Human Acts(15)

There was worse to come.

In an attempt to batten down the rising tide of fear, I thought of my sister. Watching the blazing sun describing an arc farther and farther to the south, staring at my face as though trying to bore through those shuttered eyelids, I thought of my sister, only of her. And I felt an agony that almost broke me. She was dead; she had died even before I had. With neither tongue nor voice to carry it, my scream leaked out from me in a mess of blood and watery discharge. My soul-self had no eyes; where was the blood coming from, what nerve endings were sparking this pain? I stared at my unchanging face. My filthy hands were as still as ever. Over my fingernails, dyed a deep rust by watery blood, red ants were crawling, silent.

—

I no longer felt fifteen. Thirty-five, forty-five; these numbers came, in turn, to feel somehow insufficient. Not even sixty-five, no, nor seventy-five, seemed to encompass what I was.

I wasn’t Jeong-dae anymore, the runt of the year. I wasn’t Park Jeong-dae, whose ideas of love and fear were both bound up in the figure of his sister. A strange violence welled up within me, not spurred by the fact of my death, but simply because of the thoughts that wouldn’t stop tearing through me, the things I needed to know. Who killed me, who killed my sister, and why? The more of myself I devoted to these questions, the firmer this new strength within me became. The ceaseless flow of blood, blood that flowed from a place without eyes or cheeks, darkened, thickened, into a viscous treacle ooze.

My sister’s soul, like mine, must still be lingering somewhere; but where? Now there were no such things as bodies for us; presumably physical proximity was no longer necessary for the two of us to meet. But without bodies, how would we know each other? Would I still recognize my sister as a shadow?

My body continued to putrefy. More and more mayflies crowded inside my open wounds. Gadflies crawled slowly over my lips and eyelids, rubbing their dark, slender legs together. Around the time when the day grew dark, and beams of orange light strafed down through the crowns of the oaks, exhausted with wondering where my sister might be, my thoughts turned instead to them. To the person who had killed me, and the one who had killed her. Where were they, right now? Even if they hadn’t died, they would still have souls, so surely, if I bent all my thought on the idea of them, I would be able to sense them, touch them. I wanted to shuck off my body as a snake sheds its skin. I wanted to sever the pure strength, that force thin and taut as a spider’s web, dilating and contracting, from the inert lump of rotting flesh. I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them, why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?

The metal screech of the iron gate opening and then closing sliced through the silence of the night. The sound of an engine rumbled closer. The twin beams from the truck’s headlights swept in sharply. When these beams arced over our bodies, the shadows cast by the leaves and branches, those black tattoos, danced over every face.

This time there were only two of them. They carried the latest batch of bodies over toward us, one by one. There were five altogether: four whose skulls had been caved in by some blunt weapon, leaving a splatter-pattern on their upper bodies, and one wearing a blue-striped hospital gown. They stacked them in a low heap next to ours, again in the shape of a cross. The body in the hospital gown was the last on, then they covered the pile with a straw sack and hurried away. I stared hard at their furrowed brows, their empty eyes, and realized that, in the space of a single day, our bodies had started to give off a horrific stench.

While they started the truck’s engine, I slipped toward those new bodies. I wasn’t alone; clustering around these new arrivals, I sensed the shadows of other souls. The four whose skulls had been staved in were three men and a woman. Thin, watery blood was still trickling from their clothes. Perhaps someone had splashed water over their heads, as their faces seemed relatively clean, compared with the state of their bodies. The young man in the hospital uniform was clearly set apart, special. Lying there with the straw sack pulled up to his chest like a quilt, he was cleaner and neater than any of the others. Someone had washed his body. Someone had sutured his wounds and applied a poultice. The bandage coiled around his head gleamed white in the darkness. We were bodies, dead bodies, and in that sense there was nothing to choose between us. All the same, there was something infinitely noble about how his body still bore the traces of hands that had touched it, a tangible record of having been cared for, been valued, that made me envious and sad. Mine, on the other hand, crushed out of shape beneath a tower of others, was shameful, detestable.

From that moment on, I was filled with hatred for my body. Our bodies, tossed there like lumps of meat. Our filthy, rotting faces, reeking in the sun.

—

If I could close my eyes.

If I could escape the sight of our bodies, that festering flesh now fused into a single mass, like the rotting carcass of some many-legged monster. If I could sleep, truly sleep, not this flickering haze of wakefulness. If I could plunge headlong down to the floor of my pitch-dark consciousness.

If I could hide in dreams.

Or perhaps in memories.

If I could go back to last summer, waiting in the corridor for your class to be let out, jigging impatiently from one foot to the other. To the moment I saw your form teacher step out into the corridor and hastily straightened my uniform. To the moment after I’d watched all the other kids but you file out, when I stepped into the classroom and saw you rubbing away at the blackboard.