Reseng cracked open a can of beer.
Seven-thirty in the morning. The laneways lined with four-storey, red-brick apartment blocks were jammed with people heading off to work. Reseng opened his window and lit a cigarette. The weather was strange. Weak rays of sunlight filtered down from one side of the sky, while a light rain fell from the other. Actually, the rain wasn’t so much falling as flying around. The morning commuters in ironed suits scowled up at the sky, unsure whether to open their umbrellas. Reseng took another gulp of beer in honour of those who had to go to work in weather this strange.
You might not think of beer as a breakfast drink, but in fact it’s perfect. If knocking back a can of beer after a hard day’s work makes you feel refreshed, rewarded and relaxed, then a can of beer in the morning is about feeling melancholic, fuzzy-headed, improper, and refusing to act like a responsible adult just because the sun’s come up. Reseng loved the feeling of irresponsibility that came with drinking beer for breakfast. The same irresponsibility that turned his sarcasm inward as he gazed out his window and thought, ‘Look at all of you, living life to the fullest. As for my life, to hell with it!’
Reseng took another swig. Guzzling beer while watching people go to work filled his head with surreal images. He pictured himself lying dead in a coffin and debating what to eat for dinner. Dead in a coffin, but his stomach growling as loudly as ever. How could this be? How on earth could a corpse be hungry? Dead Reseng was starving, but no one brought him any food. The funeral guests were all talking about him. ‘He really was a piece of shit, wasn’t he?’ ‘Yup, a complete arsehole.’ It didn’t stop. ‘I know it’s not right to say this in front of the deceased, but honestly he was such a prick. To hear a kid his age talking down to people so much older than him! And he never even thanked me for anything I did for him.’ It was Bear’s voice. Reseng wished he could punch Bear in the back of the head for talking shit about him, but he couldn’t. He was a corpse.
Reseng finished his cigarette, lit up another and swallowed an aspirin with a mouthful of beer. Aspirin, cigarette, beer. The inside of his head was heavy and hazy, like an enormous bank of fog had rolled in. At least once a year, anxiety would swoop down on him for no reason, and his mood would crash. Whenever that happened, Reseng started his mornings with a can of beer. He stayed indoors, turned on some music, curled up on the windowsill like a snail and drank beer all day.
Reseng drained the can and crumpled it, then tossed it onto his desk next to the other two he’d finished. Sitting beside the crumpled cans was the bomb he’d found inside his toilet. Reseng picked it up. It was smaller than a box of matches, so dainty that it had filled him with relief, of the what-harm-could-this-little-thing-do variety. But the guy who ran the meat-market hardware shop had taken one look at it and set him straight.
‘Where’d you say the bomb was?’
‘In my toilet.’
‘This would’ve blown your arse off.’
‘That tiny thing?’
‘The pressure is higher inside a toilet bowl. It’s like squeezing a firecracker in your hand when it goes off. Basically, when you sit down to take a shit, your arse forms a seal over the hole, creating the perfect conditions for this bomb to do maximum damage.’
‘Are you saying it could have killed me?’
‘Ever seen anyone survive without an arse?’
‘So it wasn’t just a threat or a warning.’
‘Not if it had gone off. But it’s hard to say if it would have. I’ve never seen one of these before. It’s waterproofed really well and has a unique chemical fuse that can sense when you take a shit. The amount of explosives is perfectly calculated to take your arse off. But it might have been a dud. Hard to say. Though I can tell it was made by an amateur, because pros don’t make the wiring this complicated. There’s no point.’
The guy held the bomb up to the light to examine it again.
‘It’s really ingenious!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who would make a bomb this cute? None of the guys I know are this creative. I’d love to meet this person.’
Reseng scowled. He’d run errands for this shop since he was twelve, which meant he’d known the owner for twenty years. And yet the guy didn’t so much as blink an eye at the thought of Reseng dead with his arse blown off, or at the tragic fact that Reseng might be on a plotter’s list. To him, Reseng was no different from his countless other regulars who’d ended up neutralised.
‘Anyway, I assume this isn’t the work of the government?’ Reseng asked.
‘Hard to say. Nowadays there are so many hired guns, companies and plotters that no one can keep track. What’d you do?’
‘I can’t count the reasons I should be dead by now. I’ve been in this business for fifteen years, after all.’ Reseng held out his hand, meaning shut up and give it back already.
‘Well, looks like you survived this one,’ the guy said, handing back the deactivated bomb.
‘Hooray for constipation.’
He’d found the toilet bomb about a week ago. When he stepped into his apartment, the smell was different. His cats, who normally raced straight for the door, had hung back. It was obvious someone had been inside. Reseng stood still for a moment to memorise the unfamiliar smell lingering in the air. Was that perfume? Cosmetics? Could it be body odour? But the smell was so faint he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. At any rate, an intruder who left a smell behind had to be an amateur. Pros never left a smell.
Reseng cautiously opened the shoe cabinet, took out a canister of forensic powder and sprayed it on the floor in front of the door. An unfamiliar shoe print appeared. A sneaker, about 250 millimetres in length. It belonged to either a woman or a very short man. There were no prints on the living room floor. The intruder had politely removed his or her shoes at the front door before entering.
‘How thoughtful,’ he muttered.
Reseng stepped into the living room and slowly looked around. If someone had been there, things would be either missing or misplaced. At first glance nothing looked any different. But then he noticed that the books stacked on his desk were in reverse order. Chu’s knife, which was always on the third shelf from the bottom, had descended to the second shelf, and the cat toy shaped like a fishing rod that he kept in the mail organiser was lying on the table. In the kitchen, a coffee cup was still wet and the tea towel was damp. Reseng picked up the coffee cup, sniffed it and held it up to the light. He snorted, dumbfounded. What had this person been up to?
The intruder had examined the books in Reseng’s reading stack one at a time, starting from the top. What kind of intruder had that much time on their hands? Why go to the trouble of sneaking in just to find out what he was reading? It made no sense. Not only that, but the intruder had handled a surprising number of his belongings for no apparent reason. Considering that even the cat toy had been taken out, the intruder must’ve tried to play with his cats, then gone into the kitchen, made a cup of coffee and washed the cup. What kind of crazy person does that?
Reseng had been gone no more than two hours. At two p.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he was at the swimming pool. He rarely skipped a workout. The intruder probably made sure he was at the pool before breaking and entering. They knew his exact movements. A plotter was behind this: the first thing plotters did was study their target’s movements. After Reseng left that day, the intruder had spent a leisurely two hours inside his home. He or she had left traces of their presence, not because they were an amateur, but because they just didn’t care. It was a message to Reseng: ‘Think long and hard about why I was here.’
Reseng stood in the middle of the living room. It took him a moment—it wasn’t an easy decision—but once he’d made up his mind, he turned on every light in the place and began ransacking the apartment. He inspected every inch of the wallpaper for tears or knife marks, then did the same for the ceilings and floors. He checked the inside of the stove, the gas lines, the cabinet under the sink, and the insides of the refrigerator and freezer. He upended every drawer, opened every box and searched the inside of the wardrobe, behind the bookshelf, inside the shoe cabinet and light fixtures, behind the wall clock and every corner of the cupboards. Then he examined the bed, the washing machine, the window frames, the curtains. Nothing.
Reseng looked out the window. The sun was going down. What if he was on a plotter’s hit list? His mind went blank. The inside of his head filled with smog. He had to think of something, but he felt as if he’d forgotten how to think. Someone had come into his home. Not just anyone’s home, but the home of an assassin. They wouldn’t have done it for fun. They had either planted a bomb or bugged the place.
Reseng began searching again, still with no clue as to what he was looking for. But this time he was much more thorough. He opened the coffee can, poured out the coffee and checked the bottom, took apart his Zassenhaus coffee grinder, emptied all of his spice jars and checked the insides, upended his garbage bin and sifted through every piece of garbage. He opened his computer, took out the components and checked them one by one, took apart his radio and TV set, pulled everything out of the freezer, ripped off the packaging, and even cut open the frozen fish and sliced open every frozen dumpling. He took all the shoes out of the shoe cabinet and turned the pockets of every article of clothing in the closet inside out. He pulled every book from its shelf and opened each one. He even opened every bill and letter, just in case there was something else in one of the envelopes.
Long after the sun had risen, Reseng was still taking things apart. For twenty-one hours straight, he ripped everything open and peeked inside without stopping to eat or sleep. His apartment looked like a bomb had already gone off, but he refused to stop. Now and then he wondered if maybe the intruder had left without leaving anything behind. But he didn’t care. His face filled with rage, he ripped and prised and wrenched, prodded and probed, and tossed his ruined belongings aside.
After gutting his wall clock, Reseng took a knife to the mattress. The grating of the blade against the metal springs made his skin crawl. He tore out a chunk of sponge, checked that there was nothing around it, and then hacked away at the mattress some more and tore out another chunk of sponge. He knew he was being stupid. But he kept going.
Sunlight crossed the verandah and illuminated Reseng’s face. He was crying. He gazed up at the sun through tear-filled eyes. Shame beamed down over his cheeks in tandem with the sun’s warmth. He looked down at his hands. The fingernails were ragged from all that plucking and prising, and the skin was bleeding from where he’d nicked it with the knife. His stomach growled. He’d spent twenty-one hours tearing his home apart nonstop, but now he had no strength left to make any food. He tossed aside the knife and screwdriver, leaned back against his bayoneted sofa and fell asleep.
He awoke in the afternoon. The sun was still shining. The room was filled with debris. He stared blankly at the mess he’d created. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he thought. But of the many, many voices inside his head, not a single one gave him an answer.
Reseng grabbed a garbage bag and started filling it with the objects he’d dismantled. Some were old; some were new. Some had sentimental value; others left him wondering how they’d got there in the first place. Reseng shoved all of it into the bag regardless. It took twenty 20-litre garbage bags to clean up his place. He put the bags in the dumpster in front of the building, and next to it the couch and broken mattress, the springs flopping every which way. If he were a target, then the plotter’s hired shadow would be watching right now. They might even take his garbage bags with them. But Reseng didn’t care. I don’t need this stuff anymore, so feel free to shove it up your arse, he thought.
Plotters never moved without a reason. He was certain he was a target. Could he survive this? Probably not. In all the time he’d been in the business, he’d never once seen someone evade the plotters. There were only those who died straightaway and those who managed to hold out slightly longer. But why the fuck am I a target? He sniggered to himself: it was a pretty stupid question. What he should’ve asked himself was: How did I make it this far? He’d lasted fifteen years in a business where the plotters made a point of regularly cleaning up after themselves. There were too many good reasons for him to be a target. If it weren’t for The Doghouse and Old Raccoon, Reseng would’ve been dead a long time ago. Thirty-two years old. Young compared to the average life span, but a long run for an assassin. His end was overdue. It was time for him to make like Old Orin in The Ballad of Narayama and bash his teeth out against a millstone and go into the mountains to die.
The first thing Reseng did when he came back inside was order ten boxes of beer. Whenever he was gripped by anxiety, whenever silent terror rose around him like a river in flood, whenever he found himself sinking into a bottomless swamp of depression, whenever he came home from a killing, and whenever he was confronted by a sticky situation, that old feeling of irresponsibility came over him and Reseng holed up at home and drank beer.
Beer Week. If he was going to drink cool, refreshing beer for a week straight, he’d have to do some preparation. Step one: throw out all the food in the fridge to make room for as many cans of beer as possible. Step two: order as much beer as he could drink. Step three: fill the fridge with beer. Step four: take the peanuts and dried anchovies out of the freezer and keep them handy so he would always be neither full nor hungry. Preparations complete. Now all he had to do was open the fridge, pull out a can of beer, pop the tab, guzzle it and crush the empty can.
He was a target. Shouldn’t he do something about that? The question occasionally crossed his mind mid-swig. But he kept swallowing. All he could do for now was: open fridge, take out beer, pop, guzzle, crush. Every now and then he chewed a few peanuts and stared at himself in the mirror while pissing in the toilet. Then he flushed and popped open another beer. Good thing I didn’t take apart the fridge, he thought, marvelling at his good sense.
He discovered the bomb two days into his bender. He had his head in the toilet, vomiting for the third time. Three or four rounds of vomiting were like a rite of passage for the proper observance of Beer Week. He threw up, drank more beer, threw up again and drank more beer. Eventually, his body got used to it and the vomiting stopped. The vomit in the toilet bowl consisted solely of yellow gastric fluids, beer and a few dried anchovy heads. He was in the middle of a dry heave when he spotted something stuck way down inside the hole at the bottom of the bowl. He stared at it for a long time before sticking his hand in and pulling out the object.
It was a tiny ceramic box. White like the rest of the toilet and made from a similar material, it wasn’t easy to distinguish at first glance. It reminded him of a hotel soap. He took a closer look. Definitely a bomb. The first thing he felt wasn’t shock or fear but relief. Not because there was anything good about it, but simply because what was supposed to be there finally was.
The phone rang. It was Jeongan, the tracker.
‘I asked around. They say these were pretty trendy in Belgium about seven or eight years ago.’
‘Toilet bombs were trendy?’
‘No, stupid! But what a great trend that would’ve been.’
‘Then what do you mean?’
‘They made pill-sized bombs—not big enough to take out a toilet, but enough to set off very tiny explosions inside the body, to look like medical accidents. They say the KGB used them to take out fat Russian politicians with pacemakers or insulin pumps.’
‘What does that have to do with this bomb?’
‘The basic structure is the same. The components are Belgian-made, and the fuse and sensor are both Belgian. Only the explosive is American—you can buy it from any junkyard. But it looks like it was assembled here, because the casing is Chinese. I’ve never seen such a mishmash. The bomb-maker must’ve ordered the parts from all over. You can’t find these on the black market, so they would’ve had to order it all online. Or they went to Belgium themselves to get it.’
‘What’s your point?’ Reseng said, getting irritated.
‘My point is that I can’t tell just from this who put it in your toilet.’
‘The parts have serial numbers on them!’
‘Hey, imbecile, if a staple had a serial number, would that mean you knew what else had been stapled? This was built from medical supplies!’
‘Then find out who built it.’
‘Do you have any idea how many bomb-makers there are? They hide out to avoid the cops. If you say you want to meet them, I’m sure they’ll all jump out dancing the can-can, singing, “Here I am!” But why are you so curious about this bomb anyway? It’s not like it was in your toilet.’
‘It was in my toilet! So keep looking!’
Reseng hung up and took another swig of beer. Jeongan would be turning in soon. He worked at night and slept during the day. Not because he was a night owl, but because most of the people he dealt with were only active at night. While the rest of the city was leaving for work, Jeongan was clocking off. Why did everyone in their line of work have to be so nocturnal? No one was forcing them to. It was exhausting, and the more tired you were, the more tired you got.
Reseng stroked the empty bomb casing. Jeongan had kept the components. He tilted his head and wondered who on earth would use such a silly little bomb. Had they meant for it to go off? Were they really hoping to see a dead man slumped in front of the toilet with his pants and underwear around his ankles and his arse blown off? Such a dainty bomb. It reminded him of the silver pill case Hanja kept in his pocket.
But it couldn’t have been Hanja. If Hanja had wanted to get rid of Reseng, he would’ve hired the Barber. For the past few years, he’d used the Barber every time he neutralised an assassin. The Barber neutralised them, and Bear cremated them. That was the cleanest method. Eventually, people might ask what had happened to the assassin and assume he was dead.
What’s Froggy been up to these days? He’s so talented. Is he taking a break?
Hey, you’re right. I haven’t seen him in forever. Maybe he’s dead?
Assassins went underground every now and then for their own safety, and would resurface after a long break. Sometimes a person you thought was dead would reappear looking perfectly healthy. And sometimes someone you were sure was alive never came back. But dead or alive, no one thought too deeply about it. They didn’t mourn, they didn’t get sad—and, what’s more, they weren’t the slightest bit curious.
Anyway, Hanja was simply too busy for a stunt like this. Nor was he witty or fun-loving enough to use such a ridiculous bomb. His sense of humour was shit. It wasn’t government spooks either. They weren’t the type to sign off on anything silly. Old-fashioned, they lacked imagination and were not at all flexible. Then who? Who put this damned bomb in his toilet? He couldn’t figure it out.
He took another swig of beer. He needed to think, but his head was a mess. What the hell’s wrong with you? he thought. Can’t you see your life is at the brink? But finding the bomb had not put a stop to Beer Week. He still had a can in his hand at all times.
He’d been in danger plenty of times before. He botched a job once, left evidence behind. Had a shadow watching his every move for a while. Even got a warning letter from the plotter for disobeying orders. But he’d never once been a target. No one had ever broken into his home before. Did Old Raccoon know? Up until a few years ago, a plotter would have needed Old Raccoon’s consent to kill Reseng. Was that no longer the case, now that Old Raccoon’s position in the industry was slipping? Or were they coming after Reseng and Old Raccoon at the same time?
But why such a ridiculous bomb?
Murder was quiet and simple in the plotting world. There were no huge explosions like in the movies, and rarely any messy car accidents or hails of bullets. It was as silent as snowfall in the night, as secretive as a cat’s footsteps. The killings almost never came to light. Since there was no murder case, there was no crime, no suspicion, no investigation. Naturally, there were also no loud news reports, no swarms of reporters, no cops or prosecutors. Only a quiet, melancholy funeral attended by clueless, sniffling family members. Or just a death with no funeral, witnessed by no one.
The rain suddenly grew heavy and splattered on the windowsill. Reseng got up from his chair to close the window. One side of the sky was still sunny. Strange weather. He finished his beer, crushed the can and set it on his desk. Then he opened a drawer, pulled out a bag of marijuana that Trainer had given him all those years ago, and stared at it. He could still hear Trainer saying, ‘It’s not the good stuff. This is the cheap stuff that Indian coolies smoke to shake off their fatigue.’ Reseng rolled a joint, but couldn’t bring himself to smoke it. It brought back too many bad memories, and sad ones, and filled him with regret for the mistakes he’d been too stupid to regret at the time. The memories he tried to keep tucked away would come creeping back like a bad smell until his whole body reeked of it.
X
The day, ten years ago, that Reseng had decided to try working in a factory, the weather had been as strange as today: raindrops flying around in an otherwise sunny sky. Reseng was following Old Raccoon’s orders and lying low outside the capital. It was a small, provincial manufacturing town belching smoke and lined with tiny factories. Reseng had rented a second-floor studio there and had been looking out the window at laundry on a clothesline. As the clothes whipped around in the wind, taking a beating from the rain and the sun at the same time, they had reminded him of Pierrot the clown: comical yet sad.
The streets were deserted during the day; everyone in that quiet, gloomy town seemed to be employed in the factories. In the early mornings, the streets flooded with bicycles and scooters, like something you’d see in China, and at lunchtime they bustled again with countless workers heading out to eat. The rest of the time the town was desolate, as if the inhabitants had suddenly emigrated to Mars.
Reseng sat at the windowsill and stared at the fake ID that Mun, the forgery expert, had made for him. He was in the middle of memorising the information he needed to live under his new name: Jang Yimun, male, twenty-four years old. Not much to memorise; it really didn’t take much to live under someone else’s name in a new town.
As Reseng was reciting his fake resident registration number, a group of laughing factory girls passed under his window. They looked bright and happy. His eye was drawn to the short one in the middle. She had a cute, round face, and had the most exaggerated body language of the four. She twisted around and wept actual tears as she laughed and said, ‘Oh, man, that’s too funny, that’s hilarious!’ while slapping the shoulder of the girl next to her. Her laughter echoed down the street. Reseng stuck his head out the window and watched as they went into the factory at the end of the street, laughing the whole way. Because of their bright smiles, he couldn’t help thinking that the factory looked as wondrous as Willy Wonka’s.
The next day Reseng applied for a job there. The Admin Section Chief had a face like a crowded balance sheet, as if he’d been born to oversee the administration of a factory. He scrutinised Reseng’s resume and asked, ‘Geumseong High? So that’s, what, a liberal arts high school?’
Reseng nodded.
‘If you went to a liberal arts high school, why didn’t you go to university? You weren’t an activist or anything like that, were you?’
Reseng laughed at the word activist. He wanted to say that he hadn’t even gone to elementary school, let alone university, but instead he just scratched his head, made a dopey face and said his marks were bad.
‘How bad?’ the Admin Section Chief asked.
‘Almost the worst. But not the worst-worst.’
‘Worst or worst-worst, you still need a brain to work in a factory. Nowadays you can’t do anything without a brain. Hmm…Twenty-four…Did your army service?’
‘I was exempt, sir.’
‘What? Okay, fine, so you’ve got no brains and you’re some kind of cripple. Then what have you been doing all this time?’
Flustered, Reseng replied, stammering, that after finishing high school he’d worked on some construction sites here and there. The Admin Section Chief narrowed his eyes in suspicion, so Reseng launched into a rambling explanation of how he hadn’t wanted to work in a factory and had gone into construction instead, but it hadn’t paid as well as he’d thought it would, and he got tired of having to be on the move all the time, and so he’d decided to settle down and learn a skill. He’d broken out into a sweat and was sure he’d made a mess of his story. But the Admin Section Chief nodded and chuckled.
‘I swear, those foremen. They keep dragging off all the young guys with their sweet-talk about how good construction wages are, but it’s bullshit. Every guy thinks he’s going to make himself a little nest egg right away, but there’s no security and the cash is just a pipe dream. The monthly pay here may be smaller than what you get at a construction site, but no one’s going to bilk you out of a paycheck, you get severance and the overtime is pretty good. As long as you put in the work, you’ll save money. And you don’t have to work on Sundays. What more can you ask?’
The Admin Section Chief was preaching to the choir.
‘Work hard!’ he said, and he clapped Reseng on the shoulder, looking like the sort of pillar of industry you would’ve seen on one of those Daehan News newsreels back in the seventies.
‘Yes, sir! I’ll do my best!’ Reseng responded vigorously, feeling like he’d suddenly become a pillar of industry himself.
Reseng was assigned straightaway to Work Team Three, where he did chrome-plating. The work didn’t require any special skills. All he had to do was dip a die-cast metal frame into a chrome bath for ten seconds, pull it back out, give it a good shake and let it dry. Despite what the Admin Section Chief had said, it was the kind of work that didn’t require the use of a brain at all: even a monkey could have mastered it after ten minutes of instruction. But no one else wanted to do the work because the chrome bath smelled foul, and because it was rumoured that it would ruin your skin and leave you in agony for the rest of your life, or else reduce your sperm count and render you sterile.
Reseng worked on chrome-plating for two straight months, until a new employee was finally hired and took his place. Chrome-plating required him to grip a heavy, unwieldy frame with rubber-gloved hands and teeter forward on his toes, as if he were wringing wet laundry over a bucket, dip the frame carefully into the electroplating solution and pull it out exactly ten seconds later. What he hated most about the work was how stupid he looked while leaning over the bath. He had to stand with his legs apart and his bum sticking way out—if the God of Chrome-Plating himself had come down to earth he would have looked just as stupid.
Not long after he’d started, as Reseng was carefully shaking a frame he’d just pulled from the solution, trying to keep the liquid chrome from spattering, the woman with the cute, round face who had drawn him to the factory in the first place came over to him. She stood with her hands clasped behind her back, watching him in evident amusement.
‘What’re you working so hard for? Don’t you need to eat?’ she said.
Reseng gave her a befuddled look. She pointed to the clock on the factory wall: 12:20 p.m.
‘You don’t get overtime for working through lunch,’ she said.
Her voice was just as cheerful as the day she’d walked past his window, filling the street with her laughter. He took off his gloves.
‘Have you eaten?’ he asked.
‘Not yet. I just got back from running an errand for the boss.’
‘Then, if you don’t mind my asking, would you care to have lunch with me?’
She stared at him.
‘Why are you talking like that? You sound like a preacher.’
The factory was too small to have its own cafeteria. The workers ate at a restaurant down a side street crowded with other tiny factories and small apartment buildings. She gestured to Reseng that they should head out. He nodded and pinned his rubber gloves to a wire and took off his vinyl apron and hung it on a coat rack. Then he lathered his hands with soap and scrubbed them for a full minute. As she watched him scrub, she sighed impatiently.
‘You’ve been here less than a month, right?’ she asked as they were leaving.
‘About three weeks.’
‘And you’re still on chrome-plating?’
He nodded.
‘They say it lowers your sperm count if you do it for too long. Each time you dip your hands in, several hundred sperm die. Can you imagine how many are dead after a day’s work? I can’t even count that high. At that rate, it’s practically a massacre. A massacre! I don’t know how they can make people do that work.’
She looked as if she was talking about an actual genocide she had witnessed. But Reseng figured she wasn’t really worried about the number of sperm inside his testicles.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve got plenty of sperm. Men produce over 400 billion sperm over a lifetime. Each time a man ejaculates, something like 150 million sperm come shooting out. So that’s plenty. No matter how hard I try, I can’t have sex three thousand times in a row. But it could be a problem for women. They only produce an average of four hundred eggs total in their lifetime.’
She stopped and looked at Reseng in shock.
‘Sex? Ejaculation? How dare you talk about that in front of a lady!’ She glared at him.
Embarrassed, he nervously held up his hands.
‘Sincerely, I…I didn’t mean to offend you.’
‘Sincerely?’ She broke into laughter. ‘Aren’t you kind of young to talk like that?’
She started walking ahead. He tagged along behind.
‘But is it true that women only get four hundred eggs in their lifetime?’ she asked.
‘I read it in a book.’
‘A book, huh?’ She looked incredulous.
He tilted his head in confusion. He didn’t understand the tone of her question.
‘What you really mean is you read it in a girly magazine that you bought at the bus station, right?’ she asked with a laugh.
‘It’s explained in detail in Richard Cardison’s Conquering Infertility. He’s a gynecologist, and according to what he wrote, the number of eggs a woman has is determined by her DNA. Some women have 423 eggs, some have 500, some have 350, you know, and so on.’
She stopped again and stared at him, but this time she looked dazed.
‘Then how many eggs have I already wasted?’ she murmured.
She grew quiet. They continued down the street without speaking. Reseng felt uncomfortable, and she probably felt the same. She was sending him signals that she wanted him to say something, anything, but he couldn’t think of what to say. When they were passing the window of his rented room, from where he’d seen her for the first time, he pointed up at it.
‘That’s where I live.’
She looked up. ‘Isn’t it expensive?’
‘Not really. Three hundred and fifty thousand won a month with no deposit.’
She stared at him in shock.
‘What? How can someone who makes less than a million won a month after taxes say three hundred and fifty thousand isn’t expensive? Don’t you also have to pay electricity, water and sewerage, gas and other utilities on top of the rent? Do you cook your own food at least?’
‘I just moved in…’
‘You eat out?’
Reseng nodded.
‘Twice a day?’
‘Sometimes I have instant ramen at home.’
‘Have you managed to save any money at all? Why are men so immature? They should be saving their hard-earned cash, not burning it with every cigarette they smoke and flushing it away with all the booze they drink. Why do you act like you’re living someone else’s life? If you keep it up, you’ll never own your own home.’
She’d turned suddenly furious. Reseng felt like a scolded child, but everything she was saying sounded more or less correct.
‘Can I go inside?’ she asked, gesturing up at his room with her chin.
Surprised, Reseng asked, ‘Where? My room?’
‘Yes.’ She looked completely nonchalant.
‘Why do you want to go in my room?’
‘I want to see how you live.’
Before he could say anything, she was bounding up the stairs. He followed without protest. She stopped at his door and looked at him. He stepped in front of it to block her.
‘Not today,’ he said hesitantly. ‘I mean, how about if I officially invite you over next time?’
‘Look, I think you’ve got the wrong idea. This is not a date, there is no officially inviting each other over. All I’m doing is checking your room, as your factory elder, to see whether or not you’re cut out for the factory lifestyle. It might seem like there’s nothing to it, but if your daily life isn’t shipshape, then you won’t do well at work.’
The look on her face really was that of a stern factory elder. It was the look of a sergeant inspecting troops for combat readiness, a persnickety dormitory leader preparing for a cleaning inspection. Reseng stared at her in discomfort. She stared right back with a look that said if he knew what was good for him he’d open that door. He had no choice. He opened the door.
Since he didn’t have much in the way of household goods, there was no mess—only the blanket, futon and pillow he’d bought at the local market, the low table that had been in the room when he moved in, an electric kettle to make ramen and instant coffee, and a single bag of clothes he’d brought from the city. The cabinet under the sink was stacked with instant noodle cups, and next to his pillow and on the table were the books that he’d either brought with him from Seoul or bought at the local bookshop: Albert Camus’ Summer and The Plague, Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, Martin Monestier’s Suicides, Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon.
‘What? This place is empty!’ She kept looking around.
‘I told you I just moved in,’ he said, plucking a towel from the floor and hanging it up.
‘Yeah, but there are still certain basic necessities you have to have. Otherwise, you end up spending more money on little things.’
Reseng nodded.
She glanced at the books on his table and asked, ‘You don’t watch TV?’
‘No.’
She gave herself a quick tour of the room, bathroom and kitchen, as if she were a prospective renter. She even turned on the bathroom tap to check the water pressure and opened every single kitchen drawer. She kept muttering things like, ‘Wow, how do you not have any bowls?’ and ‘This place is hooked up to the city gas line? I guess that’s because it’s such an expensive neighbourhood.’ As she was doing her inspections, Reseng glanced around and felt satisfied that the room wasn’t too dirty. Just then, she let out a shout—more like a scream—from the broom cupboard.
‘What is all this?’
She was holding up a pair of Reseng’s underwear. The cardboard box he’d stuffed full of dirty socks, underwear, T-shirts and other clothes that needed to be washed was sitting wide open. He rushed over, snatched the underwear from her hand and shoved it back into the box. While he was hurriedly closing the flaps, she noticed the unopened packages of socks and underwear piled high on the shelf.
‘Did you own an underwear shop that went out of business? Why do you have all of this?’
‘I don’t have a washing machine.’
‘Then wash it by hand. Are you saying you wear your socks and underwear once and throw them away? Seriously, do you have any brains at all?’
Now she was angry. Of course he wasn’t planning to throw the dirty clothes away. But he wasn’t exactly planning on squatting in the bathroom and scrubbing it all by hand either. To tell the truth, he’d been so tired and distracted that he hadn’t given any thought at all to what he should do with his dirty underwear.
She glared at him, aghast. He looked up at the ceiling, his face crimson.
‘Do you have a woman to wash your underwear for you?’
Her voice sounded strange. He looked at her quizzically.
‘I’m not saying I’m interested in you. It just burns me up to see someone who doesn’t understand the value of money. But I wouldn’t want your girlfriend to get the wrong idea.’
He had no idea what she meant. ‘I don’t have a woman, but…’
She opened the box and started filling a black shopping bag from underneath the shelf with Reseng’s dirty underwear. Shocked, he tried to stop her, but she slapped the back of his hand. It stung. He stepped back. She stuffed all his laundry into the bag and stood up.
Pointing her finger in his face, she said, ‘Keep only two sets of those new socks and underwear and take the rest back for a refund. Got it?’
‘I have to have underwear,’ Reseng said with a pout.
She tapped his face with the laundry bag.
‘There’s a year’s worth of underwear in here as long as you wash it.’
By the time they left and headed back to the street, there was only fifteen minutes left of their lunch break.
‘I bet you’re hungry,’ she said.
‘I’m okay. I can skip a meal now and then.’
She disappeared into a corner store and came out with two cartons of banana-flavoured milk and a snack cake. She held out the cake and one of the milk cartons. Though it wasn’t much, he suddenly felt incredibly indebted to her. He thanked her and accepted the snacks. They sat on a bench in front of the shop to eat.
‘Weather’s nice,’ she said, looking up at the sky.
He looked up too. ‘Yeah, it is.’
‘Laundry dries really well on a day like this.’ She gave the bag of dirty clothes a squeeze.
The next day at the factory she acted as if she didn’t know him. He tried to wave hello, but she blushed and kept walking to her section. He told himself it was because she was with their co-workers. But even when they bumped into each other in an empty hallway, she merely dipped her head and said nothing. She worked inside on the production line, while Reseng worked outside in a prefab shed where all the plating and painting were done. But in such a small factory, they had plenty of opportunity to bump into each other. Every time, she looked flustered and kept her distance from him, or hurried past, her shoulders hunched.
The next day and the next day, it was the same. He waited outside the gate for her after work, but she came out in a gaggle of co-workers, making it impossible for him to approach her. Even if she had left work alone, he would’ve had no idea what to say to her. What could he say? Please give back my underwear?
On Friday night, Reseng was lying in bed when there was a knock at his door. He opened it and there she was, holding the shopping bag with both hands, her head bent. When he greeted her, she thrust the bag into his hands without looking at him.
‘I gave it a lot of thought and realised I went too far,’ she said, her head still lowered, her voice soft and trembly. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you.’
‘You didn’t have to come all this way just to say that. But since you’re here, come in and have some tea.’
He opened the door wider. She shook her head. He started to step outside, but she shook her hands and stopped him.
‘Don’t come out. I’ll just go.’
She turned and went quickly back down the hallway. He watched open-mouthed as she rushed away, her small shoulders hunched. What had happened to the feisty, intrepid woman who’d shoved all that dirty underwear into the shopping bag? When he heard her footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs, he went back in and closed the door. He opened the bag. Inside were stacks of neatly folded underwear. He took a pair out and sniffed it. It smelled like a freshly laundered cotton sheet that had dried in the warm, afternoon sun. Just then, it hit him: her kindness was nothing more than genuine compassion for a foolish, pathetic young man who spent half his monthly pay on rent and utilities and the other half on cigarettes, booze, instant noodles and underwear. He laughed. Oh, so she wasn’t hitting on me? But he felt grateful for her compassion. Regardless of whether it was pity or mercy, he’d never received anything like that from a stranger before.
He got up and ran out after her. Five hundred metres down the street, he spotted her. When he caught up to her, he tapped her on the shoulder.
As he gasped for air, he asked, ‘Want to see a movie this weekend?’
A month later they moved in together. Reseng didn’t have much to move to her place. He’d told the factory he was twenty-four, but in fact he was twenty-two. You didn’t have to be a philosopher to know there were millions of reasons for a twenty-two-year-old man and a twenty-one-year-old woman to move in together. They could fall in love while bandaging a cut for each other. They could fall for each other while sharing a warm goldfish-shaped pastry from a food cart. They could even find themselves in love while mid-bounce on a pogo stick. So there must have been other couples on this beautiful planet called Earth who’d fallen in love over a bag of dirty underwear and decided to live together.
She turned out to be unimaginably good at housekeeping. Whether it was cooking or cleaning or laundering or ironing or sewing, she did everything quickly and efficiently, and though she seemed to do it all in a half-hearted way, it was always perfect. She would take one look at the clothes Reseng had struggled to fold, the edges never quite lining up, make a face and refold it all when Reseng stepped away for a second. She would oversleep, and yet even while rushing to wash her hair and get ready for work, she would somehow manage to set the breakfast table with soup, fresh greens and a grilled fish.
‘First we’ll save money. Then we’ll get married. If you and I both work and save up carefully for twenty years, we’ll have enough to buy a nice apartment.’
‘Twenty years?’ he said in shock.
What she was telling him was that in order to escape the tiny studio where they paid monthly rent, to move into another studio with a lump-sum deposit, and then escape that to buy their own apartment, which would still be no bigger than his left nostril, he would have to spend the next twenty years doing that godawful chrome-plating. By then, there wouldn’t be a single sperm left in Reseng’s testicles.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’re barely twenty-one, I’m barely twenty-two. Don’t you think we’re a little young to be thinking about a life that grim and boring?’
‘All I ever think about at the factory is getting married. I imagine married life while I’m tightening screws. I picture having a pretty baby and watching him or her grow up. Seriously, just the thought of it fills my heart with joy and excitement. Otherwise, what’s the point of suffering like this? It would be meaningless.’
All she ever talked about was married life. Every chance she got, she talked about children, houses, gardens, kitchen appliances. For Reseng, married life sounded like a futuristic world in an animated movie, but she looked so serious and happy that he simply nodded his head and agreed.
After breakfast, they rode their bicycles to work. She had bought his bicycle for him. ‘Bikes are great. You get good exercise, and you save money. Feel free to use the bus fare you save as spending money.’ She’d said it like she was granting him some huge favour. ‘No man would ride this,’ he’d said, giving the front tyre a kick. ‘This is a woman’s bike. Everyone at the factory will laugh at me.’ His bike had no gears and an enormous basket—a pink one, at that—big enough to hold twelve kittens.
It turned out it was good exercise. Her place was at the top of a steep hill about a hundred metres off the hilly main road. On market days she would fill the twelve-kitten-capacity basket with tofu, green onions, radishes, onions, carrots, a sack of rice, fatty slices of pork for kimchi stew, and freshly cleaned and chopped fish. She was so methodical about packing the basket that she could have fitted in a bear cub as well if she had wanted to. While Reseng dripped with sweat trying to pedal the bicycle back up the hill, she was licking an ice cream and looking radiant.
‘You should’ve bought me a cart instead,’ he would grumble.
‘I’ve always wanted to do this,’ she would say with a huge smile.
The factory folks’ reactions to his pink basket were even stronger than he’d expected. When he parked it outside the factory, they crowded around and took turns making fun of him.
‘I never would’ve guessed you had so much flair,’ the Admin Section Chief said.
His work team leader tapped the basket and said, ‘Oh, man, if you’re riding this to work, how’s your mother getting to market?’
One co-worker who’d never once spoken to him suddenly approached him. The man kept starting to say something and then stopping, but finally looked as if he couldn’t control his curiosity any longer.
‘Please don’t take this the wrong way. I just couldn’t help wondering.’ The look on the man’s face was very serious.
‘What is it?’
‘There’s a rumour going around that you’re saving up for a sex change operation. Is it true?’
As the stories spread out of control, even workers at neighbouring factories started to talk, until finally the Admin Section Chief asked him, half-jokingly, ‘Don’t you think it’s time you did something about it?’ Reseng had no choice but to hang a sign on the front of his basket that read, The rumours are not true. I am not getting an operation. And I’m already circumcised. He kept it on there for three days straight.
And yet, thanks to the bicycle, he finally became friends with his co-workers. The work got much easier and he started to enjoy himself. His team leader transferred him to the more sophisticated job of drilling holes in copper plates, which paid two hundred thousand won more per month than chrome-plating, and even used his spare time at work to teach Reseng how to trim metal using a lathe. Each time he scraped grease from his hands after work or brushed metal filings off his apron and hung it on the clothesline or laughed as he watched his co-workers play soccer with a paper cup during their breaks, Reseng felt he had finally become a true member of the factory world. He’d gained a large family overnight.
Now whenever they bumped into each other at the factory, Reseng and the woman shared shy, clandestine smiles. After work they rode home in separate directions so no one would catch on. She took a short cut while Reseng went the long way, but somehow he always arrived first. He would open the door and wait for her. She’d come riding up the hill and he’d take her bike and lock it up for her. Then they would have sex.
Afterwards they ate dinner and watched TV. She liked variety shows. Every time someone on TV made a joke, she rolled on the floor laughing and said, ‘Oh, man, that guy is too funny, that’s hilarious!’
Reseng stared straight-faced at the screen and wondered what on earth was so funny.
‘Why am I not laughing? Am I too stupid to get it?’
‘Yeah, you’re too stupid,’ she said in between laughs.
Reseng thought maybe she was right.
At nine o’clock, she sat at the desk to study.
‘I passed the middle school exam last year. Now I need to prepare for the high school one. How far did you get? I only made it to the first year of middle school. My father wouldn’t let me keep going.’
‘On my resumé I put that I finished high school, but I never even went to elementary school.’
‘Liar,’ she said, looking askance at him.
While she studied, he lay down and read Demons by Dostoyevsky. It was a big book, and a boring one.
‘Is that fun to read?’ she asked.
‘The characters have really long names. For instance, the main character’s mother is Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, and his tutor is Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Each time a new person appears, it takes well over a line just to say their name. So, no, it’s not that fun. Not with this many names to remember.’
‘Then why read it if it’s not fun? You’re the only person I know who reads such big books.’
‘I don’t read for any particular reason. It’s like you and your TV shows. I just don’t know what else to do with my free time.’
At eleven, she would start to nod off. Her head dipped lower and lower until her forehead knocked against the desk. It was sweet. Reseng tapped her on the shoulder and told her to go to bed. She looked at him, confused, and said she wasn’t sleeping, that was just her trick for memorising the thing she’d just read. She shook her head, saying the test wasn’t far off now, opened her eyes wide and resumed reading. Then about three seconds later, her head started to bob again. When her face was completely buried in the old, government-issued textbook, Reseng put down his book and carried her to the futon. He pushed the small desk to one side, turned off the light, climbed under the blanket and wrapped his arm around her. She wiggled closer and pushed her bum right up against him, took his hand in both of hers and brought it up to her cheek, and then nodded as if all was now as it should be. That was her favourite sleeping position. She told him nothing made her happier than being held by the person she loved with his hand pressed to her cheek.
‘What did you do before this?’ she asked, half-asleep.
‘I worked on different construction sites for a few years.’
‘Ha! Liar. You don’t have the hands of a construction worker. You’re such a shady character. Seriously shady.’ She sounded like she was talking in her sleep.
Every now and then he felt a tear slide down her cheek and over the back of his hand. Some nights she cried a lot. He would breathe deeply like he was asleep and watch the moonlight tiptoe across the room. Eventually she would stop crying, and Reseng would fall asleep too.
But the next morning she was always cheerful and full of energy, as if nothing had happened. She hummed as she brushed her teeth and washed her hair and set the breakfast table. After eating, she said, ‘I’ll take the usual route today. Don’t follow me like you did last time,’ and then jumped on her bike and headed to work.
Those were the days. Reseng was getting better and better at his job. His team leader asked what he thought about becoming a certified lathe technician. ‘A man’s got to have a skill. With that you can make a living anywhere. If you pass the written test, I’ll personally train you for the practical test.’
On Friday evenings, the factory workers split into teams to play pool. Their rule was that the losing team had to pay for both the pool hall and the alcohol, and they were very strict about that rule, which meant that pool on Friday nights was a serious and gripping affair. After the pool hall, they grilled pork skin over coal briquettes and drank soju. When the Admin Section Chief was there, they complained about the boss, and when he wasn’t there, they complained about him. He seemed to know that, because he tried his best never to miss either the pool-playing or the drinking.
Meanwhile, the job that Reseng had botched never made the news. The incident seemed to have been smoothed over thanks to some easygoing public officials who didn’t want to make their jobs more complicated than they had to be. He decided that, as long as it never got out and everything slipped silently back to normal, the plotters and their clients wouldn’t be too disappointed. But that was just his own opinion. If the plotter decided that he couldn’t let someone who did such shoddy work live, then Reseng was a dead man. But half a year had gone by without any contact from Old Raccoon.
Finally, around his eighth month of working at the factory, he received word. He came home to find a letter stuck in the door. It wasn’t sent through the mail; someone had delivered it personally. He opened it with trembling hands.
終結 歸家.
It was Old Raccoon’s handwriting. The letter contained only those four words: ‘It’s over, come home.’ Reseng wondered what exactly was over and where he was supposed to come home to. He couldn’t quite imagine having a home somewhere that wasn’t here.
The following afternoon, Reseng called Old Raccoon.
‘I’d like to stay here a little longer.’
After a long silence, Old Raccoon asked, ‘The factory girl, she’s nice?’
Reseng hesitated before saying yes.
‘That’s fine, then. If you’re sure you don’t want to return to this line of work, stay there.’
He didn’t sound critical, cynical or angry. In fact, it was the first time Reseng had ever heard Old Raccoon sound warm. Reseng stood with the phone to his ear. Stay there. He couldn’t quite figure out what those words really meant. Factory workers were pouring into the street on their way to lunch. Reseng’s woman was with them. She winked at him. One of the guys tapped Reseng on the shoulder as he walked by and asked why he wasn’t joining them. Reseng covered the phone with his hand and said, ‘I’ll catch up.’ She turned to look at him too, and he smiled and waved for her to go ahead. She smiled back and kept walking. Reseng brought the phone up to his ear again.
‘It really is okay if I stay?’ he asked.
‘Your name there is Jang Yimun?’
‘Yes.’
‘Live by that name. I’ll erase the name you had here. That way you won’t have any problems.’
With that he hung up.
Reseng came out of the phone booth and stared at the factory workers in the street. I’ll erase the name you had here. That way you won’t have any problems. What kind of problems was Old Raccoon talking about? It was April. Cherry trees were in bloom all down the street. He hadn’t realised until that moment that they were cherry trees. Not that it mattered. Sakura, the flower that wilts the moment it blooms. For some reason that line of poetry he’d read somewhere was stuck in his head. He looked down at his hands, hardened from eight months of factory work. As he stroked his calluses, he murmured, ‘My name was Jang Yimun,’ his voice sounding like he’d just made a great discovery. He stared at the trees and thought about the name Reseng. It had been his for so long, and now it was about to be erased. He wondered what it meant to erase a name. Sakura, the flower that wilts the moment it blooms.
He went back to the factory. He did not eat lunch. There was a stack of unfinished work at his station, so he turned on the milling machine and continued drilling four holes into the copper plates. After about twenty minutes, he had finished. He blew on the holes, brushed away the metal shavings, held the plates up to the light. Nodded in satisfaction. After restacking the plates to one side, he swept up the bits of copper scattered around his workstation and poured them into the recycling bin.
Reseng washed his hands and packed his belongings. After looking around to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, he snuck into the office and removed his résumé from the Admin Section Chief’s filing cabinet. Not that it mattered what happened to it. His name and resident registration number were also in the payroll book and on the time sheets. But he only took the résumé. He crumpled it up, shoved it in his pocket and left. On his way out, he pictured the factory without him in it. What would change if he were not there? Probably nothing. With or without him, the machines would keep on whirring, day in and day out.
Reseng rode home. He opened the door and looked around at the cramped room where he’d lived for the last six months. The time he’d spent there felt like it had happened long, long ago. He started packing the bag he’d brought with him from Seoul, but his belongings had increased since then. There was far too much to fit in the bag. He put everything he’d acquired since moving in with the woman into a garbage bag and threw it away in the next street. Then he put the shirts she’d washed for him, his spare set of work overalls and his underwear into a black shopping bag and stuck it in a used-clothing donation bin. Back at the room, he inspected every nook and cranny. There had to be something else he should get rid of. He looked around anxiously and started wiping down everything he had ever touched. When he was done, he asked himself why he’d had to erase his fingerprints. But none of the countless faces inside Reseng offered an answer.
He left her no note or explanation. He simply packed his things and left. Halfway down the street, he hid and stared for a long time at the tiny studio where he’d spent half a year of his life. The sun began to set, and he saw her peddling hard up the hill, her basket filled with bean sprouts, tofu and green onions. As usual, she parked her bike next to his and went inside. About five minutes later, she came running out. She looked confused. She stood motionless out the front until the sun had set and the streetlights came on. Reseng hid in the dark like a rat and watched as she stood there frozen. When she finally tired and went inside, Reseng dragged his bag the rest of the way down the hill. He returned to Seoul and burned the ID card belonging to Jang Yimun.
X
The rain grew heavier. The sunbeams that had streamed down between the clouds had all disappeared. Reseng finished his beer, crumpled the can and threw it on the floor next to the hundred or so others. He took a moment to admire the varied shapes of the crushed cans before grabbing a fresh can from the fridge. The one sane voice among the many inside Reseng’s head spoke to him: What are you thinking? Death has crept right up on your arse, and all you’re doing is drinking beer? But Reseng popped the tab anyway. The can sighed, exhaling its carbonation. He smirked. Since when does a can of beer sigh with regret? He took a sip and wondered why he’d bothered to come back. If he’d stayed at the factory, he wouldn’t have had to tremble in fear at a stupid bomb in his toilet. He would not have had to live this life of constant, compulsory murder.
The night after his first kill after returning to Seoul, he had asked Old Raccoon, ‘Am I going to end up killing more and more people?’
‘No, you’ll kill fewer and fewer. But you’ll make more and more money.’
‘How is that possible?’
‘The better you get at it, the more valuable the people you kill will be.’
But Old Raccoon had been wrong about that. The price of assassinations had fallen. And as their price fell, the value of beautiful, worthy people also fell. The result of which was that great people were dying in larger numbers and more easily than before. It takes countless legends to produce a hero Achilles, but only one idiot prince Paris to kill him. In that case, how many would it take to kill an idiot prince?
Reseng looked at the bomb sitting on the desk. The guy at the hardware shop had warned him, ‘If this was planted by government spooks, you’re better off putting it back in your toilet and dying. They don’t mess around.’ He’d said it as a joke, but it wasn’t. Once one of them made the list, everyone else hoped for them to die quietly. Fighting only made things worse for everyone. Detectives would notice something fishy and start sniffing around, which made plotters antsy. If Reseng was on a government hit list, no one would help him. How would you prefer to die? Reseng asked himself. One of the voices inside him murmured mockingly, At least you know Bear does a good job. Reseng drained his beer, crushed the can nervously and tossed it aside.
Don’t worry, he thought. No one dies that easily. Some people have lived thirty years with a bullet lodged in their brain. Men have been rescued from desert islands after surviving for a week with a harpoon through their bellies. People have drunk stagnant water from rotten tree trunks, chewed on cactus stalks, drunk their own urine and eaten the contents of the stomachs of dead animals while crossing deserts. A shipwrecked woman was once rescued after drifting for a month and surviving on her boyfriend’s heart, kidneys, liver and large intestine. There was even a case where a doctor had issued a death certificate, the undertaker had cleaned and shrouded the body, and the coffin lid was being nailed shut, when the person inside suddenly awoke and started pounding like crazy on the coffin lid. Life can be a surprising and cruel and disgusting thing.
Reseng opened the fridge and pulled out the last can of beer. He cracked it open and guzzled it down in one gulp, then crumpled the can and tossed it on the floor. Now he could leave. Beer Week was over.
The next morning, when Reseng stepped into The Doghouse, the cross-eyed librarian was gone. On her desk was a little sign that read: ‘On Holidays.’ He assumed it was true because her soft toys and office supplies were still there. But did The Doghouse give librarians holiday leave? Maybe the others had simply been fired before they’d had a chance to use it. Reseng went to the study.
Old Raccoon was at his desk, reading out loud as always. Reseng set the bomb casing in front of him.
‘This was in my toilet. It’s handmade, and the parts are Belgian.’ Old Raccoon peered at the bomb casing through his reading glasses.
‘Who do you think put it there?’ Old Racoon asked.
‘I don’t have the slightest idea. Do you?’
‘I have too many. Considering how you’ve lived, it’d be strange if someone didn’t want you dead.’
Old Raccoon sounded like he was talking about somebody else. Reseng hated the way he pretended to be so indifferent. It wasn’t like Reseng was arguing that he didn’t deserve to die, nor was he pleading to be saved and claiming how unfair it was. All he’d asked was who might have done this to him.
‘Do you know any plotters who use this type of bomb?’ he asked, indignant.
For the briefest second, Old Raccoon’s expression changed. The look that flashed over his face said that he definitely knew something, and that he was very amused.
‘None of the plotters I know plant bombs in toilets. And they’re not the type to play practical jokes.’
‘So it’s just a warning?’
He glared. ‘Why would they waste a warning on the likes of you?’
Reseng didn’t know what to say to that. Old Raccoon lit a cigarette and exhaled a long cloud of smoke. Then, to Reseng’s consternation, he turned back to his encyclopedia and resumed reading out loud. Reseng stared at him, half-stunned.
What was this pointless form of reading anyway? Reseng had been wondering that for the last twenty-eight years. Old Raccoon had no interest in anything. Not in politics or power or money or women or marriage or kids. Those held his attention even less than the tiny blossoms of mould that bloomed between the covers of books. To Old Raccoon, the real world was fiction. The only things that truly engrossed him were the problems raised by books—that is, by the insides and outsides of books. While the character inside the book trudged across the frozen Siberian wilderness, outside the book, the monsoon rains of early summer and the damp, humid winds ate away at the glue binding the book’s pages together. Those worries must have consumed Old Raccoon. So why had he been the leader of a hit squad for the last forty years? It made no sense when you thought about it. He should have owned a second-hand bookshop instead.
Reseng picked up the bomb casing from Old Raccoon’s desk and started to leave.
‘Go and see Hanja,’ Old Raccoon said. ‘If you want to live.’
‘And if this wasn’t Hanja’s doing?’
‘Doesn’t matter who ordered it. You’ll live if you talk to Hanja.’
‘It’s that simple?’
‘It’s that simple.’
Old Raccoon went back to his reading. Reseng looked at him for a moment—he looked like he’d shrunk since the last time Reseng had seen him—before closing the door behind him.