Soon after Jae entered middle school, his homeroom teacher called me in. His hobby was photography and he sometimes entered his work in amateur photo exhibits, half-forcing the students to attend. We had to write reports about our thoughts on his photos of a heron perched in white rapids and homeless people in a drunken stupor. The teacher was nicknamed “Bald Eagle” for his baldness, as well as “the bald homo,” but I don’t know if he was actually gay.
When he asked me if I knew why Jae had been absent for more than a few days, I realized that I hadn’t seen Jae at school for some time.
“I don’t know. We’re in different classes and different neighborhoods now. I haven’t seen him for a while.”
Bald Eagle looked at the computer. “But you two have the same address.”
“Teacher, that’s an old address. We moved.”
“Does Jae still live there?”
“I think so, probably.”
He twirled his pen and muttered to himself, “Can people still live there?”
I shouldered my way past the cram-school shuttle buses at the school gate that snatched up each kid who exited, and headed toward our old house. I followed a line of well-built structures along a narrow back road until I came to a six-lane street. The neighborhood was surrounded by a makeshift two-meter-high barricade, but there seemed to be no real effort to hide it. The dirty, battered fence was merely a sign that the neighborhood would be demolished soon, and until a decent apartment complex was constructed in its place, this was a useless, temporary landscape.
Jae could be somewhere inside those barriers. I debated several times whether to turn back. Honestly, I really didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore. I now had friends in middle school who lived in my apartment complex and went to the same cram schools. They were ordinary kids, and I could have ordinary friendships with them. We laughed and talked as we flipped through comic books, or formed teams and played computer games. That complicated life with Jae was behind me. But deep down, a part of me knew I owed him. I hadn’t forgotten that back when everyone ignored me, Jae had stuck by me.
I took the crosswalk and headed to where I thought Jae might be. Each empty house had a big red X scrawled in paint across its doors, which meant the house could be demolished. Some roofs had already caved in; I saw a dirty teddy bear missing its eyes and Barbie dolls with broken necks, scattered. The redevelopment association and the construction firm had put up signs between the telephone poles. In the deteriorating neighborhood, those new signs gleamed with messages written on white backgrounds: WE WELCOME THE BEGINNING OF RELOCATION AND HAPPINESS IS JUST AHEAD OF US. What they actually meant: “Please cooperate and leave quickly so the new apartment complex can be built. Then we’ll be one day closer to moving into proper homes.” Someone had handwritten BULLSHIT in red marker. Beside that someone else had scrawled FOOL, GO AHEAD AND SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE POOR.
I felt suspicious gazes coming from some of the still-occupied houses. Peering out from the dark, and seeing that the visitor was only a middle school student, they relaxed and receded back into the shadows. Wherever full-scale redevelopment began, no one bothered to repair or rebuild their houses, so the streets resembled an old photograph. The contours were familiar, but the neighborhood’s faded appearance felt alien. It reminded me of strange streets from my nightmares or from historical sets in documentaries meant to replicate the Goryeo and Joseon periods.
Before I knew it, I arrived at the house where I’d been born and raised. A red X was slashed across the rusted steel gate. It reminded me of a biblical story I’d learned when I briefly went to church. The story told of the Israelites, a chosen people who saved their children by marking their front doors before a wrathful angel came to kill their enemies’ children.
I opened the gate, walked into the yard, and saw in the flowerbed a toy car missing its wheels that I’d played with as a kid. There was no sign of life; I suddenly felt scared. There wasn’t a single person around and even if I screamed, I was sure no one would show up. I would have fled if it hadn’t been my house. I worked up the courage to go to the second floor where Jae’s family had lived. The stairs were much narrower and more dangerous than I remembered, and there was no noise coming from inside. I cautiously tugged at the doorknob. It didn’t open; it was firmly locked.
“Jae.”
No one responded.
“Are you inside? It’s me, Donggyu.”
I rang the bell and knocked but as expected, no one answered. This hideous-looking neighborhood with its oppressive silence pulled me back into the trauma of aphonia. You could call aphonia a mental form of claustrophobia. It’s a feeling as if my heart were a black hole sucking my words back into me. The gravitational pull was so strong, it had seemed impossible to send anything outward. The memory alone was suffocating. I ran back down the stairs. It wasn’t like I had an obligation to find Jae. I raced down to the first floor and headed toward the gate, but someone grabbed me by the waist of my pants and pulled me back. I lost my balance and tottered, then was dragged in.
“Keep quiet.”
Jae didn’t bring me to his apartment, but to the semi-basement unit that Pakistani family had once rented. Jae shoved me inside, scoped out our surroundings, and then closed the door.
He said, “You came alone?”
“Why’re you acting like this?”
“Who sent you?”
“Your homeroom teacher.”
He relaxed but he also seemed somehow disappointed. After my eyes adjusted to the dark, I looked around carefully. Compared to the mess outside, the house was surprisingly tidy.
“Why’re you here, and not in your family’s place?”
“There’s no such thing as my place here. You can live anywhere in this neighborhood now.”
“It’ll be demolished soon.”
“True.”
“Is your mother out?”
Jae’s face went blank. His eyes closed and his neck jerked back, and he looked excruciatingly bored; he did this whenever he was furious.
“What’s that?” I pointed at two full-length mirrors standing behind him. The mirrors were upright and facing each other so that within one mirror there was a mirror, and within that another mirror, and within that mirror yet another mirror, endlessly multiplying themselves.
“I found them. A lot of people get rid of their mirrors when they move.”
He dodged the point of my question. I wondered why he had two mirrors facing each other, but he changed the subject. “You remember Meth Head?”
“Of course I remember him.”
Even before we’d moved, Jae’s face had been purple with bruises. Meth Head had beat him up, but Mama Pig was so high that she didn’t care what happened to Jae. Everyone was shocked at how the tough, determined Mama Pig had fallen apart in the blink of an eye, but no one called the police or reported the beatings. I wondered if maybe Meth Head and Mama Pig were still on the second floor and left Jae alone in the semi-basement.
As if he had read my mind, Jae said, “I found the house clean after coming back from school one day. Since those two started using meth, the house was always a mess. I thought it was weird, and when it got dark, no one returned home.”
“When was that?”
“About a month ago.”
“You’ve been living alone here a whole month?” I thought, In these spooky ruins?
“I have to find the bastard.”
“And when you find him?”
“I’ll get even.”
“Get even?”
His eyes flashed a flaming blue.
“You see what it’s like here now, don’t you? If anything happens to someone, no one will know.”
“What about reporting them to the police?”
Jae smirked. “First thing they’ll do is lock me up in an orphanage.”
A stepmother who’d abandoned her child and made a run for it wouldn’t be worth a minute’s attention from the police; for women without money, applying for a divorce was a bother, and they just slipped out of the house and split.
“Do you know what this is?” Jae pointed at the mirrors set in the center of the room.
“No.”
“It’s a device to catch the devil. A kind of trap.”
“It catches the devil?”
“I read about it in a book. The devil can move between mirrors if they’re facing each other—he comes out to cross over to the other. If you cover the second mirror with a cloth just then, the devil can’t finish crossing and ends up stuck here. That’s when you grab him.”
He sounded like a salesman talking about the features of the latest TV set. According to him, the devil was most active crossing between mirrors on Fridays at midnight.
“If he’s so easily caught, how can he be the devil?”
“The devil doesn’t know how he was captured. That’s why if he wants to return to his world, he needs the help of the trap-maker.”
“What in the world are you going to do after you catch the devil?” I found myself saying this seriously.
“Weren’t you paying attention? I said I’m going to get even.”
“Okay, but you can’t keep living like this. Do you have food?”
“There’s a lot of leftovers in the empty houses. People leave everything that’s past the expiration date, so whenever a family moves out, I go over at night and clean the house out.”
My guess was that he wasn’t just hitting empty houses.
“You’re not going to tell the school you saw me, right?”
“I won’t say anything. But this area will be redeveloped soon anyway, and a bulldozer will raze it all down.”
He nodded somberly. “That’s why I have to find the devil, quick.”
He showed me weird phrases that he had written down, and explained that they were commands for the devil that he had found on the Internet. He was utterly sincere.
I couldn’t leave him like this, so I said, “I heard fires have been breaking out in the neighborhood.”
There were a lot of wild rumors about the area. As one household left, then the next, the number of abandoned buildings grew. The association wasn’t pleased about opponents to the redevelopment plans, and ignored the growing disorder in the area. In fact they encouraged it.
“You mean the random fires? They’re started by the shits from the redevelopment association.”
Jae was sure about this. He pointed at the stacks of dry-powder fire extinguishers beside the table, and said he’d collected them from the empty houses.
I added, “I even heard that someone kidnapped and killed a girl, and put her in a water tank.”
“All kinds of rumors get around.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
Instead of answering, he pointed at the mirrors and grinned. There was nothing cheerful about his smile.
I stood up. “I skipped out on one cram school already tonight, so I’ve got to make it to the next one.”
Jae went out first and scouted the surroundings like an advance guard, then let me go.
Jae still didn’t show up at school. I lied to Bald Eagle and told him I hadn’t been able to find Jae. Sometimes I packed food and brought it to the basement where he was hiding out. He didn’t make much progress capturing the devil, but he said that something was definitely moving between the mirrors and he just hadn’t caught it at the right moment. Like the alchemists who had spent their lives mixing different ingredients with lead in order to make gold, every Friday at midnight, Jae made small changes to his method. He made adjustments such as revising his commands, making microscopic shifts to the mirrors’ angles, or lighting a candle between the two mirrors. If he failed, he had to wait another week. He hadn’t cut his hair for a long time and it had gone shaggy, which made him look like a retired rocker.
“How long are you going to live like this?”
“Till I catch him.”
Jae was stubborn. His cheeks had hollowed out and his arms were bones. Each time I opened his door and went in, I was afraid I’d discover his cold, stiff corpse.