A dog-breeding farm stood behind the orphanage. The owner had sold his cows after their value collapsed, and bought dogs instead. Though he crammed hundreds of dogs into the small fenced-in area, the dogs stayed quiet because he had punctured each of their eardrums with an air gun. It’s said that if you shoot an unloaded gun into a dog’s ear, the penetrating air tears the dog’s eardrum. The dog breeder drove a truck. Sometimes he stopped by to meet the director of the orphanage. He looked at children the same way he looked at dogs, so the kids instinctively avoided him. Once a girl disappeared, and everyone suspected the dog breeder. Rumors spread that he had killed her and fed her to the dogs.
A mushroom grower, the dog breeder’s sworn enemy, lived behind the breeding farm. He grew mushrooms in an abandoned mine that Jae had once sneaked inside, along with a few other kids. It was dark and damp and sent chills up the spine. The smooth white mushrooms spiraled bleakly up thick blocks of wood. When one of the kids claimed that all the mushrooms were poisonous, they started arguing.
Jae protested, “Why would he spend money growing poisonous mushrooms?”
The other kid picked a mushroom off the wood and handed it to him. He said, “It’s because the owner’s totally psychotic. Eat it, asshole. What, you won’t scarf it down? You said it wasn’t poisonous, didn’t you?”
Jae stared blankly at the mushroom, then handed it back. “You eat it.”
“Why should I eat it? You said it wasn’t poisonous, so you should eat it.”
Jae said, “Now I think they’re poisonous too.”
“What?”
“Now that I think about it, I think you’re right. It is a poisonous mushroom. It’s poisonous, all right.”
The kid, confused by Jae’s sudden reversal, stared at him. Jae held the mushroom close to the kid’s nose. He said, “Here, I said try it. What’s the matter? You can’t eat it since it’s poisonous?”
The kid stepped back, shouting, “Asshole, are you crazy? Why should I eat it?”
“Try it, asshole. What, you scared?” Jae brought the mushroom to his own lips. “Watch carefully. This is how you eat a poisonous mushroom.”
In front of all the kids, Jae chewed it thoroughly and swallowed. But though the mushroom wasn’t poisonous, Jae was still racked with diarrhea all night long.
The mushroom grower had put up a hut where he lived right beside the damp tunnel sheltering a variety of mushrooms. Prostitutes from the coffeehouse sometimes came by, so the older boys peeked in through the window. The man lived with a twenty-four-hour news channel on at all times, so the news became the background noise even when he was having sex with these young women. The prostitute’s mechanical, insincere moans rode over the anchorwoman’s serious voice mostly relaying what politicians were doing. Whenever the couple finished having sex, they poured coffee from a thermos and drank it together in silence.
The coffeehouse girls always arrived on scooters with weak engines. And when they departed, they left behind smoky exhaust from the burning engines and the scent of cheap perfume. Both were toxic, but this illicit smell captivated Jae early on. Sometimes he followed it down the road, but the scent was inevitably masked by the time he arrived at the dog-breeding farm. From there, the world of dogs took over. The whole area reeked of dog shit and urine. When the owner wasn’t around, Jae sneaked into the farm. Each time the tense dogs, raised for fighting, came at the fence as if to tear it apart, Jae backed off. They stank with the smell of creatures living a dire, doomed existence. He felt strongly sympathetic toward the trapped dogs, and was especially taken with a red-eyed Tosa Inu who limped because of a bad hind leg. For a time the two merely gazed at each other as if in a staring contest, and whenever that happened, even the other dogs calmed down.
You could say that Jae had a rare ability to communicate with animals, but he had trouble talking to people while he lived at the orphanage. People who met Jae for the first time, especially girls, were interested in him, but it didn’t last long. He didn’t know how to hold a person’s attention, but he was surprisingly able to make deep connections with animals. And the more this happened, the less he expected of people.
The coffeehouse girls stopped by the dog-breeding farm, though not as frequently as they did at the mushroom farm. Some days they visited the mushroom farm first, and sometimes the other way around. When the girls went to the dog farm, the kids didn’t follow and peek in. They were terrified of the rumors that if caught, they would be fed to the dogs and disappear without a trace. Only Jae was fearless.
One day Jae ran into a coffeehouse girl coming down from the mushroom farm. She poured leftover coffee from the thermos and handed it to him.
She said, “So you’re here again.”
Jae got ready to flee from her and the red blouse revealing the hollow between her breasts. The young woman must have read his mind because she lightly took his arm. “Do you want a cookie? This isn’t for the customers—it’s mine. Here, have it. It’s delicious.”
He ate the cookie. In high heels, the woman was much taller than him. This moment, in which he accepted the coffee and then the cookie from her with both hands, would have the significance of a spiritual awakening for him.
“Do you want to see a movie with me sometime?” she asked.
Jae only finished swallowing the cookie and fled down the hill.