Human Acts(36)

“I can’t even smell any booze on you; how long were you waiting for? And in this rain.” Eventually, he opened his mouth.

“There was a trial yesterday.”

“A trial?” I repeated.

“You remember Kim Yeong-chae? He was in the cell with us.” I sat down facing Jin-su. At first, I sat up straight as though imitating him, but I quickly realized what I was doing and lolled back against the chilly wall. “The stutterer. My distant relation.”

“Yeah, I remember.” For some reason, I didn’t want to hear whatever Jin-su was going to say next.

“He’s ended up in the psychiatric hospital this time.”

“Right.” I got to my feet and went to have a look in the fridge. The shelves were practically bare, but four bottles of soju were lined up in the salad drawer. Two days’ worth of emergency medicine.

“He’ll probably never get out.”

I pulled out two bottles and stood them on a tray with a pair of shot glasses. I gripped the bottles by the necks to remove the lids; cold droplets of condensation made my palms slick.

“They say he almost killed someone.”

I scooped some stir-fried anchovies out of a Tupperware container and onto a plate, then some beans boiled in soy sauce. It was all I had. I suddenly had the idea of putting the soju in the freezer compartment. What would it feel like to crunch on cubes of frozen soju, to hear them crack against my teeth?

“There’s not much in the way of snacks.” I set the tray down by the mattress, but Jin-su didn’t so much as glance at it. Instead, he carried on talking, his words gradually speeding up.

“The public defender said Yeong-chae had slit his own wrists six times in the past ten years. That he had to take sleeping pills and get drunk every night just so he could get to sleep.”

I filled Jin-su’s glass. With any luck I’d be able to get away with just a single shot, then I could spread out the quilt, lie down, and try to get some sleep. I’d tell him he could carry on drinking for as long as he wanted, and go home whenever the rain let up. I didn’t let myself wonder about how often Jin-su had met up with that kid in the nine years since we’d shared a cell, or how the latter had been living in the meantime. Whatever Jin-su had come here to say, I didn’t want to hear it.

The dawn’s faint light was beginning to leach into the sky, but the rain was still mizzling down and outside the window it was as dark as evening. Eventually, I spread the quilt over the mattress and lay down.

“Get some shut-eye,” I told him curtly. “You look like you haven’t slept in about a year.”

He filled his own glass and tossed it back. While I tossed and turned in my sleep, the quilt pulled up to my face, he carried on talking at me. A slurred stream of high-flown words and random babble. It was no good to me.

—

Looking at that boy’s life, Jin-su said, what is this thing we call a soul? Just some nonexistent idea? Or something that might as well not exist?

Or no, is it like a kind of glass?

Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they’re good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.

Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.

—

That was the last time I saw Kim Jin-su alive.

I saw his obituary in the paper that same year. I had no idea what had happened to him in the meantime, during those three months that had seen autumn give way to winter. He did leave a message at the taxi office once, but we weren’t allowed to make personal calls during work hours, and when I called him back after my shift was over, he didn’t pick up.

There’d been an unusually large amount of rain that autumn, and every time the rain did stop the temperature immediately plummeted. Whenever I found myself heading home after a night shift, I would automatically slow down before rounding that corner. Even now that I know for a fact he’s dead, I still do exactly the same thing. Whenever I pass that corner, and particularly when it’s raining, I can see him in my mind’s eye standing there, his face pale as a ghost’s against the night’s dark. His black raincoat.

His funeral was a neat and proper affair. I recognized his deep double eyelids and long lashes in the faces of his family, and even that same blankness to the eyes, hinting at unknowable depths. His sister, who had clearly been stunningly beautiful at one time and who still retained a haggard loveliness even now, gave me a perfunctory handshake and then turned immediately away. They didn’t have enough coffin bearers so I volunteered and accompanied the family to the crematorium. I only stayed until I saw the coffin enter the oven, though. On the way home, I remember there was no bus that would take me all the way into the center, so I got off at the three-way junction and walked for the final thirty minutes.

—

I never got a look at the suicide note.

And did they really find this photo next to it?

He never talked to me about it, not one word.

Of course, he and I were close in some senses, but think about it; how close could we really have been? Yes, we relied on each other, but we also wanted to smash each other’s face in. To erase each other’s very existence. To thrust each other permanently out of sight.