Jae went about meeting people in this manner. As he had with Mokran and me, he showed up and surprised them. First, he tracked down Hoodie, who was working as a pizza delivery boy.
The first thing Hoodie said after he opened the door was “If I don’t deliver pizza in thirty minutes, I’ve got to pay for it.” He stank.
“That’s shitty.”
“Some customers won’t open the door on purpose, just so we lose thirty minutes.”
“Assholes.”
Hoodie added, “My sister crept back home, but we’ve got enough room to put you up.”
Next Jae ran into Baseball Cap on the street. Baseball Cap, who hadn’t outgrown his youthful looks, didn’t recognize Jae since he had shot up over twenty centimeters in a year and looked a lot older. Plus, he didn’t dress like kids his age.
Only when Jae said, “I smashed you up with a beer bottle, remember?” did Baseball Cap realize that it was the “slave.” They had a cigarette together. Baseball Cap was also getting by as a delivery boy at one of the ubiquitous fried chicken fast-food franchises.
As if muttering a curse, Baseball Cap kept repeating, “Chicken. Our store’s chicken is great. Really, it’s great.”
Jae also visited the house where Hanna had been trapped and tortured. An ordinary family had moved in. When he visited the local corner store and asked about the boys, he learned that they had been shipped to reform school. No one had heard about Geumhui. Jae next headed for where Hanna and her father were said to live and discovered that within a year, Hanna’s belly had swelled up like a hill. She still cried and said that she was in love with Leader. Jae felt his heart ripping to pieces as he left.
Jae gave each of them a clear, simple message: “You are all living in the wrong place in the wrong way. It’s not your fault, but I feel so much pain because of you.” The kids sensed that Jae identified with their suffering, and felt awed by his way of life.
Jae’s actions at the time recall those of a martial arts film character who had returned after finishing a long period of training in the mountains. He fearlessly met people, and his confidence and his eccentric looks made a deep impression on his peers. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes dozens of kids would circle around Jae to hear him speak. Most were runaways or had quit school, but now and then a perfectly normal school kid would show up.
When I ran into Mokran at one of these gatherings, she asked me, “Don’t they look like a bunch of stray cats in a park at midnight?”
I agreed. “It’s like watching cats at a rally, nodding off, grooming each other, then slinking away.”
Jae walked the entire city and found whatever he required on the spot. He easily picked the locks of donation containers and took whatever clothes and shoes he needed. If necessary, he stole without flinching, for his ideas about ownership were unusual. Because he was able to communicate with objects, he believed that so long as he respected the object’s wishes, there was nothing wrong with taking it and using it for a while. At the same time, he stayed true to his own complex taboos. He avoided the color red because he believed that red symbolized pain and bad luck. He avoided it all: red shirts, beef, bloodshot eyes, and Red Cross blood donation trucks. Whenever he picked up a book, he always ripped out its first and last pages and began reading from the second page. He said that authors had planted something in the first and last page to draw you in. As a result, no one could ever properly read a book that he had finished, and so he became the final reader of every book that he touched.
He also placed great importance on numbers. If the license plate numbers of the first car he saw in the morning added up to a number that ended in a 4, he retreated and did nothing for the entire day. Numbers that came in integers of three—3, 6, 9, and 15—were holy. He made exceptions for 12 and 24, since they were common multiples of 4.
One by one, the number of kids spellbound by Jae’s odd ways grew. The first time they laughed; the second, they approached him; the third, they paid attention. Then, silently, they began following him.