Jae ended up with a week of solitary confinement. The room chosen to punish the orphans received hardly any light, and instead of a bathroom, there was a bowl. Books weren’t allowed, so all you had was the sound of your own breathing.
A strong feeling rising up in Jae’s body confused him, and only after two dark days alone did he realize it was rage. One hundred percent pure rage. Its hot toxicity burned through him like sulfuric acid. His stomach acted up so he couldn’t digest anything he swallowed, and he threw up on the plates he was eating from. He began avoiding food. After a day or two the vomit dried and stopped giving off a smell. During the long, lonely nights on an empty stomach, he entered the next stage. This differed from the meditation practice of monks and yogis. It was more like being possessed—his soul entered and occupied other lives, then inhabited them as if they were his own.
One time, he located Red Eyes, whom he had freed. The dog had eluded the hunters and was still roaming across the hills. Jae entered Red Eyes’ soul, saw the world through his eyes, felt the hunger signals sent by the dog’s stomach, and detected the atmosphere of fear that the dog’s sensitive ears picked up. Red Eyes repeatedly dreamed about escaping the depths of an abandoned mine, then going through the stinging smoke. He dreamed of dogfights in which he tore at another dog’s ear. But outside of those nightmarish moments, Red Eyes’ soul was surprisingly peaceful. He could endure an eternity of time just resting his head on his front paws.
Then, as if someone had pulled a plug, Jae felt his soul sucked out of the Tosa Inu. He thought he might be losing his mind. But without any contact with other souls, he couldn’t endure the sharp teeth of the eternal darkness, and like a hacker who finds a lapse in security and infiltrates a system, whenever Jae caught a soul off guard he quickly entered it.
The coffeehouse girl’s abandoned scooter was blackened by flames and coated with mold-like fire-extinguishing foam. Even after the fire trucks left, the scooter kept releasing black smoke from its burning tires. Jae stayed inside the scooter for a while. He heard innumerable voices murmuring there, as if it were a haunted house in an amusement park. The inner world of the Tosa Inu was peaceful, but the scooter kept up a racket like an out-of-control manic patient. He wasn’t sure whether the voice belonged to the scooter, the woman who had ridden it, or even another soul who had entered it and was bemoaning his fate, but for some reason, Jae was fond of the scooter. He sensed its dynamic, self-assured spirit indifferent to its environment.
“I’ll tell you what it’s like to ride a scooter and race.” The voice was playful. “It’s like a yo-yo. The road enters the scooter’s soul, then reemerges. We don’t actually race ‘over’ the road; you could say we reel it in, then let it go. The road isn’t outside us—it’s running through us.”
In the middle of the endless babbling, Jae sensed a chilly soul silently enter and leave. He thought that it might be the scooter’s last owner, the strangled girl. A girl with tattooed eyebrows and full lips. He recalled the taste of the cookie she’d given him. Though this had already happened, it felt like it was coming from the future. The concept of time didn’t have much meaning for Jae, who was bound to a machine. The difference between the definite past and the unknown future blurred, and future events felt like past experiences, and memories of the past like ominous prophecies.
Suddenly a sharp noise and a burning light flooded the room, but Jae’s eyes wouldn’t open. Someone told him that his confinement was over. Like a drunk waking up in a strange location, Jae tried to regain his sense of reality. The chaos of time fell back into the right order with some difficulty, and his soul finally returned to his neglected body. He left solitary confinement, dragging his numb leg behind him. Just above his head two magpies squawked, then headed south.