To inscribe: to carve or impress a symbol on a surface, let’s say a door. There’s the mark the Jews painted on their doors, in the Book of Exodus, so the Destroyer would overlook them, pass them by, but there must be another kind of mark, that tells the Destroyer, “Hey, I’m inside, come get me, it doesn’t matter if you’re early.”
I didn’t know Eun Kang at all. I just read about her, over and over, until she started to . . . talk to me.
Last year, on a Thursday night in December, Eun Kang was unwinding in her house in Venice. A man came into her house. He raped her, dragged her upstairs to the attic, raped her again, and then killed her.
Those are the basic details. I’m sure you want to know everything, even if you think you don’t, but let me tell you what I was up to a few blocks away. It may turn out to be relevant.
I had taught that evening, and I got home a little after 10:00 p.m. Tim was at a university residency in North . . . or was it South Dakota? I tended to our dog’s needs then tended to my own.
I don’t believe I did anything special—wine, food, a shower, teeth, TV—but I remember that it had been a long day, I was . . . exhausted, and an inky, heavy feeling with no apparent cause had found its way into my heart. Our dog picks up on emotions, so I hid the feeling from her, and began to unwind, or tried to.
Shortly after I settled down in bed, and switched off the bedside lamp, I heard a helicopter circling over our house.
This is not infrequent in my neighborhood, but it sounded like there was more than one, two, even three, and they circled not just for ten minutes or so but for a long time, at a low altitude, hovering, rattling the windows and the tiles on the roof, as if they were musical instruments accompanying my uneasy state. The helicopters kept me from falling asleep, and just as I was getting there, their blades whirred into my dreams.
I slept restlessly.
It was like the helicopters and my nerves were at it all night.
In the morning, when I took out the dog to piss on the verge, a neighbor told me why the helicopters were so busy. But I don’t chat with my neighbors—did I find out on the Internet? Whatever the means of communication through which I was apprised of Eun Kang’s death, my reaction was straightforward: I was fascinated and/or horrified and I wanted to know more.
It seems Eun Kang had just finished dinner. Around 10:00 p.m., a stranger walked into her house on the 5600 block of Electric Avenue. He gained entry through a sliding door she had left open. The stranger proceeded to rape her in the kitchen, stabbing her multiple times with a knife she had just washed, along with the rest of the dishes, leaving them to dry in the drainer.
Hearing screams, a neighbor ran out. The neighbor peered through the sliding door. He had grabbed a flashlight and shone it through the glass.
The neighbor saw what was . . . materializing; he tried but failed to stop the killer as he took Eun Kang up to the attic.
In an interview, the neighbor stated, I wish I hadn’t seen it. I wish I could . . . remove what I saw from my own eyes.
When police arrived at the scene, Eun Kang was alive in the attic and bleeding. The dishes were still drying.
She was pronounced dead at the hospital at 11:15 p.m. Her unborn child, a boy, was pronounced dead three minutes later. The autopsy report used the verb destroyed in reference to the death of the fetus.
Eun Kang, four months pregnant, was going to have twins. Both feti were destroyed—the plural of fetus is fetuses, not feti, but the report used the term ungrammatically. The second unborn child, another boy, was not discovered—an odd word choice, I thought, discovered—until a second autopsy was conducted that Friday.
The suspect was apprehended roughly three hours after the incident. He was on the beach, sleeping by the sea.
His clothes were bloodstained. You would think he would have gone into the ocean to clean his clothes. You would think it would be impossible to sleep after doing what he did, but apparently it was nearly impossible to wake him up; an arresting officer said it was like trying to wake up a teenager in the morning.
According to police records, the twenty-two-year-old male was a transient, a drifter: in and out of jails for a series of minor offenses, several stays in mental hospitals, though nothing to indicate the possibility of violence. One report characterized him somewhat unprofessionally as a very strange young man.
In photos taken by a courtroom photographer, this strange young man wears a lemon-yellow jumpsuit. On another day he wore a blue jumpsuit, lending him the appearance of a hospital orderly.
The suspect’s facial expressions also changed. In some images he looks earnest while in others he seems bewildered, perhaps by the charge of three counts of murder.
During the arraignment, he said he liked the sound of the fountain in Eun Kang’s garden; that’s what drew him to her house. The house seemed very peaceful. It gave him a good feeling.
Because the door was open, he thought it meant Eun Kang wanted him to come in.
I thought I was helping her, he said, and went on to explain his theory that every individual has an expiration date, assigned at birth, and this date is imprinted on each individual’s skin, just like a use-by date on a bottle of milk. I can smell when people’s shelf lives have expired, he said. Everyone’s perishable. Most people can’t see this expiration mark, he said, but I can see.
As I read and reread the various accounts, it occurred to me that the killer walked into Eun Kang’s house around the same time I walked into mine. Except I had to use a key. And that inky feeling that seeped into my heart as events unfolded on the 5600 block of Electric—was there any line of causation?
In Greek mythology there are three Fates—the spinner who spins the thread of life, the allotter who measures the thread apportioned to each individual, and the unturnable, who selects the type of death, the time of death, and cuts the thread. Eun Kang’s fate was terrible on three counts.
She was also subject to the fourth Fate, the one mythology forgot about, the inscriber, the one who inscribes. To be written about posthumously. To get your picture in the papers because of the way you died; to have strangers pore over your violent death, endlessly.
You could argue it’s worse to go through something like that and not be written about. At least she’s remembered, you might say. At least people know her name.
Questions arose in my brain:
What did Eun Kang eat that night?
Did she hear the intruder outside or the click of the sliding door?
How did she address the intruder when he first presented himself?
As the incident . . . developed, did Eun Kang call out to God to intervene?
Did she pray, scream, or sing a sort of combined screamprayer?
If she called out to God, did he answer?
What was in Eun Kang’s heart as the night . . . transpired?
When she looked in the face of her killer, what did she see? and
What was her final thought?
And Eun Kang herself? Who was she?
The articles were only slightly more informative on this matter. She was thirty-nine at the time of her death, my age.
In a photo in the Los Angeles Times’ Homicide Report, her straight black hair is pulled back from a broad face. She wears a white V-necked top and a fine gold chain; her skin is pale, her gaze . . . intense, as if her expression was preparing itself for what lay ahead. It is the photo for her driver’s license, the unsmiling countenance one adopts when posing for any bureaucratic mode of identification.
Eun Kang had moved to New York from Korea when she was twenty-seven, to look after her twin brother who was dying of cancer. He died and in 2003 she came to Southern California to take over the family dry-cleaning business.
Family members declined to comment, apart from one distant relative who told the reporter, we just want to forget.
One small thing I learned about Eun Kang: she surfed. A friend of hers was interviewed and spoke of how much Eun Kang loved the sea.
The friend said something interesting. That summer, Eun Kang went surfing every day, often twice a day; it was like she was compelled to go surfing. As if, while she still had the chance, she wanted to enjoy every wave in the ocean, every current, every tide.
The article had a snapshot of Eun Kang, down the beach in her wetsuit, grasping her surfboard. Her black hair was tied back from her broad face, like in the other photo, but in this one she was smiling.
And in this image she looked vaguely familiar. I wondered if I had seen her that summer, when I also went to the beach virtually every day, early in the morning or late in the afternoon, eager to feel the cold water’s neutralizing effect, driven by my own compulsion. It wasn’t that unlikely; maybe we went to the same stretch of beach, between the pier and lifeguard station #13 (where, incidentally, the killer chose to sleep.) Though at the beach, immersed in the ocean’s briny, watery waste, people all look the same, their identity drained, or washed away.
I made a special trip to the deli to get a hard copy of the article, which was in one of the Venice papers. When I went to the counter to buy a couple of things, the owner saw the paper, with the picture of Eun Kang and her surfboard on the cover, and shook his head.
“What a tragic thing,” he said. “You know she worked here?”
“Really?” I had been going to this deli for years, but this was the first time he had engaged me in conversation. “When was that?”
“Just a few months ago. She was a very nice lady. A tragic thing.”
As he gave me my change, a picture of Eun Kang appeared in my mind. The owner is generally the only person working—a woman who seems to be his wife helps out occasionally—so I’m always aware of new faces.
And I remembered seeing a new face one day. It had to be Eun Kang.
She rang me up, as her boss stood beside her. She seemed nervous, learning the ropes of a new job. I smiled at her and she smiled at me. She returned my change, her fingerprints and DNA staining the coins and bills.
I didn’t bring up this memory, but before I left the owner told me they hired Eun Kang because they thought their new sandwich business was going to be busy. It never took off; they didn’t need her after all.
There was a vigil for Eun Kang. I did not consider attending—my relationship with the dead is primarily one on one, not communal—but I did pay my respects, a week or so later. On my birthday, December 27. Tim asked me what I felt like doing and I said, “Why don’t we take the dog for a walk, visit Eun Kang’s house?”
Birthdays set me on edge, and I guess I hoped this might make me feel a little less crazy. I had some misguided idea that viewing the house would be a good thing to do, humbling, a Zen exercise; it would put things into perspective.
I don’t know what I was thinking. As we walked down Electric, along the old tram tracks, I immediately got a bad vibe. The morning was gray and damp, as damp and gray as the feeling that crept into my heart the night of Eun Kang’s death.
It took us awhile to find the place—we went in the wrong direction, then noticed the numbers were getting lower, not higher. So we headed back toward Venice Boulevard, which meets Electric at a perpendicular angle.
The house at 5660 Electric Avenue was nearer to us than I had thought. Hidden behind a high bamboo fence, there wasn’t much to see. Just a red-tiled roof. I could hear the gentle burbling of the fountain. I could appreciate the attraction, what drew the killer inside. If you didn’t know any better, the house could seem inviting, could be mistaken for a calm and quiet space.
But there was this dense . . . energy oozing through the gaps in the bamboo fence, an energy that pervaded the whole street and hung in the air, mingling with the gray mist.
As if Eun Kang was still around, floating . . . everywhere. The papers described her as a small woman, but now that she was dead she seemed to be taking up much more space in the atmosphere.
Which makes sense. While we’re alive the soul is cooped up in our bodies; unrestrained, the soul is able to suffuse as it pleases, spread itself out . . .
Or maybe I’ve been living in California too long and have been brainwashed by its motley array of New Age ideologies. There has to be a rational explanation: the meteorological conditions, a projection of my mood, the electric currents emanating from the wires above our heads. Electric Avenue was named after the former power station, and though the station closed, it’s still the location of a central circuit. Whether the cause was logical or mystical, I turned to Tim and asked if we could get out of there.
I had seen a picture of a memorial to Eun Kang that her friends and neighbors had erected on the sidewalk outside her gate—a table laden with Buddhas, candles, notes, and flowers. The structure was gone, but as we left, I spotted a note stapled to a telephone pole:
Eun Kang, I hope you and your twins are in heaven. I hope your killer gets struck by lightning. How could a soul ever be cleansed of such evil? Your murderer is a vicious animal. I hope he gets the chair. If a bear attacks a person in a forest, they put the animal down . . .
While Tim wasn’t looking, I tore off the message, a remnant from the memorial, and put it in my pocket, a birthday gift. At home I pasted it into a notebook I had bought at the deli. I had intended to use this notebook for writing, but, lacking inspiration, was instead using it to keep all my clippings about Eun Kang together, in one place.
I did my best to uncover further aspects of her story, but whenever I entered the search terms Eun Kang Venice murder biography, I received the same results and the word biography was crossed out, like this:
Biography
I was, however, taken to a link on Korean ghosts.
In Korean myth there are these specters that go by the name of Gwisin. After death, some people hang around for assorted reasons, particularly when someone has done them an unforgiveable wrong. Gwisin suffer from a sense of incompletion and stay here until they have finished their work, or extracted revenge.
It struck me that Eun Kang met the main criteria for this kind of ghost.
A Gwisin’s presence is traditionally announced by eerie weather or an atmospheric shift; so perhaps I did perceive something that day on Electric. I continued to entertain this idea, despite the Wikipedia disclaimer: This article relies too heavily on one source and may fail to make a clear distinction between fact and fiction.
I printed out the “Gwisin” entry and added it to my EK notebook, which I kept on my bedside table, in the hope that it might infiltrate my dreams. Did you know that Gwisin can come to you when you’re awake or asleep?
It was Eun Kang’s last night. She was living in a green clapboard house, its color faded by the sea air. She had gone to bed but she was sleeping fitfully.
The killer was in the yard, standing by the fountain, biding his time.
There wasn’t just one fountain; there were all these fountains, burbling and murmuring, muttering warnings in their fountain tongue, drowning out the murderer’s breathing.
It was unclear who I was in the dream: Eun Kang, the killer, or an unseen third party, silently observing.
Eun Kang was sleeping in the attic but she kept waking up like she knew something or someone was outside. She went downstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water. She thought she saw a man’s blurry face through a pane of glass in the door. She assumed it was nothing but her imagination, and she went back to bed and fell back to sleep and the killer decided that it was time to come in.
On another occasion, only he turned up:
I was out on the street, it was that Thursday night, and I was just getting home from work when he ran past. I was startled and he stopped and looked at me and smiled. Even in the dark, I could see he had a beautiful smile.
“Sorry,” he said.
“That’s okay,” I said. He was covered in blood; it glowed.
“Oh yeah,” he said, sheepishly, brushing himself. “I just killed someone. I think you know her. Hey, can you tell me how to get from here to the beach?”
These dreams were unsettling, but I’m used to dreams, their effect. I would immediately turn on my bedside lamp and write everything down, so I wouldn’t forget. Then something else happened, which I also recorded, but that’s more difficult to explain.
One night I was asleep when I woke up to the sound of my own voice.
Sometimes I talk in my sleep, so loud that I wake myself up; it’s no big deal. Dying is simply a process of being unborn, my voice said, as if it were separate from me. Intrigued by the phrase, I didn’t bother to turn on the lamp, just scribbled it in the dark and was about to close my notebook when I heard a voice again: Better to be unnamed, the voice said.
Note that I do not say my voice, but a voice, the voice. To be precise I should say her voice, for this time the voice bore no resemblance to mine; it sounded like a female voice.
Even so, I didn’t think much of it. I attributed the sensation to being overworked, overtired. I must be half-asleep, I thought.
A few nights later, I was roused by a voice that was not my own: The relationship between the living and the dead is not fixed or reciprocal, the voice said, it is . . . unstable.
This was not particularly unusual: in the past my sleep had been disrupted by the harsh sound of someone else’s voice, and I could never tell where the voice was coming from, if it was a neighbor screaming outside or a persona screaming in a dream inside my head.
What was unusual was the fact that this voice was very similar to the woman’s voice from a few nights before.
It’s no big deal, I thought. I mean, everyone hears voices occasionally, don’t they?
Over the following weeks, I heard her voice intermittently.
At first she spoke only in abstract fragments, terse utterances—Death is a mode of nonidentification is another of the weird things she said—and I only heard her in my sleep or right after waking, when I was drowsy.
Then one night she told me . . . not so much a story, but a sliver, a shard of a story, and I could not blame it on dreams or sleeplessness for I was sitting up in bed, reading; the lamp was on and I was wide awake:
You know I hated that goddamn dry-cleaning business, she said. Those garment bags hanging all around me like body bags. Those tickets with their malevolent numbers and the smell of the chemical solvents. I would head to the ocean to escape the fumes . . .
The derogatory term woo woo can be applied to a naïve individual who is all too willing to believe in paranormal or pseudoscientific phenomena. Was this Eun Kang communicating with me? Or was it just another auditory hallucination?
After that, she, whoever she was, only spoke to me before sleep, when the light was on. Without my asking, she began to address those concerns of mine that none of the articles were able to answer:
So you want to know what I ate for my last meal? she said. Salmon. Wild. Caught from the Pacific. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it. Its flavor was distinctly briny. When my killer stabbed me with the knife I had used to gut the fish, its odor flowed from the holes in me, and he screwed up his face. The poor doctors smelled it too when they opened me up later, like they had walked into some hidden sea cave. God, I made such a stink!
I wish I could say the bedroom was filled with the stench of rotten fish, but that would be untrue. All I can say is I started to feel like I knew things I shouldn’t know. I started to wonder, maybe even believe, that these words weren’t just coming from some unreliable place inside me but flowing directly, verbatim, in an act of dictation from the mouth of the ghost of Eun Kang herself.
Wikipedia tells us that Gwisin have droopy black hair and their skin is transparent. They are often legless and can even be faceless, depending on their personality.
I have to confess I never saw Eun Kang’s ghost. She did not . . . appear to me, not that night, or any other. I only ever . . . heard her. A Gwisin’s voice is typically high-pitched or deep, yet this voice was somewhere in between.
Her voice was all I had to go by, though sometimes she spat her words right into my ear; when I put my finger in my eardrum, I could feel her spittle on my fingertip, sticky as snail-slime.
And once, I swear I felt her lank hair brush across my face. Korean ghosts are commonly known to do this.
I understand your look of skepticism. Despite my susceptible nature, I was doubtful throughout the experience.
The dead don’t speak, I said to myself one time after a brief visit. I said it in my mind, so quietly I could scarcely hear the thought.
The dead can speak, she responded. But you don’t want to hear what we have to say, so you sew our lips together with clear thread, and you wire our jaws shut.
And there was a . . . level, not only of information but of emotion in some of the things she uttered that I don’t think I could muster:
Yes, I did hear a noise outside, she whispered to me, but I took it for a possum or a raccoon, the rustle of an animal. When he came in, I said, “Hello, can I help you?” But let’s get to the good part, that’s what you’re dying to know, aren’t you? So you want to know what it was like? To die, like that? Well, when I looked into my killer’s face, which was too close, I saw God’s face, which was too far away. Though I could smell God’s breath, which was even more putrid than my killer’s. I called out to God to intercede, to mediate the dispute, but when the Almighty Fool did not respond, when I heard my own voice reflected back at me, echoing in the emptiness, merging with the voice of my killer—near the end I could not tell our voices apart—I saw God for what he was, or is or is not: not so much an absence, as an abscess, a festering Void, a gaping Hole from which creation pours forth. I saw that all of creation gets sucked back into that Hole. I looked up, past my killer’s innocent face—near the end I could not tell God and my killer apart—and saw I was being welcomed into the arms of an immense and merciful (or do I mean merciless?) Hole . . .
I hope you’re getting all this, she said to me and laughed. You should call this one “My Murder Was the Irrefutable Proof of God.”
Tim had been gone for most of this period but came back for a bit. He started sleeping in the bed in his office. He initially put it down to jetlag but eventually came out with it: “I can hardly bear to be around you. You’re acting really off, like you’re . . . far away. Whenever I get up in the night to take a leak, I see the light under your door. What are you doing? Look at those circles under your eyes. Are you getting any sleep?”
He was not mistaken; this . . . experience was having an impact on my sleep pattern that could not be considered positive.
“I think you need to talk to someone,” he said before he left for another month-long residency.
Didn’t he know that was the problem, that I was already talking too much, to someone, something?
There was a good week when I was utterly convinced this truly was Eun Kang. She must be biding her time to show herself to her killer, I thought; she’s waiting for the right moment to creep or seep into his cell, so she can hang him with the sturdy pink umbilical cords of her two boys.
It seemed equally conceivable I was the reason Eun Kang was lingering. She was putting pressure on me, until I got her story right, until the pressure was so extreme I would need to tell someone her story. The killer was of no interest to her; I was the one she was intent on haunting.
Toward the end of our . . . acquaintance, things went a little funny. I’ve heard that happens with Gwisin. They turn.
She would come but she wouldn’t say anything. I would sit there in bed for hours, waiting for her to speak, listening to her raspy breathing.
I suspected that I was now the object of Eun Kang’s wrath and she was beginning to . . . resent me for knowing too much. Or too little: If the Gwisin sends a message and the human fails to understand, the ghost may become somewhat aggressive.
Then, out of nowhere, she would spit out her sentiments at an alarming rate:
Death makes fiction of us all, she drooled in my ear.
The dead don’t give a shit about your eulogies or your elegies.
The fourth Fate is the worst Fate.
As far as I’m aware, Korean ghosts and ghosts in general ultimately leave, though some are reluctant to depart, even when they’ve had their revenge and their work is done.
Eung Kang left abruptly, but before she did she came to tell me this:
I’m bored with you, she said. And the world. I see it for the dull place it is. I’m heading off to the Underworld, so I can surf on its hearse-black sea. Besides, it’s a much safer place to raise two children.
And to answer yet another of your inane questions, of course I didn’t know. I didn’t wake up that Thursday morning with a bad feeling in my bones and then brush the feeling away. When I went to surf that afternoon, I had no idea that time in the ocean, its briny graceful waste, would be my last.
You think that’s why I was so crazy about the beach that summer? I’m not a fucking seer. I just wanted to catch some waves. But hey, didn’t I see you there? I was coming out of the ocean as you were heading in. Or was I heading in as you were coming out? I forget, but I remember seeing you and smiling, I recognized you from the deli, your unwelcoming face, like a house that’s been boarded up, but you didn’t recognize me. I must have been coming out of the water because you looked right at me, then, as if I were transparent, already a ghost, you looked right through me to the sea and its briny elemental grace.
That was a couple of months ago. I’m still, as they say, . . . processing the events. I don’t know if Eun Kang finished her task, attained a sense of completion. I don’t think she could decide if she needed me to shred her story, until it was unrecognizable, or perfect it, but she kept her promise. I haven’t heard from her since. I can’t say I’m not relieved. I’ve thought about going back to her house, but I don’t dare to, unless you want to come with me.
To restate my question from earlier, who was she? My doubts have returned. All along, I was just telling myself a story, right? The entire episode was an understandable side effect of watching one too many Asian horror movies, of reading and thinking too intently about such a morbid subject.
I filled that notebook. I transcribed her words so hastily, I could barely read my own handwriting. I no longer keep it on the bedside table. That seemed the sensible thing to do.
Eun Kang ceased talking to me, but that feeling I was telling you about, the heavy gray feeling that diffused into my heart one Thursday night in December, it’s still there. I never found out if it’s analogous to the feeling that transpired in Eun Kang’s heart—I meant to ask. It seems to have developed tiny hooks. I can feel its hooks as I’m talking to you. So I guess I’m still haunted, even if it’s a haunting of a linguistic nature.