I'll Be Right There (15 page)

As much as the despair I felt
—his voice seeped into me and sent ripples through my heart. Why couldn’t liking someone simply be joyful? Why must it also contain sorrow and despair? I took my hand off of the fortress wall and hurried to join the rest of the group. When he called to me from behind, I already knew what he was going to say. I turned to look at him.

“Let’s remember this day forever, right? Is that what you were going to say?” I said.

He raised his eyebrows, and the corners of his mouth lifted into a bashful smile. He walked up to me and took my hand. I squeezed his back. His voice had sounded melancholy. It was suffused with the loneliness of one who knows he is bound for loss. Ten years later, twenty years later … Where would we be in that time? I felt confused and squeezed his hand again. He squeezed back even tighter.

“Miru is in love with someone else,” he said.

“Who?”

His face darkened.

“The guy who disappeared?” I asked.

“Professor Yoon.”

“Who?” I was sure I’d misheard him.

“Professor Yoon.”

Miru was in love with our professor? I suddenly felt sorry for her. It was like seeing a green apple lying on the dusty ground of an orchard, overcome by the summer rains before
it could ripen. I pulled my hand out of his and looked ahead at Miru. Though the path was steep, Miru was walking with both hands in her pockets and her head down. If she had been within reach, I would have shook her by the shoulders and yelled, “Miru, no!” I ran toward her. The houses at the base of Naksan Mountain rushed past, and the rays of the setting sun pierced my eyes. As I ran, panting for air, everyone turned to look at me. They must have thought I had something urgent to say, because all eyes were on my face when I stopped next to Miru. I let out a deep breath. She stared at me wide-eyed. I put my hand in her pocket and clasped her scarred hand. It squirmed inside of mine. I squeezed it even tighter than I had squeezed Myungsuh’s hand. When I did so, the ache that had swept through me subsided somewhat. Miru’s hand stopped squirming. We stayed that way until Myungsuh caught up to us. The whole time, I was staring at the rays of sunlight shining on Miru’s skirt. When the others, who all assumed I had something to say from the way I’d run to them out of breath, saw that I was only standing there with my hand in Miru’s pocket, they shrugged and continued on their way. Myungsuh caught up to Nak Sujang and fell in beside him.

“What’s wrong?” Miru asked when it was just the two of us.

Miru always had her copy of
We Are Breathing
with her. She must have had it all but memorized. She also carried a notebook with her that she used to record everything she ate. If she ate noodles in clear broth, she would not just write
noodles
but would record the dish in minute detail, describing the white noodles in anchovy broth, the spring onion and shiitake mushroom garnish, the five pieces of sweet pickled radish,
and even the size of the diced white radish kimchi. Eating with her meant having to first watch her record everything in her notebook. It was as strange as when I found out that Dahn was afraid of spiders, and I would catch myself staring at her scarred hands. She looked very serious when she made those entries, as if she were carrying out a ritual.

The three of us used the same notebook when we took turns writing stories. We would go to the library or to a café, and she would open to a clean page in that notebook filled with lists of food organized by date. One of us would begin by writing down a sentence. The next person would write the next sentence, and so on. It would begin with random thoughts, but after a while we would get more serious about what we were writing. Once, Miru wrote,
Hands are my favorite part of a person
. I followed that with
Pitiful, gracious hands that never have a moment’s rest
. Myungsuh wrote,
You can tell a person’s life from their hands
. Watching our sentences accumulate one line after another felt like watering a bean and waiting for the sprout to appear. I thought about how Miru would rest her left hand on top of her copy of
We Are Breathing
whenever the three of us continued one another’s sentences.

“What’s wrong?” Miru asked me again.

This time, she was the one who looked worried. Her eyes were fixed on me. The slender fold in her left eyelid looked deeper than the one on the right. I had never looked this closely at her eyes before, my own having always been drawn to her scarred hands first. Her glossy black hair blew in the wind and covered her smooth forehead. Was everything Miru had written about hands that day not fiction after all? After
Myungsuh wrote,
I bow my head in respect to all hands rough with labor
, Miru had added a very long passage:
To hold someone’s hand, you must first know when to let go. If you miss the chance to let go of a hand that you have carelessly grabbed, the moment will pass and turn awkward. I had gotten off the bus and was coming out of the underpass in front of the school when I bumped into him. I meant to say hello but grabbed his hand instead. His thin hand rested in mine. His strong bones. The skin felt rough. He smiled with his eyes and squeezed my hand back. I should have let go then, but we started walking together hand in hand. The pleasantness vanished and was replaced with an uncomfortable silence. Since we had missed the chance to let go naturally, I became more and more aware of my hand. It would have been too awkward to drop his, but I couldn’t keep holding it either. He must have felt the same. We didn’t say a word but continued walking to school, awkwardly holding hands. Sweat was dripping from mine, I was so intent on figuring out when I should let go. On pins and needles I walked and, after a while, I started to calm down. I wanted to stay that way forever, walking hand in hand with him. We passed a hotel. We passed a bookstore and a clothing store. When we crossed the street and reached that spot across from the auditorium, the campus was noisy. There were students sitting on every bench and standing around every pay phone and bulletin board. He looked at me and asked, “Can I have my hand back now?” He sounded like he was asking for my permission. I finally let go. He patted me on the shoulder and strode on ahead of me
. Was the hand that belonged to “him” in Miru’s story that day Professor Yoon’s hand?

“Ouch! Let go of my hand!”

I loosened my grip.

“Do you hold Myungsuh’s hand that tightly, too?”

“What?”

“You squeeze too tight!”

We looked at each other and started laughing. Miru tried to wiggle her hand free, but I held on. Suddenly she asked me to meet her in front of the Dongsung Bathhouse at three on Saturday afternoon. It was a neighborhood bathhouse. From my room, I could see the redbrick chimney rising up between the old houses and the white letters that spelled out “Dongsung Bathhouse,” but I had never been inside.

“Are you asking me to go to the public bath with you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

It was the first time she had invited me somewhere alone—and to a public bath, of all places, not the movies or a café? I looked at Nak Sujang. He was standing on top of the fortress wall and pointing east, as if his body were a compass, showing the others where Samseon-dong and Changsin-dong were. He explained that we had climbed up the western slope of Naksan Mountain, and down there was Dongsung-dong, and over there was Ihwa-dong, and over there was Changshindong. Myungsuh looked back at Miru and me. The setting sun bathed him in its light.

Natsume Sōseki was an esteemed Japanese writer from the Meiji period who traveled to England on a Japanese government scholarship. His experience in England was so upsetting that he temporarily suffered a nervous breakdown. After becoming a writer, he quit his post as professor at Tokyo Imperial University, which was an honorable position to have held, in order to concentrate on writing novels. Writing seemed to be the only way for him to accept and overcome the shock of modernity that had so scarred him mentally. They said that in his later years he spent his mornings studying English literature and writing the modern fiction that he had mastered, and his afternoons composing Chinese poetry. You could say that he split his day in half in order to travel between East and West. Some say that it shows how refined he was, but I see it as a mental struggle to not be sucked under by either side
.

|||

Today, I was over at Yoon’s, sitting on the wooden deck outside, when she showed me something in Miru’s notebook. It had been a while since we last wrote stories together, and we were getting ready to start a new round of sentences. Miru had gone inside to wash her hands first. Listed in Miru’s notebook were the names of people who had disappeared for suspicious reasons and the details of their cases
.

“Do you think she’ll ever find out what happened to her sister’s boyfriend?” she asked
.

As we continued searching for him, all we found were other missing people who had died gruesome deaths—we never found any trace of Mirae’s boyfriend. While Yoon was poring over the notebook, I pushed her hair back and peered at her face. Her dark, questioning eyes met mine
.

“If Miru ever asks you to help her look, say no!” I said
.

I sounded crazy, but she just looked at me
.

“Promise me,” I said. “You won’t be helping her if you do.”

She asked me what on earth was wrong and looked back down at Miru’s notebook
.

“Don’t let her leave,” I said
.

She looked back and forth between me and the notebook and then suddenly kissed me on the lips
.

—Brown Notebook 5

CHAPTER 6

Empty House

O
n Saturday, I was just about to leave when he called.

“What are you up to?” he asked.

“I’m heading out the door to meet Miru.”

“You’re meeting Miru?”

I could have just said yes and left it at that, but I hesitated. It was the first time she and I would be hanging out without him.

“Where?” he asked.

“We’re going to the public bath.”

“Dongsung Bathhouse?”

“How did you know?”

He let out a long sigh. I felt bad for leaving him out. But he couldn’t exactly go to the public bath with us. Neither of us said anything for a moment. I looked down at my shower basket filled with a towel, a comb, shampoo, and other bath items.

“It’s good,” he said finally.

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that exactly, so I kept listening.

“It’s good that Miru has you.”

He hung up without saying goodbye. His voice was so flat that I was caught off guard by how distant he seemed. It felt like very long ago that we had walked around the city together and watched Miru straighten crooked signs and line up scattered flowerpots, or drank coffee and went to the Twelve Young Artists Exhibit, or wrote stories together, or went to Professor Yoon’s class. I stood there with the phone in my hand long after he had hung up

My father had brought the telephone the last time he and my cousin came to visit. He had applied for a phone number and installed it for me. The whole time he was visiting, he fretted over the fact that I lived on top of such a steep hill. He always called early in the morning or late at night. The phone would ring, and I would know at once that it was him. I was never wrong. My father and cousin called the most often, followed by Myungsuh. I had written my phone number on his and Miru’s palms. Miru called me exactly once to say, “So this is the right number,” and hung up.

When I stepped outside, I saw the mailman putting a letter in my mailbox. Since I had never received any mail at that address, I was going to just leave it there, but the handwriting on the envelope sticking out of the mailbox looked familiar. I bent down and peeked inside to discover it was from Dahn. I opened it immediately.

October 9

Yoon
,

I’m heading up to the city. I’ll call you in a few days before I get on the train. I got your address and phone number from your father
.

Dahn

Dahn’s letter, written in his energetic handwriting, was so brief that it could have been sent by telegram. He didn’t ask how I was or say how he was doing. I had not told Dahn that I had moved back to the city. I hadn’t even sent him my contact information. It must have hurt his feelings, but he never mentioned it. I put Dahn’s letter in my pocket with my mother’s ring and walked down the alley. A cold breeze blew down the back of my neck. As I walked in silence with my head down on the way to meet Miru, I kept touching the letter in my pocket. I realized that this was the longest I had ever gone without talking to him. I saw Myungsuh and Miru every day, but I had not told Dahn how to find me. The truth was that I couldn’t bring myself to. Each time I thought of him, I was reminded of the way he had said, “You don’t love me.”