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 Ki-ho

Fiction

Empty Cans

There in the distance you walk my horizon, just as I walk yours. —Kim Jungil, “Horizon”  They were up to tae now. They’d already discussed taedo, taedong, taeran, and taeman, and next was taemyeong. The Korean researchers immediately ruled out as obsolete the first definition for taemyeong (台命), meaning “orders given by high-ranking officials,” and had begun talking about the second taemyeong (胎名), or “nicknames given to fetuses.” Nergüi flipped back and forth between two different Mongolian dictionaries.  “We do not name babies in the womb,” he declared, adding that there was no equivalent noun in the Mongolian language for taemyeong. Nergüi was a visiting researcher at the university, sent there to help compile a Korean-Mongolian dictionary. He and the three Korean researchers had spent the last six months choosing which words would go into the dictionary, and now they were nearly at the end. They’d chosen forty-thousand entries already and were planning to add about five thousand more from among words beginning with ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅎ.  It was nearly lunchtime, their debate over taemyeong dragging on into that ambiguous hour of the day when it would become harder and harder for them to tell whether they were actually debating anything or merely devolving into idle chit-chat. Most of the Korean researchers were young and had had fetal nicknames like Puppy Poo, Lucky Duck, and Dorothy. Professor Park, the most senior among them and heavily pregnant, had named her fetus Janggeumi. She said she’d taken the name from the TV show Jewel in the Palace because her pregnancy had her craving all kinds of old-fashioned royal cuisine, like tarakjuk milk porridge or bamboo shoots with persimmon dressing. All Nergüi ever thought of when he heard the name Dae Jang Geum was a Korean restaurant in downtown Ulaanbaatar.  “Naming a fetus is frowned upon in Mongolia,” he said.  The bemused looks on the Koreans’ faces said, ‘Another taboo?’ It wasn’t too far-fetched to call Mongolia the Land of Taboos. Nergüi had explained that the countless do’s and don’ts were the nomads’ way of living in harmony with nature. He still observed the Mongolian superstition about not passing in front of a pregnant person by making sure to get behind Professor Park whenever they were in an elevator or a similar space together. Not that Nergüi was hung up on superstition. He’d gone a long way toward adapting his thoughts and behavior to Korean culture, but it didn’t change the fact that he’d grown up a nomad in the Gobi Desert. Some habits were too deeply ingrained.  Take migratory birds, for instance. Nergüi told the others that it was taboo on the steppes to count migratory birds.  “Counting kills birds,” he said.  Professor Kim, who’d disappointed his parents by being born a boy despite being nicknamed Dorothy in the womb, said, “Uh oh. I used to fall asleep counting wild geese all the time when I was in the Gobi.”  “But isn’t that only natural?” Professor Park said. “Nergüi, isn’t there a way to release Professor Kim from his curse? From what I remember, taboos are like safes: they can both be unlocked.” Everyone laughed, including Nergüi.  Nergüi mimicked a teacher scolding a student.  “You better not look up at the sky the first time it snows!”  Professor Kim delightedly agreed.  “All I have to do is not look up? That’s easy,” he said.  “Something tells me it won’t be as easy as you think,” Professor Park said. She looked at the clock on the wall and asked Nergüi, “Can you tell us any other funny taboos?”  That was a clear sign that it was time to break for lunch. Nergüi pondered what else he could share with them, then laughed out loud.  “Raindrops,” he said. “You must never catch them in your hand.”  He spread open his palm and pretended to catch the rain.  “When you do that, the rain clings to you and becomes yours, and in a land where water is precious, that endangers all life. We also do not sew new clothes for babies in the womb. Even though they’re bound for this world, you’re not supposed to do anything for the not-yet born. You have to be very careful. As careful as you are about not saying the name of the sacred Bogd Mountain when you’re in its presence.”  “You’re supposed to call it Big Mountain instead, right?”  The Korean researchers recalled Nergüi’s funny way of addressing Professor Park’s pregnancy by asking her, “How is our new person doing?” They’d thought at first that he was being cute, but now they could see how his words carried a deep sense of care.  “Not that we Koreans are ones to talk about superstition. After all, we’re supposed to give fetuses ugly nicknames to avoid bad luck.”  “That’s not strictly the case anymore. You see a lot more cutesy nicknames nowadays, along with jokey ones. I met this one woman who named her fetus ‘BTS.’”  Now the Koreans were having fun with it.  “And it’s not just fetal names. Ages ago, when infant mortality was really high, people used to have separate amyeong just for childhood. You know, those goofy names parents gave children to trick Death from coming for them? Emperor Gojong and Councilor Hwang Hui had some really good ones, like, Dog Shit and Piggy.”  “Those weren’t just nicknames?”  “Nope, those were their actual names when they were children.”  Nergüi opened the file on his laptop that contained all of the dictionary entries they’d compiled so far and searched for amyeong. Surely they’d gone over it already, but he felt as if he were hearing this noun for the first time. He saw that it had been struck from the list. Their criteria had been to eliminate words that were either fully obsolete or rarely used in daily life, and it seemed that “childhood name” had been ruled out before they could even begin to discuss whether there was an equivalent for it in the Mongolian language. Though Mongolians used plenty of nicknames and terms of endearment, they did not create separate names just for one’s childhood.  “But you know, we’re just as cautious as Koreans when it comes to naming children. We too choose names to prevent the spirits from messing with them. Take my name, for example. Nergüi means Nameless. My grandfather named me that to prevent misfortune from finding me.”  “Oh wow, I had no idea that’s what your name means.”  “Traditionally, there are a lot of names like mine. The name Terbish means Not That One. Khemedekh means Who Knows? There’s another misleading name like that, which translates to No One Knows. Some parents even name their child Khenbish.”  “Khenbish? Khen . . . bish . . . Nobody? Is that really what it means?”  “Yes,” Nergüi said with a nod.  “That’s funny. Dog Shit and Piggy are nothing compared to those.”  For reasons he couldn’t explain, Nergüi suddenly found himself overcome with longing. He ached with the melancholy of one who’d traveled a long way. His Korean colleagues, and this work of matching up vocabulary words, often had this effect on his mood. He felt himself traveling toward a place that was somehow both strange and welcoming. But naming a baby while it was still in the womb? That struck him as terribly impatient.  Every time Nergüi spoke, fumbling through explanations, his Korean colleagues listened as intently as if they’d been transported to the Gobi itself. The expressions on their faces said that these encounters with the inner life of the language gave them a much deeper understanding of the nomads’ world than a single night spent in a ger could, and that the whole world seemed to have more commonalities than differences.  These conversations would end when they suddenly reached one of those life mysteries that couldn’t be resolved by language, and their heads would tilt up as if under some other power, their eyes turning to some distant place. Alas, their voices seemed to sigh.  “But Nergüi, I bet you’ve caught rainwater in your hand before, haven’t you?”  “Of course. I’d be crazy to miss out on something that good. When it rains, your hand opens on its own.”  “That’s right . . . The same way your head lifts when it snows.”  But even those riddles were not as fascinating as Nergüi’s tale of the tin cans. His colleagues all agreed on this. It was no exaggeration to say that cans were what had made Nergüi the man he was now. Last December, they’d discussed the dictionary entry for can, ggangtong in Korean and лааз for Mongolian. Just like today, his colleagues had spent half the day lost in Nergüi’s story.  Nergüi had grown up in the southern Gobi Desert, in a distant corner of the steppes whose name meant “many small birch trees.” In actuality, there were few birch trees to be seen. Only sparse patches of hardy grass in a parched wilderness of sand and rock.  His parents had left to find work in South Korea when Nergüi was four, leaving him in the care of his grandfather. Grandfather Enebish was an elderly camel and sheep herder in his eighties. The boy’s parents had told the old man that they would work in Korea for three years and return before Nergüi started school. They sent gifts from abroad that fit right into the grandfather and grandson’s simple life in the ger. There were household goods—a plastic cutting board, a frying pan, a thermos, a trunk—and clothes and toys for Nergüi. The plastic model airplane they’d sent him back then was currently sitting on the desk in Nergüi’s lodgings.  The gifts took at least a season, sometimes over half a year, to reach them. The nearest city, which had a post office, bank, and school, was a day’s horseback ride away. Grandfather Enebish had grown far too old to make the trip. Fortunately, his younger brother was an elder monk in the city’s temple and always forwarded Nergüi’s parents’ packages to them. He sent them via the temple trucks that made their rounds to purchase wool and camel fur or else tasked younger lamas with hand-delivering them.  From some point on, grandfather and grandson had become preoccupied with waiting for others. His grandfather would sit for hours on a chair in front of their ger. His line of sight was broken only by the far-off southern horizon, and every now and then, when the normally poker-faced landscape was stirred by columns of dust swirling skyward, he would peer through his old Soviet binoculars. Nergüi, too, would pause in his playing and watch as the cloud of dust slowly moved from east to west, sometimes west to east. Surely it was a passing car, but few travelers ever found reason to enter their valley.  As Nergüi learned the lay of the land, he came to know that somewhere beyond the southern horizon were his parents, past the northern horizon were the school and city, and to the west was the dinosaur graveyard.  At five, Nergüi saddled his first horse and took to racing as far as his gaze could reach. The more he raced toward the horizon, the more it retreated, faint and distant. This taught him despair, but also kindled his longing. He felt he was trapped in some very deep place, like where he imagined the night sky must end. He stacked small stones at his heart’s horizons before returning home. The cairns gave him the courage to go further with each ride.  One day, way out to the east, he came across a jeep carrying travelers, a married couple from Korea, accompanied by a local guide. They followed Nergüi back to his ger. His grandfather always welcomed guests, but he was even more delighted to learn they were Korean. He set out tea and cheese. The man and woman stayed for an hour and boiled instant ramyeon noodles for lunch.  Grandfather Enebish showed the Koreans the letters and photos the boy’s parents had sent. They told him in turn about the city where the parents worked in a furniture factory. The city had a big lake, they said. They looked at the photo that Nergüi’s parents had taken in front of a fountain and said that it was indeed the same musical fountain found at that lake. They told Nergüi all about the delightful fountain.  In a voice heavy with emotion, his grandfather said, “It looks like a nice place to live. Your parents are clearly doing well. That’s good.”  Before the travelers left, they gave them an armful of drinks and snacks. It would be years before Nergüi learned that the gifts they’d given him were Choco Pies and Coca-Cola. Grandfather Enebish treasured the box of Choco Pies and the five cans of Coke as if they’d come from his own son and daughter-in-law. That first taste of Coke etched itself permanently into Nergüi’s memory. His grandfather had the first gulp then sat straight up and let out a rattling belch. Nergüi was terrified by his grandfather’s reaction to the beverage and took a cautious sip. His mouth and throat burned, and he felt like all the air was being sucked out of his body. Unlike the sweetness he was used to, the kind that lingered while barely even registering as sweet, this was a loud burst of sugar that vanished as quickly as it had come.  The two shared amused looks as they passed the can back and forth.  “Such an odd flavor,” his grandfather said. “It could shock a dying man back to life.”  His grandfather set the can down.  “We’ve been gifted something really precious. Better make it last.”  Nergüi did as his grandfather suggested and resisted opening a second can for an entire day. The next day, he cracked one open and drank half. He placed the rest in the cupboard. That evening, when he came back in from herding the sheep, he took another sip and found that the flavor had changed. It tasted like nothing more than lukewarm sugar water. He realized that once you opened a can, you had to see it through to the end.  It was no easy task for a child his age to keep from drinking all five at once. They didn’t last even three days. He displayed the five empty cans along the head of his bed. Each time he looked at them, he was overcome by an unbearable thirst. He even tried filling one with tarag and drinking it that way. Nergüi returned from the outhouse in the middle of the night and wept like a child waking from a nightmare. His grandfather sat up in bed. The boy was holding an empty can. The grandfather understood the enormity of the child’s suffering, and how dreadful a thing this was.  When Grandfather Enebish was around Nergüi’s age, the socialist government had come in, and some summer after that, a European named Jan and his family became neighbors. Jan and his wife were anthropologists. They’d come from some place called Oslo. They said they would be staying for two years to record life in the Gobi. They set up their tent near a well in the summer camp just one hill over, a mere stone’s throw from Enebish’s ger. He’d encountered foreigners before, when Soviet troops had come to conduct surveys, but it was his first time having them as neighbors.  With Enebish’s family helping Jan’s family out, they all grew close. When the nomads packed up to move from the summer to winter camp, Jan’s family decamped with them. They joined the nomads for every holiday and special event.  “Jan had a little boy who was the same age as me, named Anders. We were as inseparable as two puppies.”  The time soon came for the foreign couple to finish up their research and return home.  The day before they left, Enebish went with his father to help them pack their belongings into their truck. He’d grown so fond of them and missed them so much already.  “I gave Anders a bow that I’d spent a month making. He gave me these Soviet binoculars.”  Before returning home, Enebish’s father grabbed the horse’s reins and asked Jan, “Friend, can your home be reached on horseback?”  Jan smiled at this and nodded. He raised his long arm and gestured like he was tapping his hand against the western sky.  “The city where I live is out there, where this land and that sky end. We walk the same earth and carry the same sky.”  He spread his arms wide and embraced Enebish’s father, then gave Enebish a peck on the cheek.  Enebish wiped away tears the whole ride home. His father consoled him.  “Just as you have more than one finger on your hand, so people have more than one path. There’s no point in crying over their leaving.”  The next morning, before the sun had even risen, his mother woke him.  “Get up, little one. We’re leaving, too. Your father and I talked about it all night. Bring in the camels. Last I saw, the animals were by the black bog.”  Though he knew it was time for them to move to the summer camp, they didn’t usually leave so abruptly. His father had taken the horses and was already gone. Confused, Enebish went to look for the camels. By the time he’d returned with all twelve, the ger had been dismantled and packed on the cart, and the sheep were being readied. His father had returned and kept hurrying them along. His mother sat in the horse cart while Enebish and his father drove the livestock.  Enebish was beside himself. He’d promised Anders he would come say goodbye in the morning. But as luck would have it, their path took them over the hill to where Anders and his family were still camped. It seemed that Enebish’s father had had the same idea of saying goodbye on the way.  Jan and his family had finished breakfast and were packing up. Jan was startled to see them appear with all of their livestock.  “Are you decamping?” he asked.  Enebish’s father nodded. With a determined look, he said, “Our family is too sad to see you go. So we’re going with you instead.”  Looking deeply touched, Jan held his hand out to Enebish’s father.  “That is the best goodbye I have ever received.”  Enebish’s father took his hand and said, “We can’t travel as fast as your Swift Horse (and here, he meant Jan’s truck), but we’ll do our best. How many days will it take?”  At last, Jan realized that the herder’s words had not been in jest.  “Ah, that’s not possible.” He gazed off to the west and shook his head. “It’s much too far.”  “No distance is too far as long as horses can go there.”  “You sound just like Genghis Khan.”  “Do you mean that you plan to spend the summer on the road?”  “The road isn’t the problem. It’s the border. Borders are harder to cross than oceans.”  Enebish’s father didn’t understand. Neither did Enebish nor his mother.  “Our Mongolian horses can go anywhere. They can fly up to the sky and swim any sea.”  Jan went to his wife, and they spoke together for a long time. Then he came back and told Enebish’s parents, “She says there’s no grass for your sheep to eat where we live.”  “You mean there’s even less grass there than in the Gobi?”  “That’s correct.”  Enebish’s father’s shoulders sagged. In a disappointed voice, he said, “We cannot go where there is no grass. Friend, please understand that I cannot leave my sheep behind.” And just like that, Nergüi’s great-grandfather’s dream of migration came to nothing.  This story always reminded Nergüi of where he had come from and the true Gobi that he’d left so far behind. But how far away was it? It seemed even farther than over the horizon.  The six years that Nergüi spent in the Gobi with his grandfather were no different. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the introduction of a market economy, the world had changed, and yet Nergüi and his grandfather were oblivious to it all. They’d continued to revere Comrade Lenin and follow the People’s Revolutionary Party. The more he looked back, the sadder he felt to know that a whole life could just fade to nothing.  The next day, Nergüi’s grandfather pointed at his collection of Coca-Cola cans and asked, “What do you think about throwing those out?”  Nergüi shook his head.  “You’ve refused to even look at tarag or camel milk for five days now. If I could sell the sheep to buy you more of that stuff, I would. But there’s nowhere to buy it out here. Our guests only gifted you suffering.”  His grandfather set a woven leather basket in front of him.  “Shall I throw them away for you?”  Nergüi shook his head again and placed the cans in the basket himself.  He rode his horse to the horizon where he disposed of the cans at a stone tower he’d built and went home.  When his seventh year was on the verge of ending, a school bag arrived from Korea. It contained a thermos, ten notebooks, a set of twelve crayons, and a pencil case stuffed with pencils and erasers. There was no news of whether his parents were returning.  Nergüi’s grandfather told him, “This means it’s time for you to go to school.”  “Even if my parents aren’t back yet?”  His grandfather looked like he didn’t know how to respond.  “As Comrade Lenin said, all children should attend school by the time they turn eight. The children of the Gobi are no exception. However, I’ll speak to the authorities. If I tell them that you’ll start when you turn nine instead, they’ll understand. Because your case is special. You can go to school next year when your parents return. It’ll be good for you to go to school in the big city.” The school was very far from the Gobi, and the children who went there had to live in dormitories. He could come home during school breaks, but the problem was, who would take the sheep to pasture in the morning and bring them in again at night, and who would check that the camels hadn’t wandered off, if he wasn’t there to do it? Who would fetch water for his grandfather? Who would open the ceiling flap in the morning?  That was around the time when they learned that Nergüi’s parents had broken up. His grandfather couldn’t hide this tragedy from him. Not only would the two of them not be returning home together, but there was no way of knowing whether his mother or his father would ever come to get him. “You’re here, so of course someone, either your mother or your father, will come for you. Don’t be too heartbroken over it.” But his grandfather was the first to break. First his cough worsened that August, then he spent the autumn confined to bed. A zud struck, starting in early winter, taking many of their sheep with it. His grandfather knew he no longer had the strength to survive as a herder and sold off their remaining livestock. All that was left were two horses to serve as their feet and one elderly dog.  His grandfather told young Nergüi, “Child, grow like the summer sun until you’re big enough to herd again.”  The year Nergüi turned nine, he spent most of the summer in the dinosaur graveyard to the west. It was a tourist site. Foreign tourists came in droves, and locals made money giving them horse and camel rides. Children Nergüi’s age made pocket money leading the animals around by their reins. Nergüi joined them. The work was fun. The travelers were generous with tips and offered him items from their backpacks that made for nice souvenirs.  Having sold off their livestock, Nergüi and his grandfather stayed put in the winter camp year-round. They got by on the money sent to them from Korea. One day, Nergüi returned to their ger to find his grandfather waiting for him with a gloomy look on his face. There were obvious signs that someone had been to see them. He spotted a sack of salt and some foodstuffs, which told him that it had been the errand runner from his great-uncle’s temple.  His grandfather set the supper table and waited in silence until Nergüi was done eating. Then he fetched an old, worn-out sack from next to the stove and poured the contents onto the floor. It was the empty cans. Mixed in with the ones that Nergüi had left at the stone cairn was a very old-looking tin can marred with rust. Its khaki color had faded, but it hadn’t lost its shape. Nergüi didn’t understand why his grandfather had brought the cans back and spilled them all over the floor.  “They haven’t rotted at all.”  Nergüi listened to his grandfather’s words without responding.  “Animal bones fall apart. In the Gobi, even rocks decompose, but these laaz do not. It has taken me seventy years to remember their name: лааз. I wish for you to take them far away from here.”  Nergüi had never heard the word for cans before, and he would never forget that moment of meeting the word for the first time.  “Where do you want me to throw them away?” Nergüi asked. He thought about the horizons he’d visited.  “Somewhere far. Very, very far.”  “Dalanzadgad?”  “They won’t have a place for disposing of these. You need to go somewhere bigger.”  “Ulaanbaatar?”  His grandfather nodded. Nergüi was shocked. Ulaanbaatar was five hundred kilometers to the north, a tremendous distance. And his grandfather was telling him to go there alone. Nergüi looked worriedly at him, wondering if his grandfather was joking, or maybe he’d grown so feeble that he’d stopped talking sense.  “Look at this.”  His grandfather plucked from among the Coke cans the khaki-colored can that had piqued Nergüi’s curiosity. Dark red sand spilled out.  “This was a can of ham that your father received from some Soviet troops when he was twelve. I discarded it on a red sand dune, and it has frightened me my entire life to see that it never rots. That has always bothered me. It’s far too dangerous to bury something in the earth that refuses to rot. I think that if you leave these unrotting things here, you too will suffer your whole life.”  Nergüi could hear the desperation in his grandfather’s voice. There was no other way about it, he had to take this voyage.  “But Ulaanbaatar is too far. I can’t make it.”  “Why do you say you can’t make it? Am I telling you to take a hundred sheep with you? All you have to do is take this little sack, so what are you afraid of? If you don’t go, then I’ll have no choice but to go myself.”  And so Nergüi set out on the road. Before leaving, Nergüi fetched enough water from the well to fill each water jug to brimming. He gathered plenty of well-dried dung for the fire and stacked it next to the ger.  He placed the cans in his schoolbag. His grandfather lashed a supply of food and water to the saddle, then pulled some cash from his shirt.  “Go to Dalanzadgad first and look for the monk. He’ll tell you how to find your way from there.”  Nergüi wept. He’d never left home before. His grandfather gripped the right rein and led Nergüi around the ger three times.  “I’ll get rid of these and come right back,” Nergüi said. “Please take care until I can return.”  Nergüi left. He rode to the east, passing three stone cairns he’d built. After a day of riding, he reached the outskirts of Dalanzadgad. As evening fell, one end of the earth glittered as if the stars had fallen from the sky. He slowly rode into the center of that light. Houses huddled together with fences between them, and large trees stood in rows. There were more cars than horses. Standing beside his horse on the asphalt, Nergüi felt himself shrink. He instinctively avoided the large roads where cars traveled and kept to the alleys. The smell of food and the smoke of cooking fires filled his lungs.  The temple was not within the city but was instead out past a hill where a monument stood. It was a small temple. Next to the yard with its white stupa was a single poplar tree. A flock of ravens clung to its branches like overripe fruit. He tethered the horse and entered the temple.  The evening was still and quiet. The thick scent of incense hung in the air. Three lamas of different ages came out to greet him. Nergüi recognized the youngest as the errand runner who’d frequented their ger.  “Nergüi, what are you doing here?” he asked, clasping Nergüi’s hands. The young lama explained that the elder monk, his grandfather’s younger brother, had left for a pilgrimage to Tibet.  “He’s been gone three years already. But I can help you in his place with whatever it is you need.”  The young lama gave him dinner and a bed for the night.  “Did you know I delivered a letter to your grandfather three days ago? But I wasn’t able to stay long enough to see you.”  Nergüi nodded. “Who was the letter from?” he asked, remembering that the lama always read letters to his grandfather, who couldn’t read himself.  “The letter was sent from Korea.”  “From my father or my mother?”  “Well . . . I can tell you it was your father.”  The look on the lama’s face said that it was difficult for him to say anything more. When Nergüi explained that he was on his way to dispose of the metal cans, the lama patted his head.  “Your grandfather must have a lot on his mind. I’ll help you. I’ll find you a ride to Ulaanbaatar. We’ll have to leave early, so you’d better get some rest.”  At dawn, the lama took Nergüi to a wool collection yard downtown. Nergüi climbed into the passenger seat of a wool truck.  The driver was kind. He played music loudly the whole day for Nergüi. The Soviet truck was big and old and bounced slowly over the unpaved highway across the steppe. It stopped in at collection points both large and small in the Gobi to load up wool. When night fell, they covered the top of the truck with a canvas tarp and slept on the steppe.  They were three days out of Dalanzadgad. That afternoon, the driver shook Nergüi awake.  “Look at that, Country Boy.”  Nergüi gaped at the enormous smokestacks and the city so tightly packed with houses that none of it looked real.  “Welcome to Ulaanbaatar,” the driver said with a laugh.  Nergüi watched an airplane ascend into the western sky. The truck seemed to be headed straight for the smokestacks downtown. Just then, he spotted a towering pile of something by the side of the road. To his shock, it was all metal. An actual mountain of metal. But what really made his heart jump were the familiar looking cans in that mountain.  “Here!” he shouted at the driver.  The driver pulled over.  “This is the place you’re looking for?”    “I think so. But, mister? What do they do with all of that?” Nergüi asked, pointing at the cans.  “They send it to China. China buys it from us.”  Nergüi jumped down from the truck and said goodbye to the driver.  “Good luck, kid. If you want a lift back home after, then head to the place I told you about.”  Nergüi walked into the open-air junkyard. There wasn’t even a gate or door. Inside were brown mountains of broken-down cars, harnesses, factory parts, cables, signboards. Nergüi reached yet another mountain of metal cans and took off his backpack. He added his cans to the pile. Like rain drops falling into a stream, his were soon unrecognizable from the other cans. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to get rid of them. Now, he was terribly eager to get back to his grandfather. He walked out of the junkyard, glancing back as he went.  This was where Nergüi’s story of the cans ended. If the boy had his version of the story, then the grown-ups had theirs. On his way out of the junkyard, Nergüi ran into a youngish woman. The woman was holding a baby. She studied Nergüi. The woman looked very familiar to him. She spoke first.  “Nergüi? Is that you?”  The woman came running and threw her arms around him.  “Baby, let me get a look at you.”  She stroked his face as tears ran down her own. Nergüi couldn’t believe what was happening to him.  “Mama, I came to throw away some cans,” he mumbled. “Yes, baby. Yes, you did . . . Well done. I see that your grandfather sent you.”  Nergüi’s story did not end with the dramatic reunion with his mother. His mother had returned from Korea several years earlier and remarried. The junkyard was her home. Several days later, Nergüi accompanied his mother to the airport to retrieve her ex-husband’s ashes. She had Nergüi go ahead of her.  “Your father has been waiting for you here for five months, because you and your grandfather are the only ones who can claim him. But now it’s done.”  Nergüi never returned to the Gobi to Grandfather Enebish. The way the grown-ups told it, packing up the cans and sending Nergüi on that long trip was his grandfather’s way of saying that he was taking his own final journey. That was the way of the Gobi, was what Nergüi told his fellow researchers.

by Jeon Sungtae

Fiction

Wishful Wall-Clock World

A friend returned from a tour of South America with a gift: a cuckoo clock with curious features. Basic timekeeping functions were included. Nothing remarkable there, aside from the rather clickety clock hands. At the top of each hour, a small door swung open, and out sprang a red bird. As the clock had been made in South America, the bird was most likely a parrot—a squawker bent on drowning out the ticking and tocking with its shrill cry of pakou! Of all our household items—sitting on shelves, hanging from hooks, or mounted on walls—this clock seemed uniquely alive. So much so that when it chimed, the fiery bird nearly flew off the wall.  As for the clock’s peculiarity, it resembled a house with an attached garage: nestled in the bottom corner was a clock within a clock. This smaller clockface displayed Spanish words for seven emotions, ranging from feliz (happy) to enojado (angry). The mood clock’s circular sequence ensured that opposite ends would meet. Feliz and enojado, back to back.  Every morning, before stepping out of the house, I’d set the mood clock to feliz—a silent promise to myself. The creaky clock hand always needed a good push. But why, oh why, would it point to enojado by the time I returned? Did it shift to match my actual mood? I pulled it back to feliz and kept my eyes on the dial. It stayed stock-still.  “Dad. Did you mess with the moods?” “What’s that?”  Dad was blithely unaware of the mood clock. While I hoped for a happy day each morning, he merely appreciated the cuckoo for chiming and reminding him of the time.  It would take only a fraction of a second for the mood hand to slip from feliz back to enojado—a shift of roughly fifty-two degrees. So I decided to fix my eyes on the clock. All it required was sitting on the edge of my bed and staring straight ahead, but with my gaze locked on nothing more than the stiff hand of a wooden novelty clock . . . my thoughts were bound to wander. Within an hour, I had collapsed into bed, my mind far gone.  Pakou! Jolted awake, I saw the mood clock pointing to enojado. I was determined, once and for all, to catch the clock in the act—but sleep got the better of me three times over. Each time, the hand had already tipped back to the bleakest emotion. At 12:40 a.m., I made one final attempt—like a fisher casting one last line into a reservoir before it closes for the night—and pinned my eyes on the mood clock. Streetlight spilled in through the window, casting shadows darker than dark. At 1:00 a.m. sharp, the cuckoo emerged with another pakou! I paid no attention to the blustery red bird. Another hour was lost, and my vision blurred as I wondered how much longer I could keep this up—when, in a flash, the cuckoo flew down to the mood clock, gripped the dial in its beak, and began pushing it back from feliz to enojado. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”“¿Qué?”“I want to be happy. And you’re messing it up.”“¡Ay, no sé!” Apparently lacking night vision, the bird turned the wrong way as it replied to me. I had plenty of questions, which I asked, but the bird cut me off with another “Ay” and ducked back inside the clock. I got to my feet and stood before its door. When I opened the thumbnail-sized hatch and shoved my head inside, I saw a cozy indoor space. Uh, wait a sec . . . My head—a pretty large one at that—actually whooshed through the door? Startled, I pulled back and glanced around. Lo and behold, I stood at the edge of a threshold, with the clock inside and my room outside. Fwooh fwoooh—after a few deep breaths, I slipped my head back in for a better look. Seeing nothing but a wooden corridor, I eased myself in—arms first, then torso, then legs—and entered the clock. The corridor led to a spiral staircase. At the bottom, I found a small room to the right. A tilted pillar rose from the center of the rough wooden floor. Next to it stood a high stool. The bird perched on top while two wooden figurines labored below, rotating, at steady speed, a horizontal steering wheel fixed to the base. One rotation made the second hand go tick; sixty rotations, and the minute hand went tock. The bird seemed intent on ignoring me. Even on its coarsely carved birchwood face, the fretful features were plain to see. As I stepped closer and blocked the figurines’ path, the bird finally flew down and squawked in Spanish—stern words from an even sterner face. Not knowing the language, I only caught a few words, but the bird clearly had much to say. “Me llamo Boris.”“My name is Ki-eun.” The bird named Boris insisted on getting things off its chest, flailing its wings all the while. As for me, I demanded to know why Boris had dashed my hopes for happiness. Eventually, I learned why the mood clock kept reverting to enojado, and more than that, I came to recognize the heft of Boris’s burdens. The rickety pillar jutting from the floor turned out to be the other end of the mood dial. The trouble began in Sucre, Bolivia, where a clockmaker, overrun with inventory, decided to upgrade the basic cuckoo clock by adding a mood indicator. The seven Spanish words were enough to entice tourists in search of reasonably priced souvenirs. Boris launched into a tirade about the ill-conceived add-on. Eager to cash in, the clockmaker had disregarded the clock’s inner workings. The mood dial pierced through the floor at an awkward angle, obstructing the tireless motion that kept the clock ticking. “Everyone wants to be happy, so they turn the dial to feliz, you see? Then it blocks our way! The figurines get stuck—and the clock dial too!” cried the bird, waterworks prevented only by the absence of tear ducts. “Look, just look! We only have room when the dial is at enojado!” Boris’s beak had worn thin from pushing the creaky dial—¡pac pac pac pac! The onomatopoeia rang clear across languages, the enraged pac pac making me shrink back. The two figurines added to my guilt as they spun round and round without respite. “Must’ve been tough—”“Es serio. ¡Pac pac! ” When I stepped back into my room, it was 1:40 a.m. The bird will be crying again in twenty minutes. I was now fully aware of the weight they bore—both the bird and the two figurines—but even so, I could hardly accept the daily display of enojado. My moods were grim enough without being reminded by a clock. And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to put the clock away—not to spare my own feelings at the expense of the cuckoo or Dad. Twelve more minutes had passed: the clock pointed to 1:52 a.m. My eyes followed the second hand, and soon it was 1:54 a.m. Spurred into action, I dug my nails into the enojado label until it snapped off clean. Feliz left some dried glue behind, but it more or less came free. With some fresh glue, I swapped the two labels—voilà, my mood could stay happy. Problem solved! Except the quick fix had disrupted the orderly sequence of emotions, throwing them off balance. There were six minutes left until the hour, and since it’d taken barely a minute to swap two labels, I figured I could rearrange the rest before the next chime. Happy and angry hadn’t caused any damage, but friendly left behind a hole, contented, a deep crack, and as a final blow, tired split the entire clock apart. Two minutes before 2 a.m., time stopped. Gone was the cuckoo’s little door frame and perch for crying pakou! The figurines clutched the steering wheel that had broken loose and spun aimlessly around. Pakou! The cuckoo carried on, regardless. Surrounded by rubble, it chimed for 2 a.m. An immeasurable span of time passed before the three clock denizens recognized the debris for what it was: wreckage. For a moment, I was tempted to feign surprise—“What on earth happened to the clock?”—but given the gravity of their situation, I chose to stay calm and square up to the damage. My full confession left their faces clouded with tearless woe. Sorrow refused to pass. No amount of consolation could get through. Carefully chosen words fell on deaf ears, and after what felt like hours, I pulled out my phone: 2:20 a.m. I was ready to collapse into bed. “Let’s sleep for now and sort this out in the morning. Although it’s not my problem, really.” Alas, Boris and the figurines replied that they didn’t need any sleep. I could no longer make out their frantic words. In my sleepy haze, I decided to sweep them up like broken objects. I shoved them all away—the enraged Boris, the figurines, and the scattered bits of wood—into an empty cupboard. Then I sank into slumber. With no more hourly interruptions of pakou, I enjoyed a good night’s sleep. It restored my mood to feliz. *“Ki-eun, it’s half past one.”“Hm?” Our church offered four different Sunday service times, the last starting at 1 p.m. As part of our Sunday routine, Dad and I typically slept in until ten, lazed around in our rooms, then set out for church around 12:30. But today, the overcast skies had kept us in the dark well into midday. Dad explained that without his trusty cuckoo, he hadn’t noticed the time. I opened the cupboard to show him the shattered clock. “Good lord. Wrecked beyond repair.” Since we’d skipped the service without a word, the deaconess was bound to notice and come knocking at our door. No doubt, she would plop herself down in the middle of our living room, scold us for missing church, recap the sermon, sing a handful of hymns, and only then leave us in peace. I rather enjoyed attending church—belting out hymns in unison, listening to scripture about the fainthearted finding courage. But at home, it all felt out of place. With only the deaconess, Dad, and me, my voice would ring too loudly, and without accompaniment, we’d have to carry the tune ourselves. Once the sermonizing began, I never knew where to look. Was I supposed to hold eye contact, or could I let my eyes roam out the window or around the room? I had to rethink every detail. The deaconess did indeed come knocking at the door. Dad and I ignored the repeated knocks, and once the noise died down, we stepped out for a late lunch. We headed to a rice-and-fish eatery across the street, only to run into the deaconess and her family eating braised mackerel. We’d overlooked the fact that she lived right next door. It was a close-knit neighborhood that felt like a village. We joined them at their table, and after lunch, we accepted our fate and returned home with the deaconess, ready to go over the service. “What kept you two away today?”“Ah, yes. About that . . .” There was no hiding from the deaconess, not with her probing smile. Dad seemed reluctant to recount the whole story of the broken clock, but he explained anyway. “You’re adults, not babies—you shouldn’t need a clock to wake you up!” With that, the deaconess opened her Bible and read, “We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience, and experience, hope.” *I found it soothing to read scripture and listen to the commentary. Reflecting on words that had survived millennia, I’d join those words by stepping into that vast stretch of time, feeling like a tiny speck. It was oddly liberating. Really, a cómodo feeling.  * Romans 5:3–4 (King James Version). Whether praying at home or at church, Dad always took longer than others, going beyond the tacit allotment of time. Eyes would blink open and drift toward the pulpit—but not his. He’d still be praying, hands clasped, head bowed. The deaconess and I stayed still too, waiting for him to look up. After that, our little worship was nearly over, except for the trickiest part: applying the sermon to our own lives by reflecting on the past week and setting resolutions for the next. Maybe Dad lingered in prayer to delay what he dreaded. “I had a tough week,” I began. “It was a week of tribulations. Was I patient? Honestly, I can’t say I was. I need to embrace patience like a purifying fire and let it strengthen me against trials. That’s my goal for the week a—” Pakou! The birdcall pierced through our quiet voices. Living in a lakeside town, where winter brought flocks of migratory birds, we were accustomed to the constant chorus of their cries. But real birdcalls—hooh hooh, hwiii, or caaaw—scattered wide and echoed into the distance. This one didn’t, and I knew exactly why: the sharply aimed pakou came from the cupboard. As I glanced up to finish my sentence, I saw that Dad and the deaconess were lost in thought. Dad had a habit of pausing at the sound of birds. “Hmm, a night heron,” he’d say. “Is it the second day of December, today? They’re right on time. There’s a goose, a watercock, a mallard, and a turtle dove too.” He usually rattled off names, but this latest birdcall seemed to throw him into quiet confusion. As for the deaconess, why did she fall silent? She usually filled every second with chatter, but now she stayed still, even as my sentence broke off and the shrill pakou was followed by real birdcalls. Reassured by the chirps he recognized, Dad cleared his throat and refocused. Meanwhile, the deaconess jumped to her feet, blurting, “I just remembered—.” With that, she scooped up her things and left. She left so abruptly that the crescent-shaped rice cakes we’d set out as refreshments were mostly untouched. As we finished them ourselves, Dad remarked, “Ten years next door, and I’ve never seen her so distracted.” Who knew what got into her, but I was more relieved than puzzled. Thank God she left early . . . a half-day of weekend, salvaged. The rice cakes tasted deliciously sweet. Chirrup, chirrup—a bird called from outside. “That’s a varied tit,” Dad told me. Only then did my mind turn to the wooden clock pieces that had chimed. I opened the cupboard and found the woebegone cuckoo perched on the top shelf. On the bottom, the two figurines were spinning as they used to inside the clock, but in a noticeably smaller circle. When the next pakou! sounded, I checked the time. 4:38 p.m. “Still going, even without batteries.”“They’re from the clock?”“Mm-hmm. That’s the cuckoo.”“Why is it ahead of time?” The cuckoo’s pakou now came on its own version of the hour. The original clock had been built to chime every sixty minutes, but crammed into the cupboard without gears, the figurines spun in a tighter circle, speeding up the cycle. The cuckoo now chimed before the hour—or on its own hour that no longer matched ours. I wanted to tell the bird it was out of sync, but with only rudimentary Spanish, that wasn’t an option. Another pakou—4:52 p.m. “Now it’s chiming whenever,” said Dad. He and I chuckled and headed off to our rooms. With family worship cut short, we’d earned an extra moment of rest. Time to lie down. Stretched out in bed, I mused: the deaconess had sprung to her feet at the sound of pakou! She had never left family worship unfinished before. Funny how we’d each reacted differently to the wooden cuckoo somehow crying without batteries. The deaconess rushed off as if time were up, Dad stayed unbothered, and I watched as an observer. I wondered how others might respond to the cuckoo’s cry. If pakou! could silence people like the deaconess and send them home, it was a power I wanted to wield as if it were my own. I tucked the cuckoo and figurines into my pocket. They grew restless, making the fabric bulge and bounce as they squirmed. I needed a crowded place where I could sit and observe. A coffee shop crossed my mind, but it didn’t seem quite right. I grabbed a takeout coffee and headed to a bench by the lake. * Even cold weather couldn’t keep people away from the lakeside park, especially on a weekend afternoon. Locals were out walking, waiting for birds with cameras in hand, sitting, or just standing around. There were plenty of birds I couldn’t name, ones that Dad would’ve recognized. My pocket began to rise and fall in a steady rhythm as the cuckoo and figurines settled into a new circle. Where should I set them down? I tried the bench, but the pakou was barely audible. I had to lean in so close I was practically lying down, drawing too much attention for an observer. On the ground, their circle turned too wide. I thought about holding them in my palm, but that meant staying still for ages. I ran through the options while sipping my coffee. Then it occurred to me: the cup had an ideal circumference. The figurines could spin at the bottom while the cuckoo perched on the rim. This could work. But with half the coffee still steaming inside, I first had to drink it all down. Despite the chilly wind, the coffee refused to cool. My experiment was delayed. The brief limbo left my thoughts unmoored—no longer guided, they lost their way and wandered, inevitably lurching toward sadness. The mood clock had a label for sadness too: triste, just before enojado. Seeing those labels every day made me register emotions in seven categories. I settled into sadness and examined its shapes, only to find trivial snippets—nothing worth sharing. Best sorted alone. Why were others so eager to lay theirs bare? The world’s countless trivial sorrows felt eerily alike, each one prompting a déjà vu: Wait, haven’t I heard this story before? And Dad’s sorrow? He carried his as if the world rested on his shoulders. Like me, he chose not to speak of it, though not because it was small. His sorrow had planetary proportions, and since he had yet to face it, he kept it to himself. Anyone who met him could sense he was circling his sorrow. Mere words—Dad, are you okay?—could barely dislodge a stray pebble from that orbit, so I held back from asking. Dad’s triste stayed quiet, and without an outlet, it had no way of erupting into enojado. I drank to the bottom of my cup. Wiping it dry with my sleeve, I freed the cuckoo and figurines from my pocket and placed them inside. The figurines resumed their work below while the bird perched on the rim. Exactly as planned. The relief—cómodo! I waited to see how often the coffee-cup clock would strike and what events might be set off by pakou!The cuckoo cried every fourteen minutes. I watched to see if anyone took it as their cue to leave, but did this tenuous thread of events count as anything like causality? Pakou! Some people stayed on benches, others kept walking, a few leapt up to take photos, still others turned around or stopped in their tracks. Likewise with the birds: some kept foraging, others drifted on the water, one or two took off or dove to the ground. I observed six cuckoo cries at fourteen-minute intervals, which meant I’d been sitting by the lake for at least eighty-four minutes. The sun dipped lower, and the cold bit harder. As I stood and reached for my cup to call it a day, a bird photographer in a camo vest gave me a thumbs-up. What’s that for? Is he onto the pakou? He turned to his camera, slipping back into his world of avian moments. I watched him a little longer although not long enough to hear another pakou. Then out of nowhere, a kid sprang up from the railing and slammed into my shoulder. It sent him sprawling. My legs gave out, dropping me back onto the bench. The cuckoo and figurines were the ones knocked over and scattered. Kids performed soaring leaps all around the neighborhood. They darted from structure to structure, navigating obstacles in the most creative, challenging ways. It turned out their movements had a name: parkour. “They forge their own path, away from common roads. For them, it’s an actual physical path, not a metaphor.”Dad had made me aware of parkour as a practice. Just as he knew every bird that swooped down to the lake, he seemed to understand what made the parkourists tick. “It’s a method of moving,” he told me. Along the lake were benches, brick walls, and other useful structures; the surrounding residential area was a maze of alleyways and old concrete walls. A perfect playground for parkour. It even attracted young enthusiasts from out of town. “Huh. A method of moving.” I’d pointed out the kids to complain, but once Dad explained their whys and wherefores, I could only say, “So that’s what it is.”  “Oh, shit.” That’s what the boy muttered instead of saying sorry. Honestly, I felt the same. But I rarely say so, kiddo. And since you bumped into me, should you really be the one swearing? My mood was dipping toward tired when the kid brushed off his knees and spoke again. “Is that a parkour?”“A cuckoo. It cries pakou from a clock.”“Oh, shit. It is a parkour.” He called over the other kids, shouting about the “effing real parkour.” I silently hoped the bird and figurines would stay still, but even on the boy’s palm, they scrambled to set up a circle. Round and round—they went about their clockwork. Rotating on a surface even smaller than the cup, they completed a cycle in no time, and out came the cry: pakou! The kids whooped, “Whoa, did you hear that? It cried ‘parkour!’” They launched into a parkour frenzy—leaping from one bench to the next, to the garden fence, to the brick wall, to the lakeside guardrails, down to the path, up to the residential fence, from fence to fence again, and finally to the weathered gray wall of a house. The kids considered it fate—that they finally encountered their so-called parkour, my wooden bird crying pakou. To me, parkour was what the kids practiced, but to them, it was the name for my cuckoo. The word slipped between us, causing momentary confusion. One of them asked where I’d gotten it, and when I said it was a friend’s gift from South America, their faces lit up. Looking for an explanation, I turned to the quietest one among them who stood staring at the spinning figurines. He simply confirmed it was a real parkour, a thing of urban legend. So here’s a parkour kid doing parkour, holding a parkour, calling it parkour. The bird was the real deal, the kid insisted, while their leaping (frenzy) was an extension of meaning. Once they calmed down, the kids huddled around the parkour, whispering plans for their next move. I stood just out of reach, waiting to retrieve the clock pieces. But then the kids scattered. The one holding the parkour shot me a glance before bolting toward the houses. Parkour-trained or not, the kid’s legs were far too short compared to mine, and I soon caught the hood of his jacket. “Where do you think you’re going?”“Uh, just borrowing this for a sec.”Judging by his face, not quite.“No way.”“I mean it. Really. Just a sec,” he pleaded. I flatly refused, “No way. No way. I said, no way.” As I stood my ground, he eventually gave in. He asked me to wait at the bench with the parkour. Why? He said parkouring when the parkour cried parkour could transport you to a better world. It was a rare moment, he explained, a chance to perform parkour in the truest sense, which meant I had to wait. “A better world?”“Yeah. You parkour when the parkour cries parkour. Then you land in the world you want.”“Could I do it too?”“You only need one move—a jump.” I held my breath.“So yeah, probably.” I figured I’d wait. Once the kids left, a hush fell over the dusky lake. The cuckoo kept up its regular cry of pakou, or as the kids would have it, parkour! To my ears it sounded, at best, like parkou(r). Two more cries of parkou(r), and the kids started showing up lugging backpacks as big as themselves. Their numbers had doubled. They’d clearly planned for a day like this: where to go, with whom, and what to bring. Poised to leave, they exuded a mix of light-heartedness and nerves. Someone was missing—or maybe two? Amid the flurry of voices, a call rang out. “He’s not coming. Says he’ll go next time.” “Next time? There is no next time.” Laughing, they each chose their spots to leap. Parkou(r)! “Wait!” someone shouted, just as the cuckoo cried from its perch on the cup. It was a girl in a red jacket, holding the hand of a younger boy. She apologized for stopping them—she wasn’t sure her little brother could leap just yet, but they’d be ready by the next cry. Her brother, his ruddy hand pale from clutching hers, pouted that he could leap just fine. Leading up to the next cry, the kids practiced leaping together. Being used to parkour, they nailed their synchronized jump on three. They didn’t mind the passersby, the bird-watchers, or anyone else glancing their way. The kids were bound for the worlds they wished for, so why bother with the stares? I was an onlooker too, but then I grew curious, and strangely got involved . . . Parkou(r)! The kids jumped all at once and vanished—except for the girl in red and her little brother. She’d held him back again, her hands pressed firmly on his shoulders. Although she had stayed by choice, I wanted to offer some kind of comfort. She looked conflicted, but knowing nothing about her, I didn’t have the right words. And so. “Why?” I asked.“There’s nowhere I want to go.” Then I noticed the camo-vest photographer pointing his camera our way. He’s looking! Did he catch the moment they vanished? I panicked. I left the girl behind and bolted. Had I been caught on camera? If the parents reported their kids missing, would I be blamed? But I’d only watched, and even if the man had proof, I had nothing to hide. I picked up my pace, tossing the cup away and shoving the bird and figurines back into my pocket. If any witnesses came after me, I could disappear like the kids. I’d go to a better world. It didn’t have to be because of that camo guy. I could vanish for my own good, anytime, anywhere. The portal was right in my pocket. Dad was preparing dinner. I came home and opened the door to the salty smell of kimchi stew. Left over from yesterday, the stew was already low in the pot, and Dad had made it worse by leaving the burner on full blast. With not enough broth to stay soaked, bits of kimchi had crisped around the edges. It was fine. We had other banchan sides: dried fish strips, braised black beans, and spicy stir-fried anchovies. Dad was busy scooping out two bowls of rice, as if he’d known I’d be walking in just then. Once we were nearly done eating, I reached into my pocket for the bird and figurines and set them on the table. They fumbled for a moment, then settled into their clockwork motion on the tabletop. “Dad.”“Mm?”“If you could leave, right here right now, for someplace better, would you go?”“Well . . . to a better place, I would.”“Where, exactly?”“We shouldn’t dwell on it. Not if we go to church.” Dad refused to talk about that better place. Even when I told him everything I’d seen by the lake, he gave me that look—You’re supposed to be a good churchgoer, Ki-eun. But how did it actually work? Would I have to imagine a place the moment I jumped? I wasn’t sure, but any place full of joy and feliz was more than enough. It couldn’t be that complicated if even the parkour kids pulled it off. Maybe our family could too. We had nothing to lose. I told Dad he had to jump when the bird cried. “You have to. Please, no questions. Just jump anywhere—onto the couch, onto the carpet. Where you jump is up to you.” His eyes saddened, but I shut out the guilt and urged him to try. If nothing happened, we’d carry on like yesterday and simply wash up and sleep. Pakou! Dad didn’t jump. I launched myself from the chair onto the table, thinking, Of course, he wouldn’t. And yet, I had. Soy-glazed black beans spilled across the table. Dad gasped a silent uh-oh and reached to catch the bowl. My last glimpse of him. I felt bad for leaving, but I also brimmed with hope. Where . . . Where will I be? I blinked—and Dad was already wiping the table. For a second, I stood still on the tabletop, lifting one foot so he could keep wiping. Then I climbed down—from the table to the chair, then to the floor—and helped him clean up. We covered the leftover banchan dishes and stacked the empty ones in the sink. By then, the wall clock pointed to 8:20 p.m. Dad and I would each retreat to our rooms, pass the last hours of Sunday, and drift off. I stood and watched as Dad said good night and disappeared behind his door. It had been a long day. I’ll leave the ruminations for tomorrow. Tonight, I’ll just fall asleep. I opened my own door. Wait, 8:20 p.m.? How was the clock back on the wall? It was the cuckoo clock, as good as new. In the bottom corner, the mood dial pointed to feliz. I stared at it for at least twenty minutes, but the dial never budged. At 9:00 p.m. sharp, the cuckoo emerged from its door and cried: parkou(r)!

by Jeong Gi Hyun

Fiction

A Day, Without Trouble

The following year, Yeongin began looking for a new job. She interviewed with a company that sourced fabric and materials from Korea and China, then shipped them to Vietnam, where it manufactured clothing for global retail brands. She took the elevator up to the twelfth floor. When the doors opened, a long, wide hallway stretched ahead, lined with large doors on either side. Some resembled apartment doors, while others were fitted with wrought iron grilles or made of glass lit by neon signs. Boratec, Dozen, Unico, Cox—it was difficult to tell by the company names alone what any of them did. When Yeongin came to the right number, she knocked on the glass double doors and stepped inside. A man introduced himself as Manager Kim. He seemed lively, curious, and slightly belligerent, and had bloodshot eyes. He led her into the sample room and pointed to the clothes hanging on the wall: anorak jumpers, jumpsuits, shirtdresses, golf skirts, padded jackets. We made these, he said. He explained that until now, the office had been run by just three people: himself, Manager Ham, and Section Chief Jung—all in sales. The Korean CEO was based in Hanoi, where he appointed a Vietnamese representative to handle local affairs while he himself focused on sales, operating under the title of managing director and running two factories. The smaller Korean office handled domestic contracts and accounting. Up until last year, the sales team had managed everything on their own, but it had become too much, so now they were hiring an admin. Manager Kim noted that with her background at a confectionery company, Yeongin would catch on quickly. He asked if she’d be able to communicate with the Vietnamese staff in English. When she said it wouldn’t be an issue, he led her out of the sample room to show her the workspace: four desks with no partitions, one of which was vacant. At the center of the room stood a large table for inspecting fabric and samples. Three days later, Yeongin started working at that office. She took the empty desk.  Yeongin took an old cup she’d found in the corner of the office, filled it with water, and slowly poured it into the ZZ plant pot. She’d never seen a money plant so large. Placed right at the entrance in front of a partition bearing the company name in Korean, its leaves spread out like a giant fan. It was as tall as she was. Its leaves were dark and glossy, not a single one wilted, yet in the four months she’d been with the company she hadn’t seen anyone water it. She rinsed the cup at the officetel kitchenette and set it beside the grimy coffee maker that Manager Kim used each morning. Without addressing anyone in particular, she said to the others in the office, I just watered the ZZ plant. You won’t need to for a while. ZZ plant? We have one of those? Manager Kim asked, standing up and rubbing his face. He craned his neck in the direction she pointed, then walked over to look. Section Chief Jung, who’d been staring at his monitor, got up to join him. It’s right here.  So it’s been here the whole time, Jung said. Manager Kim explained the plant had been a gift from a client about two years earlier. I guess it’s been here all along, he echoed. When Yeongin asked who had been watering it, both men looked at each other, baffled. Neither had known it was there, so who could have? At lunch, Yeongin went downstairs with Manager Ham, thinking two things. First, how had such a massive ZZ plant survived for two years, apparently unnoticed and without a drop of water? Second, how had three people managed the workload alone until now, when the four of them could barely keep up? That morning, as soon as the morning meeting ended, Manager Kim and Section Chief Jung had gone off site—one to a client, the other to a warehouse—and would likely miss lunch altogether. Just another ordinary day. During her first couple of months at the company, Yeongin had been so busy she barely had time to think. She was responsible for managing payments and the complicated logistics. Some cargo had to go from China to Korea, then to Vietnam. Others could be shipped directly from China to Vietnam. Still others, starting in Vietnam, had to pass through Seoul, be split up and delivered to Hoengseong and Hwanggan for buyer confirmation, then return to Vietnam via Seoul. Most shipments traveled by sea, which meant they were at the mercy of ocean weather. Yeongin loaded goods onto ships docked at ports where she’d never been, then waited for those ships she’d never seen to cross the ocean. Sometimes, typhoons would delay vessels at port. And there would often be accidents: thread or zipper colors didn’t match the samples; inner pockets were poorly stitched; jackets were finished with even the outer pockets sewn shut; the bias tape was a bit crooked; finished leather jackets gave off a foul odor. One shipment that needed to go from China to Vietnam via Korea by Thursday still hadn’t reached Seoul by Tuesday. Another—heavy fabric that should have gone straight from China to Vietnam—arrived in Seoul by air. Once, cargo was mixed up at a Vietnamese port, and instead of boxes ofleggings, they received flame-resistant gloves. That very morning, Yeongin learned the missing leggings shipment was now en route across the Pacific to the Port of Los Angeles. Manager Ham scooped hot bean sprout soup into a small bowl which contained a soft-boiled egg. Sewing is the hardest part of garment production, he said. Really? So many suppliers are involved that if one thing goes wrong, it sets off a chain reaction. And just because we work hard here doesn’t mean things go smoothly. There’s always something beyond our control. One thing leads to another, one problem leads to the next. It’s always like that. Even after we’ve done our part, we still get called back to handle complaints. There’s no such thing as ‘done’ in this business. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, and not once have I felt, ‘Ah, I’m finally done.’ It really drains you, he added, pouring some radish kimchi into the soup and shoving a spoonful into his mouth. He crunched loudly. So, Yeongin, why did you leave your last job again?  Yeongin stared at the washing machine as it neared the end of its first rinse cycle. The laundry, unable to withstand the speed, clung to the drum as it spun. When the rinse cycle ended, water began to fill the drum again. The wet clothes, still mixed with soap suds, started to whirl. With each turn of the drum, bubbles slid down the glass door, and the laundry tumbled from top to bottom. In the sunlight slanting into the laundromat, Yeongin noticed the mess of handprints on the washer door. They looked like the traces of a desperate ghost, groping for some­thing.  A woman entered, carrying laundry in a tarpaulin bag. She glanced at Yeongin, then pulled out two pillows and two cases from the bulging bag, loaded them into a machine, tapped the kiosk buttons, and stepped outside to light a cigarette, leaving the bag wide open on the table. Her curly hair caught the light, glinting copper.  Yeongin unlocked her phone and checked Inbeom’s social media. Her eyes landed on a photo taken on a clear day along a main road. Inbeom was among a group of protestors walking past a row of ginkgo trees. The camera was aimed at the flags and flagpoles above, each bearing a different banner, so only the top of a hat was visible at the bottom of the frame. Yeongin recognized it as Inbeom’s. In the next photo was Inbeom’s face, shot from above. Yeongin studied the image. Inbeom had pulled her hat low, revealing only the tip of her nose and mouth. The caption read: #258. There were five comments. Two came from ad accounts. One was a standard message of support. Another mocked: All the democracy folks, the woke, the disabled, the queers—soon as the sun’s out, they all crawl out. One comment pointed out Inbeom’s braless chest: omg you can totally see her nipples lol. Inbeom had only replied to that last one. Yeongin reread her words, though she’d read them many times before. Take a good look, you dickhead. That was her last post—two months earlier.  Yeongin opened the washer door and pulled out the clumped laundry, shaking it loose. According to Manager Ham, the terry cloth beach ponchos had been delivered two years ago. The retailer had filed a complaint now, claiming color transfer had occurred while the stock sat in a warehouse. But it’s been two years! Manager Kim shrieked after hanging up the phone. Scrubbing his face with both hands, he turned to Yeongin. Once they arrive, let’s run them through the washer, he said. Just a basic wash. Don’t use the dryer, though. The fabric might shrink. After inspecting the wet ponchos, flipping them inside out and back again to check their condition, Yeongin gathered the bundle in her arms and left the laundromat. Even as she walked across the short crosswalk, sweat trickled down her back. The elevator to the twelfth floor was crowded. Young people heading up to the thirteenth sipped iced coffees from plastic cups and joked with one another, bursting into laughter. Their voices were so loud and sharp they seemed to be attacking each other. Yeongin often ran into them in the elevator, but she had no idea what they did for work. How is it? Are the stains coming out? Manager Kim asked as soon as she stepped into the office. Yeongin nodded. Yup, they’re all gone. Relieved, he glanced at the four boxes stacked near the entrance. Inside were forty-eight ponchos, divided evenly among the boxes. From that day on, Yeongin shuttled between the office and the laundromat with the ponchos. She waited for each wash cycle to finish, then brought the wet ponchos back to the office to dry them. There wasn’t enough space to hang all the laundry at once, so she had to wash the forty-eight ponchos over several days. Though September was almost over, the heat was relentless. Every time she crossed the street on her way to the laundromat, she inhaled the hot air and was startled to realize it was the same temperature as the human body. Outside, it was hot and humid, but inside, the office was so cold she wore a cardigan. They couldn’t turn off the AC—if only for the sake of the laundry. A message came in from Vietnam: the rainy season had begun. What was worse, this year’s rain was unusually frequent, making it difficult to manage the fabric. Before she took the ponchos to the laundromat, Yeongin carefully removed the tags using embroidery scissors and a needle, then reattached them after the ponchos dried. While waiting for the machine to finish, she checked Inbeom’s social media. There were no updates. She stared at the top of Inbeom’s head, just visible beneath the cluster of colorful flags, then slipped her phone back into her pocket.  It had been over a year since Yeongin last had any contact with Inbeom. She counted the months, recalling their last meeting. They’d both been busy with work and hadn’t seen each other for a while. They decided to meet in Mangwon-dong in Seoul, a place everyone seemed to go, and ate at a small restaurant.  Inbeom looked worn out. Her hair was unkempt, tied loosely at the nape of her neck, and she gave off a musty laundry smell she didn’t seem to be aware of. Mid-meal, Yeongin opened a shopping app and ordered a high-performance laundry detergent, shipping it to Inbeom’s address. When she showed Inbeom the order screen, telling her to mix it into her wash, Inbeom said flatly, Don’t use that app. That company kills people.  Okay, okay, Yeongin said with a nod, spooning some fried rice into her mouth. The food was salty and sweet, so she kept reaching for her water.  After the meal, they went to a nearby café—an old two-story Western-style house converted into a coffee shop with a spacious yard. They climbed the stairs from the yard to the second floor and found seats in what must have once been someone’s bedroom. There were four small tables, just big enough for two people to sit face-to-face. A zelkova tree extended its branches toward the large window overlooking the yard, and Yeongin made Inbeom take that seat. Sit by the tree. Look at it. Inbeom stretched her legs out comfortably. Over coffee served with cinnamon sticks as stirrers, they talked about ordinary things. Food, health, work. Cruel stories Inbeom had come across recently. Elderly men asking students at the Wednesday protests against Japanese wartime sexual slavery if they were there to learn how to become prostitutes. A mother, hoping to get her son nominated for office, shouting through a megaphone in front of parents who had lost their children in a tragedy. Stories so cruel they felt unreal. Yeongin didn’t want to understand them—she didn’t think she could, and she didn’t want to dwell on them either, so she changed the subject to work, where she was living, where she used to live, their childhoods, news about relatives who had emigrated to the US, elections in some foreign country. Then, when the word “war” came up, Inbeom’s tone shifted. Why do you call it a war? she said to Yeongin. It’s not war. It’s genocide. As of yesterday, eighty thousand tons of bombs have been dropped there. Eighty thousand tons, on a strip of land that small. How could those bombs tell the difference between soldiers and civilians, between children and adults? How can you call that a war? Yeongin listened half-heartedly. Yes, yes, you’re right. Inbeom was always outraged about something. Her concerns were countless—too many for Yeongin to grasp. Those awful people weren’t Yeongin. And words like “war” and “genocide” belonged to a time and place too far away. She nodded, changed the subject, and the conversation carried on. Later, Yeongin would replay that moment again and again—the moment when she thought they had moved on and Inbeom thought they hadn’t. Inbeom believed they were talking about the same thing, and Yeongin believed they had finished talking about it and were onto something else. They exchanged a few more words. When they both realized what had happened, they looked at each other. Inbeom nodded slowly, and Yeongin gave a bitter smile. A crow landed in the zelkova tree. The crow, with a large beak and gleaming black feathers, turned its head, scanned the area, then flew off again. Yeongin watched it. When she turned back, Inbeom was quietly staring into her coffee. The cinnamon stick teetered on the edge of the saucer. She fumbled with the cup, scratched her nose with her index finger, and said, Eonni. Her tone was the same as always, but Yeongin noticed that her fingers were trembling. These days . . . Inbeom began, then cleared her throat. She took a deep breath, as if the words were difficult, then slowly exhaled and looked at Yeongin. When the silence stretched on, Yeongin blinked in surprise, waiting for her to continue. Tears welled in Inbeom’s eyes but dried before they could fall. It’s hard to talk to people lately, Inbeom said. There are things that matter to me. I think they should matter to other people too, so I bring them up. But when I do, they become trivial. They become nothing as I talk about them. Then people look at me like, Why are you still going on about that? Or they give me this look like, Why bring that up now? Like they’re annoyed or feel sorry for me. That’s when I realize, they don’t care. Not at all. These things that mean so much to me, they mean nothing to them. I see it. And you don’t know how much that’s killing me.  Killing you? Yeongin thought about what Inbeom had said. She thought about it when she was alone, or alone in a crowd. As if quietly asking herself or shouting into the wind. When she sat on the edge of her bed, struggling to wake up. When she stepped into the bathroom in the morning and gazed into the mirror streaked with toothpaste foam. When she splashed cold water on her face until it went numb. When she stood in the subway on her way to work, packed in tight, her shoulders and hips pressing into strangers. When she handed over her meal ticket at the cafeteria that served the same menu day in, day out. When she sat behind her partition, lips clamped shut, the taste of garlic and chili pepper lingering no matter how much she brushed her teeth. When she stuck and removed memo notes, trying to re-prioritize tasks that had to be done today or maybe tomorrow at the latest. When she opened her desk drawer and stared at the clutter, trying to remember what she was looking for. When she stared at the smeared handprints on the subway door on her way home. Killing you? Why go that far? Why say something like that? Since that day, Inbeom hadn’t reached out, and neither had Yeongin. She was tired of everything about Inbeom, but still checked her socials now and then. New posts showed up every seven to ten days. Not about where Inbeom was or what she did or was doing. Just announcements of what had happened in a certain place, what was going to happen. She often added hashtags like #massacre, #colonialist, #genocide, #colonialism. About a month after they’d stopped talking, Yeongin came across a flyer on Inbeom’s page. Under the question “Still fresh and sweet?” was the caption: “Strawberries, peaches, grapefruits grown on land soaked in occupation and massacre.”* The post included images of beverages distributed in South Korea, and among them, a children’s drink and a peach-flavored beverage made and sold by the company where Yeongin worked.  * “Under the question ‘Still fresh and sweet?’ was the caption: ‘Strawberries, peaches, grapefruits grown on land soaked in occu­pation and massacre.’” —From a BDS Mart pamphlet produced by Palestine Peace Solidarity Hunched over at her desk, Yeongin read the flyer from start to finish. She read it again, with a tightness in her chest. In a strained attempt at polite, friendly language, the flyer explained how Israeli forces were stealing water and fruit trees from Palestinian farmland, and how people were being injured and killed on the very land where those trees had grown. As she read, Yeongin pictured Inbeom’s parched, vacant face staring at her. You don’t know my life either. You don’t know what I have to do or what I have to put up with. Don’t take it out on me. She wrote messages like that to Inbeom, then deleted them. When the mix of worry and resentment became too much, she couldn’t help herself and wrote: You’re not going to die because of those things. You can’t die because of them. They can’t kill you. Because they happened to someone else. Because they didn’t even happen to you. She wrote the words in the message box and read them over and over again. Then she pressed X and deleted everything, afraid her finger might hit send. One day, Yeongin saw a short video on Inbeom’s page. The camera moved toward a collapsed building. Between slabs of concrete, children’s feet in small shoes stuck out. Ten pairs, maybe more. Yeongin began to count but lost track. The short legs were dull gray, coated in cement dust. The second video showed another collapsed building. A body hung limp, impaled on a piece of rebar that was jutting up toward the sky. On another day, on a different account, she saw people kneeling in the rubble, brushing dust from the ground with their hands. A pale face slowly emerged, just the forehead, eyes shut. Blood, mixed with cement dust, had crusted into a dirty black on his head. In the next video, people screamed and ran down a hospital corridor. In another one, an older woman and a younger one screamed outside a building after hearing someone’s name. A man rubbed his stubbled face as he sobbed. At first, Yeongin tried to understand what had happened. She watched the short clips again and again, trying to piece everything together. But soon she began drifting through the videos. Whenever she logged on to visit Inbeom’s page, her own feed was flooded with jerky, truncated clips. Videos made by strangers, from places she didn’t know, chosen by people she didn’t know. She hadn’t searched for them, hadn’t expected them, but still, every time, she clicked on one and slipped into another. That’s how she watched coastlines being swallowed by tornadoes and tsunamis. Soldiers struggling to recover something from a rocky shore with sticks. A port city exploding, edited with dubbed sirens. A plane crashing into a runway in slow motion, with the caption “FAKE, FAKE, FAKE” blinking across the screen. A slow-motion shot of something being crushed inside an industrial shredder, overlaid with screams and groans. And even a nighttime street scene with a warning to “watch to the end,” though nothing much happened. Yeongin ultimately arrived at videos where what you saw and what you heard didn’t match. People kneaded dough while lamenting exam results. Calm voices talked about being hurt by a boss, coworkers, professors, friends, family, neighbors, while chopping potatoes on a cutting board. There were people who made and uploaded such videos. Yeongin watched them before falling asleep. Videos that left her confused because the visuals didn’t match the audio. Videos that reassured her because she didn’t have to focus on either. Sounds that easily faded into the background and helped her sleep. Yeongin, could you come here for a minute? She was flustered when Manager Yoon called her over to his desk and pointed at the monitor. It was her email correspondence with a client. It was an email she had sent, with several people, including Manager Yoon, copied. She couldn’t understand why he was bringing it up. As she stood there, confused, Yoon told her to read it.    No, no, just read what you wrote. Just the part you wrote. He pushed a few printouts toward her. They were emails Yeongin had written over the past two weeks. Do you think the person reading this would understand what you’re trying to say? he asked. Yeongin hadn’t noticed a problem, but reading them over again, she saw they were a bit hard to follow. Sometimes the word order was inverted, and a few sentences lacked a subject or object. But whether the reader would understand or not, Yeongin couldn’t say. As she stood there, pale, he tapped his desk with his index finger, watching her. What exactly is the problem?  Yeongin opened her umbrella and stepped into the rain. The wind made it hard to keep it steady. The umbrella, stretched taut against the gusts, bent under the pressure. Her shoes and pant hems were still damp from her morning commute, and now her feet were soaked again. She pulled the umbrella closer and kept walking. She needed to stop by the eye clinic before her lunch break ended and get back to the office. She crossed to the building opposite her office and waited on a dark-upholstered couch. In the exam room, she rested her chin and forehead on the slit lamp and stared into the light as the doctor instructed. A bright beam passed through her eyes. The doctor stepped back, stuffed a fist in his coat pocket, and turned to the monitor. He asked her if she worked somewhere dry and dusty. Then he told her she had micro-abrasions, and they were making her eyes sting. With a prescription for artificial tears and anti-inflammatory drops, Yeongin crossed the rain-soaked street to return to work. The rain had gotten heavier in just a short time, and even under the umbrella, she got wet. When she stepped back into the office, wiping her face with her hand, Manager Ham, who’d stayed behind for lunch, turned to look. What a mess out there, he muttered. The rain kept coming. A period between summer and autumn. A record-breaking storm was sweeping through East Asia, and in Korea, it was the heaviest rainfall in 117 years. News reports showed landslides and flooding in low-lying areas, with homes, streets, farms, and orchards underwater. Yeongin stood by the window next to Manager Ham, peering down as if over a cliff. But there was nothing to see. Just sheets of rain cascading down the glass like a waterfall. The day before, a message had come from the factory in Hanoi, saying they were evacuating. The Red River, which starts in China and runs through Vietnam, was close to overflowing, and authorities had issued an evacuation order. It had been pouring for days in both countries, and when the Chinese opened their dams to relieve pressure, the Red River surged. The factory, located near the river, evacuated nearly two hundred workers. Not long after, word came that the typhoon heading for the Gulf of Tonkin had intensified. Both Manager Ham and Manager Kim looked grim, saying if the factory flooded, they’d miss multiple delivery deadlines, even after the rain stopped. You okay? The night before, Yeongin had posted a message in the Zalo group chat for the first time. Everyone who normally emailed or messaged in English was there. Linh, Trang, Robert, Ngoc Uoc—everyone okay? I’m fine. I’m home, but my window broke.   Hanging in there. I’m okay. For now. In the dark, Yeongin read the replies while listening to the wind rattle the windows. Rain pelted the glass like someone throwing handfuls of rice. By morning, the evacuation order had been lifted. The factory had avoided flooding, but logistics in Hanoi had ground to a halt. Deliveries had to be postponed. Manager Kim and Section Chief Jung left early that morning to meet with buyers. In the Korean staff group chat, someone posted a few photos with the caption: On the way to the factory. Uprooted roadside trees lay toppled across the asphalt, roots clinging to red soil. Crushed signs, broken branches, torn scraps of siding were strewn across the wet streets. The last post was a dashcam video about two minutes long. A bulldog figurine bobbed its head on a dusty dashboard, and a rosary swung from the rearview mirror. A truck loaded with coiled wire drove ahead, with several motorcycles in front and behind it. Then it happened, as the car moved slowly along the typhoon-ravaged road and approached the bridge. The truss bridge, suspended between a gray sky and the murky river, began to sink at the center. So slowly, so silently, it seemed as if nothing was happening. Like a sandcastle quietly collapsing. The ground just disappeared, as if the other side hadn’t fallen but rather this side had lifted. The truck and motorcycles that had entered the bridge only seconds before vanished, as if they’d slipped over a crest. The video cut off just as one motorcycle, moments away from falling in, hesitated and began to reverse. Manager Kim, still out on business, commented beneath the video: That’s why you never go near the river when the water’s up.  Yeongin tilted her head back, dropped in the anti-inflammatory drops near her tear ducts, and closed her eyes. A dull ache spread behind her eyes before fading. You know how it poured like crazy yesterday? Manager Kim said, sounding glum. He was back from his meetings, biting into a roll of kimbap wrapped in foil. He said he hadn’t eaten lunch yet, though it was nearly dinnertime. Even in that downpour, I drove all the way to Hwanggan to meet the buyer. While I was at it, I handed over a million won in gift certificates. Then, on the way back to Seoul, the rain started coming down real hard. Suddenly I got scared. Had a few close calls on the road. Somehow made it to Seoul, but I couldn’t go home. So I ended up coming back here instead. I was sitting alone in the office, exhausted, and I don’t know, I just started tearing up. I felt so alone. I asked myself, why the hell am I doing this? Yeongin watched the tears well up in his eyes. He kept chewing, cheeks puffed out with kimbap, lost in thought. In the sample room, Section Chief Jung was on the phone, head bowed, talking to a client. When Manager Kim finished eating, he balled up the foil and tossed it toward the trash. Alright, alright, he said, slapping both cheeks before opening his eyes wide. It was 5:30 p.m. With the Vietnam office and factory shut down, there wasn’t anything Yeongin could do. She slipped off her slippers and put her feet into her wet shoes. I’m heading out. See you Monday. Manager Ham, who usually worked late on Fridays, stood and said he was going to grab a coffee. He followed her out. Standing beside him at the elevator, Yeongin pressed the button and waited. The elevator lingered on the thirteenth floor for a long time before finally descending. When the doors opened, laughter erupted. There was no room to squeeze in among the people who’d just burst into laughter. Let’s catch the next one, Manager Ham said. He sent the elevator down before hitting the button again. That thirteenth floor—I think it’s a pyramid scheme. When Yeongin asked how he could tell, he replied, Young people, moving in herds, eyes all lit up. What else could it be but a cult or MLM?  At home, Yeongin opened the fridge and took out some frozen rice. The plastic container cracked loudly in her hand. She covered it with cling wrap and put it in the microwave. While she waited, she checked Inbeom’s page for any new posts. Where had Inbeom been last night? What had she thought about, listening to the rain? That night, Yeongin had a dream. She was speeding down a windy street on a motorcycle. Broken branches from yellow flame trees, torn khaya leaves, cold rain hitting her forehead and eyes. Tears streamed as she rode. She felt her body tilt as the ground slipped out from under her—slowly, starting from the front wheel, sliding, sliding without end. On and on the wheel tilted, until it tapped her forehead as she lay in bed, and she opened her eyes. It was so dark she couldn’t tell the time. Still lying down, she touched her forehead, then fumbled for her phone. She checked the time, pressed the phone to her chest, then dialed Inbeom. After a few rings, Inbeom answered. Mmm, she said. Eonni.     Hearing her voice, Yeongin held her breath. Where was she? There was barely any background noise. She didn’t sound like she was out. Yeongin listened to the silence, then hung up. She closed her aching eyes and drifted back to sleep.  She woke to the sound of rain on her umbrella. In the dim room, she saw a figure standing. I’m turning on the light, Inbeom said, before Yeongin had a chance to react. Yeongin kept her eyes closed until they adjusted to the brightness. When she opened them, Inbeom was standing by the light switch, looking down at her, a plastic bag stretched taut in her hand, heavy with something. As Yeongin lay there, blinking, Inbeom asked, You sick? Yeongin said no. What the heck? Inbeom let out a sigh, shoulders slumping. Why’d you hang up without saying anything? Inbeom shuffled into the kitchen, muttering that Yeongin had scared her. Then she moved back and forth between the kitchen and bathroom, asking if Yeongin had a large bowl or basin. There was a clatter of dishes, the smell of rain and outside air. Is it still raining? It stopped. Inbeom brought over the large mixing bowl Yeongin used for kneading dough and set it on the floor beside her. Inside, a few small grayish-brown fish swam in murky water. They’re guppies, she said. Someone gave them to me, but they keep multiplying. I don’t know what to do anymore. Yeongin watched the fish circle the bowl, their fins brushing the bottom, and dipped her index finger into the water. The fish darted to the edge. There were five. The water was slippery but not too cold. Inbeom told her she’d left a basin of tap water in the bathroom and to let it sit a day or two before transferring the fish. The chlorine has to evaporate and the cold needs to go. I brought food too. Yeongin glanced at Inbeom, who was watching the fish, and looked back at the guppies. I guess I’ll need an aquarium. Yeah. And if you can, get an air pump. Yeongin asked if she remembered the guppies they’d had as kids. The aquarium seemed big, but maybe that was just because we were small. To keep the adult guppies from eating the fry, we’d put an isolation box inside the tank, but one night the water level dropped so low that all the babies died. When I woke up, they were stuck to the sides of the box, all dried out. Can that really happen in one night? Do you remember? Did you see it? Of course I remember. I stood next to you crying. I thought I imagined it. I mean, how could something like that happen overnight? Maybe there were too many fish all of a sudden and there wasn’t enough air. Maybe. Yeah, there were so many baby fish. Did the rain stop? It has now. Yeongin asked if Inbeom wanted a pillow, if she wanted to sleep a bit. Inbeom shook her head. Yeongin shut her mouth and waited. It was a strange hour—too late to go back to sleep, too early to eat or start the day. She felt uneasy, afraid that Inbeom might get up and leave at any moment. If you didn’t, if you could give me a little more time, I might ask how you’ve been, how work is going, Yeongin thought. And maybe you’d say it’s not great, that it’s getting better, or that it’s just okay. And I’d say, Oh really? And maybe later, I could say I’m sorry. Maybe later. A little later. The sun will rise soon, Inbeom said, still looking toward the dark window. Yeongin was startled, as if Inbeom had replied to something she hadn’t said aloud. She thought: What do you mean, Inbeom? Why would you say something so obvious, like it’s a lie? Are you serious? What? Inbeom frowned, squinting at Yeongin. Why would I need to be serious about the sun rising? In a couple of hours, it’ll come up, Inbeom said. Let’s go watch it together. Before leaving the house, Yeongin took two apples from the fridge. She asked Inbeom whether she should feed the guppies, and Inbeom said it should be fine since they’d be back soon, but then changed her mind and said she might as well feed them, just in case. Yeongin wrapped the apples in paper napkins, slipped them into the pocket of her windbreaker, grabbed a water bottle, and followed Inbeom out. The small used car Inbeom had bought five years before was parked down the street. When she opened the passenger door, a maple leaf wedged in the frame landed on Yeongin’s foot. She placed her feet on the mud-stained floor mat and fastened her seatbelt. Inbeom’s fingertips on the steering wheel were stained yellow and black, likely from conté crayon or charcoal. Inbeom had always drawn with conté. Yeongin didn’t know much about Inbeom’s art. Once, she’d received a drawing of a cotton plant on kraft paper. She’d framed it and hung it on her wall. But a leak from the upstairs unit had soaked the wall, and mold bloomed around the frame. That was a long time ago. What she remembered more clearly were the drawings Inbeom made as a kid. Comic strips in lined notebooks. One was about a girl with impossibly long, yarn-like legs that she kept coiled up under her skirt. When people mocked her for having short legs, she’d undo the ribbon tying them up and shoot up into the air, cackling. Is this better? Does this look better to you? she’d ask. Yeongin had liked that one especially. When Inbeom threw the notebook away, saying it was nothing, Yeongin rescued it and tucked it between the pages of a photo album. She’d been in high school then, and Inbeom in middle school. They left the city and headed southeast. As they crossed the city limits, scattered raindrops fell but quickly stopped. Yeongin placed an apple on her lap, pushed her thumb into the stem end, and split it in half. She held one half to Inbeom’s mouth and bit into the other, gazing out at the mountain shrouded in darkness beyond the highway. Somewhere out there, there must be a village, but it wasn’t visible except for the occasional flicker of light. The farther away it was, the more slowly it seemed to reach her. Yeongin thought: The base of the mountain must lead to the village, the village to the fields and paddies. Water would still be draining from the rice fields, the rainwater in the creeks would still be swirling, winding downstream. Peach and pear trees would have dropped their fruit onto the soaked ground, the rice stalks must be flattened and submerged, barn floors would be a muddy mess, the chickens and pigs dead, the bellies of cows soaked, kittens swept away. And those who saw and heard all this must be thinking: How are we supposed to live now? It rained too much, Yeongin said. It rained a lot in Vietnam, too. Really? Trees were uprooted. Windows and signs smashed and torn down. But none of it felt unfamiliar. It felt like I’d seen it before. Like it had happened here. If someone told me it wasn’t Vietnam but somewhere in Korea, I’d have believed them. That’s how it looked. Yeah. Yeongin watched as Inbeom let go of the steering wheel with one hand to take another bite of apple. She chewed hard, in big, determined bites, like she wanted to finish it fast, then handed the core to Yeongin. She took it with a napkin and wadded it into a ball. Inbeom stared straight ahead, still chewing. Inbeom, Yeongin said. Do you ever think about how bad people can be? I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. What kind of bad? Just . . . regular bad. The kind that’s everywhere. Yeongin looked down at the apple in her hand. The bitten part had already started to brown. The people you mentioned. The bad things they do. But the more I think about it, the harder it is to figure out what makes something bad. Yeah, it’s hard. On the heart. On the mind. Yeah. It’s not something I did, but I can’t say it didn’t pass through my hands either. Lately, everywhere I look, that’s all I see. No place is safe anymore. Inbeom turned on the signal and merged into the right lane. Rockfall barriers flashed white in the headlights. The slopes where black trees stood alternated with pale retaining walls. I went to the West Sea once, when I was twenty, Inbeom said.  There were four of us, I think. My friend’s uncle had rented a bungalow by the coast, but something came up and he couldn’t go, so we went instead. When we arrived, the people in the next bungalow were out on their terrace, frying something in oil. Mitten crabs. They said the area was full of them.Just a short walk away was a mudflat, and apparently it was crawling with crabs. One of my friends said we should go right away, so we borrowed a bucket and some hand hoes from the caretaker and headed out. We wandered between the mud and the rocks, collecting mitten crabs. It was fun. We kept finding them, spotting them everywhere. We dug with the hoes again and again, pulling up more crabs. Even after we’d filled over half the bucket, we didn’t stop. Then one friend held out their palm and said, Look at this. It was a baby octopus. It was so small, smaller than a pinky finger, from its head to the tip of a tentacle. It was strange. So tiny, but unmistakably an octopus. We stared at it, fascinated. Then that friend opened their hand and dropped it straight into the bucket of mitten crabs. The crabs reared up, claws raised in fury. Someone gasped, but it was already too late. In a frenzy, they swarmed the octopus and tore it apart. They tore it to pieces. We just stood there, staring into the bucket, stunned. I wanted to dump the whole thing out, leave the crabs behind, and go back to the bungalow. My knees and butt were soaked with mud, and I was cold, freaked out, and shivering. I kept saying we should stop, that we already had more than enough, but my friends didn’t want to leave. They kept digging, calling out, Look over here, over here. Soon the mood soured. One of them turned to me and said, What’s your problem? Said it’d been forever since they’d done something like this. That all they wanted was to have a little fun. And if I was done, I could head back to the bungalow by myself. In the evening, we fried the mitten crabs, just like the people in the next bungalow had done. We borrowed a burner and a pot from the caretaker, along with some flour. I ate the crabs too. I didn’t want to make my friends uncomfortable. But we couldn’t even finish frying all of them. The leftover crabs, as if they’d run out of strength, stayed curled up, their legs tight against their bodies. Whenever the bucket tilted, they clattered like wet gravel. In the end, we handed the whole bucket with the rest of the crabs over to the caretaker. Later, one of the friends wrote about the trip on her blog. How fun it had been, how delicious the crabs were. I was part of the story too. She posted a photo of my feet in the mudflat with the caption: The friend who kept whining about going back to the bungalow because she didn’t want to get sunburned. I don’t think the friend who dropped the octopus into the bucket was bad. What kind of malice could there have been? And the rest of us, who just stood there and watched while the octopus got torn apart—what kind of malice could we possibly have had? We were just stupid, that’s all. Eonni, if the world ever goes to hell and we can’t turn it back, I don’t think it’ll be because people are bad or full of malice. It’ll be because we’re stupid. That numb indifference. The kind where you see something and feel nothing. That kind of thing. I just didn’t want to be part of it again. Stuffing a bucket full of mitten crabs like it’s a game, then tossing in a baby octopus—how easily it happens, how it becomes nothing, how we pretend it’s nothing. I never want to do that again.  I’m just trying not to turn into that, Inbeom said with a sigh. I think I’m a little worn out these days. That’s why I acted like that—why I spoke so harshly to you. I’m sorry.  They were stuck on the road for a long time as they passed through two interchanges into the city. Morning arrived as they stopped and started. The sun would be fully up before they reached their destination, but Yeongin didn’t mind. Inbeom didn’t seem to either.    Maybe we can just sit by the beach for a while, have a coffee,and then head back.  Yeongin opened the center console and found a packet of biscuits, but Inbeom couldn’t remember how old they were. As Yeongin nibbled on them, she looked out at the dull morning light. The mountains, just beginning to change with autumn, looked dusty and gray. The autumn leaves won’t be that vibrant this year, Inbeom said. I heard if it rains too much right before the season starts, the colors fade. Really? The sun came up between scattered clouds, casting a cold light. Once they passed the congested stretch of road, Inbeom started speeding again. Yeongin pulled up the navigation app on her phone and scrolled through the route. After passing a small village, the road snaked ahead like a lazy serpent. It felt like they were crossing a mountain pass. On the map, the earlier road had been marked red, then yellow. Now the road they were on was green. Yeongin said that up ahead, the road was marked blue. Have you ever seen that? No. What does blue mean? Must mean no traffic. Like, we’ll be able to go really fast. They sped down the quiet road and entered a tunnel.It was long and narrow, with a high ceiling. It looked newly built. About halfway in, Inbeom leaned forward toward the steering wheel and began to slow down. Yeongin saw the car a second later. It had crashed into the right wall, blocking the lane. The tunnel was dim, making it hard to see. For some reason, the car’s hazard lights weren’t on, and from a distance, only the faint rear light was visible, just enough to signal something was there. Inbeom pulled up behind the wreck and turned on her hazards. What do we do . . . she murmured. After exchanging a glance with Yeongin, she unbuckled her seatbelt and got out. Yeongin climbed out too. The air smelled of cement and blew her hair back. She followed Inbeom and peered into the driver’s side. The driver was still in the seat, slumped toward the passenger side. When Inbeom knocked on the window, he slowly straightened. Inbeom opened the door. An elderly man with age spots on his cheeks stared at them, dazed. Even when they asked if he was okay, he didn’t answer. He just looked at them like they were ghosts. A large crate full of farming tools sat in the passenger seat. While Inbeom asked if he could move, Yeongin pulled out her phone to call emergency services. She stared at the damp leaves stuck to the rusty hood while she waited to connect. The call didn’t go through. She tried again. Just then, the old man turned the wheel. His old Sorento lurched forward, scraping along the tunnel wall with a harsh screech.    No! Inbeom clung to the door and was dragged a few steps. Yeongin grabbed her by the waist. She panicked when Inbeom wouldn’t let go of the door. Stop! they shouted together. Turn off the engine! Stop!The old man stepped on the accelerator a few more times, trying to move the car forward, then slumped back, drained. He stared blankly as Inbeom reached in and pulled the key from the ignition. His breathing was now shallow and uneven. Blood trickled from the right side of his head, down his temple, and off his chin. Inbeom held his hands, which kept reaching for the wheel, and gazed into his eyes. Sir, look at me. Just look at me. Yeongin covered one ear against the roar of the jet fan and the wind as she spoke to emergency services. Not knowing the name of the tunnel, she gave the last town they’d passed and read off the man’s license plate. Her voice was hoarse, and she had to clear her throat several times. After the call, she looked toward the tunnel entrance. Outside, it was blindingly bright. That’s why they hadn’t seen the wreck when they entered. With no traffic ahead, cars would be entering at high speed, just like they had. What if the next driver couldn’t slow down in time? As the thought crossed her mind, a car entered the tunnel, its square headlights cutting through the dark. Yeongin stood beside Inbeom’s car, hazards flashing, and waved her arms. The first car crossed the lane and sped past, stirring up a gust of wind. Then a second car passed, then a third, a fourth. Each one switched lanes early to avoid the wreck, but the fifth car didn’t slow until the last second. As it swerved sharply, it let out a long, angry honk. Yeongin understood the driver’s fury. She also understood the moment that had just passed. In that split second, she’d seen it: the collisions, one after another, the bodies tangled and thrown from the crash. First her own. Then Inbeom’s and the old man’s. Then the approaching driver’s. The next person’s. The chain reaction. She understood that all of them, in that single instant, had moved from one possibility to another, from one moment to the next. But what about the next time? Am I crying? She wondered: Do I believe? In the driver who just passed? In the one coming next? Do I believe they’ll stop? That they’ll slow down? It was hard for her to say yes, and that was what scared her most. Inbeom was calmly looking into the old man’s face, saying something, and he now had both legs outside the car and was gazing back at her. Inbeom’s hands were streaked with his blood. Yeongin wiped her face with her sleeve and walked toward their car. She had no choice—no choice at all. Though she felt like this, could she act? Could she not? She opened the driver’s side door, leaned in, and pressed the horn. We’re here, we’re here, we’re here. Inbeom glanced over. Kwahhh— A deafening blast filled the tunnel. Yeongin turned her face toward the oncoming headlights and hit the horn again. The wind kept rushing in. The cars entering the tunnel surged closer, like pistons in a cylinder.

by Hwang Jungeun