Three years after bringing Jae home, Mama Pig closed down her little shop and began working for a hostess club’s kitchen in Gangnam. Around that time they moved into my family’s multi-unit. We had just built an extension to our old two-story house and converted it into six separate apartments. Two families each moved into the second and third floors, and one family moved into the semi-basement. We lived on the first floor. My mother grumbled that we’d gone even deeper into debt because of the high construction costs. A working-class family from Pakistan lived in the semi-basement, a young bachelor and an asthmatic old man lived on the third floor, and Jae’s family as well as a Chinese-food delivery man rented the apartments on the second floor.
My first memory of Jae as a kid is him teetering on a dining chair with his arms outstretched when, with an ear-splitting cry, he fell in my direction. I don’t remember a grownup running to help him or take him to a hospital; I just remember him falling and a dull pain nailing me to the floor. I assumed that Jae recalled what happened and later often asked him about it, but each time he shook his head. It felt somehow unfair that I remembered the accident more vividly than Jae, when it had happened to him. Maybe he had passed out, or it had happened when he was so young that he had just forgotten. But whenever I think about him, this scene appears before me like a movie theater preview. This memory—maybe even a fake memory I made up much later—came back along with a jumble of sensations. When Jae standing at that high place loses his balance and totters, my heart starts pounding and my head goes numb. From somewhere a whirring sound begins, like a fan that’s lost one of its wings turning at high speed, and my hands go slick with sweat. My breath shortens, and a faint smell of something like gasoline permeates. I, of all people, can’t deny this memory. It’s stayed with me through all these sensations. What I mean is, I’m sure they aren’t images from a movie that have accidentally sneaked in.
The crescent-shaped scar on Jae’s forehead was likely from that fall. Throughout his life, whenever he was thinking, he rubbed at the scar with his index finger, as if scrubbing the fuzz from an eraser. He falls toward me over and over again. His backlit silhouette, both arms stretched out to me to pin me down inside fear and pain.