First kiss the earth which you have defiled, and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, “I am a murderer!”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, a former death row convict, spoken by Sonja in Crime and Punishment
I was surprisingly relaxed when we were put in the juvenile detention centre. It seems strange to me now, but maybe that was because, at the time, I thought I would no longer have to rack my brain for ways for us to survive each day. Nor did I have to worry about where we would sleep. No more standing with Eunsu in ragged tennis shoes and no socks to elicit more sympathy from people getting off the subway, people who scattered in all directions in a mere second or two, leaving us to feel like every last person on earth had vanished and it was just Eunsu and I left behind in this empty world. No more thinking about how we had nowhere to go. No more getting up in the morning and worrying about what we were going to eat that day. And maybe, too, it was because I thought there would be others like us there, kids who had been abandoned by their mothers and beaten by their fathers. But as usual, my hopes betrayed me.
It happened our first night, when I went in holding Eunsu’s hand, right after the warden finished roll call. The kids surrounded us. I was afraid because, once again, we were among the youngest ones. I was accustomed to fighting, but we were locked up in there, and I did not yet know how everything worked. There were those who gave orders and those who did their bidding. One of them pointed at Eunsu.
“I bet I could lift that runt with one finger. What do you think?”
The other kids snickered. I didn’t know what he meant. In a flash, two boys grabbed my arms. I had a sinking feeling. One of the kids spread out a blanket and laid Eunsu down on it. The moment I tried to resist, their fists flew at me.
“Hey kid, calm down. The boss is only going to lift him up a little.”
The kids pulled off Eunsu’s pants. I had no idea what they were going to do to him. He was stretched out in front of them like a fish pulled from a tank. The one they called the boss proudly held up his forefinger and said, “One finger!” Eunsu, poor blind Eunsu, called out for me over and over. The boy put his finger on Eunsu’s pepper and started rubbing it. As Eunsu called out to me, the vowels and consonants began to drop out of his voice. His pepper swelled and rose, and the hushed cheers from the kids egged it on. Splayed out in front of everyone, my thirteen-year-old brother’s hips began to jerk up and down. Then a cloudy burst of semen shot from his pepper. He looked as if half of his body was off the ground. While the kids were busy snickering, I saw my opening and attacked the boss. I started strangling him without any warning. If the guards had not busted in just then and pulled me off of him, I might have killed him. I looked back as they were dragging me away to see a dazed-looking Eunsu staring into space with unfocused eyes, tears streaming down his face. I didn’t mind taking a beating, and in fact I was used to taking one, but the thought of leaving my blind brother alone in that room with those animals made me crazy. And like an animal, I howled.