture happened to be pliers, of all things. The transfer students who kept their heads down, pressed low to their desks, especially the high achievers, dreamed of—no, prayed for—the moment when they graduated and were liberated from those old locals forever. For the moment the old locals would spill away in droves to fill the technical schools, or if they ended up in regular high schools, be quarantined in the vocational streams to be constantly away from school at workshops and practicums. The moment they would split off from each other forever. The pliers, of course, symbolized the technical school. The myth of the pliers crushing the boy’s fingers represented the real fear of bullying, and served as secret preemptive practice for the violent oppression of physical laborers. When these transfer students grew up, they would call it “menial labor,” without considering where in that phrase might be room for the intellectual work required for blue-collar jobs. Favorite celebrities, most hated teachers, personalities, blood types—those were the topics that were supposed to establish friend groups among teenagers, but reality was much simpler and clearer: teens hung out with teens who lived in the same complex as themselves. It was as if there were two schools in one. Sure, there were exceptions. Take K, who lived in public housing complex 4 and was the top student at school. K, who’d stolen Unju’s new running shoes and run away from home, only to come back on midterm day—K, who had gotten perfect grades at that midterm, transferred to a foreign language high school from which she was expelled after getting caught going to school on a motorbike she got from her boyfriend, and was now a dermatologist—was one of these exceptions. Public housing was mostly where what adults called the “wild kids” lived, and as anyone who’d ever been a teenager could attest, it was the cliques of wild kids who reigned at the top of the food chain. Unju wanted to join Seonsuk’s clique. Her grandiose dreams: sitting cross-legged on three or four desks pushed together at the back of the classroom. Riding on the back of one of those cheap motorcycles the oppas who delivered Chinese food always drove. Burning her calves on the muffler. Showing off the scar the next day and ordering the gang to bring her wet towels. Unju wanted to be a hooligan and wear jori flip-flops. When jori came into vogue, all the news outlets decried the trend, saying the jori was a variant of the Japanese geta sandal and that young people were mindlessly adopting remnants of the colonial oppressors, but Unju dreamed of going out in jori flip-flops, hoped to have snow fall and melt between her toes. She could picture all the wonderful things that would happen below the waist—the burned calves, the snowflakes between her toes—if only she could catch Seonsuk’s eye and join her clique, and thought of all the unimaginable and exciting things that would happen above the waist! If she wished to make those dreams come true, she had to become Scheherazade. She must be that one character in every Korean war movie who died first in the bombing, the tragic clown who could never wipe that stupid grin off his face because how else were they going to maximize pathos when he inevitably put on a brave front for once just to lose his life? That was her role. So she told them her uncle was a manager for some big-name celebrity and fed Seonsuk’s gang all the fake gossip she could invent. About how so-and-so got some other celeb pregnant and she had an abortion at that-clinic-over-there, how this one celeb raped that one so that one got the manager to kill the rapist. Unju was putting herself at risk, of course, telling stories like that. She made herself a target. She made herself vulnerable, scoring herself like a fish to help the spices sink in better. They grew close. Not even the high schoolers could touch Seonsuk because everyone knew her two older brothers. “Sure, they beat me up sometimes, but at least they won’t let anybody else touch me. They’re probably better assholes than the ones who beat up their little sisters and let the sisters get pushed around outside,” she mused, pulling out a wad of tissue from between the cushions of the karaoke booth sofa and telling Unju to take a sniff. “Then again, those assholes probably can’t hit as hard as the assholes back home.” It wasn’t clear why Seonsuk brought Unju into the fold, but it was clear that their friendship was a net positive for Unju’s self-esteem. Once they’d started hanging out, Unju was both wealthy and wild. In class, Unju’s teacher would call her out, saying she was zoning out all the time. Unju had been looking at herself from someone else’s eyes. And she was so magnificent she’d stunned herself. She’d even almost managed to forget the things that happened at her old junior high school, the one she’d attended for a little while before she transferred here. How the day after she got beaten up, she went up to the kids who did the beating and bowed low. She’d have felt less ashamed if they’d made her do it. It wasn’t even a calculated move. Groveling before those classmates was a reflex, involuntary and natural. That wasn’t all. Unju now lived in a big condo unit, more than forty pyeong wide, and the produce drawer actually contained produce. When they went to drink in the mountains, the others told Unju to bring fruit and whiskey from her dad’s stash. Unju sneered at the girls who didn’t shorten their uniform skirts, and took off her jori to slap a girl who lived in the same building and with whom she’d walked to school together before. Seonsuk reminded her of the produce drawer. The girl downstairs reminded her of the sole of her jori. Both filled her with a sense of superiority.Unju’s parents wept daily. They should have moved to the other neighborhood, in the famously high-achieving school district. Back when they still had a choice, the cost of a forty-two-pyeong unit in this neighborhood was the same as a twenty-seven-pyeong unit in the other neighborhood, and their daughter was never one for academics anyway, so they chose to live in a spacious home instead of letting their pride suffer in that other area where all the parents were devoted to their children’s education, but little did they know the cultural price they would pay for fifteen pyeong of floor space, her mother and father would lament over the phone with their friends. “Driving at ten kilometers an hour through the alleys every night trying to find this girl, I don’t care if the neighbors are honking at me from behind, I’m just scanning the streets, trying to see if I can find her. I dragged her out of a karaoke booth the other day, and I was glad it wasn’t a video parlor instead. The night before, she brought a friend over to stay the night, and I was so glad I’d get some proper sleep in bed this time instead of going out looking for her again. Her friend can’t go home because her dad beats her badly, apparently, and I wish I’d learned from him, because we never beat our girl when she was younger, so we can’t start now.” Unju still hadn’t finished junior high school when they moved out of the neighborhood. Her parents had taken the leap. Even Unju could tell it was the end of an era. Seonsuk had begun to look a little less cool than before, and now Unju clearly saw the state of Seonsuk’s public housing unit, which had seemed like an adult-free palace on those lazy afternoons of skipping classes. Seonsuk had pointed at the furniture and the utensils, describing them as the relics of one family’s unemployment and downfall. The mungap cabinet resurrected as a TV stand had come from the old-timey bar in Cheonho-dong; the stainless-steel cups and ttukbaegi stone bowls from the sundaeguk stew place in Hwagok-dong; and the paper wraps Seonsuk put over the spoons for fun whenever they had red bean shaved ice from the kongnamulguk soup place in Daeheung-dong. Seonsuk’s mother had decorated the house with these and other odds and ends from the restaurants where she made banchan sides, items she received in lieu of pay when the businesses went bankrupt. The design philosophy: job loss in the food industry. Seonsuk tugged on a ring hanging from the mungap cabinet, as though pulling an ox by the nose-block, and nicked karaoke money. The rice paper panels on the cabinet doors had been reinforced by acrylic panes so the papers couldn’t be torn through. For the longest time, Unju had thought that Seonsuk meant her mother had owned those restaurants, not worked at them. Unju had drunk more than her fill of alcohol, too. She and the gang would put the futons away and sit in a circle playing 3-6-9 drinking games, downing Toad Jinro, they’d have girls-only nights, stripping games while boys rapped madly at the window opening into the hallway, older boys they’d never met before. They were one step away from danger, even Unju knew that much. The mythical girl who downed 50% bbaegal liquor and got raped could soon be her. But above all, Unju never once pictured herself going to a vocational school. She partied at karaoke booths and came home at midnight for tutoring. She dragged herself across the academic threshold and made it into a standard, university-bound high school. Her friends mocked her, saying she was pretty smart if she could achieve that after all their partying. Unju hung a shiny “pretty smart” ornament on the Christmas tree of self-esteem in her mind and stared transfixed into her reflection, radiant and distorted. At her first test in high school, Unju came dead last. In this new neighborhood, she wasn’t even considered average, let alone well-off. How was her wounded self-esteem supposed to survive? With a produce drawer filled with fruits? The produce drawers of her new friends were filled with packs of expensive traditional medicine. Unju invited her old friends over to her new neighborhood. She rode motorcycles and burned her calves on the mufflers. Unju needed Seonsuk. Each time she felt pathetic, it was through Seonsuk that Unju uplifted herself. I want to ask you a favor too. Unju thought about Seonsuk’s text message as she climbed the hill up to Seonsuk’s low-rise apartment. It was thirty-eight past four in the morning. The sky turned black as pitch, as though ready to end the day before it began, and unleashed a deluge on the world. Torrents of water cascaded down the slope, fiercely resisting Unju’s steps, pressing against the tops of her sandal-clad feet as she made her way upwards. Unju knew exactly why she sought her old friend. To talk about old times. About how they’d been fearless, impulsive, violent, how they’d made their parents cry. About how they’d chugged spoiled milk and thought, Huh, it stinks, but swallowed it all anyway. She would share memories with a friend who’d been through the bad times with her, to build a roaring campfire of nostalgia—like those adults who still lived in dreams of the past, boasting about the glory days. Pushing open the fingerprint-smeared glass door that led into the building, Unju looked forward to her Deviation Day. The phrase had come into vogue a few years ago, originally used to refer to camping as a way of deviating from daily life. Then to skipping work without giving notice. One mountainous county famous for its camping scene even turned it into a slogan: Take a Deviation Day at J County and rediscover the real you—You, modern man—find liberty from the rat race and deviate from society today! Return to a time before civilization, cook meat on a grill and dare to place a pine caterpillar upon the bridge of your nose! Unju climbed the stairs of the building—it had no elevators—as if ascending a mountain and pictured herself pitching an imaginary tent in her old friend’s living room. Inside the tent, they would talk about old times. As if the outside world, warm with children blowing bubbles and adults pulling carts full of canned food, were instead a danger zone crawling with brown bears, and Unju and Seonsuk would feast on their memories hygienically, enjoying the thrills at no risk whatsoever. By doing so, she would correct the image her husband had wounded. She would erase that image of frailty, which had compelled Unju to shriek, “Are you calling me a victim? Some sacrifice to marriage? Are you saying I’m beneath you?”  * Focus with Kim Jongbae was followed by Kim Young-chul’s PowerFM, which was followed by Shin Yunju and Household Music, which was followed by a regularly-scheduled broadcast on a famous YouTube politics channel, which had just begun when Seonsuk came home from work. A member of the logistics team for a Northern European furniture company, she worked from four in the morning to one in the afternoon. When she first started working early morning hours eight years ago, Seonsuk had worn two watches on her wrist, the one on the top set to regular hours and the one on the bottom running five hours fast—the time zone mandated by her job. She sometimes ran into younger people working night shifts, and they complained that their breakups were caused not by differences in personality but in time. It was two in the afternoon—that is, seven in the evening for Seonsuk. And for Unju, the perfect time for day drinking. She’d brought a Ballantine’s 21, a parody of the years when she’d steal whiskey from home to offer the other girls whenever they had a party in the mountains. Before Seonsuk came home, Unju had looked around for ways to brighten up the house for a party. But the tiny and cheap ten-pyeong apartment was a Northern European furniture showroom, as white and sterile and quiet as an empty hospital ward. The sort of place where you lowered your voice because of the sheer tension of the place. I came here to get away, Unju thought with disappointment, staring at the living room centerpiece: a hardworking dehumidifier. “Couldn’t you have emptied the water before I got home?” Seonsuk said snidely, tilting back her head to massage her neck. With a dismissive foot, she pushed the dehumidifier towards Unju, instantly resurrecting a power dynamic from three decades ago. As she emptied the water tank in the bathroom, Unju told herself that she was only doing this because Seonsuk was letting her crash for a while. Her old self-defense mechanisms were stirring to life, too, and she wondered—Why’d I even come here? She regretted her decision already. There was nothing shocking about her husband’s resolution. Their interest in each other was only one of the many elements of daily life they had grown indifferent to. Some people responded to their mid-life crisis by expelling their frustrations, while others shrank inward, with most tragedies occurring in the mismatch between the reactions of each party, but in Unju and Gyeongsu’s case, they were walking towards apathy in perfect time. Sometimes, they missed the passionate old days. Where Unju had her burned calves, Gyeongsu had memories of going around the neighborhood lowering circuit breakers. But they had extinguished those sparks as soon as they came back to life, crushing each under their heels—I can’t be bothered, I can’t be bothered either—before the flames could return. They had watched each other kill the fire before it started, and sighed in relief. They were on a stroll one day when they spotted a statue of the Virgin Mary outside a church, surrounded by lit candles. Then a man emerged and used a bell-shaped object to extinguish the little flames. Smoke wafted from the dead wicks, but so wispy it was almost invisible. That was what they had wanted—for their passions to die a quiet death by extinguishment underneath those little bells. Because it was better to not have at all than to have only part of the whole. In Unju’s imagination, Gyeongsu went around the neighborhood with his self-flagellation friends like a gang of little troublemakers. He was full of energy. He burst into an Olive Young store and demanded, “Hey, are the Natracare Ultra Pads on sale yet?” His exuberance had come back to life, but he pretended it hadn’t. He was deceiving her. With his lips he swore to punish himself by abstinence, by forgoing the desires he’d never even had. And that was a double betrayal. They’d promised to be disappointed in life together, but he was leaping alone from the Mariana Trench to the sun with his barely-concealed zest. All the while, he claimed that he was making sacrifices for her. Denying his own desires. Gyeongsu was running away. Running away from the stagnation of their relationship, from the monotony, from the deadness. From the wet, sagging sense of subsumption. So please pull me out of here too, Unju thought, watching as Seonsuk scrolled through a food delivery app. She recalled going to a friend’s house for Toad Jinro. She would stop mid-run and bend down to grab the elastic ankle bands of her pant legs and tighten them. It was a different age, when the world was so fucking awesome that she barely had time to pee. “Remember the Japanese lady who sold tangsuyuk outside the school?” Unju asked, picking out whiskey glasses from the cupboard. Cook-it-yourself tangsuyuk places had been a huge fad in the mid-nineties, when the classic sweet-and-sour pork was divorced from the Korean-style Chinese restaurants and went independent like the cook-it-yourself tteokbokki places. One of those was right outside their junior high school. It was owned by a woman in her thirties who had once lived in Japan. Always covering her arms with plastic wrap for fear of burns, she used to smoke as she fried the pork and also sold alcohol to minors. “Don’t forget the fun money,” Seonsuk’s gang used to say, when they wanted to talk about getting drinks at the tangsuyuk place without mentioning alcohol. The woman, who had lived with a man who ran a yakiniku restaurant, thrived on sharing her wisdom with the junior high students. “Never do anything by halves,” she’d say, or “Nip it in the bud,” and reenact the events that had happened in Japan. Though her husband had never hit her, he had broken everything in sight when he got drunk, and she boasted that she had fixed that little problem of his. One day, when the mirrors and windows had both been broken, the woman claimed to have walked barefoot across the broken glass as if she were Jesus on the water. She wanted to avoid getting cut as much as she could, but also knew that if she tensed, the glass would only dig further, so she took a deep breath and willed herself to walk across that minefield with her full weight on every step. The floor was a bloody mess, and she was taken to the emergency room. The woman who recreated that moment, widening her stance like a sumo wrestler, each step heavy with her weight, was the one who taught Unju and Seonsuk to drink with their meal. They had tangsuyuk with liquor sold by the glass. The tangsuyuk was low on the pork, the canned pineapple pieces scantly dotted the sauce, which tasted too much of ketchup, and the liquor was way too pricey. But it wasn’t such a bad memory for reigniting lost passions. A memory of violence, blood, liquor, and meat, and even the exhausted Seonsuk would not refuse the campfire of nostalgia. “Spill the tea. Your husband bothering you? Something wrong?” Seonsuk said, getting out of the dining chair. But Unju changed the subject. “Remember the tangsuyuk lady’s irezumi tattoo? What was it, roses? A dragon?” Talking about the present was tiresome, she thought. And she couldn’t really figure out how to describe Gyeongsu’s behavior. Seonsuk stared for a long time. Then she said, “Sorry, but I’m going to take a few winks. Order whatever you want, this one’s on me,” and disappeared into her room. Because there was no air conditioning in the bedroom, they had to keep the door open. Seonsuk fell asleep quickly. Unju, who had waited ten hours for her, listened to the sound of her snoring, slowly sipped her whiskey, strained to hear the politics broadcast at minimum volume, and fell asleep. She opened her eyes at five in the afternoon. The rain had stopped, and the sun flooded the house with yellow light. The golden hour was ten in the evening for Seonsuk, but Unju didn’t take that into account. They’d both slept and woken up, but the day was still young, young enough for them to enjoy themselves. “Sorry, I ate while you were sleeping,” Seonsuk said, holding out the remnants of the delivered jokbal. “No, I set these aside before I started eating,” she clarified. The pork had been piled nicely into a corner of the packaging. Now, what hardcore stories from their past would they resurrect? What ordinary memory would they transform into epic drama? Even Unju knew that the tangsuyuk lady didn’t have a tattoo on her back. She asked anyway. Damn, that was a freaky tattoo! she hoped Seonsuk would say, joining her in her distortion of history. But Seonsuk only gave her a tired look, without even a hint of interest in the train to the past. She even refused the Ballantine’s. “No, I’m good.” Should I just go home? Unju wondered. In the meantime, Seonsuk came back to the table and held out a scrap of paper. It contained an unfamiliar name, a phone number, and a Resident Registration Number. “Said I had a favor to ask, didn’t I? All the other doctors just ask for your DOB, but this one wants your registration number, too.” Seonsuk wanted Unju to help her get an appointment with a certain doctor of neurology at a big-name general hospital. The doctor was one of the leading names in the treatment of spinal conditions, and Seonsuk needed Unju to call that number at every opportunity so the former could schedule surgery for a herniated disc. The name on the note was the doctor’s, the phone number the hospital’s, and the registration number Seonsuk’s. “Some people cancel appointments with him because they’re so desperate they go to another hospital with shorter waiting times,” she explained. “And you need to keep calling if you want to catch one of those slots. And people on spinal problem communities online are saying that he’s finally opening up appointments—they’ve been closed since September, you know. Apparently some people wait a whole year to see him, but I’m fine with that. And don’t you dare slot in your parents instead of me if you get an appointment. I’m in a lot of pain, okay? You don’t have to do it all the time, just whenever you can. Like you’re waiting for the subway or your coffee or something. I can’t use the phone when I’m working, you know? I’m starting off with a huge disadvantage.” “Are you really busy at work?” “We have a no-phones policy. I couldn’t call the fire department even if I had to.” “You’re sure you don’t want to drink?” “I have a good feeling about this one. It’s destiny, you know? Me and this doctor. Some places tell me I need surgery, and some places say I’ll be fine with nerve block injections. But something tells me when I see this doctor, it’s all going to work out. Like, the timing will be perfect and everything. What time is it?” “Seven.” “Let’s go to sleep.” “It’s seven.” “It’s midnight.” The apartment was bustling now, with neighbors returning from cram schools and offices. Seonsuk stuffed a pair of American-made neon orange earplugs swimmers apparently loved to use, and set out a futon for Unju in the living room. Then she sat cross-legged on the fresh, fragrant blankets and took a deep breath, as if to drive away the energy of the evening and summon serenity into her. As if to bend society’s clock to match her own. But what about the campfire of nostalgia? “I’m going home,” Unju said, pouting. “No you’re not. Let’s chat until my meds kick in,” Seonsuk retorted, knocking back a sleeping pill. They lay side by side on Seonsuk’s bed. It felt like old times. The sparks hadn’t died yet. “Do you still talk to Yeongju?” asked Unju. “What’s she doing these days?” Until Unju came into the picture, Yeongju had been Seonsuk’s best friend. She dropped out of high school and found work as an assistant at Blue Club, a barbershop chain, and often paid for drinks because she started working before anyone else. “Oh shit, I can’t sleep when I tell this one,” Seonsuk said. Rising slowly, she began.  *  One day, Seonsuk got an SOS from Yeongju, who was working as a nurse assistant. The clinic she worked at was moving into a new building, but they hadn’t hired a moving service that also packed things for them—as a result, Yeongju was left to box all the patient files by hand. The numbers on the patient files went far past ten thousand. “I’m going to throw out my back again if I try that,” Yeongju said, asking Seonsuk to do it for her. “Am I getting paid for that?” “No, we’d have hired the premium movers if we had the budget to spare.” Thousands of files plucked, moved, and shelved later, Seonsuk took in the new clinic and its freshly-renovated walls. Yeongju’s new desk was ready, installed in an empty alcove. There was a chair, so Seonsuk tried sitting in it. Her knees hit the desktop. Yeongju would spend eight hours of each day in that chair. She would twist and turn her legs in every direction, looking for a comfortable position, until she inevitably sat cross-legged on the chair, where she would labor on towards yet more back surgery. Seonsuk prided herself on her Northern European furniture company job. She’d been hired as a “multi-skill worker” at first, which the company advertised as an equivalent to a medical internship that would take her across many departments, helping her develop as an all-rounder—but it really meant she was assigned odd jobs without being affiliated with any department at all, loading packages at the logistics team before being summoned to do dishes with the food team, before being ordered to the sales team to stock their shelves. Two years later, she settled in the logistics team. At first she moved boxes by hand or pallet jack only, but she practiced with the forklift until she could drive it with ease. Back when she’d just started, though, still not used to operating the forklift, colleagues would impatiently pull boxes off her load with angry glares, which had discouraged—but not defeated—her. She had to learn at some point, so she might as well learn now, she told herself. “Sorry that took so long,” she apologized, and when the colleague responded, “Wait, that was you?” without recognizing her, she felt her chest ache. The same happened when she got the prongs of the forklift smoothly into the gap in the thin paper pallets without a hint of anxiety for the very first time. Eventually, she was stocking products on distant overhead shelves with the reach truck, crossing dock levelers to receive freight from shipping containers, and even got to ride the order picker they nicknamed the “Flying Nimbus.” That wasn’t to say it was all smooth sailing. Once, she’d been driving under a low ceiling with the mast raised, and struck a sprinkler pipe. Water exploded over the workers and the products like an unexpected waterfall, and Seonsuk sat in her forklift, frozen, with head hung low until the pipe finally ran out of water, telling herself that she was on a movie set, and they were shooting an exaggerated storm sequence that couldn’t possibly fool the audiences. The deluge only stopped once water splashed up to their ankles in the gigantic warehouse. “People always screw up just as they’re getting confident,” her colleagues said as she remained glued to her seat. “It’s all insured, don’t worry,” they said. It was those very people who, when more forklift operators joined the team and they had to take turns operating the few machines they had, forcing them to carry more boxes by hand, conspired to shove her back down to the hand-loading role. But Seonsuk held her head high. She was a born tactician who knew how to distribute and display inventory just right, a virtuoso on the controls, a master of spatial awareness, and a mediator who knew how to resolve disputes. Those intellectual exercises gave her joy. At least, until her musculoskeletal system began to act up. “Most people say it’s kind of like a stabbing pain, but for me it’s like I’m getting sliced up. It’s like a hydraulic press with hundreds of needles poisoned with pure agony pressing right on my shoulders and scapulae and arms until the pain’s been literally injected to every last cell, all the way to the toppity-top layer of skin. You know what Yeongju’s up to now? She’s calling my doctor—not my doctor, but that doctor—between work so she can get him to see her boss’s parents. And their backs are fine, but they’re just so old they’re bound to hurt something by the time they get their turn. And I’m supposed to lose out there, too? We’re supposed to lose out?” Seonsuk fell asleep at nine in the evening, that is, two in the morning. Unju stepped out into the living room and lay sleepless on the floor. She remembered the farewell party her friends had thrown for her during winter break, in their final year of junior high school. This was before the big pub fire in Incheon, back when struggling bars treated the law as a recommendation and let minors in without a fuss. They’d let the minors sneak in Toad Jinro too, knowing they couldn’t afford much, but only up to three bottles. It was snowing that night, and they were all piss-drunk when they staggered out of the bar, when the boys got into a fight with three men. The men were in those pale brown lace-up boots that were all the rage back then. Seonsuk’s gang outnumbered the adults, but they were just too drunk to put up a decent fight. One got caught and slammed to the floor, and one of the boots kicked him in the gut. Another of the boys fell on top of him, and the boot moved up to the newer, easier target, and kicked again and again. Kicked at the one below, and then the one on top. Then another boy fell, and as bellies one, two, and three felt the sting of the lace-up boot, Unju fled across the six-lane street. So did the other girls. Not Seonsuk. Across the street, in the narrow alleyway between the bar and a gimbap eatery, they could see the back of a lurching drunk. And though he made it hard to see what was happening beyond, Unju knew Seonsuk was being touched. They could not call the police. They were in junior high school, they had drunk alcohol, and Unju must not be suspended from school. She must not be expelled to attend the same high school as Seonsuk. Next she remembered knocking madly with Seonsuk on Yeongju’s front door. Yeongju opened it, and Unju and Seonsuk made a beeline for the bedroom. Yeongju’s father lay on his side just beyond the sliding door watching TV, but because he was hard of hearing, they had no reason to hush, as long as he saw nothing. Seonsuk and Unju crawled under a blanket and lay facing each other. Seonsuk reached over and touched Unju’s breast. A light hold at first, as if checking the ripeness of a fruit, but then she twisted as though to tear it off. She shoved Unju against the wall and punched and kicked at her stomach. Unju screamed, but Yeongju’s father heard nothing. Standing guard outside the door, Yeongju thought, About time she got a beating too. The next day, Unju was black and blue all over, but only from the neck down, a technique Seonsuk learned firsthand and often from her own older brothers. And because she had taken her fair share of that beating on that day, Unju felt that she deserved to use the Seonsuk of today—their friendship—as a path back to deviation. When she returned home, Gyeongsu fussed that she must be exhausted from the night out and gave her a massage. The blackout curtains were drawn shut, the lighting was dimmed, and the singing bowl music was started as he went on about muscle tissue, which told her that Gyeongsu had come back from a seminar about massages. Gyeongsu slid his thumb down Unju’s oil-slicked neck. “You think I look stupid, trying to be better.” He released her shoulder from his grip, saying it was too knotted, and switched to press with his elbow. “Knots—more like rocks!” He had become a more earnest person. So had Seonsuk. He was still massaging her when Unju fell asleep again. She dreamed they were in bed together, all three of them. Gyeongju and Unju took turns squeezing Seonsuk. Her aching neck and back, the one side that was always twisted from looking backwards—“I’m on that little machine for eight hours a day, which means I’m basically driving from Seoul to Busan and back, but half the time I’m driving with my neck turned back and my back twisted to the side. The vibration’s killer, too, gets all the way to the top of my head. Wanna see something funny?” Seonsuk, who lay in the bed next to Unju, took her hand. Unju thought Seonsuk fell asleep at that very moment, because—“See? No grip strength.” Her eyes slid shut. Like in the movies, where someone dropped a wine glass as they nodded off. As they died. Her old friend’s grip was just that frail. Back to the dream—the pungent scent of oil enveloped their naked bodies, and as if wrestling in mud, entangled, they rubbed the knots out of one another’s muscles. Hands ran down spines in a wake of flesh that had never known hard labor. Seonsuk guffawed and said out loud, “What are you, Thumbelina and the fairy prince? You’re both so good. That hits the spot. That really hits the spot.” Was this a new kind of threesome for middle-aged people? Unju laughed. She opened her eyes, however, and though excited, Unju was not even smiling. Before leaving Seonsuk’s house, Unju remembered to take the little note with Seonsuk’s registration ID. Next to that one was a piece of scrap paper, its edges cut perfectly straight and the front side marked only with the instruction for Unju to leave her own Resident Registration Number. It would take, what, three years? For Seonsuk to get that surgery with that doctor and for Unju to finally get her turn? Unju’s pen hovered over the paper, but never made contact. Seonsuk might do anything with her registration number. Not now, perhaps. But someday.

by Lee Misang

Fiction

When Our Enemies Climb the Mountain

What was the newbie’s name again?  The question came to Noah across several partitions and desks. She stood up and peeked over her own partition, an ambiguous color she couldn’t quite call brown or beige.  “It’s Lee Noah,” she said.  The section manager scanned her up and down with his sleepy-dog eyes. “Right . . . ” he said. Then he told her to head out with Assistant Manager Park. Noah nodded and glanced over at the desk farthest down the line. On the other side of that partition was a round, hunched back clad in green. That back belonged to someone with whom Noah had never conversed until now. After a moment, Park Nokwon came over. “Bring your things. We’ll head straight home from there.”  Nokwon drove a white Hyundai Porter, the entire cargo bed of which was carefully covered with a slick, waterproof tarp. Clothes and handbags and years-old file folders were heaped up on the passenger seat. Nokwon gathered them all and shoved them in the back. Inside, the truck smelled of soil and pine resin.  Some elderly people on a bench near the parking lot watched them get into the truck and take off. Every afternoon, those old folks came wearing only lightweight coats or rain slickers to the township office and walked through the parking lot to get to that bench, where they sat until sundown. Noah wasn’t sure what business they had there. She guessed they must have been idling the hours away. That was, after all, the most popular pastime among the residents of this small town. Letting time slip past them, slowly and relentlessly, while they watched it go by, unfazed.  The township office was on the western end of town. If you left through the front gate and headed east, you would come upon a bridge that spanned a gray river. If you crossed that bridge, you’d be on the national highway. Both sides of the road were sparsely dotted with pale yellow fields and paddies, greenhouses, and prefabricated buildings with unknown purposes. Noah glanced over at the GPS screen, which said they were about a half hour away from the observatory.  It had been silent inside the car ever since they left the office. Nokwon didn’t turn on any music or even the radio. It was hard to imagine her listening to either. Careful not to shoot her a sideways glance even by accident, Noah turned toward the window.  “Noah.”  Startled, she whipped around and found herself staring at Nokwon’s side profile full-on. Nokwon’s face was dumpy, like it had been shaped out of mud. She looked at once extremely old for her age and like she was just barely out of her teens.  “Have you heard of the observatory before?” she asked.  Noah said she had. Several times, in fact. Among all the petty civil complaints that came through the township office, she found the ones about the observatory especially fascinating. The townsfolk had a lot to say about the people living there. They were too noisy, they were as quiet as death, no one knew what they were thinking, they were obviously up to no good . . . According to the townsfolk, even as the people at the observatory cleaned up litter on the mountains, wandered through the forests and fields, sat around in circles and sang songs, painted the exterior of the abandoned building, tore down that old barbed-wire fence, and flashed smiles at passing hikers, there were also times when they would start shouting out of nowhere at the top of their lungs. Get out of here! This is private property! Sometimes, the people filing complaints mimicked the sound of their voices. Their impressions were either low and heavy, or else sharp and pitchy like cracking ice. Either way, not pleasant to hear. The traffic light shone yellow. As the truck slowed to a stop, Noah shouted. “Ah!” She’d spotted something behind the traffic light pole. A dark brown flock was clamoring in the middle of an open field. “Eagles,” Noah exclaimed. “Must be lunchtime,” Nokwon said, peering through the window on the passenger side. “Have you never seen one before?” “It’s my first time seeing them in the wild.” Noah lowered the window a little. Faint chitters and the smell of bird shit commingled and entered through the crack. The smell reminded Noah of another one of the locals’ complaints. The one about the flock of eagles that lingered around the food manufacturer on the outskirts of town. It seemed that everybody in a small town had something to say about the smell and sound of birds. Every winter, the eagles flew 3,000 kilometers to the town from Mongolia. They made regular visits to the food plant, scavenging in the early dawn among the discarded scraps and offal of cows and pigs. On weekends, a few citizen groups would come out, cameras in tow, hauling more animal carcasses in their Starex minivans or trucks to scatter the remains across the paddies and fields. Residents who lived near the food plant begged the city to do something about the eagles’ shit and noise. Yet there were others who pleaded for the city to ensure that the eagles would never leave. They said the town generated a good amount of tourism revenue from all the people who traveled there to feed the birds or else to birdwatch and take pictures. “Goodness, they’re huge,” Noah muttered. On a few different occasions, she had seen jokes about the eagles of Gangwon-do posted online. They always seemed drawn from the same playbook. Like the one about seeing a little kid or an older person on the street in fur clothes, but when you go up to them and try to start a conversation, they just spread their wings and fly away. Seeing the eagles in real life, Noah could understand where the jokes were coming from. The birds really were shockingly huge, and there was something weirdly human about them. Especially their hunched, rounded shoulders and drooping necks. The traffic light changed, and the truck peeled off again. Noah felt embarrassed about the sound she’d made just then in her excitement. She shut her mouth and rolled up the window just as Nokwon spoke again. “This may be a bit of a sensitive question, but I think I should ask.” The truck traced wide curves along the winding road. Nokwon seemed to be stalling even more than earlier. As if she were waiting for the words to rise slowly to the surface of the water, revealing their distinct shapes. “Does your name . . . happen to have a religious meaning?”“Oh. Yes, it does. My mother is a Protestant.” Nokwon bobbed her head. In the silence that settled over them again, Noah tried to guess what she would say next. With her left hand, she slowly picked at the fingernail on her right thumb. Would Nokwon praise her name or attack it? Noah wasn’t exactly looking forward to either response. Questions about her name had always made her anxious. That uneasiness was one of the reasons she had long wanted a name change. But what Nokwon said next fell neither on the side of praise nor censure. Instead, she tossed Noah a complete curveball of a question. “When we get to the observatory and meet the people there, if we have to introduce ourselves by name, could you use an alias? Would that be all right?”“Oh, sure,” said Noah. “That’s no problem, but . . . ”“The people there are sensitive about other religions,” Nokwon explained. A green sign appeared, pointing toward the observatory beyond the guardrail. Noah nodded slowly. At last, she could understand where the anxiety that permeated the voices of all the townsfolk who had filed civil complaints stemmed from. The truck exited the highway and drove straight along the bypass marked with a road sign. The endlessly winding route soon transformed into a mountain road. The glaring potholes dinting the asphalt suggested the road had long been neglected. Once they had driven about ten minutes uphill, a cylindrical building emerged between the gaps in the overgrown foliage. At a glance, the building looked like a tall, white lighthouse. When they passed the sign at the parking lot entrance, a domed roof that gleamed like tinfoil and a rectangular building attached to the side of the rounded one also came into view.Nokwon parked the truck. Yet another sign stood near the stone steps that led inside. At one point, that sign had borne the observatory’s name, but now it was coated in black paint. “Noah, this is your first time working offsite, isn’t it?”“It is.” As soon as they got out of the car, the wind burrowed into the napes of their necks. The air was twice as cold as it had been lower down the mountain and made their hair stand on end. Noah looked behind her. Fierce streaks of white cut across the faces of the mountains that lay beyond the observatory. Her mother’s voice rang in her ears. It always snowed in Gangwon-do starting from October. Remember? Could you really spend the rest of your life in a place like that? You’re so sensitive to the cold as it is. Nokwon checked once again that the tarp over the cargo bed was secure. “Just think of today as a time to learn the ropes,” she said. “Watch what I do. If someone starts a conversation with you, keep it short.” “Will do,” Noah said, sniffling. Nokwon handed her a scarf from the backseat. Noah tried to turn it down several times before accepting. The scarf, too, smelled of soil and resin. Nokwon started up the stairs first. Noah followed close behind. As they drew nearer to the building, they spotted several figures behind the floor-to-ceiling window. Standing in a row, the shadows were watching the two of them. At last, one of them moved, and the door to the main entrance swung open. A woman in a dark fur coat stood in the doorway. She was small in stature with greasy black hair that fell nearly to her waist. “Park Nokwon!” Her voice pierced through the two buildings, the staircase, and the mountain itself before landing in front of them. The woman came running toward them with small, quick steps. By the time the echoes died down, she was standing right before their eyes. She clasped Nokwon’s hands in her own. No one had ever treated Nokwon with such uninhibited familiarity, not at the township office or anywhere else. The woman pumped Nokwon’s hands up and down as she spoke. “It’s been ages. So good to see you. The roads weren’t frozen on your way here, were they? Temperatures have plummeted lately. Aren’t you cold? Come on inside. I’ll fetch you some tea.”Then she turned to Noah. When Noah took a step back, the woman quickly closed the distance and started in on her, too. “I believe it’s our first time meeting. Are you a new hire? What’s your name?” The woman held out her hand. Instantly, the gesture became a handshake. Noah took pains not to stumble over her words. “Pleased to meet you. I joined the township office last month. My name is Jeong Seonhwa.” It was her mother’s name. Even she wasn’t sure why this was the first name to come to mind, but it seemed fitting. Old-fashioned as it was, her mother’s name was unassuming. Perfect for hiding her true identity, and familiar enough from years of hearing it said that it rolled right off the tongue. Which was why, when she met Nokwon’s eyes over the woman’s shoulder, she was startled. She couldn’t understand what emotion she was seeing in her colleague’s glare. Likewise, she had no idea why the woman in front of her who had initiated the handshake then opened her mouth and let out a long exhale. All Noah knew was that she must have accidentally knocked something over or spilled something out. She felt a chill graze the nape of her neck again. “How fascinating,” the woman said at last. “What an amazing coincidence. My name is Seonhwa, too.”  Seonhwa ascended the stairs with the two women on either side of her—to be precise, she had one arm locked around one of Nokwon’s arms and the other around one of Noah’s. The glass door to the observatory opened automatically. The warmth inside the building nestled its way in between them. The place smelled of detergent and bleach. The lobby was divided into two areas: the left side, which boasted a backless bench, and the right side, where a tall desk that had once served as a reception counter was located. Behind the desk was a white staircase that led upstairs. Several people in work clothes were seated on the bench. They were the ones who had been watching Nokwon and Noah through the huge window moments earlier. From a woman with frosty white hair and drooping eyelids to a young man who looked like he’d just graduated high school, they were a group of about six people who appeared to have absolutely nothing in common. All of them sat up ramrod straight, their brows and the corners of their mouths taut and perfectly straight, which made them look like mannequins. Beside them were all sorts of cleaning supplies—a red washbasin with a neat pile of rag mops inside, a bigger mop leaned up against the wall, an industrial vacuum cleaner, the works. “It’s a bit hectic around here, isn’t it?” Seonhwa said. “Mondays are our big cleaning days.” She led Nokwon and Noah into a small room between the staircase and the desk. She mentioned that the space had originally been used as a staff lounge. On the middle shelf of the otherwise empty cupboard sat a box of coffee grounds and tea leaves. Seonhwa took a coffeepot out of the cabinet under the sink, chatting nonstop as she boiled water.“I stocked up on a nice variety while I was in town. And thank goodness I did. Which do you prefer—caffeinated or decaf? If you don’t have a strong preference, I can prepare one of my favorites for you . . . It has an especially nice aroma.” Noah furtively studied Seonhwa’s face as she accepted the teacup the other woman handed her. Just as with Nokwon, it was hard to guess Seonhwa’s age. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth were deep, but her cheeks and lips were as rosy as a teenager’s. Her unwavering cheeriness made her look like a bright-eyed college first-year.The tea was suitably warm and smelled strongly of grass. Noah tipped back her teacup and snuck a glance straight ahead. Nokwon was leaning against the cupboard opposite Noah, sipping her own tea. In the truck, she had spouted all those warnings about using an alias and keeping conversations short, but now that they were in the observatory, she looked very much at ease. Noah would even venture to say she was behaving more naturally than she did at the township office. Nokwon didn’t say a word until Seonhwa had led them back to the lobby. Only when Seonhwa started saying something to the people on the bench did Nokwon sidle up to Noah and hurriedly whisper, “Don’t hold eye contact for too long.” It was a directive without an obvious subject or object. With whom she was supposed to avoid eye contact, roughly how much time spent looking at someone counted as too long—not one thing about the instructions was clear. And there was no chance to ask follow-up questions because, right then, Seonhwa turned back to them. She pointed at the bench and introduced the people seated there one at a time—men and women, elders and children, straight-backed and tight-lipped in their head towels and aprons. The whole time Seonhwa was speaking, Noah kept her eyes on the ground and merely nodded. “You all met Park Nokwon last time, didn’t you?” When the people on the bench answered that they had, Seonhwa gestured to Noah with both hands, beaming. “And this—this is Jeong Seonhwa. She has the exact same name as me. Isn’t that neat? I was so surprised.” All eyes in the lobby turned to Noah. She could feel their gazes on her with her entire body. She no longer needed to consciously adhere to Nokwon’s earlier command. She needed to concentrate all her efforts on training her expression and could barely manage that, let alone look anyone in the eye. Nokwon took a step toward her. The person who seemed so distant and awkward around her at the township office felt like her guardian here. So much so that Noah had to actively resist the urge to grab onto Nokwon’s sleeve or arm. “Seonhwa,” Nokwon said. “We came today because of some civil complaints. We keep getting them at the township office.”“Yes, yes, go on.” Seonhwa’s voice was truly pleasant to listen to. It made Nokwon’s seem pitiful in comparison. In a shrill voice that cracked often, Nokwon relayed the contents of the complaints that had been made. She deftly pruned and trimmed the contradictory parts, and her tone was polite and refined. In sum, residents had complained that in the last several weeks, the group at the observatory had been unusually rowdy, doing things that filled the air with a burning smell as if they were stoking fires, and flashing light beams into the sky. Residents who had come up to the mountains early in the morning to forage for wild vegetables were startled when the people from the observatory appeared wielding scythes or weed trimmers, giving the townspeople such a scare that their hearts dropped to their stomachs. Some of the complainants had even appealed for clarification on the purpose behind the group’s stay at the observatory . . . With that, Nokwon ended her report and took another sip of tea. Her slurping echoed throughout the lobby. The people from the observatory did not say a word, nor did their expressions change in the slightest; they simply stared at Noah and Nokwon. Noah once again lowered her eyes. Seonhwa said they would need time to discuss the matter amongst themselves, so Nokwon and Noah returned to the staff lounge to wait. They could hear whispering on the other side of the walls. Noah glanced over at Nokwon several times. She was waiting to hear something that might shed a bit more light on their current situation, but Nokwon said nothing. She merely held her teacup, still faintly steaming, and stared at the little window behind the lounge sink. Seonhwa returned shortly after. She suggested they all have a quick chat upstairs. Nokwon stood first. Noah followed, glancing over at the window Nokwon had just been staring at mere moments earlier. When she stood directly in front of the sink, she could see down to the parking lot below the mountain woods. In the center of the lot sat Nokwon’s truck, covered in that blue tarp. Someone was approaching the vehicle. That someone wore a white sweater, a varsity jacket, and a head towel. Noah had seen that outfit earlier in the lobby. The side of the person’s face, scarred from acne, also looked familiar. The boy stood in front of the truck and hawked up spit. He was holding something long and curved in his hand. It looked like a scythe. “Seonhwa!” Startled, Noah whipped around. There was Seonhwa, who had called her by their apparently shared name, smiling at her. “This way, please,” she said, gesturing toward the staircase at the end of the lobby. When Noah glanced out the window again, the boy was already gone. On the walls as they climbed the stairs were photographs that had faded blue. Most of them were pictures of the heavens. The dynamic light of Capella as observed in December, the pale or blue-tinged glow of the Pleiades star cluster, the moon’s craters and Jupiter’s stripes—all the labels and dates beneath each photo were from over a decade earlier. Noah had heard that the people currently living here purchased the observatory and its surrounding land about a year ago. She thought about the complaints from the town’s residents claiming that during that time, the atmosphere in the mountains had grown immensely tumultuous. “I’m not convinced this so-called tumultuousness is because of us,” Seonhwa said as she made her way up the spiral staircase. “As you know, Nokwon, what we’ve done here is essentially no different from volunteer work. Don’t you remember? How we cleared all the weeds on these grounds, cleaned up the mountains of trash that had piled up, and got rid of the wild animal traps installed here ages ago—all those things? You know it, too, don’t you? We’ve done what any good neighbor would. But if people are complaining that these good deeds have made things tumultuous here, well, we have nothing to say to that.” She pushed hard against the iron door at the top of the staircase. It opened with the scraping of the hinges. Inside, they were all bathed from head to toe in a clean, white light. The moment Noah stepped foot into that light, she realized she had never been to an observatory before. She had only seen pictures or videos. The observation deck was much more crowded than she’d imagined and much brighter than anticipated. Light poured in through the tall glass windows that reached up to the domed roof, illuminating the hall, the three of them, and the huge telescope in the center of the room. The body of the telescope gleamed white in the sunlight. The other telescopes all around them had been covered in silver cloth and looked like ghosts in a puppet show. Seonhwa crossed the room, weaving around the telescopes as she went. She explained all sorts of things to Noah and Nokwon as they trailed after her. She spoke as if she were introducing the trees and shrubs in a garden. This here is a catadioptric telescope, that one is a refracting telescope, that one we mainly use for observing Jupiter, and this one we use to look at star clusters—Nokwon cut in. “You said you and the others spoke earlier. What did you all conclude?”“Oh, about that . . . ” Seonhwa stopped short. Right in front of the telescope in the center of the room. She looked back and forth between Nokwon and Noah. When her gaze landed on Noah again, it lingered for a long time before wandering off into the air. Noah herself couldn’t understand why this felt like such a loss. “We’re leaving in two weeks,” Seonhwa said. “For those two weeks, we’ll be more careful. But our prayer meetings, cleanups, patrols, and such can’t be helped. That’s what we came here to do, after all. If any more complaints come in, please tell the townspeople that everything will be resolved in two weeks’ time.”“Why two weeks?” Nokwon asked, and Seonhwa chuckled.“We always planned to stay here only until then. We have to make our living, too, you know. How could we possibly stay here forever?” Nokwon nodded. There were no further questions. She left the deck first. Noah followed. As quick as their steps were, Seonhwa soon caught up to them. In one swift motion, like gliding over ice, she caught Noah by the arm. “Seonhwa,” she said.“Yes.”“It feels so strange to keep calling someone else by my name.” Seonhwa laughed again. Noah said nothing. Seonhwa rubbed her hands up and down Noah’s arm. Unlike her gentle way of speaking and her soft steps, her grip was awfully strong. She brought her face close to Noah’s and whispered. “Seonhwa, we’re leaving in two weeks. The morning of the thirteenth. You should come by in the evening on the twelfth. We’re planning to hold a big event. It’ll be fun, and so very beautiful. An event unlike any other you’ll ever see. You’ll come by, won’t you?” The door leading outside was flung wide open. Nokwon had put down the doorstop. Noah hurried out once Seonhwa released her arm. Nokwon stood at the bottom of the staircase looking up at the two of them. Seonhwa had followed Noah out and whispered one more thing to her—“You’ll get the royal treatment if you do come”—before she took off down the stairs. Noah stood frozen in place. Just like when she had first gotten out of the truck and set foot in that parking lot up in the mountains, her entire body shuddered. When they reached the parking lot again, the sky was already dark. A flock of red-tinged clouds was covering the forest treetops. Beneath the clouds sat the truck. One of the front tires and one of the back tires had been slashed. What stood out was the tattered look of the rubber, as if the tires had been slit several times with a knife, not merely punctured. Seonhwa came up to them and inspected the tires. She swept her long hair up into a bun, squatted in front of one of the tires, and stroked the gashes with her finger. She turned to Nokwon. “This doesn’t look good,” she said. “How on earth did this happen? I can’t tell if it’s the work of a wild animal or a madman . . . ” Noah took a step forward. She thought about mentioning the boy she had seen outside the window in the lounge earlier, telling Seonhwa that she had gotten a clear look at his white sweater and the round back of his head, even the scythe in his hand. But Nokwon’s hand shot out in front of her. As Noah faltered, Nokwon went around to the back of the truck. She snatched off the tarp and began rolling it up. Soon, the stack of spare tires tucked into a corner of the cargo bed came into view. The whole time Nokwon was replacing the tires, the parking lot remained eerily silent. Not even the sound of branches knocking against each other in the wind or the cries of birds could be heard. At some point, all the people from the lobby came to stand around them in the parking lot. They formed a semicircle around the truck. Noah quickly spotted the boy in the white sweater. He had both hands stuffed in his pockets as he watched Nokwon change the tires. His face was perfectly blank. Meanwhile, Seonhwa looked like she was biting back a laugh. She sat crouched beside the truck, also watching Nokwon work. She didn’t seem to care that her fur coat was dragging on the half-frozen ground. When Nokwon stood up at long last, Seonhwa hurried over to her as if to embrace her. “Park Nokwon,” she said.“Yes.”  “When we leave here, I’ll think of you often. I’m going to miss you.”Nokwon looked down at her. She drew in several breaths before she said, “Me, too.” As they got in the truck and the whole time they were leaving the parking lot, Seonhwa didn’t stop waving goodbye. As expected, the people behind her stayed put. They drew closer like a flock of birds, eyes fixed on Noah and Nokwon as if trying to etch the two of them deeply into their memories.  Two weeks went by in a flash. In that time, Noah was slammed with all kinds of complaints, paperwork, and questions. Most of the questions had to do with the business trip she and Park Nokwon had gone on. Despite the fact that it had been several years since she was appointed to her post, hardly any employees regularly chatted with Nokwon. Even conversations about work were usually kept to the point. Seeing her and Noah sitting side by side and eating together the day after their trip, several people outright gasped in shock and quietly approached Noah later to ask: What was Assistant Manager Park like? Wasn’t it uncomfortable working with her? Noah always gave more or less the same answer. No, it wasn’t. She was kind. She taught me a lot. None of it was untrue. That whole time at the observatory, Nokwon had acted as Noah’s caretaker, albeit half-heartedly, and Noah had followed her around, all but clinging to her sleeve. However, there was something odd about what Nokwon had said as they were heading back down the mountain. That conversation was the one part of the story Noah didn’t tell anyone. That day, Nokwon had asked: Will you go? Sorry? I heard Seonhwa earlier. Inviting you up there on the twelfth. Oh, my. You have excellent hearing, Assistant Manager Park. Nokwon turned the steering wheel, not a hint of laughter on her face. Only after the mountain road transitioned into the regular road mottled with light and noise did she speak again. If you want to go, I’ll help you. Noah looked over at her blankly. Nokwon went on. I have no ties to the people at the observatory. That must be why they destroyed my tires, right? So I’m just asking your opinion. Do you want to go? Nokwon pulled up in front of Noah’s house. She lived in a newer low-rise apartment building about a fifteen-minute walk from the township office. Roughly half the apartments in the building, which was made up of only studios and two-bedrooms, still sat empty. The day Noah and her mother showed up in the moving truck, her mother had taken a look around her apartment, which still smelled of wallpaper glue, and said: Are you really going to live here? That day, too, Noah kept her mouth shut for a long time. But on her move-in day and that day in the car with Nokwon as well, the answer had been clear to her. It lingered, clear as anything, in her ears and eyes and on the tip of her tongue. Yes, I want to go, Noah said. I’m curious. Nokwon studied her face. For a moment so brief Noah nearly missed it, Nokwon seemed to flash a smile. All right, then, she said. I’ll be in touch soon. Have a nice weekend. But the weekend went by, and Nokwon did not get in touch. The following week was no different. After Noah made several attempts to bring up that day over lunch before stopping herself each time, Nokwon finally gave her a phone number. It was the number of a senior officer at the local precinct. “Who is this?” Noah asked, but all Nokwon said in reply was, “You’ll meet him the day after tomorrow. I’ll go with you, too.” Where exactly were they going, and why did Noah need a cop’s phone number? Once again, Nokwon failed to share even one proper piece of information. She told Noah she would be around to pick her up in the evening and to dress warmly. That was all. Noah didn’t ask any more questions. She wondered if it might be better to just let herself be swept along.  On Sunday evening, Noah woke to the flash of police lights outside her window. Just before then, she had been dreaming. About birds. The observatory and the national highway, the township office and her apartment building all bled into one image that unfolded before her eyes. The birds flew over the tangled heart of downtown. The sound of their wings beating against the air like winter blankets being dusted off could be heard loud and clear all the way on the ground. The sound grew closer and closer, as if it would soon strike her eardrums. When Noah opened her eyes to the flash of red and blue lights, her surroundings were utterly silent. She checked her phone and saw that she had three missed calls. All from Nokwon. Noah scrambled to put on a jacket and a scarf and hurried downstairs. Nokwon was standing outside the building. Behind her was a patrol car. “Were you asleep?”“Sorry. I didn’t know when you were coming, so . . . ”“Get in the back.” There was a man already in the backseat. He looked to be around Noah’s age. The armbands on the shoulders of his thick, light gray jacket stood out starkly. The design consisted of several overlapping images—a yellow sea eagle, a set of scales, a rose of Sharon. The man held out his hand and said, “I’m Cho Namwook, senior officer.” The policeman in the driver seat was a bit older. Nokwon got into the passenger seat beside him. The car pulled off as Noah and Namwook shook hands in the back. On their way to the observatory, Namwook explained the next steps. It turned out, there was hardly anything for the women to do. Nokwon had been to the observatory several times and so was going to inform the officers about the layout and geography of the place, and if they needed to interview witnesses, the officers would request Noah and Nokwon’s cooperation throughout that process. “What kinds of witnesses?” Noah asked.“According to what Assistant Manager Park has told us . . . There is a high possibility that the event being held tonight is in violation of the law.” Noah looked straight ahead. The crown of Nokwon’s head was perfectly still where it peeked over the headrest. Outside the car window, the landscape was much more unmoving and desolate than last time. The snow that had fallen intermittently over the past two weeks sat piled up like cobwebs on the branches and roots of the trees. The patrol car rattled up the mountain road. Even after they had passed the observatory, they drove up a long incline, coming to a stop where the road leveled out again. They were on a shoulder of the road bordering the mountainside. Nokwon turned around in her seat. “Noah. The sergeant and I will scope out the area around the observatory first. You and Officer Cho can head in together.” Nokwon and the sergeant got out of the car. They cut off the police lights and started on foot back down the road they had all just come up. Noah absently watched their retreating backs. She felt as if she were still in a dream. Beside her, Namwook asked, “Should we get going, too?”  After locking the car door behind them, Namwook cut on his flashlight and shone it on the path ahead. They headed in the opposite direction of Nokwon and the sergeant. The mountains in the dead of night were far colder and darker than they had been two weeks prior. Even the beam from the flashlight looked like it would freeze over in midair. Noah and Namwook made their way up the mountain, hunched into themselves all the while. Once they were out of the car, Namwook kept his mouth shut. It seemed now that he’d explained the situation, he didn’t have much else to say. Noah, of course, didn’t bother him with questions. She was brimming with things she wanted to know, but she wasn’t sure that she could ask them aloud. She was also afraid of ending up on the receiving end of his questions. Questions like: What was she doing climbing this mountain in the middle of the night? The truth was, there was only one reason. And that was because of what the woman who shared a name with her mother, who had gripped her arm and looked at her with stars in her eyes two weeks ago, had said. It’ll be fun, and so very beautiful. Noah’s toes ached like they would soon snap clean off as the two of them hiked up the frozen road. She had already lost sensation in her cheeks and forehead from being barraged with the wind. Even so, she couldn’t stop turning over those words in her mind. Some part of them reminded her of what her mother always said. Every time Noah mentioned wanting to change her name, her mother would suddenly flash her a tender smile, taking Noah’s hands in hers and caressing them gently. All the while, she would repeat the same remarks. Your name is the one that leads everyone toward a better, more beautiful world. In that new world, everyone will be well fed, happy, and warm— “We’re here.” Noah’s foot slipped as she came to a sudden stop. Namwook reached for her. She grabbed his hand but fell anyway. The humiliation dawned on her faster than the pain of her knees hitting the ice-hard ground. Namwook helped her up as her face burned red. Not a single streetlamp stood on that road, but the moon shone so bright that their faces were plain to see. Namwook was frowning. “You’re not here against your will, are you?” he asked. “Did your assistant manager force you to come or . . . ”  “No, it’s nothing like that at all,” Noah assured him, brushing off the frost that clung to her knees and palms. When she stood again, she could see clearly over the guardrail the gentle slope of the mountain and the observatory at its base. Only then did she realize where they were—on the roadside at a point a little higher in altitude than the observatory. Noah wiped her nose. “I came because I wanted to. I wanted to see for myself. What sorts of things go on here . . . ” She trailed off and pressed her body against the guardrail. The dome above the observation deck they had visited last time had been opened up more than halfway, and there were people gathered inside. She couldn’t see anything in detail, but she was certain that something was in full swing down there. “There they are,” Namwook said.“Yes.”“I heard you met them in person. What are they like?”“You want to know what they’re like?”“I’ve never met them, not even once. I’ve only heard the rumors.” Murmurs and movement continued to stir from the half-open deck. Seonhwa would be in there in her long fur coat, as would the people Noah had seen in the lobby in their head towels and the boy who’d snuck out to the truck with the scythe in hand. What were they like? The others at the township office had wondered the same thing. In the same tone of voice they used when asking about Nokwon, they probed Noah to find out what the deal was with the people from the observatory. Every time, Noah skirted the question with a laugh. And when they left and she was all alone, she thought to herself. They were . . . interesting. They seemed full of conviction. It was rare to see such certainty in anybody. Even her mother, who prayed every night, had never shown that degree of steadfastness. For the past two weeks, Noah had thought long and hard about where their devotion stemmed from. “They just . . . seem like people who live diligent lives.” Namwook laughed dryly at that. Just as Noah was about to laugh, too, a commotion arose from the observatory. They turned their heads in unison. The first thing they spotted were the bright yellow lights. The lights swelled gradually until they reached the roadside where the two of them were standing. Namwook took out a pocket telescope and brought it to his eye. Noah leaned farther over the guardrail. It looked like a fire had broken out inside the dome. The flames rose from the observation deck, flicking higher and higher upward as the blaze quickly began to swell.  While Namwook radioed someone, Noah took out her phone and started pacing up and down the roadside. When at last she got a signal, several messages from Nokwon came flooding in. Telling her not to move and to wait where she was. Noah tried calling, but no one picked up. She huffed on her fingertips and tapped out a text. What’s going on? There was no reply. Instead, Noah got the answers to her question through other means. The first answer came to her on the wind blowing from the observatory toward the mountains. It was the smell. A fishy odor and the smell of something burning, followed at last by the sour stench of rotten meat being grilled, all intermingling in the air. The smell grew more and more dense and pungent. All the while, the flames were taking on a clearer shape. Dark gray smoke soared up alongside the blaze, and yellow and blue sparks shot out from the dome. Soon after, the second answer landed on Noah’s forehead. She looked up. Another one of the things that had just grazed her forehead struck her cheek this time. Noah snatched it out of the air and studied it. A feather. A long one with a pointed tip. In the glow of her phone flashlight, she could see that it was a deep chestnut brown. She held it up at eye level. The birds were overhead. They were mid-flight, their backs to the North Star. Their outstretched wings were long and large enough to completely obscure the star cluster. Noah tipped her head back as far as she could and tried to track the birds’ movements. She recalled the moment she had seen those wings for the first time. How the birds had looked like a group of Buddhist monks wearing black robes and sitting on a bare field after the harvest, how their stooped backs made them easy to mistake for elderly people or children, how they looked thick and soft to the touch. The birds flew toward the observatory with renewed vigor and began to circle the deck. The flames and smoke and stench all continued to rise up in between their massive wings.The eagles’ cries were higher-pitched and more grating than Noah had expected. The song being sung inside the dome was pitched lower than the birdcalls, but Noah could still hear it all the way out on the roadside. At first, all she heard were murmurs, but soon the lyrics became crystal clear. When our enemies climb the mountain,When our enemies climb the mountain . . .  Noah took out her phone again. She opened the camera app and zoomed in on the dome. There were people inside, dancing. Some lay on their stomachs with both hands raised. Others shoved a lump of meat deeper into the flames. The more Noah zoomed in, the more quickly everything seemed to move. The various colors of the flashing lights and the dancing bodies and the raw meat, entangled into one. When a woman in a dark fur coat appeared onscreen, Noah gripped the phone tighter. Seonhwa stood before the flames and looked up at the sky. She didn’t react in the slightest, even as sparks flew in all directions. She was focusing all her attention—her heart and soul—on the observatory, the flames, the piece of raw meat that had not yet been tossed into the fire, the birds flying over the heads of the crowd around her. The cell phone camera couldn’t capture Seonhwa’s expression in any detail. All that showed up on the screen was the outline of her side profile. Noah was about to press the record button after several false starts when Seonhwa suddenly began to turn her head. Her dark face sizzling in low-resolution, she was looking right at Noah. The song continued, the same verse repeating over and over. When our enemies climb the mountain . . .  Noah dropped down and crouched on the ground. She stared at the phone she was clutching in her hands, at the face crawling with pitch-blackness on the screen. Noah heard something bubbling inside her skull. The sound of something boiling and thus transforming. “We should get moving, too.” Startled by the hand on her shoulder, Noah whipped around. Namwook also must have been surprised because he pulled his hand away and took a few steps back. “Where to?” Noah asked, short of breath. Namwook frowned and said now that they had confirmed there was an arson, they had to get started on making arrests and putting out the blaze. Wildfire relief services were on their way, as was the fire department. The two of them began walking, their backs to the observatory. Namwook led the way down the road. He glanced back several times. Once, he met Noah’s eyes with a look that asked: Don’t you have something to say? But Noah said nothing. That sound from earlier was still stewing in her ears. It was as if the fire in the observation deck had lit a twin blaze inside her.  By the time they reached the parking lot, the night was already filled with flashing emergency lights and the wail of sirens. An orange firetruck and a wildfire relief vehicle were parked in front of the observation deck. Noah remembered receiving emergency training on wildfires at the township office. If the training modules were correct, soon the volunteers would start spraying water from backpack pumps alongside the firefighters. “There’s another patrol car in the parking lot,” Namwook said. “Do you want to wait in there for a bit?” Noah nodded. Namwook regarded her for a few seconds before he took off running toward the firetruck. Noah went the other way, toward the parking lot. As she entered the shadow of the mountains, she turned back and made sure Namwook was out of sight before switching directions. She headed toward the observatory. Her steps were hurried. She thought she heard someone calling her name, but she didn’t stop. First, she entered the lobby. The sprinklers dotting the ceiling had been activated and were spraying down the hall. At least the smoke detectors appeared to be functioning normally. Noah crossed the lobby, careful to sidestep the water showers. The sprinklers near the stairs had been set off, too, but their effect seemed to have been even more minimal there, as the staircase was filled up halfway with hazy smoke. Noah covered her nose and mouth with her sleeve and climbed the stairs. Her field of vision soon clouded over with smoke, and she lost her footing several times. The third time she slipped, someone grabbed her. A long-haired woman in a dark fur coat. Seonhwa did not speak. She simply guided Noah, slowly, back down the stairs, maintaining a firm grip on her the whole time. Overhead, the sounds of sirens, birdcalls, and singing mingled and resounded. Noah shouted, “I lied to you about something.” Seonhwa did not say a word. Noah went on, confessing that she had used her mother’s name as an alias and divulging her real name. Seonhwa remained silent. She grabbed Noah’s hand and continued walking. They passed through the lobby along the edge of the room as water continued to stream down from different spots on the ceiling and exited through the back door. The cold air of a winter night greeted them outside. Only then did Seonhwa let go of Noah’s hand. She leaned down, painstakingly studying every inch of Noah’s face. Hers was an earnest gaze that seemed to be trying hard to recognize someone with whom she had parted ways long ago. “We gave the observatory a new name,” Seonhwa said. She revealed the name. It belonged to a very old and famous ship. It was also the name of the wooden boat from the story her mother used to tell her all the time as a child. The Ark. The ship that faced the new world head on, even as fierce storms raged, without capsizing or running aground. That new world was much cleaner and far more beautiful than the world that had come before. Seonhwa stood up straight again and pointed at the observation deck. “Look over there.” A spray of white, the water from the firetruck and wildfire relief truck hoses, was streaming into the dome. The eagles flew in and out of the building, beating their wings. Their noisy cries blended into the sounds of rushing water and sirens. Just as Seonhwa had said, it was unlike anything Noah had ever seen. The flock of eagles soaring between the spray of water and the dome seemed trapped in a sort of limbo one moment and in command of everything the next. “I kept waiting for our enemies in there,” Seonhwa said. At times, she went on, that felt more important to her than any teachings. In every book, salvation came after an enemy air raid. The arrival of the enemy also signified the end of that long and agonizing waiting—a wait that had become a world unto itself. That was why every day, Seonhwa kept a close eye on the people who came by. She waited for the one who would climb the mountain and bring her grueling wait to an end. “That’s why I believe it was such an incredible stroke of fate that we met. Don’t you agree?” Noah’s mouth fell open. She stared at Seonhwa. “Well . . . ” she said after a long while. “I . . . I’m not sure. You don’t exactly feel like an enemy to me.” Seonhwa took a few steps back. She let out a hm and pouted as if the words had wounded her. “Then why did you come here?” she asked. Noah could see the birds raging behind Seonhwa, the smoke rising up from the dome, and beyond all that, stars scattered innumerably across the sky. The winter sky in Gangwon-do was indeed high-reaching and full of stars. Suddenly, Noah wondered what sorts of stars she would be able to see through the big telescope in the observation deck that was currently in flames. When she asked the question aloud, Seonhwa frowned. Still, she answered. She said that telescope was custom-made, and in the winter, she often used it to see Saturn. If you brought one eye close to the eyepiece, you could see a ring of stars glittering quietly near the forest.  Once the fire had been quelled, the arrests followed quickly and smoothly. The people from the observatory did not put up much of a fight as they got into the patrol cars. This was after the eagles had already vanished somewhere else. Namwook dropped Noah off in front of her house. The whole time they drove down the mountain, he’d kept sneaking glances at Noah as if he wanted to ask her something, but in the end, he didn’t. Instead, he told her something about himself. He brought up his experiences at the first post he’d been assigned to. There, he had encountered one colorful character after another. He’d seen it all—students banding together to burn down an abandoned building, neighbors who had lived in harmony for years while constantly stealing from one another as if they were simply swapping belongings. One summer, some people had come in from the city and were roaming the beach stark naked. Namwook confronted them in all their nude glory and convinced them to put on some clothes. “Now, I don’t try to understand people like that,” he said, slowing the car to a stop. Outside the window, rows upon rows of low-rise apartment buildings were visible. Noah unfastened her seatbelt, then paused and looked Namwook in the eyes. “So what do you do?”He shrugged. “I just accept it. The fact that there are people like that in this world.” Noah stood outside for a while after Namwook drove off. The emergency lights at the front entrance to the building kept flickering on and off. Noah suddenly craved a smoke. But she had neither a cigarette nor a lighter on her, and in fact, she’d never smoked before. Instead, she took out her phone. She had a text from Nokwon. Did you get home all right? Noah slipped her phone back into her pocket. She thought about Seonhwa climbing into the patrol car. She’d held Noah’s gaze the entire time. Right up until someone shut the car door. She kept mouthing the same questions. It’s you, isn’t it? Aren’t you the one? Seonhwa asked again and again, but Noah didn’t answer. Now, she wished she had. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Nokwon. Only after letting it ring several times did Noah pick up. She wanted to ask why in the world Nokwon had brought her to the observatory. But the moment she answered the phone, she found herself blurting out something else entirely. “Those people saw me as their enemy.” For a while, all Noah heard on the other end of the line was quiet breathing. She proceeded to spill everything she’d heard at the back entrance to the observatory. Nokwon listened silently until at one point she burst out laughing. It was the first time Noah had ever heard her laugh. She couldn’t even imagine what Nokwon’s face would look like laughing. Once her laughter petered out, Nokwon said, “How kind of her. To include us in her story.” When Noah finished speaking, she felt as if she had resurfaced above water. Once she managed to steady her breathing, she asked, “Why did you call?” Nokwon stopped laughing and also paused to catch her breath. She asked if Noah was planning to take off work the next day. When Noah swore she was fine to go in, Nokwon insisted. It was good to rest one’s body and mind after experiencing something like what they had, she said. Only with proper rest could Noah get back to work. After ending the call, Noah looked around. All at once, she realized it was just like her mother had said—she was truly far from home, in an unfamiliar place. From the new apartment building behind her to the lights from cars and houses glowing in the distance, everything felt both strange and new. “A new world,” Noah muttered. When she looked up, her surroundings had grown immensely brighter. It was the glow from the emergency lights that had decisively flickered on as if they had been waiting for their cue. Noah blinked against the piercing light and looked up at the sky. The night was as dark and still as ever. The star clusters and nebulae, the planets and satellites, all shone in silence. Between them, birds were flying. Birds that traveled to a new land every winter. They did not seem to be flying toward one place but rather in circles, all facing different directions. As if they had no other destination but right there in the center of everything, they circled around and around in a ring and slowly made their descent.

by Yuni Haam

Fiction

Half-Life

1 About twelve years ago, one wise student of mine asked me, out of the blue, “Professor, do you have some money to spare?” “Money to spare?”“Thirteen million won . . . the more the better, if you have it.” I looked at him, impassive. He avoided my gaze, tracing the wood grain on the hardwood surface of my office table.This kid is real trouble. I’d already decided even before he finished talking. “What for?” I asked.“I want to set you free.” Ha—The loud sigh escaped from between my lips before I even realized. Only then did he look up at me. Maybe it was his heavy eyebrows, but the whites of his eyes seemed unusually deep. Sung Woojung.That was his name. A third-year student who had skipped the regular high school route, passed the High School Equivalency Exam, and enrolled at the university at twentyone. His registered address was in Mok-dong, Seoul, but he was living alone in a studio apartment near campus in Jinwol-dong, Gwangju. When he was a first-year, he’d shown up to department events now and then and seemed to take part in study groups and the writing club, but by the following year, he’d all but vanished. He didn’t come to class, let alone finals, and ended up receiving academic warnings at the end of the first semester as well as the second. The Terminally-Online Recluse Supreme. That was the nickname his friends in the department gave Woojung. TORS for short. The classmate you seldom saw in school but always found online; the guy who occasionally surfaced in online communities for first-years to drop game items or share e-books and films from dubious sources, then vanished like smoke; the TA’s silent savior who, in the comfort of his studio, single-handedly debugged the cross-platform glitches between the mobile and PC versions of the department’s website.  But those quirks alone weren’t enough for the title of “Recluse Supreme.” What clinched the nickname TORS was the police raid that took place in the second semester of his sophomore year.  “Professor, did you hear about Woojung getting raided?” I first heard about it over coffee with some students between classes. “Raided?” I asked. “Is that some kind of internet slang?” “No, no. A real police raid. With a search warrant and everything.”  The students seemed unfazed, as it was old news to them, but, to be frank, I was stunned. It was something I’d never encountered before. Suddenly it felt like I was the student and they were the ones with lessons to teach.  “What happened?”  At my question, chaos erupted. One student said it must be for distributing illegal videos; another guessed it was related to quick-cash loan scams. Quick-cash loan scams? You know, those places that send out emails and upload posts advertising easy loans? He must have been working for one of those scammers. But do they raid people’s apartments for that kind of stuff? They’d have indisputable proof without even having to search his place, no? That brought on a brief silence, then one student—who had a Business Administration major friend living in the same building as Woojung (it was the one with the priciest rent in the area, being a new construction with Renaissance-style pilotis; as such, no other student in our department lived there, or could afford to)—spoke up:  “Apparently everyone in the building came out to watch when the raid happened. You know those boxes? The ones they use for all the seized property. My friend said they had the NIS logo on them.” “Holy shit, then it has to be—”  And the chaos resumed: It’s got to be something North Korea-related. I knew something was off when he was sharing all those e-book and film files. That must’ve been a manifestation of his proletarian comradeship for us. It could’ve been part of the proletarian revolutionary tactic to destabilize South Korea’s free market. Dude, then what, are torrents supposed to be Lenin’s invention now? Why are you suddenly bringing up Lenin? That film we watched with the professor, it was The Torrent Horse, wasn’t it? That was The Turin Horse, you moron . . . Wasn’t that about Lenin? It was Nietzsche!  “But, professor, my friend said Woojung had seven computers in his apartment.” “Seven? Seven computers for a guy majoring in a field that only needs a word processor?” “I study Excel sometimes,” one student offered.  The conversation veered again. You can’t write novels if you mess around with sciency programs like Excel. I heard Professor Lee draws tables with an actual ruler because he doesn’t know how to make one in MS Word.  “Gotta hand it to you, Professor!” The students gave me a thumbs-up.  Without a word, I stepped back into the lecture hall. Later, I heard about the raid from Woojung himself.  “It was nothing.” “I heard it was the National Intelligence Service . . . that can’t be right, can it?” “It was. It was the NIS.”  I stared at him. He wasn’t fazed at all—he might as well have been naming his favorite kimbap. “The NIS really raided your studio apartment? Why would they do that?” I was sure he was lying. “They were just putting on a show,” he replied, then added it was because of a defamation charge. “That just . . . doesn’t make any sense. I mean, the NIS conducting a raid for defamation?” “Because the director of the NIS was the one I defamed,” Woojung said and even let out a soft snort.  That year was the final year of the Lee Myung-bak administration. The presidential election was scheduled for December, and starting that spring, or actually even from the year before, the internet had become a cesspool of criticisms, hate speech, and insults. People consumed it like entertainment, like some new online game had just dropped. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.  “Funny thing is, those people can’t take criticism.”  At the time, Woojung had been repeatedly posting the same message on an online sports forum, referring to the director of the NIS as the director of “NDS”—National Durian Service. This was in reference to the scandal where the director had tried to smuggle three boxes of durians as a gift for his wife on his way back from a business trip to Vietnam and got caught at customs. The NIS issued a statement explaining that he’d disposed of the fruit at the airport upon learning it was prohibited.  “Is this . . . what is . . . ”  I still couldn’t believe it. The director of the National Intelligence Service smuggling in durians—not schematics for new weapons but durians—and filing a defamation suit against a twenty-something college student over jokes? It made no sense.  “He’s just harassing me,” Woojung said, as if comforting me. “He knows full well it’ll never stick.” Twelve years later, I would hear something similar from him, standing outside the main entrance to the Gwangju Nambu Police Station. “How can you set me free with thirteen million won?” I asked, settling back into the sofa. “There’s this thing called Bitcoin.” “Bit . . . what is that, some kind of laundry detergent?”  I was completely serious, thinking of a similar-sounding laundry detergent brand, which was actually Beat. I wondered, Did he join some pyramid scheme hawking laundry detergent?  “No. It’s called cryptocurrency, and it’s—”  Woojung then gave me a lengthy explanation involving blockchain, P2P networks, and mining. He mentioned nodes and algorithms, but none of it made any sense to me. I only kept thinking, Was he always this talkative?  “If you buy Bitcoin now, it’ll pay off in the future.”  Just five hundred coins for now. He said they’d cost about thirteen million won. I nodded like I understood. “So you’re telling me that I should buy some kind of cyber money, right? Like credits, similar to acorns for Cyworld?”  “No, it’s not . . . ” Woojung started, but gave up. “Have you eaten?” “Yes. Well, no.” “Let’s grab something,” I said, getting up. “I’ve got a night class.”  He stared at me, puzzled, for a moment, but stood up as well. I was startled to notice he was shorter than I’d thought.  Over stone-pot bibimbap at a hole-in-the-wall near campus, I asked, “What gave you the idea?” “Pardon?” “Why did you want to set me free?”  Woojung picked up some seasoned bean sprouts with his chopsticks, then put them back down. He downed his water and said, “Because. You’re a writer.” “You want me to quit teaching and just write?” “Yeah,” he answered in a low voice. “Hey, am I that terrible a professor?” He only smiled at my remark.  It must have been because of what he’d said. That evening, we finished eating in near silence and grabbed coffee from the coffee shop next door before parting in a hurry. At the time, I was teaching five days a week, with two night classes running until 10 p.m. The small private university outside of Seoul where I worked didn’t have the budget to hire faculty when needed, which meant I carried a heavy load. By the time I got home after class and finished all the household chores, I’d sit at my desk to write, and a dull ache would wrap around my temples, like elastic bands cinched too tight around my ears. Even in that condition, I wrote anyway, but . . . when I opened the file the next day, there they were: sentences I couldn’t possibly read without cringing remained on the page, their words like malaria pathogens, staring back at me with blank faces. I should’ve deleted them on the spot, but instead, I kept trying to salvage them, until finally I took out my frustration on the poor delete key—and then it was back to square one. Day after day after day.  I tried not to show any of this to my students. One of them worked part-time loading and unloading trucks when he wasn’t in class, and I’d heard about another student, who’d come to study late in life, working weekends, carrying a double-door refrigerator on his back up stairwells for a moving company. How could I possibly grumble in front of them? There were people with actual grounds for complaint. So I’d walk into class and, like a middle-school student trying to look cool by bragging that he’d watched all the TV he wanted and slept all he wanted before an exam, I’d say things like: “Everyone has their own circumstances, their own life. That’s where the aesthetics of fiction comes from.” Empty words.  And yet. This kid saw something. I kept thinking this as I drank my Americano with him. He must have seen something. And naturally I found myself drawn to him. “Do you have some of that yourself? That Bit-whatever?” To my question, Woojung answered quietly that he’d managed to get about two hundred so far. Geez, this kid. As we walked out of the coffee shop, I said to him in a serious voice, “Don’t get mixed up in stuff like that.” He just looked at me. “Setting yourself free doesn’t happen with that kind of thing, how can it? Even if you hoard a mountain of acorns, a squirrel is still just a squirrel.” After saying that, I gave him a quick wave. I had ten minutes before the night class began.  That had been twelve years ago.  2 Fast forward to this year, the third Friday of June 2024, around 2 p.m. I stood under the awning outside the Civil Service Office of the Gwangju Nambu Police Station, constantly opening and closing the contacts on my smartphone.  I should give him one last chance, shouldn’t I? I hesitated. A hot, muggy breeze kept pushing into the shade, carrying with it a smell of something metallic. At the guard post by the parking lot entrance, a young conscript cop—one of those kids doing their mandatory military service with the police instead of the army—kept glancing my way. It seemed he was looking for a chance to leave his post for a moment once I headed inside. If he asks for forgiveness, if he admits what he did.  Then I’d call the whole thing off, turn around, get in my car, and drive away. Going to the police station, over something between a student and his professor . . . But if I’m being honest, I was also imagining other scenarios. Filing a lawsuit, being interviewed by detectives, taking the witness stand in court. He insulted me and harassed me constantly. My days have been shattered, and I’m even receiving medical treatment due to extreme stress—no, no, I’d better scratch that last part since I haven’t actually seen a doctor. This was the kind of routine I’d fallen into around that time whenever I thought about the incident. Moments when I kept driving myself into an even more miserable state, when what had never happened mingled with what I shouldn’t say. Ha—  Out of old habit, I let out a long sigh and returned to my original resolution. Then I tapped the call button as if I were being extremely generous. “Hello?”  After a few rings, a voice drifted through the phone. We’d exchanged texts now and then, but it had been ages since I’d heard his voice. Calm and composed, neither high nor low— it was Sung Woojung. Maybe it was his tone, but I found myself flustered and tongue-tied. Perhaps that was when the storm started brewing in my heart. How can he be this calm at a time like this? Isn’t this a bit brazen? Isn’t this, in itself, another kind of insult?  Quietly, making sure not to make a sound, I tapped the call-record button.  * The strange happenings began in early March of this year. I woke up late in the morning and checked my phone to see that I’d received more than two hundred messages on the messaging app KakaoTalk. (Around that time, I’d been putting my phone on silent after work.) Over forty missed calls from restricted numbers. I sat on the edge of my bed and pressed one hand to my forehead.  What the hell is this? Did Father . . . again? That’s where my mind went, naturally. Some debt I didn’t yet know about.  What happened was, starting the previous year, I’d been barely scraping by because of a debt that had appeared out of nowhere. It was a debt incurred from my father’s failed real estate investment, and the total came to 430 million won. Monthly interest alone was 2.6 million; principal and interest together came to nearly 4.8 million won. When I went to the bank counter and received the slip with that number written on it, I walked back to the waiting area and sat down on the sofa. Strangely, I felt calm. I thought of the date tree in the garden of the old house where I grew up. Not the lush summer tree but the thin, bare one with its reddish branches in the dead stretch between late autumn and early winter. When I was in elementary school and middle school, I was too scared of that tree to walk past it or even look at it. I kept imagining someone was hanging from the top. On blustery days, the rattling of branches crept through the window into my room, and the sound was like — well, like someone desperately clutching a hand over their mouth to stifle their crying, their breath leaking out. In those days, I tried so hard not to listen, and yet I kept putting my ear to the window. On the slip the bank teller had given me, the one with the numbers, I carefully sketched branches of the date tree. With 430,000,000 written in the background, I drew the long, arching limbs that resembled the strands of someone’s hair. My heart kept sinking. But I never grew afraid.  Ten years earlier, my father had taken out a loan of nearly 200 million won, using the apartment where he lived as collateral. With the money, he purchased some wooded hills in the town of Jucheon in Yeongwol County, Gangwon Province, apparently planning to open a camping ground. Of course there was a real estate broker involved. A man called Mr. Lee, who claimed to be a distant relative— someone my father had met for the first time at a family clan gathering. While Mr. Lee was shuttling my seventy-three-year-old father around Yeongwol, in and out of banks and credit unions and a judicial scrivener’s office, I was completely clueless as to what was going on. Because my father was in Wonju, Gangwon Province, and I was in Gwangju, but that was no excuse. I knew about the property. My father had bought it in my name. After you retire, you can go there and write as much as you want. Writers need a place like that, don’t they? That’s what he said when he called asking for copies of my ID, my registered seal certificate, a letter of attorney. Hills? Why are you suddenly buying hills? Only people who want to be close to nature live in places like that. Writers all live in cities these days. And yet, I sent him all the documents he requested. Apparently this is how people pass on their assets to their children. That way, you can avoid inheritance tax or gift tax. I learned later that Mr. Lee had coached my father to say exactly this.  Those hills, purchased for a little over 200 million won, came back to me a decade later as a debt of 430 million.  So naturally, I assumed those two hundred messages and forty missed calls were related to that. Like some other loan or unpaid taxes, some private lender who hasn’t surfaced yet. But that wasn’t it.  hey gorgeous, what u wearing rn? u said call u so why tf aren’t u picking up?? u frigging bitch! it’s me, oppa! send a pic rn Most of the messages were like this. (Actually, much worse.) Trash talk and insults sent to me, mistaking me for a young woman. And yet also informing me that they’d come see me right away. All the phone calls from restricted numbers seemed to be more of the same. Messages and calls from not one person but dozens, all arriving around the same time.  With a sullen face, I scrolled through all of them, one by one. Some contained insults I’d never even heard before, and there was plenty of slang I couldn’t decipher (though they were clearly profanities, from context), but the more I read, the more relaxed I became. It was obvious that these were misdirected. They’d arrived at my number, but I clearly wasn’t the intended recipient, and they had nothing to do with some other debt I didn’t know about. Hate speech like this was everywhere these days. I hurried to get ready for work and soon forgot about the whole thing—dismissed it as a fluke, a misunderstanding, a prank at most. Geesh, kids these days . . . I thought, blaming the hollow world.  Of course, I didn’t know that was only the beginning.  * “Hey, it’s me. How have you been?”  I tried my best to keep my voice cool. But doing that made me feel like something was tickling at my throat. “Good,” Woojung answered, his voice flat. “And you, Professor?” “Well, you know, same as always.”  Neither of us spoke for a moment. The brief silence made me uncomfortable, but I decided to endure it. He would be the one more on edge, anyway. That thought gave me strength. “What’s going on?” Woojung was the first to break. Instead of answering him right away, I waited. Then I said, “Don’t you have something to say to me?”  This time, he stayed quiet. It felt like cowardice. About two weeks earlier, I’d sent him the same message by text. Don’t you have something to say to me? He hadn’t replied then, either. That gave me conviction.  “I’m at the police station right now. I wanted to confirm with you one last time.” “Okay. What is it?” “No, no, I’m not the one to talk. You’re the one who should be telling me.”  I pulled the phone away from my ear for a second to make sure the audio recorder was running. By then, “one last chance” and “forgiveness” had begun to sound useless. What I need now is evidence, or a confession. Maybe that’s what I’d wanted from the very beginning.  “Professor.” “Yes?” “You don’t have to talk to me, just do what you want to do.”  I said nothing. Woojung continued, “This is just to harass me, isn’t it? If you’re going to do that anyway—” “So you have nothing to say to me?” I cut him off, my voice sharper, insistent. “No.” “Okay, I got it.”  That was the end of our conversation. I glared at the conscript officer in the guard post for a moment, then took one short breath. Then I opened the door to the police station and walked in. This was the real beginning of Scenario B. I did my best to keep my cool and braced myself to be—to maintain the attitude of—the professor who had struggled to be as magnanimous as possible but could no longer take it and so, reluctantly, had come to the police.  I believed I was in the right.  * The flood of nightly messages and calls from restricted numbers that began in early March continued every day for an entire month. Some days, there were fewer than twenty, but most days, there were over a hundred. They usually began with “cutie” or “hey babe,” but ended with “fuck it, bitch!” and “imma keep calling u til the end, just watch!” They came between 2 and 5 a.m., without fail. Once, I stayed up during those hours to answer every single call. When I said, “Hello,” nearly all of them muttered, “Fuck, it’s a guy. Fell for it again!” and hung up. But, regardless of my voice, a few stayed on the line for at least five minutes, making strange moaning sounds. (In those cases, I was the one who had to hang up.) Still, it didn’t bother me much. I figured I could just ignore them. Sure, sure, you pathetic idiots. Call and text all you want. That was the extent of my feelings. My information must have leaked from somewhere. Oh no, was it the bank, maybe? Father had mentioned looking into private lenders and payday loans . . .  Then, starting in April, the calls came not only during the middle of the night but also during the day. While I sat in a strategy meeting about job placement for graduates in our department, while I led a writing workshop for grad students, while I had a late lunch with colleagues, my phone rang without a pause, like an old window rattling in the wind and rain.  “Professor, shouldn’t you take that? It sounds urgent.” Whenever my students said this, I’d hand them my phone. “Take a look. It’s driving me insane.”  They gathered around it in a circle. “Why . . . are they calling you ‘babe’?” “Looks like you’ve been hacked.” “Professor, have you been going on those . . . websites?”  All eyes turned to me. I closed my eyes and shook my head without a word. Then one of my graduate students offered practical advice. “Professor, try changing your KakaoTalk profile picture.” “My profile picture?”  Until then, I’d never uploaded a photo on my profile. I hadn’t even filled in my name; a question mark graced the empty space where the name should have been.  “Post your picture and your name. That way people won’t mistake you for a woman.”  Aha. Then my students began pouring out more suggestions. Post a picture of you in hiking clothes; I think the one where you’re getting an IV would be best (that was a picture I’d sent them, explaining why I couldn’t make a study session); we could take one right now; just stand over there by that orchid pot, it’ll do wonders, and so on. I sat quietly, listened, and uploaded a picture that looked the least embarrassing.  “In any case, what could possibly have caused this?” I muttered in a dejected voice, and suddenly the room fell silent. “Sure, my information could’ve leaked, but this is just . . . ” One grad student raised her voice with righteous anger. “Frigging Korean men are the problem. It’s like hatred is their default setting!” She said this staring straight at me, and I couldn’t help but close my eyes again.  Perhaps thanks to my students’ advice, I did receive fewer messages from that day on. The hundred-plus texts I used to receive day and night dropped to three or four. (Mostly questions like “You’re not actually a man, right?” “Is that a pic of your dad?”) That was encouraging. But the calls from restricted numbers were another problem. Those kept coming. If anything, there seemed to be more of them.  Once, I was driving to a resort in Sinan, South Jeolla Province, for a faculty workshop, accompanied by my colleague Professor C. The whole ride, my phone was ringing off the hook. My car’s GPS had been broken for ages, so I used an app on my phone, but the calls kept interrupting . . . Eventually, it got to the point where Professor C handed me his own phone and said, cautiously: “Professor Lee, these calls—they’re because of that problem, aren’t they?”  That problem C mentioned was my debt. Last February, before the semester started, I happened to mention it over drinks at a pub near campus. There are fixed costs bleeding me every month, but then 4.8 million on top of that? It’s suffocating. Loans on top of loans . . .  He’d listened quietly, then said in a soft voice, “But you’re a writer, Professor Lee, so you should keep writing, given the situation.” I knew full well what C meant. And yet there was such a thing as a heart that couldn’t bear his sincerity. “Professor C. The thing about anxiety . . . when it gets thick enough . . . it turns into hate, and . . . ”  What I mean is that I can’t write anything in this state, everything I write is garbage. I said more, but that’s about all I remember. But, what I do remember—what stayed with me for a long time—was something C said, almost to himself, right before we left the pub:  “But Professor Lee, hate sometimes comes when you don’t know yourself very well.”  That day in the car, I said nothing to him about the calls. I just smiled and left it at that. Because a thought had suddenly crossed my mind: This might not be a simple data breach; someone might be leaking my number on purpose, out of spite, because of “that problem.” For instance, someone like Mr. Lee, who had coaxed my father to purchase the hills. (Two years earlier, my father had sued him for fraud, as it turned out he’d been in cahoots with the previous landowner and the judicial scrivener, and was tangled up in several other lawsuits involving real estate scams.) Why hadn’t I thought of that before? I was nearly convinced it was that.  The calls kept coming. I thought about changing my number, but I couldn’t. I, again, had reasons I couldn’t change it . . . So I kept suspecting Mr. Lee and his associates, waiting to get my hands on proof.  Then I actually stumbled onto something.  The phone call that came around 1 a.m. on Children’s Day, May 5, was from a guy who must have been in a hurry, or maybe he didn’t know how to hide his number because he called me with his caller ID fully visible. Instinctively, I hit the call-record button and answered.  “Huh? Huh? Goddamn it . . . ”  The moment he heard my voice, he was about to hang up.  “Hey, wait, wait. I can see your number. The last four digits are 2832, right? If you hang up now, I’m going to keep calling you the same way you’ve been calling me.” He didn’t hang up. Instead, he kept muttering in a low voice, “Man, this is bad.” “Okay, so what I want is simple,” I did my best to keep my voice calm. “How did you get this number?” “I don’t know anything. I didn’t do anything, I just happened to get it.” He seemed to be a boy freshly out of puberty, his voice only recently dropped. A kid who thought speaking tough was a way to protect himself. “So, how did you get this num—”  Even before I finished speaking, 2832 said, “It’s not my fault. She was the one who said she wanted to see me and gave me her number and told me to call . . . but then you answered . . . ” “Where? Who gave it to you?” “In a video game. She sent me a note.” “A video game?”  StarCraft, he said. People still play that?  “That’s it then, right? I told you the truth.” The boy was about to hang up again.  “No, no, wait, wait,” I was almost pleading. “Can you tell me her username? Please. It’s really important.” He hesitated for a moment, then told me to hold on a second. I knew I was close. “The username is . . . how do you even say this? Turn . . . turning horse? It’s spelled T-U-R-I-N H-O-R-S-E.” “Turin Horse? You’re sure?” “Yeah.” That was the end of our conversation.  Turin Horse. From The Turin Horse. I knew exactly who that username belonged to. The guy who had watched that film over twenty times after I first told him about it.  It was Sung Woojung’s username. 3 “Gee, all kinds of stuff happens these days, don’t they?”  The detective’s name was Park Doyoung. Of the Phishing Investigation Team in the Detective Division. That was what he said while scrolling through the messages on my phone. “Bereavement scams are on the rise these days. You’d be surprised how many people fall for them.” He swiveled his computer monitor around to show me. On the screen was a text message: I am deeply saddened to share the news of the passing of my beloved mother. A simple funeral service will be held at—followed by a clickable link.  “Once you click that link, your phone gets hacked and becomes a ‘zombie’ phone. Sixteen people fell for it in our jurisdiction this month alone.” I nodded half-heartedly.  Detective Park Doyoung, the man I’d been told to speak with, looked about ten years younger than me. Wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and a white slim-fit dress shirt, he looked more like a church lay leader or a sales rep than a detective.  “If people abuse others’ good intentions, eventually there won’t be any good intentions left anywhere.” He handed my smartphone back to me. “And you suspect your student is behind all this?”  I stared at him without answering. I’d already told him all about what had been happening to me, the username I’d discovered, the story about my student who used the username. I was the one who laid everything out, and yet hearing those words come out of his mouth, I felt like I was the one with issues. A heartless teacher accusing his own student. That phrase wouldn’t leave my head. “I’m not certain,” I said. “But I’d like to find out.”  Two days after my call with 2832, I dialed the customer service number for the Korean branch of Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind StarCraft. (Even while I was on the phone, calls from restricted numbers kept coming.) After navigating through several layers, I finally connected with the Manager and launched into a long, slightly exaggerated explanation of my situation. I can’t even think straight because of the calls—they’re coming in even now, as we speak—and all I want to know is simple: the identity of the user behind the username “Turin Horse.” After listening patiently, the Manager said, “Oh, sir, I’m terribly sorry for all the trouble caused by one of our users. Please allow me to apologize on their behalf.” Then, she continued in a voice more exaggerated than mine, “But I’m afraid we cannot provide that information.” Under no circumstances could they disclose personal information about their users.  I raised my voice at her pointlessly. “Did you hear what I said? I literally can’t live a normal life right now.” “Of course, sir, I understand completely. But providing that information would mean breaking the law.” “There’s really no way?” “I’m very sorry, sir. Please understand that we value your opinion as a customer—” She was immovable. I had no choice but to hang up with nothing solved. Before I did, I snapped hysterically, “I’m not your valued customer! I’ve never even played your stupid game!”  “Is there some kind of bad blood between you and this student?” Detective Park asked, hands poised over his keyboard. Bad blood. Bad blood . . .  I wasn’t sure. That question had plagued me ever since I heard the username “Turin Horse” from 2832. But no matter how I dug through my memories, nothing came to mind. I believed I’d been on good terms with Sung Woojung and assumed he’d feel the same. Other than reading, writing, eating, and talking together, what more could there be between a professor and his student? It was frustrating.  Could it be . . . that? After racking my brain for days, an image came to my mind out of nowhere, like a page from a picture book you’d randomly picked up in a bookstore. Perhaps it was a memory I’d invented in an effort to find a possible explanation, and perhaps it had been distorted and exaggerated, but for some reason, once the thought entered my mind, Woojung’s expression that day grew sharper and clearer. That moment, I had realized that his back was rather hunched, as if something about him were twisted.  But even if my memory were accurate, that had been nearly a decade ago. It was far more plausible that he had no memory of it at all, had not even thought of it in years. And above all . . . there was no context, none whatsoever. It was beyond my comprehension. I could forgive him, if only I could understand what was going on . . .  * After we had bibimbap together at the hole-in-the-wall near campus, Woojung started coming by my office now and then. I’d return from class to find him sitting at the table with his hands on his laptop keyboard and a serious look on his face. (I never locked my office door when I was on campus.) “What is it? What’s with the serious face? Did someone sue you again?”  That was my standard joke every time I saw him, and he’d scratch his temple and quietly chuckle. We shared the same space but didn’t talk much. Him at the table, me at my desk (separated by a partition), we worked on our own things. After hours of going through paperwork and student assignments, I’d look up and realize he’d packed up and left. He didn’t even say goodbye, I’d mutter sometimes, but I was never disappointed. I believed it was his way of being considerate.  Once, he asked me with a look of genuine disgust, “Professor. Why is this supposed to be a good movie?”  He’d been watching The Turin Horse on his laptop. I answered in jest as always, “It’s black and white. All black-and-white films are good films.” Then I added, “Isn’t it terrifying?” In all honesty, that film—the story of a horse, a man, and his daughter, all awaiting death in the house without moving as a storm raged outside—frightened and terrified me. I didn’t want to be afraid alone, so I often recommended it to my students.  “Is it good because it’s terrifying?” he asked. I answered in a voice full of uncertainty, “Well, in art . . . it’s not easy to arouse that kind of emotion, is it?”  “I . . . think the daughter in this film is just foolish,” he remarked and went back to watching. But even after that, I saw him watching the same film again and again. (I asked him later and he told me he’d seen it at least twenty times.) He even changed his username to the film title, and revised his position on the daughter.  “Now that I’ve watched it more, it’s not that the daughter is foolish . . . she was trapped. She was the horse itself.” I didn’t take his words very seriously.  In December, I went on an overnight retreat to a vacation lodge near Metasequoia Road in Damyang with my students from the department writing club. It was something of an annual tradition, a consolation trip for those who dropped like autumn leaves from the Spring Literary Contests, the newspaper-sponsored competitions that served as springboards for new authors, and that year, Sung Woojung, who hadn’t partaken much in club activities, came along as well. There were eight of us in total.  We strolled loosely through Gwanbangjerim Forest where the leaves had all turned rusty red, stopped for a late lunch on Damyang Noodle Street, then returned to the lodge and got right into grilling pork belly and drinking soju. Guys, I keep turning down offers to judge the Spring Literary Contests because one of you might win, but, huh? How many years has it been now? I cracked joke after joke, trying to lighten the mood that kept growing heavy, but that wasn’t enough to shake the look on their faces, so I kept downing shots. In the end, I got drunk first and headed up to a room (on the loft level, and I vaguely remembered climbing the stairs on all fours), and fell asleep immediately.  I was deep in sleep when someone shook me awake. “Professor, I think you need to come down for a sec.”  He was a second-year student, one of the youngest in the writing club.  “What’s going on?” I asked, unable to even open my eyes. “It’s . . . I think something’s about to go wrong.” What does he mean, something’s about to go wrong? Did these kids get into a fight? I put on my glasses and ran my fingers through my hair.  When I went downstairs, the students were still drinking, looking the same as before. It was around three in the morning. Soju bottles and paper cups were strewn across the coffee table. Christmas carols were drifting from a Bluetooth speaker someone had brought, and the kids were talking in twos and threes, occasionally bursting into laughter. Bloodshot eyes, a faint smell of mint wafting from somewhere, street lights growing brighter as the night deepened, warmth and coldness, relaxed minds, and anxiety hidden within . . .  And there, in the corner near the decorative fireplace, I caught sight of Sung Woojung’s back as he sat hunched over, clutching a backpack and crying. As well as the white pellets scattered around him.  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked the second-year student standing next to me. “He’s been like that for an hour.”  He said he’d come to wake me because Woojung was making him nervous, because he felt like something might go wrong. Upon closer look, I realized the white pellets were popcorn. Someone, or perhaps several people, had been throwing them. As I watched, one of the fourth-year students threw popped kernels in Woojung’s direction.  “Damn it. Give me back my fucking backpack! What the hell are you doing clutching my backpack?”  I made the conscious decision to approach Woojung first. He didn’t stop crying even when I sat down beside him.  “What’s going on? What happened?”  At my question, he lifted his head for a moment and stared at me. He must have been crying a while—his eyes were red and puffy, his forehead was pale. Then he buried his face in the backpack again and cried even harder.  “Professor . . . they’re all fools,” he sobbed. The fourth-year got to his feet. “Just fucking stop!” Woojung continued, still sobbing, “They don’t even know they’re fools . . . and they keep doing foolish things . . . ” “Goddamn it, for real!”  I don’t know why, but everything felt annoying in that moment. The immaturity of being unable to hide his feelings, the mindlessness, the self-absorption. Those judgments solidified inside me.  I spoke in a hard, cold voice. “Stop.” That was what I said—not to the fourth-year student but to Sung Woojung. “You’re the one being foolish right now. So stop.” He looked up at me. His eyes showed embarrassment, but soon turned to resentment. For a long time afterward, I didn’t forget his gaze. I didn’t look away.  * “Professor, I’m sorry to say this, but . . . ” Detective Park trailed off. “It looks . . . it might be a little difficult to press charges.” “Why’s that?” I asked, leaning forward. “You didn’t incur any financial damage, and . . . the problem, if there is one, is that he gave your number to other people, but that’s not enough to . . . ” “Even though I’m suffering this much?”  Detective Park nodded as though he sympathized with my situation. But his words said otherwise: “The problem is really the people who made the calls, not the person who gave them your number, so . . . ” He added that it’d be better to press charges against those who made the calls, but even that was tricky. Because all they did was make calls. That was the precise moment when a strange hostility began to envelop me. What’s tricky about it? All they did was make calls? Does he really not understand their disgusting intent? I stifled my anger, flexing my calf muscles. The humiliation and helplessness I felt every time my phone rang—and yet, the reasons I couldn’t change my number. Could this man even fathom what was going on inside me? What kind of circumstances surrounded him? Could he also have debt beyond his ability to pay off?  Last autumn, my father, having been diagnosed with hydrocephalus, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s all together, had begun calling me at all hours. Nine, ten times a day. Every time we connected, he asked the same question: “How come you don’t call these days?”  At first, I tried to take it matter-of-factly. This isn’t my father talking, it’s his disease. But it only lasted a few days. He kept bringing up the wooded hills. I got fifty-three points on the land transaction permit score. Fifty is passing, so it was all good from the start. You have no idea how hard Mr. Lee worked. It wasn’t the Yeongwol County Office he had to visit, but the Provincial Office’s Forest Management Department and the National Forestry Cooperative Federation. And every trip cost money, so what could I do? He didn’t want to burden you, so he even looked into loans with the land as collateral . . . Say, I heard, you’d have to register legally as a person engaged in forestry. Want me to look into it for you?  It was unbearable to listen to those words. So on days when I couldn’t bring myself to answer his calls, I set my phone on silent after work. Then my mother would call immediately. “Hon, can’t you call him to save your poor old mother?”  That was exactly what she said. She said my father trembled with anxiety when he couldn’t reach me by phone. He would strip off his diaper and urinate on the bed as if it were normal. My mother, who refused to send him to a nursing home, saying, “I can’t do that to your poor father,” was desperate as she pleaded with me.  And once—just once—I’d yelled at my senile father.  “Father! Please just stop!”  At my words, he stopped talking and went silent for a moment. Then he said, “I just . . . since you’re a writer . . . I really like that you’re a writer, you see.” “No, that’s not what I’m saying!”  And then I burst out crying. After listening to me sob in silence, he spoke with sadness in his voice: “Why are you crying? You miss your mother? Oh you poor thing . . . ” It was his disease speaking to me.  “Then what can you do for me here?” I lowered my voice and asked Detective Park. “Well, even if you do decide to press charges . . . it’ll be processed by priority.” His face showed some annoyance. Perhaps, out of his seasoned experience, he’d sensed my hostility in that moment. It was a defense mechanism against hostility. That was how it felt. “You mean you’re not interested in things like this.”  He gave no response. I got to my feet. “Seeing as you’re just sitting there talking about ‘good intentions.’” He looked at me with an impassive face. Without glancing back, I left the station.  4 Sung Woojung finished all four years of college but didn’t graduate on time and ended up registering for his mandatory military service while still in school. About three days before he shipped out, he came to see me in my office.  “How’s it going? It’s going to be rough, serving at your age.”  I offered a rather perfunctory greeting. Since the retreat, something between us had evaporated, but I didn’t think much of it, nor did I care to.  “Professor,” he said, looking me in the eye. “You said before that everyone has their own circumstances and their own life, right? That the aesthetics of fiction comes from that.”  I sat quietly, listening. “But . . . is that really true? Is that really the aesthetics of fiction?” Around that time, I’d heard that Woojung had moved out of his studio apartment near campus and into a cheap, cramped room at a goshiwon . All kinds of rumors were circulating among his classmates in the department— someone said his father’s business had flopped; another said he’d simply moved because his lease was up, that he was only staying at the goshiwon for a few days before registering for the military service. But the most credible account came from the second-year student, who’d grown close to Woojung since the retreat. That’s not it. He said he was the one paying his own way the whole time. The studio apartment, he paid for with the money he earned himself, and now that he’s not making money, he’s cutting costs wherever he can. “Hey, what’s all this about fiction when you’re about to ship out?” I said, trying to change the subject. Or actually, he was making me uncomfortable.  “Then . . . why do we write fiction?” Woojung muttered, almost to himself. “Is emotion really all there is?”  That day, sitting in my car in the Nambu Police Station parking lot, I called Woojung again. He didn’t answer, and yet I kept tapping the call button, more and more obsessively. Fine, don’t answer. Please don’t answer. That was part of what I felt. Cold sweat ran down my back, and my hands shook. I was that furious. Woojung still didn’t pick up.  Unable to stop myself, I started typing a text. Pick up the phone. I was about to hit send when . . . when . . . when my eyes drifted to the messages we’d exchanged around last Christmas. They were texts from those days when the strange calls hadn’t yet started, when I was consumed by interest payments on the debt that had appeared out of nowhere.  Did you sell it all back then? The Bitcoin? Yes. Really? All of it? You told me to sell it, so . . . Hey, how could you actually go and sell it just because your professor told you to? LOL  He hadn’t replied to that one.  I stared at the last message I’d sent.  LOL.  I finally understood that there was a certain truth buried in those three thoughtless letters.  * Until recently, I’d spent a lot of time thinking about emotions, mostly feelings like anger, shame, hatred, guilt. I believed it was difficult, exhausting work, this task of listening to someone’s heart, and I’ve tried to channel it through my writing.  But is that true? Many times, I’ve wondered if those feelings were only ever resolved inside me. Just understanding and fathoming someone else’s discomfort and humiliation.  What changes after you fathom?  What comes after your heart overflows? I couldn’t shake the thought that the answer was a bigger lie. I’m still on edge, paying off the bank interest every month. I couldn’t just be on edge, so I put the apartment I’d been living in for years on the market. Hardly anyone comes to look, but I’m hoping that it sells soon. That’s my main emotion these days.  My father ended up moving into a nursing home early last month, and he doesn’t call anymore. Or rather, he can’t. As for those strange calls and messages, they stopped like magic the day after I went to the police station. I can only guess how that came about.  Some nights, late, I read through the texts Woojung and I exchanged, and every time, I think of a horse trapped in the stable. A horse that was mercilessly whipped. A horse that is no longer moving.  That was what I saw, in the place where a certain feeling had passed.

by Lee Kiho