Almond(15)

I was a topic at the teachers’ meeting as well. They received calls from parents complaining about how, despite not acting in a visibly strange way, my presence itself was disrupting the class. The teachers didn’t quite understand my situation. A few days later, Dr. Shim came to school and had a long meeting with my homeroom teacher. That evening, he and I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, with jjajangmyeon between us. When we almost finished them, Dr. Shim got to the point after beating around the bush for some time, basically suggesting that school might not be the best place for me.

“Are you saying I should quit school?”

He shook his head. “Nobody can tell you to do that. What I mean is, can you put up with all this kind of treatment until you come of age?”

“I don’t care. You know that, if Mom has told you about me.”

“Your mom wouldn’t want you to be treated this way.”

“Mom wanted me to live a normal life. Sometimes I get confused what that actually means, though.”

“Maybe it means living an ordinary life?”

“Ordinary . . .” I mumbled. To be like others. To be ordinary without having experienced terrible ordeals. To go to school, graduate, and if lucky, go to college and get an okay job and meet a woman I like and get married and have kids . . . things like that. Put differently, to not stand out.

“Parents start out with grand expectations for their kids. But when things don’t go as expected, they just want their kids to be ordinary, thinking it’s simple. But son, being ordinary is the hardest thing to achieve,” he said.

Looking back, Granny must’ve wanted an ordinary life for Mom, too. But Mom didn’t have it. Dr. Shim was right—being ordinary was the trickiest path. Everyone thinks “ordinary” is easy and all, but how many of them would actually fit into the so-called smooth road the word implied? It sure was a lot harder for me, someone who was not born ordinary. That didn’t mean I was extraordinary. I was just a strange boy wandering around somewhere in between. So I decided to give it a try. To become ordinary.

“I want to continue school.” That was the decision I came to that day. Dr. Shim nodded.

“The problem is how. My advice to you is this: remember that the brain grows. The more you use it, the better it becomes. If you use it for bad, you’ll grow a bad brain, but if you use it for good, you’ll have a good brain. I heard certain parts of your brain are weak. But if you practice, you can make them stronger.”

“I have been practicing a lot. Like this.” I pulled the corners of my mouth upward. But I knew my smile didn’t look like other people’s smiles.

“Why don’t you tell your mom about it?”

“About what?”

“That you’re a high school student now, and that you’re going to school every day. She would love to hear it.”

“That’s not necessary. She can’t hear anything.”

Dr. Shim didn’t speak anymore. Of course he couldn’t, no one could object to what I had said.





26


Long streaks of rain slid down the window. It was a spring shower. Mom used to love the rain. She said she liked the smell. Now she could no longer hear or smell it. What was so special about the smell anyway? It was probably just the fishy stink of rainwater, rising from the dry asphalt ground.

I sat by Mom’s side, holding her hands. Her skin was really rough, so I put some rose-scented moisturizer on her hands and cheeks. I went out and took the elevator to the cafeteria. As it opened, I saw a man standing outside.

He was the man who later introduced me to a monster. Dragging the boy into my life.

*

A middle-aged man with silver hair, he was wearing a nice suit, but his shoulders were drooping, his bleak eyes welling up. He could’ve looked handsome if it weren’t for his gloomy expression. His face was dark and gaunt.

His eyes quivered when he saw me. I had a hunch that I would see him again soon. Well, I know “hunch” isn’t a word that really fits me. Technically, I never felt the hunch.

But on second thought, hunches aren’t usually just randomly felt. The brain subconsciously sorts your daily experiences into conditions or results and keeps a growing record of them. And when faced with a similar situation, you unconsciously guess the outcome based on that data. So a hunch is actually a causal link. Just like when you put fruit into a blender, you know you’ll get fruit juice. The way he looked at me gave me that kind of a hunch.

After that, I often bumped into him at the hospital. Whenever I felt someone’s gaze on me at the hospital cafeteria or hallway and looked around, it was always him. He looked like he wanted to say something or maybe he was just observing me. So when he stopped by my bookstore, I greeted him like I usually did.

“Hello.”

With a slight nod, he went on to carefully browse the bookshelves. His footsteps were heavy. He passed the philosophy section and lingered around the literature section for a while before taking out a book and approaching the counter.

There was a smile on his face, except he didn’t look me in the eye. Mom had told me that this meant “anxiety.” He asked the price, pushing the book toward me.

“A million won, please.”

“More expensive than I thought,” he said, skimming through the pages back and forth. “Is it worth that much? It’s not even the first edition. And it’s technically a translation, so it’s not like being the first edition would mean much.”