It hardly seems to exist, except for the man who suffers it–in his soul for months and years, in his body during the desperate and violent hour when he is cut in two without suppressing his life. Let us call it by the name which, for lack of any other nobility, will at least give the nobility of truth, and let us recognize it for what it is essentially: a revenge.
– Albert Camus, Reflections on the Guillotine
And then one day, I met a girl. She worked in a beauty salon close to where I lived. She was very popular among the guys in my gang. No matter how hard anyone tried to come on to her, she would not be won over. I went there to get my hair cut and liked her so much that I tried to pay her extra, but she said she didn’t take tips from bad guys like me. I had assumed from her crude way of talking that she’d been around the block, but she surprised me.
I fell in love with her. And though she didn’t show it, she seemed to like me, too.
I asked her to live with me, and she made a surprising suggestion. She said if I wanted us to live together then we should get married, and was I willing to throw away everything and run away with her and truly start a new life in order to marry her? She said she hated bad guys. I couldn’t make up my mind. I had no skills. To be honest, I was worried because manual labor doesn’t pay even a fraction of what you can get from stealing a few times. You have to have a home if you want to get married, and you could work for a hundred years as a manual laborer and still not be able to buy one. But I felt like I could go anywhere in the world as long as I was with her. We ran away together. She found work in another salon, and I ran deliveries for a neighborhood market. They were hard but happy times. Then, she got pregnant. That joy, too, was brief. One night, her stomach started hurting, so I carried her on my back to the hospital. They told us it was an ectopic pregnancy. They said they needed three million won to operate. They said I had to hurry because her life was in danger. She looked at me and said she was scared. I was scared, too. I couldn’t let her die like Eunsu. I had no choice but to hunt down my old friends while she was in the hospital. I had once made some good money from a job I pulledm, back when I was on top of my game, and loaned it to one of them. My plan was to get the money back from the guy. But he was gone, and instead an older guy he had been close with made me an offer. One last job, he said. I had no other choice. And I was thinking the same thing: just one last job.