Diary of a Murderer

It’s been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six? Anyway, it’s about that long ago. What drove me back then wasn’t, as people usually assume, the urge to kill or some sexual perversion. It was disappointment. It was hope for a more perfect pleasure. Each time I buried a victim, I repeated to myself: I can do better next time.

The very reason I stopped killing was because that hope vanished.

·

I kept a journal. An objective report. Maybe I needed something like that at the time. What I’d done wrong, how that made me feel. I had to write it down so I wouldn’t repeat the same gut-wrenching mistakes. Just like students keep a notebook with all their test mistakes, I also kept meticulous records of every step of my murders and what I felt about them.

It was a stupid thing to do.

Coming up with sentences was grueling. I wasn’t trying to be literary and it was just a daily log, so why was it so difficult? Not being able to fully express the ecstasy and pity I’d felt made me feel lousy. Most of the fiction I’d read was from Korean-language textbooks. They didn’t have any of the sentences I needed. So I started reading poetry.

That was a mistake.

The poetry teacher at the community center was a male poet around my age. On the first day of class he made me laugh when he said solemnly, “Like a skillful killer, a poet is someone who seizes language and ultimately kills it.”

This was after I’d already “seized and ultimately killed” dozens of prey and buried them. But I didn’t think what I did was poetry. Murder’s less like poetry and more like prose. Anyone who tries it knows that much. Murdering someone is even more troublesome and filthy than you think.

Anyway, thanks to the teacher I got interested in poetry. I was born the type who can’t feel sadness, but I respond to humor.

·

I’m reading the Diamond Sutra: “Abiding nowhere, give rise to the mind.”

·

I took the poetry classes for a long stretch. I’d decided that if the class was lame I would kill the instructor, but thankfully, it was interesting. The instructor made me laugh several times, and he even praised my poems twice. So I let him live. He probably still doesn’t know that he’s living on borrowed time. I recently read his latest poetry collection, which was disappointing. Should I have put him in his grave back then?

To think that he keeps writing poems with such limited talent when even a gifted murderer like me has given up killing. How brazen of him.

·

I keep stumbling these days. I fall off my bicycle or trip on a stone. I’ve forgotten a lot of things. I burned the bottoms of three teapots. Eunhui called and told me she made me an appointment at the doctor’s. While I yelled and roared with anger, she stayed silent until she said, “Something is definitely not normal. Something definitely happened to your head. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen you get angry, Dad.”

Had I really never gotten angry before? I was still feeling dazed when Eunhui hung up. I grabbed the cell phone to finish our conversation, but suddenly I couldn’t remember how to make a phone call. Did I first have to press the Call button? Or did I dial the number first? And what was Eunhui’s phone number? I remember there being a simpler way to do this.

I was frustrated. And annoyed. I threw the cell phone across the room.

·

I didn’t know what poetry was, so I wrote honestly about the process of murder. My first poem, was it called “Knife and Bones”? The instructor remarked that my use of language was fresh. He said that its raw quality and the perceptive way I imagined death depicted the futility of life. He repeatedly praised my use of metaphors.

I asked, “What’s a metaphor?”

The instructor grinned—I didn’t like that smile—and explained “metaphor” to me. So a metaphor was a figure of speech.

Ah-ha.

Listen, sorry to let you down, but that wasn’t a figure of speech.

·

I grabbed a copy of the Heart Sutra and began reading:

So, in the emptiness, no form,

No feeling, thought, or choice,

Nor is there consciousness.

No eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind.

No color, sound, smell, taste, touch,

Or what the mind takes hold of,

Nor even act of sensing.

No ignorance or end of it,

Nor all that comes of ignorance.

No withering, no death,

No end of them.

Nor is there pain, or cause of pain,

Or cease in pain, or noble path

To lead from pain.

Not even wisdom to attain!

Attainment, too, is emptiness.

The instructor asked me, “So you really haven’t studied poetry before?” When I responded, “Is it something one has to learn?” he said, “No. Rather, if you have a bad teacher, it’ll ruin your lines.” I said, “That so? That’s a relief.” Then again, there are at least a few things in life you can’t learn from others.

·

They took an MRI. I lay down on a medical table that resembled a white coffin and went into the light; it felt like a kind of near-death experience. I floated in the air and looked down at my body. Death is standing by my side. I understand. I am going to die soon.

A week later, I had some sort of cognitive abilities test. The doctor asked questions and I answered. The questions were easy, but answering them was hard. It felt like putting your hand in a fish tank and trying to catch a fish just out of reach. Who is the current president of Korea? What year is it right now? Please repeat the last three words you just heard. What is seventeen plus five? I was sure I knew the answers, but I couldn’t remember them. How could I know but not know? How was this possible?

After the exam, I sat down with the doctor. He looked grim.

“The hippocampus has atrophied,” he said, pointing at the MRI scan of my brain.

“It’s unmistakably Alzheimer’s. We can’t be certain at this point how far it’s progressed. We’ll need to keep watch over time.”

Next to me, Eunhui sat quietly, her mouth firmly shut.

The doctor said, “Your memories will gradually disappear. Your short-term memory and your recent memories will go first. It can be slowed but it can’t be stopped. For now, take the prescribed medication regularly. And write everything down, and keep those notes on your person. In time you may not be able to find your own house.”

·

I’m rereading a yellowed paperback copy of Montaigne’s Essays. Reading it as an old man is surprisingly enjoyable: “We trouble life by the care of death, and death by the care of life.”

·

On the way back from the hospital, we were stopped at a checkpoint. The policeman looked at Eunhui and me like he knew us, then sent us off. He was the youngest son of the village association leader.

He said, “We’re running a checkpoint because there’s been a murder. Working day and night with no end in sight is killing us. What do people think, that murderers wander around in broad daylight saying, ‘Please catch me’?”

He then told us that three women had been murdered between our district and the neighboring one. The cops had deduced that it was the work of a serial killer. The women were all in their twenties and had been killed late at night on their way home. They had rope burns on their wrists and ankles. The third victim was found soon after my Alzheimer’s verdict, so naturally I asked myself: Am I the murderer?

At home I flipped through my wall calendar and checked the suspected dates. I had foolproof alibis. I was relieved it wasn’t me, but I didn’t like knowing that someone was kidnapping and killing in my territory. I warned Eunhui that the murderer could be lurking among us. I told her what precautions to take and never to be out alone late at night. It would be over for her as soon as she got into a man’s car. And it was dangerous to walk with headphones on.

“Please don’t worry so much,” she said.

At the front door, she added, “It’s not as if murders happen every day.”

·

These days I write everything down. There are times when I find myself somewhere unfamiliar and stay confused until I get back home, thanks to the name-and-address tag hanging from my neck. Last week someone took me back to the local precinct.

The policeman greeted me with a smile. He said, “Sir, it’s you again.”

“You know me?”

“Of course. I probably know you better than you know yourself.”

Really?

“Your daughter is on her way. We’ve already contacted her.”

·

Eunhui graduated from an agricultural college and was hired by a local research center. She works on improving crop varieties. Sometimes she takes two different varieties and grafts them to create a new species. She practically lives at the research center, in her lab coat, and occasionally pulls all-nighters. Plants aren’t interested in what time humans arrive at and leave work. Sometimes the pollination has to take place in the middle of the night. They grow this way, brazen and fierce.

People think that Eunhui is my granddaughter and act surprised when I say she’s my daughter. That’s because though I turned seventy this year, Eunhui is barely twenty-eight. The one most curious about this is none other than Eunhui. When Eunhui was sixteen, she learned about blood types at school. I’m type AB, but Eunhui is type O. For parents and their kids, that’s an impossible combination.

“Dad,” she asked, “how can I be your daughter?”

In general, I try to be as truthful as possible.

I said, “I adopted you.”

That was around the time Eunhui and I started growing apart. She wasn’t sure how to act around me anymore, and in the end we couldn’t bridge the distance between us. After that day, we were no longer as close.

There’s a condition called Capgras syndrome, which is caused by an abnormality in the part of the brain that controls intimacy. If you suffer from it, you’re able to recognize the faces of people close to you, but you no longer feel you know them. For example, a husband will suddenly start to distrust his wife, saying, “You look just like my wife and act exactly like her—who are you really? Who put you up to this?” No matter the evidence, he’ll think she’s a stranger. She looks like a stranger to him. Before long, the patient will be forced to live with the feeling that he has been exiled to an unknown world. He will believe that these people with similar-looking faces are lying to him.

After that day, it was as if Eunhui began feeling that the small world surrounding her, the family that was made up of the two of us, was an unfamiliar one. Still, we continued to live together.

·

When the wind blows, the bamboo forest behind the house makes a clamor. I become tangled up in thoughts when that happens. On these windy days, even the birds go quiet.

I bought the tract of bamboo forest long ago. I never regretted it—I’d always wanted my very own forest. In the mornings I head out behind my house for a walk. You can’t run in a bamboo forest. If you accidentally trip on something, you might even die. If you cut down a bamboo tree, its sharp, firm roots remain. That’s why you have to constantly watch your feet when you’re surrounded by bamboo trees. On my way back to the house I listen to the crackling of bamboo leaves underfoot and think about the people I’ve buried below. Those dead bodies become bamboo and shoot up toward the heavens.

·

When Eunhui was younger she once asked me, “Where do my birth parents live? Are they still alive?”

“They’re dead,” I said. “I brought you home from an orphanage.”

Eunhui didn’t want to believe me. She seemed to have searched the internet for information, even sought out the relevant government building, before locking herself in her room and crying for days. Then finally she accepted it.

She asked, “Did you know my parents?”

“We’d met before, but we weren’t close.”

“What kind of people were they? Were they good people?”

“They were wonderful. You were their main concern till the very end.”

·

I pan-fry some tofu. I have tofu for breakfast, tofu for lunch, tofu for dinner. I drizzle the pan with oil and add the tofu. Once one side is cooked, I turn it over to the other side. I take out some kimchi, then have my meal. No matter how bad the Alzheimer’s gets, I hope I can manage at least this much alone. A basic rice with tofu.

·

I was in a minor car accident. It happened at a three-way intersection, and the bastard’s jeep was in front of me. These days, bad vision is part of my everyday life. It’s probably the Alzheimer’s. I didn’t see the guy’s car at a standstill, and before I knew it, I ran right into him. It was one of those jeeps custom-designed for hunting. As if searchlights on the roof weren’t enough, he’d also mounted three sets of fog lights on the bumper. Such cars are remodeled so the trunk can be rinsed down with water. He’d also added about two extra batteries. When hunting season starts, guys like him flock to the mountains behind the village.

I got out of the car and walked over to the jeep. The driver didn’t get out. He had his windows rolled up, so I knocked on the glass.

“Look here,” I said. “Let’s talk face-to-face.”

He nodded and gestured as if to say, Just go on your way. That was odd. Didn’t he at least want to check his rear bumper? When I didn’t budge, he finally got out of the jeep. A short, stocky man in his early thirties. He quickly scanned the bumper and said it looked fine.

It wasn’t fine. The bumper was dented.

He said, “Don’t worry about it, sir. It was already dinged. It’s really fine.”

I said, “Just in case, let’s exchange numbers. So there won’t be trouble later.”

I handed him my number, but he wouldn’t take it.

“There’s no need.” His voice was low-toned, expressionless.

I said, “Do you live in the neighborhood?”

The guy didn’t say anything. But for the first time he did look me straight in the eyes. He had the eyes of a snake. They were cold and cruel. I was positive: in that moment we recognized each other.

He neatly printed his name and number on a piece of paper. It was a kid’s handwriting. His name was Pak Jutae. I returned to the rear of the jeep and checked the damage one more time. That’s when I saw it: the blood dripping from the trunk. I also felt his gaze. That gaze studying me as I listened to the dripping blood.

If blood drips out of a jeep made for hunting, people tend to think it’s carrying something like a roe deer. But I begin by assuming there’s a dead person inside. It’s safer to think this way.

·

Who was it again? A Spanish writer, or was it an Argentinian? I don’t remember stuff like a writer’s name anymore. Anyway, in some writer’s novel, an elderly man walks by a river and ends up sitting on a bench, talking to a young person he’s just met. Only later does he realize what’s happened: the young person he met by the river is actually himself. If I had the chance to meet my younger self, would I recognize him?

·

Eunhui’s mother was my last offering. On the way back from burying her, my car crashed into a tree and flipped over. The police said that I was speeding and had lost control around a curve. I had to have brain surgery twice. Lying in the hospital bed, I felt so completely at peace. It wasn’t like me. At first I thought it was because of the pills they gave me. Before, I became uncontrollably irritated if I even heard someone being loud. Noise had been almost unbearable. The sound of people ordering food, the sound of kids laughing, the sound of women gabbing—I hated it all. But now this sudden peace. I’d always thought my constantly seething mind was normal. It wasn’t. Like a person who has gone deaf, I was forced to get used to this sudden stillness and peace. Whether it was from the impact of the crash or the surgeon cutting me up, something had happened to my brain.

·

Words are slowly escaping me. My head is turning into a sea cucumber. A hole is opening up. It’s slimy and everything escapes through it. In the morning, I read the newspaper from beginning to end. After I finish reading, I feel as if I’ve forgotten more than I’ve learned. Still, I read. Each time I read a sentence, it feels like I’m forcibly assembling a machine that’s missing a few crucial parts.

·

I’d had my eye on Eunhui’s mom for a long time. She was an administrative assistant at my community center. She had lovely calves. Maybe it was the poems and the writing, but I felt I was getting soft. It was as if all this reflection and thinking were stifling my impulses. I didn’t want to get soft or suppress the feelings boiling inside me. It was as if I were being shoved into a deep, dark cave. I just needed to know if I was who I knew myself to be back then. When I opened my eyes, I saw Eunhui’s mother directly in front of me—chance is often the beginning of bad luck.

So I killed her.

But it wasn’t easy.

It was disappointing.

A murder without any pleasure. Maybe whatever change was happening inside me had already started by then. The second brain surgery merely made it irreversible.

·

In the paper this morning, I read about another serial killing that shocked the local community. When were they saying the killing took place? Something was off, so I went through my notes and found I had jotted down information on the three earlier murders. Recently my memory’s been more erratic than usual. Whatever I don’t write down slips through my hands like sand. I jotted down the details of this fourth murder in my notebook.

A twenty-five-year-old female student was found dead on a country road. Her arms and legs were bruised with rope marks, and she was naked. Just like the others, she had been kidnapped, beaten, and left for dead by the roadside.

·

That jerk Pak Jutae hasn’t called me. But I’ve seen him around a few times. Too frequent to call it a coincidence. And there must have been times when I saw but didn’t recognize him. He’s prowling around my house like a wolf, watching my every move. If I approach him to talk, he quickly disappears.

·

Is he after Eunhui?

·

I’ve let more people live than I’ve killed. My father always used to say, “How many people in the world get to do whatever they want?” I agree.

·

It seems I didn’t recognize Eunhui this morning. Right now I do recognize her. That’s a relief. The doctor says that soon Eunhui will also disappear from my memory.

He said, “The only thing you’ll remember is the way she looked as a child.”

You can’t protect someone you can’t recognize, so I put Eunhui’s photo in a pendant and hung it around my neck.

The doctor merely said, “No matter what you try, nothing will help. The recent memories go first.”

·

Crying, Eunhui’s mother begged me, “Please, at least spare my daughter.”

I said, “Okay, then, don’t worry about that.”

I’ve faithfully upheld that promise until now. I hated people who made empty promises, so I tried hard not to become that kind of person. But the issue is now. I’m writing this down again so I won’t forget: I can’t abandon Eunhui to her death.

·

At the community center, the teacher taught a class using a poem by Midang. The poem was called “The Bride.” In it, a groom is heading to the bathroom on his wedding night when his clothes get caught on the door latch. He flees, assuming his new bride is the lewd type and has grabbed at him. About forty years later he happens to pass by the same place and sees that his bride is still waiting there for him, so he nudges her, and she turns into a pile of ash.

The teacher and students alike went on and on about how beautiful the poem was.

I read it as a poem about a groom who kills his bride on their wedding night, then runs away. A young man and a young woman. And a dead body. How could you read it any other way?

·

My name is Kim Byeongsu. I turned seventy this year.

·

I’m not afraid of death. And I can’t stop from forgetting. If I forget everything, I would no longer be the person I am now. If I can’t remember who I am now, if there turned out to be an afterlife, how would that still be me? So it doesn’t matter. These days only one thing occupies me: keeping Eunhui from getting killed before I completely lose my memory.

The karma, and the pratyaya, of this life.

·

My house is at the foot of a mountain, with its back turned from the main road, so passing hikers easily overlook it. Those on their way down are more likely to discover the house than those going up. A large temple stands at the summit, and some people assume my house is a hermitage or temple lodging. There’s the occasional dwelling a few hundred feet down the road. A couple with dementia lived in what the neighbors called the Apricot Tree House. At first it was just the husband who had dementia, but not long after, his wife received the same diagnosis. I don’t know what others thought, but the couple did fine. Whenever I ran into them on the street, they would put their hands together respectfully and greet me. I used to wonder, Who did they think I was?

At first they thought they were living in the 1990s, but in their final years they traveled back to the ’70s. Meaning, they returned to a time when one wrong word could get you imprisoned, a period of emergency measures and the so-called Makkoli Security Law. So when the two ran into strangers, they became guarded and cautious. To them, all the villagers were now strangers, and they found it bizarre that these unfamiliar people were constantly coming and going around them. Then it got to the point where the couple stopped recognizing each other. That was when their son showed up to put the old couple in a nursing home. One day I happened to pass by their house and witness the couple on their knees in front of their son, begging him to spare their lives, saying, “Please don’t kill us! We’re not Commies, we swear!” They seemed to have confused their son, who’d shown up wearing a suit, with a National Intelligence Service agent. The couple who could no longer recognize each other united in front of their son. The son alternated between being furious and tearful, until the neighbors stepped in and forced the old couple into the car that drove them away.

That could be my future.

·

Eunhui keeps asking me, “Why? Why are you like this? Why can’t you remember? Why aren’t you trying?” To Eunhui, I must be the very definition of strange. Sometimes she thinks I’m purposely making things difficult for her. She says I’m pretending not to know things, just to see how she will react. She says that I seem far too calm.

I know Eunhui cries alone when she shuts the door behind her. Yesterday I overheard her speaking on the phone with a friend. She said she was losing her mind.

She said, “He’s not the same person. He’s a different person today and different tomorrow. And he was different just now than from a moment ago, then a second later he’s different again. Sometimes he’s obviously got Alzheimer’s, unable to remember what just happened, then other times he seems absolutely normal.

“He’s not the father I used to know,” she said. “I can’t bear this. I can’t stand it anymore.”

·

My father was my genesis. My father, who beat my mother and my sister, Yeongsuk, whenever he drank: I smothered him to death with a pillow. My mother pressed down on his body and Yeongsuk on his legs. She was only thirteen. Rice husks burst from the sides of the pillow. Afterward, Yeongsuk refilled the pillow with the swept-up rice husks and my mother numbly stitched it up. I was sixteen when it happened. Sudden deaths were common after the Korean War. No one paid attention to a man who had died in his sleep at home. Not even a constable came by. We set up a makeshift tent in the front yard and received mourners.

When I was fifteen I could carry a sack of rice on my back. In my hometown when a boy was strong enough to do that, not even his father could lay a hand on him. But my father still beat my mother and younger sister. He’d strip off their clothes and chase them out of the house in the freezing cold. Killing him was the best solution. The only regret I had was getting my mother and sister involved when I could have done it alone.

My father, who’d lived through the war, always suffered from nightmares. He also talked a lot in his sleep. Even as he died, he probably thought he was having another bad dream.

·

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit. It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers.”

That’s from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

·

I began killing when I was sixteen, and I continued until I was forty-five. I lived through the April Revolution and the May Massacre. President Park Chung-hee proclaimed the Yushin Reforms as he dreamed of making himself dictator for life. First Lady Yuk Young-soo was shot to death. President Jimmy Carter visited, told Park Chung-hee to abandon his dictatorial ways, then went jogging, wearing only underwear. Park Chung-hee was assassinated. Kim Dae-jung was kidnapped in Japan and narrowly escaped with his life. Kim Young-sam was expelled from the National Assembly. Martial law was declared in Gwangju, and the army laid siege to the city and beat and shot people to death.

Through it all I thought only about killing. I carried on a one-man war against the world. I killed, I fled, I lay low. I killed again, fled, and lay low. Back then there was no such thing as DNA testing or surveillance cameras. Even the term “serial killer” was little known. Dozens of suspicious-looking persons and the mentally ill were considered suspects, and were dragged off to the police station and tortured. A few even made false confessions. The precincts didn’t cooperate with each other, so when a similar crime occurred in a different precinct, they didn’t make the connection. Thousands of cops wielding batons climbed up the wrong mountains to investigate.

Those were good times.

·

I was forty-five at the time of my last murder. Looking back, it dawns on me that my father was also forty-five the year he suffocated under the pillow. What a strange coincidence. I’m writing this down, too.

·

Am I a devil, or a superhuman? Or both?

·

Seventy years of a life. When I look back, it seems that I’m standing in front of a gaping black cave. I feel little about my approaching death, but when I think about the past, my heart feels dark and vast. My heart was like a desert; nothing grew inside me. There was no moisture to be found anywhere. When I was younger, I tried to understand others, but it was too difficult a task for me. I always avoided eye contact so people assumed I was the shy and docile type.

I used to practice making faces in the mirror. A sad look, a happy look, a worried look, a dejected look. Eventually I developed a simple technique. I just imitated the person in front of me. If someone frowned, I frowned, and if someone laughed, I laughed.

In the old days, people thought the devil lived inside a mirror. The devil they saw in the mirror, he was probably me.

·

I had a sudden urge to see my sister. When I said this to Eunhui, she told me that my sister had passed away long ago.

“How did she die?”

“You know—she died after a long struggle with pernicious anemia.”

It sounded oddly familiar, as if I’d heard this before.

·

I was a veterinarian. It’s a good job for a murderer. You can use all kinds of powerful anesthetics. You can bring an elephant immediately to its knees. In the country, vets make a lot of house calls. While our city counterparts sit in clinics treating pet dogs and cats, in the country you travel around treating livestock, from cows and pigs to chickens. In the past, you even encountered the occasional horse. Outside of chickens, they were all mammals. There’s not much of a difference between the human anatomy and theirs.

·

Once again, I found myself somewhere unfamiliar. A neighborhood I’d never been before. Some local kids surrounded me and put me in a storeroom, keeping me from going wherever it was I kept trying to go. They claimed I had been scared and caused a racket. A cop came, and after radioing in on his walkie-talkie, he took me away in his patrol car. I continue to forget and end up in strange neighborhoods, surrounded by locals, until the cops arrive.

The cycle repeats: the crowds, the encircling, the hauling off to the police station.

To an elderly serial killer, Alzheimer’s is life’s practical joke. No, it’s a hidden-camera prank show. Surprised you, right? Sorry. It’s only a joke.

·

I’ve decided to memorize a poem a day. It’s not as easy as I’d thought.

·

I don’t understand the new poems these days. They’re too hard. But I do like the following line, so I’m writing it down:

“My pain cannot be read, for it does not have captions.” From Kim Kyung-ju, “A City of Sadness.”

From the same poem: “The times I lived were like bootleg liquor that no one had ever tasted. / I got easily drunk in the name of those times.”

·

I was out shopping for groceries downtown when I spotted a familiar face prowling around Eunhui’s research lab. I couldn’t for the life of me tell who he was. It only came to me when I saw his jeep on my way home. It was that jerk. I took out my notepad and checked for his name. Pak Jutae. The guy had made his way to Eunhui.

·

I started exercising again. Generally, I focus on my upper body. The doctor had said that exercise would help slow down the Alzheimer’s, but that wasn’t why I began working out. It was for Eunhui. In a fight, what determines life or death is upper body strength. You seize, restrain, and choke. The weakest spot in mammals is the neck, where the trachea is. If oxygen doesn’t reach the brain for a few minutes, you die or end up brain-damaged.

·

Someone I met at the community center once said that he liked my poems and that he’d like to publish them in a literary journal. This was over thirty years ago. I said, “Sure, go ahead,” and not long after, I got a call. He said that the book was out and asked where he should send the copies. Then he read off his bank account information. When I asked if I had to pay for them, he said all the contributors do. When I replied I didn’t like that, he whined, “The books are already printed, and if you do this to me now, it puts me in a bind.” When he used the words “in a bind” so casually, I had a strong urge to correct him. But I had brought this situation on myself, with my bourgeois desires. It wasn’t solely the guy’s fault. Some days later, two hundred copies of a small regional publication with my poems in it arrived at my house. There was even a card tucked inside congratulating me on my debut. I saved one copy and used the rest for fuel. They burned well. My poem-heated floors kept me warm.

Anyway, after that I called myself a poet. The way you feel about writing poems that no one reads and committing murders that no one knows about is not that different.

·

While I was sitting on the wooden veranda waiting for Eunhui, I watched the sun set behind a distant mountain. I wondered if the sun’s blood would soon stain the barren winter peak, but it quickly turned bleak. If I now enjoy things like this, it must be my time to go. I’ll likely soon forget everything I’ve just seen.

·

They say that if you study human fossils from prehistoric times, you will discover that the majority were murdered. The most common clues are said to be holes bored into the skull or bones severed by sharp objects. Natural deaths were rare. Alzheimer’s would have been near nonexistent: it would’ve been hard to survive to late middle age. I feel like a prehistoric human who somehow landed in this period he doesn’t belong and where he has lived for far too long. My punishment is Alzheimer’s.

·

Eunhui was once bullied at school. She didn’t have a mother and her father was old, so the kids teased her. Without a mother, a girl doesn’t know how to grow into a woman. The girls had a sixth sense for this and picked on her. One day Eunhui went to the school counselor for advice about a crush she had on a boy. By the following day, a rumor that Eunhui was obsessed with boys had spread across the school. The kids teased her, called her a slut. I read all this in Eunhui’s diary. I had no idea what to do.

There are things that a serial killer can’t put an end to: the bullying of a preteen girl.

I don’t know how she got out of that situation. She’s doing well now, so does that mean it’s okay?

·

These days my father keeps showing up in my dreams. He sits at a low-lying wooden desk and begins reading something. My poems. With his mouth full of rice husks, he looks at me and laughs.

·

If my memory serves me right, I have lived with two women. The first woman bore me a son, but one day they both disappeared. Since she took our son when she fled, she might have sensed something in me. I probably could have found them if I really wanted to, but I left them alone. She wasn’t the kind of woman worth reporting to the police. The second woman and I were actually married. We lived together for five years, until she said she couldn’t stand me any longer and asked for a divorce. That she could speak so openly makes clear she had no idea what kind of person I was. I asked what was so wrong with me, and in what way, and she said, “You have no emotions. It’s like living with a stone.” The whole time, she was carrying on with another man.

A woman’s facial expression is a difficult code to crack. It seemed to me that my wife always got worked up over nothing. If she cried, I got annoyed, and if she laughed, I got angry. When she went on about something, I would get so bored I could barely stand it. There were times I wanted to kill her, but I controlled myself. If a married woman ends up murdered, her husband is always the prime suspect. Two years after she left, I tracked down and killed my ex-wife and the bastard she’d had the affair with, dismembered them, and tossed them into a pigpen. Back then my memory wasn’t like it is now. I never forgot what I wasn’t supposed to forget.

·

Because of the number of serial murders in our area, a lot of crime experts are being featured on TV. A man who’s supposed to be an expert profiler, or something like that, said: “A serial killer can’t stop once he’s begun. He ends up desiring an even stronger sensation, and tenaciously sets about hunting down his next victim. The addiction factor is so strong that even in jail, he thinks only about the next murder. If he starts believing that he won’t be able to commit another one, he feels despair and tries to kill himself. That’s how strong the drive is.”

Experts only look like experts to me when they talk about things I know nothing about.

·

Eunhui keeps coming home late these days. I don’t remember when I first heard about it, but Eunhui’s research center is working on ways to grow tropical fruits and vegetables on Korean soil. They grow tropical fruits like papayas and mangoes in a greenhouse. There are many Filipino wives in every village who miss fruits they used to eat back home, so they sometimes stop by the center and gaze at the crops, and even pick the fruit.

Eunhui has never really gotten on well with people, and instead gives all her affection to the silent plants.

She once told me, “The plants give each other signals. When they feel threatened, they release a chemical odor to warn the others of danger.”

“So they’re emitting poison?”

“No matter how small a creature is, they all have a way of staying alive.”

·

The dog next door keeps wandering onto our property. He shits and pisses in the yard. When he sees me, he barks. This is my house, you filthy mongrel.

The dog doesn’t even run away when you throw a rock at him, but just hovers. When Eunhui returns from work, she says that the dog is ours. She’s lying. Why would Eunhui lie to me?

·

I killed people for thirty years straight. I was very diligent back then. Now that the statute of limitations has passed, I could even go blab about what I’d done. If this were America, I could probably publish a memoir. People would attack me. Let them, if they want. It’s not like I have many days left. I’m a tough one, when I think about it. After all those killings, I went cold turkey. I felt, well, like a boatman who’d just sold his boat, or a mercenary who’d just retired. I can’t say for sure, but there must have been guys in the Korean or Vietnam War who killed more people than I did. Do you think they’re all losing sleep over it? I don’t think so. Guilt is fundamentally a weak emotion. Fear, anger, and jealousy are much stronger. Gripped by fear or anger, you won’t be able to sleep. I laugh when I watch a movie or TV show with a character who loses sleep out of guilt. What are these writers trying to sell? They know nothing about life.

I quit killing and took up bowling. A bowling ball is round and firm and heavy. I like touching it. I bowled alone from morning to night until I could barely walk. The owner would signal my last game when he turned out all the lights except in my lane. Bowling is addictive. With each game, I feel I can somehow do a little better than the last time. I feel I can get the spare that I just missed, or raise my score. But I always end up with my usual score.

·

One of my walls is covered with notes. The multicolored notes stay where you stick them, and though I don’t know where they came from, they’re all over the house. Maybe Eunhui bought them to help my memory. These notes have a special name, but I can’t remember it right now. The north wall is covered with them, and now the wall facing west is plastered with them, too, but they don’t help much. They’re mostly notes I don’t understand, notes I don’t remember sticking on the wall in the first place. Like the one saying, “Things you must tell Eunhui.” What was it I meant to tell her? Each of the notes feels like a distant star in the universe. Nothing seems to connect them to each other. There’s also one that the doctor wrote for me:

“Imagine it like a freight car hurtling along without knowing the rails are cut off ahead. What do you think will happen? Won’t the train and the freight pile up where the tracks stop? And it will end in total chaos, won’t it? Sir, this is exactly what’s happening inside your head right now.”

·

I remember an old lady I met in the poetry class. She told me that in the past—she emphasized this part—she’d had numerous love affairs: “I don’t regret it. When you get old, you have all these memories. Whenever I’m bored I think about each of the men I slept with.”

My life these days is just like that old lady’s. I recall each person who died at my hands. There was also a movie about that: Memories of Murder.

·

I believe in zombies. There’s no reason why something you can’t see doesn’t exist. I often watch zombie movies. I once kept an ax in my bedroom. When Eunhui asked why I kept an ax there, I said it was because of zombies. Axes work best on dead people.

·

The worst thing in the world is to be murdered. I can’t let such a thing happen to me.

·

I hid the syringe in the sewing kit near my bed. A lethal dose of pentobarbital sodium. It’s a drug used to put cows and pigs to sleep. I may use it on myself when I get to the point where I’m smearing my shit across the walls. I can’t let it get that far.

·

I’m afraid. Frankly, I’m kind of afraid.

I’ll read a sutra.

·

I feel so confused. When you start losing your memory, your mind starts to lose its way.

·

A poet named Francis Thompson wrote, “For we are born in other’s pain, / And perish in our own.” To my mother who gave me life, your son will soon die because his brain is riddled with holes. Or maybe I’ve got the human version of mad cow disease? Is the hospital hiding this from me?

·

For the first time in ages, Eunhui and I went downtown to a Chinese restaurant. We ordered lemon chicken and a mixed meat and seafood dish, but I had no idea what it tasted like. Am I losing my sense of taste as well? I asked Eunhui about work, but as always, she merely listened without saying it’s sweet or bitter or anything definite. Eunhui spoke and acted as if nothing in the world had any effect on her. It’s as if she were saying, Yes, I do live there. And just like anywhere, there are people, things happen every day. But none of it has anything to do with me, and it doesn’t really affect me.

Eunhui and I have little to talk about. I don’t know much about her life, and she doesn’t know who I really am. But these days we do have one subject in common: my Alzheimer’s. Eunhui is afraid of it. Because she’s afraid, she keeps bringing it up. If my Alzheimer’s gets worse but I live for a long time, Eunhui may have to quit work and take care of me. What young woman wants to be stuck deep in the provinces, taking care of her demented old father? Since Alzheimer’s is a degenerative disease, there’s no hope for improvement. So my dying quickly would be good news for everyone. And, my Eunhui, if I die, there’s more good news for you. You become the beneficiary of the life insurance policy I took out. Though you don’t know about that yet.

I locked it in over ten years ago. The insurance saleswoman, who made a house visit after receiving my call, seemed surprised at the large amount of the policy. She looked in her mid-forties but seemed inexperienced. She was probably a housewife who’d raised her kids and gotten a late start in the insurance industry.

She asked, “Will your daughter be the sole beneficiary?”

I responded, “I don’t have any other family. I had a sister, but she died young.”

“It’s good you’re thinking about your daughter, but you should also prepare for your retirement.”

“I’m already set for retirement.”

“People live much longer on average than they used to. You should be prepared for the danger of living too long.”

The danger of living too long. People these days really do excel at coming up with amusing phrases. I said nothing and just stared at the woman. I knew how to reduce the danger of living too long by a hundred percent. She must have seen something threatening in my eyes, for she shrank back a little.

“Well, do what you think best. But you should be preparing for retirement . . .”

She quickly spread out the documents for me to sign. I signed and signed. If I die, the insurance company has to pay out a huge sum to Eunhui. But what if she dies before I do? I can’t stand the thought of Eunhui being dragged away and killed by someone. I know what that’s like better than anyone.

·

I’ve never cursed anyone out. I don’t drink or smoke either, so people always ask me if I’m Christian. There are fools who spend their whole lives putting everyone into categories. It makes things easy, but it’s a little dangerous because they can’t fathom people who don’t fit into their flimsy boxes, like me.

·

In the morning, I opened my eyes. I didn’t know where I was. I bolted up, pulled my pants on, and ran out. An unfamiliar dog barked furiously at me. I rushed around looking for my shoes, then saw Eunhui coming out from the kitchen. It was our house.

What a relief. I still remember Eunhui.

·

It happened about five years ago. I went to Japan on a hot springs tour with the old folks from the neighborhood. At Kansai International Airport, the immigration officer asked me, “What do you do?”

I don’t know what I was thinking, but I said, “Killing people.”

He glanced at me and asked, “Are you a doctor?” He had misheard “killing” for “healing.” I nodded without saying anything, since a veterinarian is also a doctor. He said, “Welcome to Japan,” and stamped my passport with a thump.

·

The only comfort is knowing I can die without pain. I’ll be a drooling idiot before I die and won’t even know who I am.

·

I’ve got a neighbor who blacks out after a night out drinking. Maybe death is a stiff drink that helps you forget the boring night out that is your life.

·

I happened to see a text message Eunhui sent her friend: “I’m going crazy. Each day is just too much to take.”

Whether her friend was comforting her or being sarcastic, she texted back: “What a loyal daughter. Seriously, you’re incredible.”

“What’s more terrifying is what might happen later. With Alzheimer’s, they say your personality changes. I think it’s already started.”

“Send him to a nursing home. You said he’s not even your real father, so why are you taking on the entire burden alone?”

The friend’s texts continued. “Don’t feel guilty. He won’t remember anyway.”

Eunhui’s reply went like this: “They say Alzheimer’s patients still have feelings.”

I still have feelings. I still have feelings. I still have feelings. I brood over this phrase all day.

·

My life can be divided into thirds: my childhood before I killed my father; my youth and my adult life as a murderer; then my peaceful life after I stopped murdering. Eunhui symbolizes the last third of my life. Maybe the best way to put it is that she’s a kind of amulet for me. As long as I can see Eunhui when I wake up, I won’t return to the past where I wandered around looking for victims.

On TV I saw that there was a tiger in a Thailand zoo who’d become deeply depressed after losing her cubs. She didn’t eat or move. The zookeeper, unable to stand it any longer, tried to find a way to rouse the tiger. He put a baby pig in the tiger’s cage. The tiger took the baby pig for its own and nursed and raised it. Maybe that describes my relationship with Eunhui.

·

I’ve lost all appetite. If I eat, I throw up. I want to eat something, but I don’t know what. I don’t want to do anything. I never drank or smoked my whole life, but I feel the urge now. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever start.

·

“I’m seeing someone,” Eunhui told me.

According to what I remember—though of course that’s become hard to trust—it’s the first time Eunhui has brought up a man. I suddenly realized that I wasn’t the least bit prepared to accept him. I’d never imagined Eunhui living with another man. I can’t imagine it even now. Could I have actually assumed that she would always live with me?

When Eunhui was in middle school, some guys interested in her used to hang around near the house. They were young and I was already old by then, but there wasn’t a single guy who didn’t run when he saw me. I didn’t try to scare them; all I did was quietly say a few words, but for some reason every one of them became scared and fled. No matter how fierce a dog is, it always surprises its owner when, at the vet’s, it tucks its tail between its legs and whimpers. Teenage boys are no different from dogs. From the first confrontation, the look in your eyes determines the relationship.

“So?” I said.

“I’d like you to meet him.” Her cheeks flushed.

“So you’re going to bring him home?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Because you should meet him.”

“What for?”

“He wants to marry me.”

“Then marry him.”

“Please don’t be like this.”

“Everyone is alone in the end.”

“Why bother living if we’re going to die anyway?” Her low voice was frosty with anger.

“You’ve got a point.”

“Do you want me to stay unmarried and live with you my entire life, Dad?”

Was that what I wanted? I couldn’t say for sure. Because I didn’t know, I just wanted to avoid the subject.

“Anyhow, I don’t want to meet him,” I said. “If you want to marry him, get on with it without me.”

“Let’s talk about this later.”

Eunhui left the room. For some reason I felt ashamed, and angry, too. But I didn’t know why. I felt hungry, so I made some noodles. After a few bites, I realized that they tasted weird. Too late it came to me: I left out the soy sauce. I looked everywhere but couldn’t find it. I made a note to buy another one. Maybe they’ll find dozens of open soy sauce bottles around the house after I die.

I was washing the dishes when my heart sank and I was thrown off again. There was a bowl of unfinished noodles in the sink. Two bowls of noodles already for today’s meal.

·

“On my honor, friend,” answered Zarathustra, “there is nothing of this that you speak: there is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even sooner than your body; therefore, fear nothing more!”

It’s as if Nietzsche had written that for me.

·

One bad thing about living so many years as a murderer: you have no close friends to talk to. But do other people actually have such friends?

·

As soon as thunder and lightning struck outside, the bamboo forest stirred with noise. I didn’t sleep all night, I was so intensely irritated by the sound of rain running down the house’s eaves. But I used to enjoy that sound.

·

Eunhui brought the man she’s seeing to our house. It’s the first time she’s done this, and she acts serious and grave. I’m forced to accept it. My hands are clammy.

The man came in a four-wheel-drive jeep. I could tell right away it was made for hunting. As if the searchlights installed on the roof weren’t enough, three more fog lights were mounted on the bumper. These kinds of cars are revamped so the trunk can be cleaned with water, with two extra car batteries thrown in. When it’s hunting season, bastards like him gather in the mountains behind the village.

“I’m Pak Jutae. Pleased to meet you.” The man made a full bow, his knees to the floor.

I accepted it with a slight bow. At around five foot six, Pak was on the short side, but he had fair skin and a good build. On second glance, though, he had a narrow forehead, small eyes, and a pointy jaw—a typical rat-like face. He had on thick-rimmed glasses, maybe to hide his face. He seemed both familiar and not, but I couldn’t bring it up since I didn’t trust my memory at all these days. After he finished bowing, he sat down on his knees. Eunhui sat between us.

I said, “No need to kneel.”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

I burst out, “I’ve got dementia. Alzheimer’s.”

Eunhui’s gaze darted up at me. A stare of protest.

I added, “Did Eunhui tell you about it?”

“Yes, she did.”

“Even if I forget who you are, please don’t take it personally. The doctor says that the most recent memories go first.”

“I hear there are good medications these days,” Pak said.

“How good can they be?”

Eunhui brought out some sliced pears and apples. While we ate the fruit, Pak slipped easily into telling me a bit about himself.

“I work in real estate,” he said.

“Real estate.”

“I buy land, divide it into plots, then resell them.”

“The work must keep you moving around, looking at land.”

“I do have to make an effort to go and see for myself. Land is like women—you can’t trust what you hear without seeing for yourself.”

I asked, “Any chance we’ve met before?”

“No, we haven’t. Today’s the first time.” He smiled lightly as he looked up at me.

Eunhui interrupted. “You may have seen Jutae somewhere. He’s often in the area these days.”

He chimed in, “It’s a small town.”

I said, “You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

He had a trace of an accent from down south. He nodded in agreement, but his response wasn’t what I’d expected.

He said, “You’re right. I was born and raised in Seoul.”

“If you marry Eunhui, will you move to Seoul?”

He glanced quickly at Eunhui and back to me, then said no. “Eunhui won’t be going anywhere. Why would we leave when you’re based here?”

Eunhui said, “We’re planning to live downtown.”

Her hand reached out and brushed against his, but he didn’t take her hand. His hands curled inward like a threatened snail, so Eunhui’s hand returned awkwardly to its owner. It happened in the blink of an eye, but it worried me.

When he got up, Eunhui followed him. She slid easily into the hunting-style jeep. It was clear that she’d been in it many times. She rolled the window down and, after telling me she’d be downtown for a bit, rolled it up again.

I went back to the house, closed the door, and started writing about my first meeting with this Pak Jutae before I forgot. Something didn’t feel right. I’d just met the guy, but I already hated him. Why? Had I seen something in him? What was it?

·

My heating bill is too high. The cost of living for everything is skyrocketing.

·

I was shocked when I flipped through my notebook. The bastard was that bastard. How was this possible? I feel possessed by a ghost. The guy had calmly walked into my house. As Eunhui’s fiancé, at that. And I hadn’t even recognized him. Did he think I was acting? Or did he believe that I’d actually forgotten him?

·

I’m reading a book when a note falls out of it. It’s yellowed, which means I’d probably written down the quote a long time ago:

“And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.”—Nietzsche

·

Mid-breakfast, I asked Eunhui, “How did you meet this Pak Jutae?”

She said, “By chance. It was truly by chance.”

Wisdom begins when people stop believing in the phrase “by chance,” which they use out of habit.

·

Sometimes murder is the neatest solution. But not always.

·

That’s right. The phone number Pak gave me. The number the bastard wrote down himself. Where did I put it?

I look for it all day but can’t find the memo with his number. I comb through the house but find nothing. It’s getting harder and harder to find things. Had Eunhui secretly thrown it out?

·

The lady at the local corner store laughed at me and said, “Your shoes are on backwards.”

It took me a long time to understand what she meant. What does it mean, wearing your shoes backwards? Is it a figure of speech?

·

After Eunhui left for work, I found a nursing home brochure on her desk.

The ad copy was colorful and enticing, from “A Refuge for the Body and Mind” to “Hotel Facilities.” Would my mind and body really find rest there? I put the brochure back on the desk. Eunhui is dreaming of marrying the man she loves and building a home together . . . Shipping me off—the obstacle—to a retirement home . . . Were these Eunhui’s ideas, or Pak’s schemes?

·

I found his phone number on Eunhui’s cell phone. I went shopping downtown, and after buying something, I asked the male clerk for help. One good thing about being old is that people assume you’re harmless. The clerk did as I’d asked and, pretending he was a deliveryman, called Pak Jutae.

The clerk explained, “I’m calling because the address on the invoice is too blurry.”

It looked like Pak was simply giving out his address without suspicion. After writing it down, the clerk handed it to me.

Errand completed, the clerk beamed at me and asked, “So what happened?”

I said, “My granddaughter ran away from home.”

The clerk laughed. Why was he laughing? Does it mean he understands? Or is he mocking me?

·

I began tailing Pak. He spends most of his days at home, then takes the jeep out at four or five p.m. He rarely goes to places like teahouses. Sometimes he stands in someone’s field or fruit orchard and looks around. It’s as if he’s in real estate and sizing up property, but then he doesn’t meet enough people for that line of work. Sometimes he goes out late at night and speeds along without a clear destination. My instincts tell me that he might not be hunting animals. If my guess is right, would this be God’s idea of a classy joke? Or God’s judgment?

·

I contemplated turning Pak in to the police. What did they call it, the thing the courts give out? That’s right, a warrant. They need it to search the bastard’s house and car. But if they search and don’t find concrete evidence, they’ll release him. Then he’ll suspect me—he’s already wary and keeping an eye on me—and if the bastard is really a killer, Eunhui or I would be his next target. I see us through his eyes. A seventy-year-old man with Alzheimer’s and a fragile woman in her twenties living in isolation near a mountain. We must look like easy prey.

·

I sat Eunhui down and told her about Pak Jutae. What I’d seen in his trunk when I’d rear-ended his jeep. How bright and fresh the blood had been. How he had fled. After that, how long he had kept his eye on me. If such a man ends up in front of her “by chance,” what that “chance” meant, and how much danger she was in.

Eunhui listened patiently, then said, “Dad, I truly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I tried again, but she reacted the same way. She said I was speaking so incoherently that she couldn’t understand me. I felt the way I had when I’d first learned English and rambled on in front of an American. I did my very best to speak, the other person tried hard to understand, but nothing got communicated. Eunhui only took in the fact that I intensely disliked her man. I said, “It’s not that I hate him; I’m warning you that you’re in danger. You’re dating an extremely dangerous man. Your meeting him was definitely not chance.”

Our talk ultimately fails. Eunhui’s patience runs out, and as I become more impatient, I become even more inarticulate. As usual, language is slower than action, unclear and ambiguous. When now is the time to act.

I hear the sound of Eunhui’s muffled weeping from her room.

·

I cautiously tracked down a phone booth without surveillance cameras nearby, and from there called 112 to report Pak. I muffled the receiver with a cloth and disguised my voice. I told the police that Pak Jutae with his hunting-style jeep could be the serial killer they were looking for. At first, the operator didn’t understand me.

I tried to slowly, clearly describe Pak’s jeep. This time the operator seemed to get it, but did not take me very seriously. He asked me to identify myself. I said I couldn’t—I was worried about my safety. He asked me why I thought Pak Jutae was the killer. I answered, “You should have the car examined. I saw blood coming out of it.”

·

I definitely entered the room to do something, but since I can’t for the life of me remember what that something is, I stand around absent-mindedly for a while. It’s as if the God who’d been masterminding me had let go of the controls. I stand there blankly, not knowing what to do. What happens if I forget like this again just as I catch Pak?

·

The news says that a suspected serial killer had been held and interrogated by the police, then released without charge. Why had the police let Pak go? Had they really not found anything? Times have changed, but they’ve remained incompetent.

Will I have to deal with him myself? Is there really no other way?

·

For the first time in my life, I began considering murder out of necessity. If a man whose hobby was collecting high-end audio gear had to buy an amp for a work event, he would probably feel the way I did.

·

I’ve decided on a final goal before I die. To kill Pak Jutae. Before I forget who he is.

·

I once heard about an American struck by lightning who became a musical genius overnight. He began playing the piano though he’d never had lessons, manically composed music, and later became an orchestra conductor. As for me, after damaging my head in a car accident, I lost all interest in murder and ended up becoming like everyone else. I lived like that for over twenty years, but now I’m preparing for a murder, not because I want to but because I have to. God is commanding me to make banal my sacred misdeeds.

·

The doctor said that dementia patients struggle with multitasking. If you put a teapot on the gas range and then start doing something else, nine out of ten times you’ll end up burning the pot. He said that even washing dishes and doing laundry at the same time could become difficult. For women, one of the first activities they have to give up is cooking. Cooking, surprisingly, requires a systematic completion of several tasks at the same time.

The doctor advised, “It’s best to simplify every aspect of your life and develop the habit of doing one thing at a time.”

I decided to follow the doctor’s advice. For the time being, I have to focus with all that’s left of my abilities. The bastard can’t be taken lightly. He’s young, strong, and armed. He’s also a good talker who’s charmed Eunhui into marriage in no time. He’ll have two goals for approaching her. The first, to get a better look at me. The second, to kill her. If he needs to, he’ll probably wipe me out, too. But the bastard already knows that I have Alzheimer’s. If he decides he doesn’t need to kill me, he won’t overextend himself. It’s Eunhui he’s lusting for, not me. I have to get rid of him before that happens. The news reports make me think that the bastard kidnaps young women, brutally tortures them, and kills them.

After twenty-five years, I’ve returned to the work I am best at. But now I’m too old for it. One improvement on the past is that I no longer need to secure an escape route. You could say that the sum of hunting is in the pursuit and capture. In contrast, what’s most important in murder isn’t to seize the desired object, but to safely escape. It’s important to catch, but you can’t be caught yourself. This time will be different. I’m going to give everything I have to catch the bastard. This time the goal isn’t murder, but the hunt.

When hunting, the first step is to find the prey’s territory. Second is to scout a good location and stake it out. Third, not to miss a single chance to capture it. If you fail, return to step one.

·

Now that I have decided to catch Pak Jutae, my appetite has suddenly returned. I sleep well and feel good. I’m starting to get confused about whether I’m doing it for Eunhui’s sake or for mine.

·

Pak lives on the first and basement floors of a two-story house. If you follow a small field to the back, it leads to a building that used to be a cowshed. The jeep’s nose is rammed into the back of the shed, and its rear juts out. Without pushing the door open and walking into the yard, it’s hard to see anything. A cleverly placed barrier of bush clover almost perfectly blocks the house from view. This kind of house may protect your privacy, but it’s fatally weak against trespassers, because if someone breaks in, it’s impossible to know what’s happening inside. So that means Pak is fearless about outside enemies. The house quietly betrays his thoughts: I can take care of my own property. The only thing I care about is staying out of sight.

A granny well over seventy lives on the second floor. What is her connection to Pak? Was she renting, or were they related? In any case, she probably wouldn’t get in the way. She has a stoop and has trouble moving.

I’m tired. I’m calling it a day.

·

Eunhui was getting ready for work when I saw that her neck was bruised. It’s the kind of mark left after someone’s choked you. I ask Eunhui about it. She automatically pulls in her neck as if trying to get rid of it altogether. I press on and ask her if that Pak bastard did this to her.

She says, “Please don’t call anyone you want a bastard, Dad.”

“Then what happened to your neck?”

Eunhui tells me that I went into her bedroom and tried to choke her. I can’t believe her and I can’t not believe her. Everything about me is like this now.

“Why did you do it?” she says. “Dad, you’re not that kind of person. It was like you went insane. You nearly killed me.”

“A lie. You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie? Please, please accept the facts. Dad, you’ve got Alzheimer’s!”

Eunhui throws the word “Alzheimer’s” at me like a hammer. I suddenly feel drained. I have no memory of it, not even as vague traces of a dream. I feel lost. If I’d really done this to her, it’s a miracle she is still alive, since I have powerful arms. I beg Eunhui to forgive me. I also tell her to always lock her door before bed. After blowing her nose and wiping her tears, she snatches the nursing home pamphlet I’d seen the other day from a drawer. I ignore it, but she doesn’t give in.

“Dad, it’s too much for me. And for your sake, you should be at the home anyway. What if something happens when I’m not here?”

I understand. Who wants to die choking in their sleep?

“All right,” I say. “I’ll take a look.”

According to the law, Eunhui can have me locked up in a mental hospital without my consent. If you make a call, an ambulance arrives and stocky men put you in a straitjacket and throw you in an isolation ward. That’s it. Unless the family gives permission for your release, you can be locked up forever. I’d heard of cases in which family members, unhappy with their inheritance, banded together, forced their drunk father into a mental hospital, and started negotiating. I’d already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, so Eunhui could easily get rid of me. Right this minute if she wanted to.

A nursing home would be better than a mental hospital, but I don’t want to go anywhere just yet. Either way, I don’t have much time left as a free man.

“Let’s go for a visit.” Eunhui spoke fervently as she held my hand. “Just have a look, that’s all.”

I gave in and agreed. Only after Eunhui left for work, I remembered: I had choked Eunhui’s mother to death.

·

I bought a voice recorder people use to study languages and hung it around my neck by a cord. No matter how simple the task, I record it before I do something. Afterward, I do it. Midway, if I forget what I’m doing, I press Replay. I’ll listen to what I’ve just recorded and try it again.

I say, “I’ll go to the bathroom and pee,” then go to the bathroom. I say, “I’m going to boil water and make coffee,” and go boil the water. The person I was a few minutes ago gives orders to the person I’ll be a few minutes later. Like this, the person I am is endlessly divided. Even when I’m zoning out, I’ll see the recorder and automatically press the Replay button. I’m not in desperate need of it yet, but I’m preparing for the worst. I have to tirelessly repeat for my body to remember.

·

I tried talking to Eunhui again, but she just cried quietly as I spoke. Why was she crying? All I did was warn her of the danger she was in, so why does she look so aggrieved? I was only worried about her. I have no way of understanding such complex emotions. Was it sadness, or anger, or grief? I couldn’t tell. Her eyes wet with tears, she pleaded, “Please don’t talk that way about Jutae anymore. It hurts to listen to it. He’s a good man. Calling the man I’m to marry a serial killer—aren’t you taking it too far? How can you suspect a person like that without evidence?” In any case, she finally fully comprehends my point. That alone is a relief. At least I’ve succeeded in planting doubt about the bastard in her heart. What destroyed the ever-victorious Othello was Iago’s seed of doubt.

“You’re not even my real father!” she said again, and fled to her room. She’s right, but I feel gravely insulted.

·

I’m lying down when I hear footsteps coming toward my house. Five young folks in uniform. At first I thought they were the police.

“Hello,” they said. There were three men, two women. I asked who they were, and they said they were students from the Police Academy.

I invited them inside and asked, “What’s this about?”

They said they were in the middle of a group project. Their assignment was to select and investigate old unsolved cases. They showed me a few articles they had photocopied. They were all about murders I’d committed. It was kind of amazing to me that events from decades ago still came back so vividly.

One of them said, “Our group suspects that these murders are connected—the work of a serial killer. Though no one thought of it that way back then.”

The police cadets rattled on excitedly. The girls were pretty and the boys, handsome. Even in the middle of discussing serial murder, they would burst out laughing for no reason. These kids, they think playing FBI is fun.

I said, “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. Why have you showed up at my house making a racket?”

Instead of an answer, a new character appeared as if out of a scene in a play. A man around his mid-fifties. The students stood up and saluted him.

He said, “It’s all right. Sit down.”

The new character was Detective Ahn. He introduced himself and handed me his business card. He said he couldn’t just send the students out alone, so he had accompanied them. He sat behind them, appearing indifferent, but his gaze cast about the corners of the house out of professional habit.

When he said, “Carry on,” the students became more insistent, their faces newly flushed with determination.

One said, “We drew lines connecting the locations of these cases. Here, please have a look.”

The lines they’d made on the map formed an octagon, and the village I lived in was at the center. A female student with a small face and a high-bridged nose, her eyes shining with excitement, shoved the map at me.

She said, “We believe that if the criminal exists, he’d be in this area . . .”

My neighborhood.

“. . . based on what we’ve deduced. Though of course there’s no chance he’d still be living here.”

A hasty conclusion. Detective Ahn, who’d been drowsing, suddenly straightened and frowned at the students.

I murmured, “In our neighborhood.”

“Sir, you’ve lived here the whole time, so we wondered if you ever saw anyone suspicious back then.”

I said, “Back then, there were a lot of spies. Since the neighborhood’s close to the North, a lot of them did come over. If a friend we spent time with disappeared for a few days, we’d say, ‘Uncle must have come.’ Uncle from the North, we meant. No one said as much, but everyone knew what was going on. Outsiders hiking in the area were often stopped and interrogated as potential spies.”

A tall male student became impatient and interrupted. “We’re not looking for spies.”

I raised my hand and stopped him. “What I’m saying is that if someone looked suspicious, they would’ve already been arrested twice over. I mean, people became rich overnight back then by turning spies in and collecting the reward money.”

The lanky male student said, “So you’re saying that the criminal would be one of those arrested as a spy and then released. But how do we find out?”

I said, “Maybe the local precinct still has those records.”

From the back, Detective Ahn cut in. “They don’t.”

“They don’t?” a slender-faced girl said with reproach. These confident young Police Academy students, these kids who had watched TV shows like CSI and dreamed of joining the force, would dismiss a provincial homicide detective in a second—but if you had all been there, if you’d been the cops in my district, would you have caught me? The records were probably a pitiful mess. A careless prelim investigation. Little mutual cooperation. The few suspects they managed to round up released with verdicts of not guilty. I’d read that a couple of them sued the government, claiming they were tortured during interrogation, and they eventually won reparations once Korea became a democracy.

Detective Ahn said, “Do you know what the eighties were like? Even police in the Gangwon-do countryside wore helmets, and cops were attacked with Molotov cocktails in front of universities in Seoul. You think anyone cared that some people died out in the country?”

Detective Ahn went out for a smoke. The students followed him. While the rest of them were putting on their shoes, one male student whispered to me, “Detective Ahn was in charge of a few of those cases. He’s been known to work weekends to catch the murderer, even now, though the statute of limitations has passed. There must be a reason he can’t let it go.”

A girl standing in the yard added, “You’ve got to be careful with country people. They’re more stubborn than they look.”

The kids don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s why I like them.

Detective Ahn stopped smoking and, as if he’d suddenly had an idea, came back to the veranda.

“Do you have any family?” he asked.

“I’ve got a daughter.”

“I see . . .”

A man who’d lived alone for a long time. He’s probably looking for a lone wolf. The students began scouring the neighborhood, but Ahn didn’t follow them. Instead, he perched on the edge of the veranda.

He said, “I shouldn’t be saying this in front of you, but now that I’m getting older, I’m breaking down everywhere.” He tapped his knees.

If someone saw us, he would think that Detective Ahn and I were old friends from the village.

“Are you ill?” I asked.

“Diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure. There isn’t anything I don’t have. It’s all because of these stakeouts for the same guy. I’m sick of it.”

“Why don’t you retire somewhere peaceful?”

“I’ll get my rest eventually, when I’m in the grave.”

“Naturally. The grave’s most comfortable.”

We were quiet for a moment.

The detective said, “Doesn’t everyone have that one thing? The thing they have to see to completion before they die?”

“Of course they do,” I agreed. “I’ve got one, too.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing much to share. One of the students mentioned how you’re still trying to catch the criminal. What will you get out of it even if you catch him? You can’t put him behind bars anymore.”

“I don’t know why I keep returning to those cases. I’m getting worse about it these days. At the least, I need to let the killer know that someone hasn’t forgotten and is still after him. That way he can’t sleep easy.”

So, Detective Ahn, you know what murder is. What a crime scene soaked in blood is like. Murder and its irreversible power. There’s something in it that captivates us and pulls us in. But Detective Ahn, I always sleep well.

I said, “Anyway, you should really watch your health. These days I keep forgetting everything.”

“But you look fit for your age.”

“You know how old I am?”

I sensed him flinch. I pretended not to notice and changed the subject.

“The doctor says my brain’s withering. Later, it’ll be just like a dried-up walnut.”

Ahn stayed quiet.

I added, “By tomorrow, I might forget you paid me a visit.”

·

The students leave, but I stay pumped up. I wanted to sit them down and tell all. Walk them through from the first murder to the last, every single one of them still vivid to me. They’d be rapt listeners. Kids, there’s no main subject in the documents you’re looking at, only lines of objects and predicates. If you replace the name “John Doe” on the line, I’d be that very name, that subject. I was dying to reveal myself to them, but managed to hold back. I still had one thing left to do.

·

I had to make a trip downtown. When I got back, I could tell that someone had entered the house while I was gone. The person had been careful, but someone had definitely gone through the house. There were some things missing, no matter how much I hunted for them. They’d been taken, for sure. Was it a burglar? I’d never been robbed before.

When Eunhui returned from work, I told her that we’d had a burglar. She looked at me with pity and said no such thing had happened. She asked me what had gone missing, but I couldn’t remember. Still, something was definitely missing. I sensed it. But I couldn’t form the words for it.

“People say all dementia patients are like that,” she said. “They think their daughter-in-law or nurse is a thief.”

They call it “theft delusion.” I know that much. But this isn’t delusion. Things have definitely disappeared. I always keep my journal and my voice recorder on me, so they were spared, but something else was missing.

“I know,” I said. “The dog has disappeared. The dog’s disappeared.”

“Dad, when did we ever have a dog?”

Strange. I was sure we had a dog.

·

The cherry blossoms along the main road into my hometown were lovely. In the spring, people strolled in long lines through the tunnel of cherry blossom trees, first planted under Japanese rule. When the flowers were in full bloom, I’d take a detour around that road on purpose. It scared me to stare too long at them. You can chase away a fierce dog with a stick, but you can’t do that with flowers. Flowers are fierce. That street of cherry blossoms—I keep thinking about it. What had scared me so much? They were just flowers.

·

I’ve never once been arrested or detained, but prison was always in my thoughts. In my confused dreams, I’m always walking down a jail corridor that I’ve actually never once entered. I search for my assigned cell and am bewildered when I can’t find it. Or sometimes I’m assigned a cell already crammed full of people, and when I enter, all the people I’ve killed smile brightly at me, waiting.

I always recall the prisons I’ve seen on TV or read about in novels as worlds of iron. The iron cell doors clanging open. Barbed wire decorating the towering walls like vines. Handcuffs and iron shackles tight around the wrists. The clinking of the prisoners’ plates and trays. Even their gray uniforms remind me of iron.

Each person has a different image of salvation. It might look like an English garden with sunlight beaming down on the lawn, or a traditional Swiss cottage, its sills lined with flowers. For me, I’ve always imagined it as a prison. I see rough men reeking of sweat from their armpits, groins, their entire bodies. Only inside that prison, I’d be tamed within the strict hierarchy of convicts and utterly forget who I am. It’ll feel like I’m finally able to put my restless self to sleep.

I also fantasize about solitary confinement. I repeatedly imagine being trapped in a coffin-sized room, my hands bound behind me as I lick my plate with my tongue. I’m miserably trampled and drained, suffering from an intense longing for the earth beneath my feet, the world that I’ve left behind. Imagining this gives me intense pleasure. I’m probably exhausted from making every single decision and executing them by myself for too long. A world that shrinks the autonomy of my demonic self to zero; for me, that place is prison and solitary confinement. A place where I can’t just kill anyone and bury him, a place where I wouldn’t dare to think those thoughts, a place where my body and mind would be completely destroyed. A place where I would lose myself forever.

·

The public stadium. I remember the crowds swarming in. At the rally, they said that the North had sent down guerrilla units, captured American warships, shot the first lady. Public speakers roared: Let’s rip up the Red pig Kim Il-sung and slaughter him. Let’s beat up the Communists. Kids sat in the front and gazed up reverently at the platform. We knew what was about to happen. We were anticipating the government-sponsored spectacle of erupting blood, the severing of body parts.

“It’s him!” A friend pointed at a young man sitting behind the platform. “Today it’s that man. I’m sure of it.”

“How can you tell?”

“’Cause he’s a gangster!”

He did immediately stand out. Aside from him, the rest were community leaders: the mayor, the chief of police, the general running the military district, the superintendent of education, and the school principals. Only the young man radiated tension—tension typical of a life dependent on brute strength. He was so broad-chested that his suit jacket wouldn’t button up all the way.

Moments later, he got up on the platform to great applause. The rally was reaching its climax. Some overexcited women cried and fainted. As soon as the man appeared, two women in cotton dresses walked in front of him with a scroll of paper. He screamed, “Those fucking Commies, those fuckers, let’s wipe them off the planet!” Then he pulled out a knife. The women screamed and covered their eyes. He immediately swung the knife downward and sliced off his pinkie.

“ERADICATE THE COMMUNISTS!”

The two women took that pledge of his, written in blood, and held it up from either side, high in the air. Immediately the stadium echoed with the military band’s performance of “The Torch of the Red Hunt”: We who protect these beautiful rivers and mountains, we live with the spirit of men. We risk fields of fiery mortar to protect our families back home. Fellow soldiers, I’ll protect my country. Under the torch of the Red Hunt, I’ll risk my life.

Medical aides rush out of the ambulance parked beside the stadium. The man shouts, “I don’t need it. I don’t need anything!” The young gangster is agitated at the sight of his own blood. Like a cornered animal, he whirls around, gasping for air. Only when the chief of police comes and whispers in his ear does he finally shrink back. The medics help him down and begin to stanch the bleeding.

Gangsters got up on the platform at every rally and cut their finger off as they screamed, “Crush the Communists!” The rally truly ended only when blood splattered on the platform. Rumor had it that the police force requested gang cooperation each time, for dramatic effect. Their boss would single out his underlings for the task. I wondered, Did our country have enough gang members to handle the many public rallies? But one day these rallies suddenly disappeared, after our president was shot and killed by the secretary of state.

While everyone was trying to catch the phantom that was communism, I was doing my own hunting. An official announcement about a man I killed in 1976 declared that an armed spy had murdered the man: “We believe that the criminal brutally slaughtered his victim, then fled back to the North. Based on the savage nature of the crime, it is clear that the puppet regime of the North was responsible.”

Since the murder was apparently committed by a nonexistent ghost, there was no need to catch the criminal.

·

Returning home from downtown, I ran into a stranger at the edge of the village. The young man stared directly into my eyes, his arms crossed. Who was he? Why was he being so openly hostile to me? I was terrified. Out of habit, I first assumed he was a police detective. But I went home, searched my notes, and realized who he was. It was that bastard Pak Jutae.

Why was his face still not imprinted in my memory? I was frustrated. Anyway, I write it down before I forget. About how he showed up again.

·

Eunhui brought up the nursing home again. She said, Let’s at least have a look. I had become curious about how old people with dementia live, so I decided to go. But Eunhui only ended up getting angry. I asked her why she was angry, and she claimed that I’d said, “When did I say I’d go?” and started resisting.

“I did? I don’t remember . . .”

Eunhui entreated me again, so I immediately followed her. Later, when I reviewed what I’d recorded, I heard myself in the car repeatedly asking her, “Where are we going?”

Each time she answered patiently, “Dad, you said you wanted to go see the nursing home, so that’s what we’re doing right now. We’re just going to look.”

Eunhui took pictures of the home, saying it would help me remember it later. I used my recorder and took notes.

The elderly residents looked at peace. I sat for a bit with a group of old folks playing board games. They welcomed me. A game of building blocks wasn’t going smoothly. The pieces kept tumbling, but they were enjoying themselves.

Eunhui said, “Look at them. Everyone’s having a good time.”

She doesn’t know that there’s no room for others in the happiness I’d pursued. I don’t remember ever feeling happy while doing something with others. I had always turned deep inside myself, and in there I discovered a lasting pleasure. Like a pet snake that requires hamsters, the monster in me required constant feeding. Only at those times did others have any meaning.

I felt disgusted as soon as the old people began wildly clapping and laughing. Laughter equals weakness. It means offering yourself unarmed to others. It’s a sign that you’re willing to turn yourself into bait. These people had no power—they were coarse and childish.

We also stopped by a lounge full of chatting residents. Their conversations were disjointed fragments. One with severe dementia kept talking nonsense to himself, and those listening to him blabbered back. Nothing they said was very funny, but they kept exploding with laughter.

Eunhui said to the social welfare officer taking us around, “How do they understand each other and keep up conversations like that?”

As if it wasn’t the first time the woman had heard this question, she said, “Drunk people still enjoy each other’s company, for example. Full mental faculties aren’t necessarily essential to enjoy talking to one another.”

·

My notepad has the random phrase “future memories” jotted on it. What had I seen when I wrote this down? It is definitely my handwriting, but no matter how much I study it, it means nothing to me. Isn’t the word called “memory” because it happened in the past? But the phrase “future memories” . . . Frustrated, I looked it up on the internet and found that “future memories” means remembering what you have to do in the future. These were the memories that dementia patients were said to lose first. “Take pills thirty minutes after eating” is an example of a future memory. If you lose your past memories, you forget who you are, and if you lose your future memories, you end up living eternally in the present. But without a past and a future, does the present have any meaning? Still, what can you do? If the rails are broken, the train has to stop.

Anyway, I’m worried about the important work ahead.

·

I like a quiet world. I can’t live in a city because too many noises rush in at me. Too many signs, billboards, and people and their facial expressions. I can’t interpret all of that. It scares me.

·

I went to a writers’ reunion for the first time in ages. The area’s literary folk have aged a lot. One person who’d passionately written novels is now studying genealogy. It means his heart is starting to move toward the dead. Some who’d written poetry are now obsessed with calligraphy, also an art that belongs to the dead.

One old man says, “Now that I’m older, I enjoy reading other people’s writing.”

Another old man agrees, adding, “One of the original principles of Asian art is imitation.”

Now old, they return to the East. There’s a retired vocational school principal whom everyone still calls Principal Park. He asks me if I’ve continued to write poetry.

I say, “Sure.”

He asks me to show him some.

“They’re not worth showing anyone.”

“Still, I’m impressed. Writing poems after all this time.”

“Meaning, I’m trying to write poems, but it’s not going well. Maybe it’s age.”

“What are they about?” Principal Park asks.

“What I always wrote about, really.”

“Still the same old subjects—blood, corpses? You should mellow with age, old man.”

“I have mellowed out. Anyway, I’d really like to write at least one good poem before I go.”

“If there’s something you want to do, don’t put it off. Just do it. Who knows if you’ll be around tomorrow?”

“Exactly.”

We drank our coffee. I say, “I’m rereading the classics these days. Greek classics.”

“Which ones?”

“Tragedies, epics, the like. I read Oedipus Rex and the Odyssey.”

“Those kinds of books interest you?” Principal Park asks as he fiddles with his reading glasses.

“I’ve found there are things you only see when you’re old.”

I went to the bathroom and checked my recorder. Everything had recorded well.

·

I found a good poem on my bookshelf. I was excited and read and reread the poem, trying to memorize it. Then I realized that I’d written the poem.

·

My journal shocked me once again. The Police Academy students’ visit had been cleanly erased from my brain. I now experience this often, but never get used to it. It’s different from forgetting, since it feels as if it had never happened in the first place. It’s more like reading a page from an Antarctic explorer’s log or a crime novel. But the handwriting is definitely mine. I have absolutely no memory of it, but I write it down once again: Yesterday, five Police Academy cadets and someone named Detective Ahn paid me a visit.

·

These days, I only remember things vividly from the distant past.

My very first memory: sitting in a basin and splashing water in the middle of the yard. I was probably taking a bath. Since I was small enough to fit in the basin, I was likely three years old then, or younger. Some woman’s face was close enough to be touching mine. Probably my mother. There were other women coming and going in the background. My mother briskly scrubbed at my body, turning me this way and that, as if I were an octopus she’d bought at the fish market. I vividly remember the moment I felt her breath against my neck, and how I frowned as sunlight pierced my eyes. Since I don’t remember my sister being there, either she wasn’t born yet or she was elsewhere. Just as my bath ended, my mother grabbed my penis and said something, but I don’t remember anything after that. Except I remember thinking: That’s strange, she pulled my penis, but why does my butt hurt? Then, last, the raucous cackling of women.

·

Man is a prisoner of time. A dementia patient is someone trapped in a cell where the walls are collapsing inward. They’re moving faster and faster.

I can’t breathe.

·

The more I think about it, the visit from the Police Academy cadets makes me uneasy. Won’t they get in the way of my catching Pak Jutae?

·

Eunhui didn’t come home last night. I imagined the worst and prepared myself. I made my decision and got ready to find the bastard as soon as daylight hit. Then sleep overwhelmed me. When I woke up, I saw that Eunhui must have stopped by, then left again. It was noon.

Was she acting out?

·

When I skim through my journal or listen to what I’ve recorded, I discover events there I have no memory of. It’s natural, since I’m losing my memory, but it’s weird reading about your actions, thoughts, and speech as you lose them. It’s like rereading a Russian novel that you read a long time ago. The setting is familiar, and so are the characters. But it’s all somehow new. I keep asking myself, Did it really happen?

·

I asked Eunhui why she hadn’t come home the night before. She avoided looking at me and kept tucking her hair behind her ears. She does this whenever I say something she doesn’t want to hear. I see the younger Eunhui beneath that habitual gesture, that immature, naïve kid who once depended on me.

Eunhui tried to change the subject, and said, “The past is the past.”

“Why’re you suddenly acting out?” I asked. “Where were you last night?”

“So what if I stayed out?” Eunhui talked back, nothing like herself.

Her flaring up means she’d definitely been with that bastard. She no longer bothers to make up excuses; she thinks I’ll forget anyway. She doesn’t know how desperately I’m trying to hold on to my memories.

“The bastard’s a bluebeard.”

“A bluebeard? He doesn’t have a beard.”

Eunhui lacks refinement.

·

Why’s the bastard letting Eunhui live? Is it his way of holding her hostage? Is he keeping her near him so I can’t turn him in? If so, he could just get rid of me first. What are you waiting for, Pak Jutae?

·

Eunhui’s on the phone with a friend. I crouch down, my ear to the door, and listen in. She’s fallen in love with Pak. She can’t stop talking about him. She goes on about what a wonderful person he is, how good he is to her. For the first time, I feel like I’m listening to the undiluted voice of a woman in love. Eunhui’s never lived in a typical family, since she lost her parents when she was young, then lived with me ever since. For the first time, Eunhui is lost in fantasies of having her own family. But Eunhui, why that bastard, of all men? Why, of all people, is the bastard you love fated to die at the hands of the same man who killed your parents?

·

I want to kill Pak Jutae, and soon. But I keep losing track of my mind. I feel impatient. If I keep on like this, will I end up a man unable to do anything at all? I feel depressed.

·

I found Detective Ahn’s business card in Eunhui’s wallet. Why is he pursuing me? To realize his final goal in life?

·

Eunhui has begun outright avoiding me ever since I’d warned her about Pak, but I’m trying not to feel disappointed in her. Someday when my brain is shriveled up and I can’t remember anything, when I become totally helpless, or even when I’m dead and buried, Eunhui will, I hope, discover my journal. She’ll hear my recordings. Then she’ll learn about what kind of person I was. She’ll know what I had planned to do for her sake.

·

Eunhui said, “A policeman visited me at the lab today.” When I asked her who it was, Detective Ahn fit her description.

She added, “He asked me about my mother.”

“So what did you say?”

“As if I know anything about her! I said I knew nothing.”

“Why would a detective come around after all this time, asking about your mother?”

“How would I know? I just told him to tell me if he finds out anything.”

“And?”

“He said he would. But something was a little off.”

“What?”

“You told me my mother died. But the detective said that she was declared missing. He said, as for my father, the hospital issued a death certificate so he’s officially reported dead, but my mother isn’t. She was missing for so long that she was finally declared dead. Can you tell me what happened? Something feels wrong.”

“You said that to Detective Ahn? That something wasn’t right?”

“Yes. He said he agreed.”

“It’s what the orphanage director told me, that your mother was dead. So of course I always believed this.”

“Where do you think she is now?”

“Who knows? She might even be somewhere very nearby.”

In our yard, for instance.

·

When I replay the recorder, I discover that I’ve recently saved several songs on it. I’ve got songs by Kim Choo Ja and Cho Yong-pil. There’s Park In-soo’s “Spring Rain” as well: Spring rain, spring rain, you make me cry. Till when will you keep falling? You make me cry, spring rain.

Why had I sung these tunes?

I’m not sure anymore.

Because I’m not sure, I get angry. I try to delete them, but I don’t know how to, and finally give up.

·

After napping, I woke up and found Pak sitting at my bedside. He pressed firmly down on my forehead so I couldn’t get up. He said, “I know who you are.” I asked, “What do you mean, you know who I am?” He said that as soon as he’d laid eyes on me, he knew we were the same breed. And that he’d known instantly that I recognized him, too.

I asked, “Are you going to kill me?”

He shook his head. He said he was preparing a more amusing game, then opened the door and left. As expected, my hunch was correct. But what game was he planning?

·

Shame and guilt: Shame is when you’re embarrassed for yourself. Guilt lies outside yourself, with others. Some people probably feel guilt but no shame. They fear being punished by others. Me, I feel shame but I don’t feel guilt. I’ve never feared what people think, and I’m not afraid of punishment. Still, my sense of shame is extreme. I’ve even killed someone solely out of shame—my type of person is the more dangerous kind.

Letting Pak kill Eunhui would be a shameful thing. I’d never forgive myself.

·

Over the years, I’ve saved many lives. Even if those lives belong to animals that don’t speak.

·

When I come to my senses, Detective Ahn is sitting in front of me. I have absolutely no recall of when he came over and sat on the veranda and began talking. He keeps talking. It’s like watching a TV show that’s already half over.

“. . . that store, of all places. So of course I’d go nuts. Would you—”

I cut him off. “What store do you mean?”

“I’m speaking of the cigarette store. The store where I said I always bought cigarettes.”

“What about that store?”

Detective Ahn might look like a big bear, but his gaze is at once indifferent and sharp.

“Your memory must really come and go. I said the murdered woman used to work there.”

Now I know where this is heading. My eighth victim was someone folks called the “cigarette girl.” So Detective Ahn had been a regular there. But how had our conversation led to her?

“And?”

“She still shows up in my dreams, begging me to catch her killer.”

I said, “Be sure to catch him.”

Detective Ahn said, “I’m going to.”

“But isn’t getting the serial killer who’s on the loose right now more urgent?”

“That’s the Special Investigation Bureau’s task. As for me, since I’m just holding out till retirement, I’ll stick to my hobbies until my time’s up.”

Detective Ahn retrieved a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and stuck one between his lips, defensively repeating, “These cigarettes, so bad for your health, are supposed to be good for Alzheimer’s.”

I said, “I should have taken up smoking.”

“Would you like a smoke?” he asked, offering me one.

“I don’t know how to.”

The cigarette smoke slowly rose up one of the veranda’s wooden columns.

“Don’t say you’ve never lit up before,” Ahn said. “Anyway, your dog seems to like people. What’s his name?”

He made a clucking sound to attract the dog. From a fixed, safe distance, the yellow-haired mutt wagged his tail.

“He’s not ours,” I said. “I should close the front gate or something—everyone keeps coming and going as they please.”

“But the dog was here last time, too. He’s not yours?”

“I’m telling you, he showed up one day and keeps hanging around. Scram!”

“Leave him alone—he’s a tame one. But what’s that in his mouth?”

“A cow bone. The neighbor down the road is always making beef-bone soup, so he would’ve gotten it from there. It smells foul. How can a person live day and night on beef-bone soup alone?” As an afterthought, I added casually, “So, after all this time, why hasn’t the criminal you’ve been pursuing not been hauled in? Maybe it’s because he’s already dead.”

“That’s possible. But he wouldn’t have lived in peace. Even my sleep is uneasy, so there’s no way a guy who’s killed so many could sleep like a baby. If he’s dead, he would have caught every nasty disease out there first and suffered. Don’t they say that stress is the source of all illnesses?”

“Do you think it would influence dementia, too?”

His eyes became alert. “What? Murder?”

I gestured dismissively. “No, I mean stress.”

“There’s probably some connection.”

“What person doesn’t have stress? That’s life’s . . .”

I couldn’t remember what was next, so I sat there dumbly. Detective Ahn said carefully, “Tonic?”

“That’s it. Isn’t it the fuel of life?”

We laughed on and on for no reason. The mutt crouched and barked at us.

·

Everything’s starting to get mixed up. I think I’ve jotted something down, but when I check, there’s nothing there. Things I’m sure are on my recorder, I find written down instead. And the opposite happens, too. Memory, records, delusions—I can’t separate them anymore. The doctor said I should listen to music. I followed his advice and began listening to classical at home. Who knows if it’ll help. He also wrote me a new prescription.

·

Within days, my condition improved. Was it because of the new meds? I felt better and wanted to go out. My confidence returned. My muddled head was clearer, and my memory seemed to be improving. My doctor and Eunhui agreed with me. The doctor explained that dementia often accompanies depression in old age, and that the depression can make the dementia worse. So if you treat the depression, dementia seems to slow its progress or at least temporarily improve.

For the first time in ages, my confidence soars. I feel capable of doing everything. While my mind’s alert, I’ve got to do what I’ve been putting off.

·

They found another female body. Like the others, it was in a ditch on a country road. The victim’s bindings and the location where she was dumped matched the other murders. The police increased the number of checkpoints and now crowd around them like a pack of wild dogs.

·

It suddenly occurred to me: I might be jealous of Pak.

·

Now and then I think, If I’m caught, they can’t actually punish me. It’s strange. I should be happy about it, but I’m not. Instead, it feels as if I’ve been abandoned by the human race. I don’t know philosophy. There’s a beast inside me. A beast doesn’t have a moral code. I don’t have any morals, but why do I feel this way? Maybe because I’m old. Maybe only luck has kept me from getting caught. But why do I feel so unhappy? And what exactly is happiness? Feeling alive—isn’t that happiness? Wasn’t I happiest when day after day I was thinking about murder or planning one? Back then I was as taut as a stringed instrument. Then as now, I’ve lived only for the present. There’s been no past and there’s no future.

A few years ago at the dentist’s, I found a book with the title Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life and skimmed through it. The author emphasized the importance of immersion, the joy it brings you. Look here, Mr. Author, when I was young, older people got worried when a kid became obsessed with something. They would call him single-minded. Back then, only the crazy ones had that kind of focus. If you knew how engrossed I was way back when I was killing, and how enjoyable it was, if you knew how dangerous obsession is, you’d shut up. Immersion is dangerous. And therefore, enjoyable.

I don’t remember any of the last twenty-five years I’ve spent not hurting a soul. The boring daily life was followed by more of the same. I’ve lived far too long as this wrong person.

I want to become obsessed again.

·

After my car accident, I suffered from severe delirium. It was so bad that the nurses bound me to the bedpost. Since my body was tied up, my mind fluttered away. I dreamed a lot. One eerily vivid dream still stays with me as if it had actually happened. In the dream I am a company man and have three kids. The two older ones are daughters, and the youngest is a son. I take the packed lunch my wife made and head to work at what looks like a government building. The sweet boredom of a stable life where everything is known. Not once in my life have I felt this.

After I eat lunch with my colleagues, play a bit of pool, and return to the office, a female colleague tells me that my wife called. On the phone she screamed, “Darling, darling, darling!” And the phone cuts off just as she says, “Please save me!” While speeding home I try to speak but can’t. When I open the door, I see my wife and three children laid out in a row. At that moment, the police rush in and handcuff me. “What is this?” I say. “I sped home in order to catch myself?”

Once the delirium passes, I feel bereft whenever I recall the dream. But what had I lost? The brief taste of ordinary life that I’d been exiled from? My wife and kids? Grieving for something that was never mine didn’t make sense. It was probably just hallucinations from the anesthetic. So does that mean my brain can’t tell the difference? But my relief the moment the dream-police handcuff me is something to chew on. It’s what a person would feel when, after a long journey in which he saw everything the world had to offer, he returns to his old, run-down house. I don’t belong to the world of packed lunches and the office, but to the one of blood and handcuffs.

·

There isn’t much I do well. I excel at only one thing, but it’s the kind I can’t brag about. Think of the countless people who end up in the grave proud of something they can never share with others.

·

Is there anything more ironic than forgetting to take the meds I need to slow the decline of my cognitive skills? I put dots on the calendar to remind myself to take my pills, but sometimes I forget what the dots mean and stand staring blankly at the calendar.

I remember a bad joke I heard ages ago. A father tells his son to get some candles when the electricity suddenly goes out.

The son says, “Dad, it’s so dark. There’s no way I’ll be able to find the candles.”

His father says, “You fool, just turn on the lights and look for them.”

My relationship with meds goes something like this joke: I need a decent memory to take the pills, but since that’s what I don’t have, I can’t remember to take them.

·

People want to understand evil. A pointless desire. Evil is like a rainbow. It retreats at the same pace as your approach. Evil is evil because you can’t understand it. In medieval Europe, weren’t sodomy and homosexuality also sins?

·

Composers probably leave their musical scores behind so that others can play them again in the distant future. When a musical motif comes to a composer, his head must explode in fireworks. In this state, it can’t be easy for him to calmly retrieve paper and jot notes down. There’s a hint of comedy in the calm of meticulously writing down notations such as con fuoco—like fire, with passion. But inside every artist’s inner world there is a place for the stifled office clerk. I guess it’s necessary. That’s how the score, and the composer, will be passed down the generations.

Some composers probably don’t leave any written musical scores behind. In the same way, there were likely some powerful martial arts masters who only used their skills to protect themselves and died without passing down their secrets. And the poems I wrote with my victims’ blood, my poems that forensics officers call the scene of the crime, are buried in the cabinets of the police station.

·

I keep thinking about future memories, since the future is the very thing I’m trying hard not to forget. I’m fine forgetting the past when I once killed dozens of people. I’ve lived for decades with no connection to murder. So it’s a good thing. But I can’t forget the future—namely, my plan. The plan: to kill Pak Jutae. If I forget this future, Eunhui will meet a grisly death at his hands. But my Alzheimer’s-diseased brain is doing the opposite: it preserves my oldest memories most vividly, and stubbornly refuses to record the future. It’s as if my brain is repeatedly warning me that I don’t have a future. But when I think about it, I realize that without a future, the past might have no meaning either.

It’s the same for Odysseus. Early on his journey home, Odysseus lands on the island of the Lotus Eaters. After eating the lotus fruit that the locals hospitably urge on him, he forgets about his return home. Not only Odysseus, but all his followers forget as well. The hometown belongs to the past, but plans to return to that home belong to the future. Even afterward, Odysseus continues to struggle with forgetting. He flees the Sirens’ song, and escapes from the goddess Calypso, who tries to hold on to him for eternity. The Sirens and Calypso planned to have Odysseus forget the future and remain stuck in the present, but Odysseus resists and aims to return home because he learns that living solely in the present means descending to the life of an animal. You can’t call a person who loses all his memories a human being. The present is merely the connecting point for the past and future; it’s meaningless alone. What’s the difference between a patient with advanced dementia and an animal? Nothing. They eat, shit, laugh and cry, then finally die. Odysseus rejected this. How? By remembering the future, and not giving up on his plans to stride toward the past.

In that sense, my plan to kill Pak is also a kind of homecoming. Maybe my trying to return to the world that I’d left, the era of serial killing, was an attempt to recover who I once was. In this way, my future is connected to my past.

Odysseus had a wife who’d waited anxiously for him. Who was waiting for me in my dark past? Was it those who died by my hands, those bodies who slept beneath my bamboo forest and babbled on each windswept night? Or was it someone I’d forgotten?

·

I’m pretty sure the doctor planted something in my head when I had brain surgery. I’ve heard there’s a computer like that. One that, with the press of a button, erases all your records, then self-destructs.

·

Once again Eunhui doesn’t return. It’s been how many days already? I can’t tell. He hasn’t already gotten her, has he? She’s not answering her phone, either. It’s time to act, but I keep forgetting. I’ve got to act fast.

·

I had trouble sleeping, so I went outside and saw the night sky radiant with stars. In the next life I want to return as an astronomer or a lighthouse keeper. Looking back, I realize the hardest part of life is dealing with humans.

·

I’ve finished all the prep. Now I just have to get onstage. I do a hundred push-ups. My muscles are tight and firm.

·

In a dream, I see my naked father going to the bathhouse. I ask, “Father, why are you going to the bathhouse naked?” He answers, “I’ll be getting undressed anyway. I might as well go there naked.” He had a point. Still, it doesn’t feel right, so I ask, “Then why does everyone else go dressed to the bathhouse?” He says, “But you know we’re different from the others.”

·

I woke up in the morning feeling stiff all over. I ate breakfast and stretched. The stinging in my hands and feet turned out to be light scrapes, so I hunted down the medicine chest to get some ointment. The floors under my feet rustled with sand. Had something happened last night? I didn’t remember a thing. There wasn’t anything new saved on my recorder when I turned it on. I’d definitely gone somewhere last night, but I must’ve left it behind. I must have sleepwalked. I wondered if I’d spent the night getting rid of Pak. Yesterday I jotted on my notepad: “I’ve finished all the prep. Now I just have to get onstage. I do a hundred push-ups. My muscles are tight and firm.”

Nothing stood out on TV. The news mentioned nothing about a murder. There was just the weather report. The summer would be unusually hot. The scum—they broadcast the same news every May or June, year after year: “This summer will be unusually hot.” It’s just a ploy to sell more air conditioners. In early winter, they use another news clip: “This winter will be unusually cold.” If all these clips were for real, the earth would be a sauna or a freezer by now.

I watch the news all day. They must not have discovered Pak’s corpse yet. It’d be dangerous for me to hang around in the area, so I stay put. Does the corpse even exist? The dried dirt up my arm makes me think I’ve buried him somewhere, but I’m frustrated because I can’t remember. How will Eunhui react if she discovers his corpse? What will she do afterward? Will she learn years later what a difficult act I’d committed for her sake? What about the police? Will they discover that Pak was the serial killer who had driven the neighborhood into a cauldron of fear? Maybe that’s too much to hope for.

I took a shower. I washed thoroughly, then burned the clothes I’d been wearing. I vacuumed the entire house and burned whatever was in the dust bag. Then I poured bleach into the bag, finally washed and dried it. Then I asked myself, Why bother? I’d forget it all anyway. If caught, wouldn’t I finally end up in the jail cell that I’d only seen in my fantasies? What was so bad about departing the confusing world of dust for a world of iron divided into rigid square frames?

·

Today I listened all day long to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”).

·

I read this in the papers a while ago: A terminally ill cancer patient asked the hospital staff to call the police. He then confessed to a murder he’d committed ten years before. He had kidnapped his business partner and killed him. The police discovered the partner’s remains buried on a small mountain. Returning to the hospital, they found the murderer in a coma and near death. He’d had to bear the guilt on top of the intense physical pain, so the public forgave him. Everyone must have assumed that he was paying for his sins. But would I also be forgiven? What would they say to a serial killer who had slipped painlessly into oblivion and even forgotten who he was?

·

I’m completely alert today. Do I really have dementia?

·

Why isn’t Eunhui back? She isn’t answering her cell phone, either. Has she found out who I really am? No, not possible.

·

I took a walk in the bamboo forest. The bamboo sprouts were growing rapidly upward. Something connected to the green shoots began coming back to me, then disappeared. I looked at the sky. The bamboo leaves rustled in the wind. I felt calmer, at peace. I didn’t know whose bamboo forest it was, but I liked it. I wandered through the entire village. There was something I needed to find, but what it was, I couldn’t remember.

I opened my journal and read something I’d written about Pak Jutae and his jeep, about how often the bastard kept showing up and monitoring me. I walked through the village one more time. There was no sign of Pak or his jeep. No doubt he died at my hands. I feel proud that I defeated the young bastard, but it also feels futile, since I recall absolutely nothing. I’m not one to collect trophies—I’d trusted my memory to meticulously record what happened. Frankly, if I can’t remember, what use is a victim’s ring or barrette? I wouldn’t even know where it came from.

·

I sat on the back veranda and watched twilight fall over the village. Is this how life ends?

·

Stray dogs are known to dig tunnels under front gates and crawl onto people’s property. Once they end up on the streets, even house pets instantly act like wolves. They howl at the moon, dig holes, and adapt to the new social codes. Even pregnancy has a hierarchy: only the head female can have babies. If a low-ranking female somehow ends up pregnant, the others attack and kill her. A yellow mutt who’s dug in my yard for a few days is walking around with an object in his mouth. This mutt from nowhere. What did he bring me this time? I threatened him with a stick until he cowered and fled. I used the stick to turn over the pale object covered with dirt.

A girl’s hand.

·

Either Pak Jutae is still alive or I had the wrong man. It’s one or the other.

·

Eunhui’s still not answering her phone.

·

An Alzheimer’s patient is like a traveler who mixes up his dates and arrives a day early at the airport. Until he reaches the ticket counter, he’s as sure of himself as a rock. He calmly hands his passport and ticket over the counter. The attendant shakes her head and says, “I’m sorry, but you’ve come a day early,” but he believes the attendant is wrong.

He says, “Please check your system one more time.”

Another staff member joins and says that the customer has mixed up the dates. Only then does the man admit he is wrong and retreat. The next day, when he comes to the counter and shows his ticket, another attendant tells him the same thing: “You’ve come a day early.”

This scene repeats itself daily. He ends up eternally wandering around the airport, unable to arrive on time. He isn’t trapped in the present, but flounders in a space that isn’t past, present, or future. No one understands him. As his loneliness and fear escalate, he becomes a man who does nothing. No, he’s changing into a man who can’t do anything.

·

I was sitting dumbly in my car, parked at the curb. I didn’t know why I was there. A patrol car stopped behind me, then a young cop knocked on my window. I didn’t recognize him.

He asked, “Sir, what are you doing here?”

“I’m not sure myself.”

“Sir, where do you live?”

I dug out my vehicle registration papers one by one and showed him.

“Could you please give me your driver’s license, too?”

I did what he told me to. The policeman looked straight at me and asked, “What brings you out here at this time of night?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“Please follow me. You do know how to drive, correct?”

I turned on the hazard lights and followed his car into the village. Only when I was home did I remember: I had been heading to Pak’s house to find Eunhui. I was thirsty, so I opened the fridge. I saw a hand in a plastic bag.

Could that really be Eunhui’s hand? God, for some reason I can’t stop thinking that it’s her hand. Otherwise, why was it sent to me? Since Pak is alive, he’s boldly sent me the hand. The bastard is challenging me to a game, but I can’t even make it to his house. No, even if I broke into his house, I would never defeat him. My entire body trembles with rage, knowing I have no choice but to take his taunts.

I turned the room inside out looking for Detective Ahn’s business card so I could call him. With nothing to lose, nothing scared me. But no matter how much I looked, I couldn’t find his card. I was forced to call 112 and say, “My daughter’s been murdered, and I think I know who her killer is. Please come quickly, before I forget.”

·

Oedipus was on the road when, in a fit of anger, he killed someone. Then he forgot about it. The first time I read this, I was impressed that he could forget such a thing.

When an epidemic rages across Thebes, King Oedipus orders the criminal who has offended the gods to be captured. But before the day’s end, he learns that he is that very criminal. In this moment, does he feel shame or guilt? It’s probably shame for sleeping with his mother, and guilt for killing his father.

If Oedipus looks into the mirror, he’ll see me standing there. We look the same, but the image is flipped. Though we are both murderers, he doesn’t realize that the person he killed was his father and even forgets that he killed a man. Only later does he come to know what he has done, and gouges out his eyes.

From the start, I was aware that I was killing my father, had known that I would kill him. Afterward, I never forgot. The rest of the murders were a mere chorus to the first one. Each time my hands were covered in blood, I sensed the shadow of the first murder. But in the last act of my life, I’ll forget about all the evil I’ve committed. As a result, I’ll become someone who doesn’t need to—someone unable to—forgive himself. Though a blind Oedipus becomes enlightened and wise in old age, I become a child. I’ll be a ghostly figure who can’t be held responsible.

Oedipus proceeded from ignorance to forgetting, and from forgetting to destruction. I’m the exact opposite. I’ll transition from destruction to forgetting, then from forgetting to ignorance, pure ignorance.

·

Plainclothes detectives knocked on the front door. I got dressed and opened the door for them. Behind the detectives were uniformed cops.

I asked, “Are you coming because of the 112 call?”

“Yes. Are you Kim Byeongsu?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

I handed over the plastic bag.

One man asked, “So the dog came with this in his mouth?”

“That’s right.”

“Can we search the premises?”

“There’s no need to search here. You have to get the criminal.”

“Who is it? Do you know?”

“It’s the bastard Pak Jutae. He’s in real estate and goes hunting in the area . . .”

The detectives laughed and smirked. A man standing behind the police abruptly emerged up front.

He said, “Are you talking about me?”

It was Pak. He was with them. My legs went weak, my eyes searched them. Were they in it together? I pointed at Pak and shouted, “Get the bastard!”

Pak laughed. Something warm trickled down my thigh. What was this?

“The old man’s pissed his pants.” They couldn’t stop laughing and snickering.

Shaking, I collapsed onto the veranda. German shepherds came in through the gaping front gate.

A middle-aged detective in a leather jacket said, “Give him the warrant, though who knows if he’ll recognize it.”

As soon as the order was given, a younger cop shoved a piece of paper at me.

“Here, you’ve seen the warrant. We’ll start the search now.”

After one of the shepherds sniffed around a corner of the yard, he barked sharply three times. One of the uniformed police began digging with a shovel.

“Ah, here it is.”

“But something’s not right.”

With one look you could tell that it was a child’s remains. A bony white skeleton, it had clearly been buried for years. The police start a discussion among themselves. The locals are just outside, crowding against the gate. The cops put up a police line. The police seem either disturbed or excited, I’m not sure which. I’ve always been slow at reading people’s expressions. And who was that kid? They’re saying she was buried long ago, but why can’t I remember anything? Why is Pak with the police?

·

I’m behind bars. The police keep coming for me. They keep talking about “yesterday,” but I have no recall of “yesterday.” Each interrogation feels like the first one, so I always start from the beginning. I tell them how many people I’ve killed and that I never got caught; about the kinds of poems I wrote; about why I didn’t kill the poetry instructor; about Nietzsche, Homer, and Sophocles, how the three keenly understood the life and death of man.

The police don’t want to hear any of this. They don’t seem interested in my proud past or my philosophy. They believe I killed Eunhui, and they focus only on that. I tell them Pak Jutae probably killed her. I say that he had been seeing Eunhui. I say that since I collided with his car and saw blood dripping from his trunk, he’s been keeping an eye on me.

The detective in front of me smirks, laughs, then says, “When he’s a cop?”

I protest. Isn’t a cop also capable of murder?

He nods readily. “Of course that’s possible. But probably not this time.”

I look for Detective Ahn. He of all people might believe me. Again, the detective ruthlessly shakes his head. He says he doesn’t know a Detective Ahn. I describe his appearance in great detail, his way of speaking, and what we talked about. One of the police detectives says, “For someone who says he has no short-term memory, how can you remember this Detective Ahn so clearly?”

The man’s right, but why am I so angry?

·

I feel like I’ve ended up in a parallel universe. Here, Pak Jutae is a cop, Detective Ahn doesn’t exist, and I’ve become Eunhui’s murderer.

·

The police detectives come for me again. Again one asks me, “Why did you kill Kim Eunhui?”

“Pak Jutae killed my daughter.”

As if I wasn’t there, the middle-aged detective leans toward the younger one and says, “What’s the use of questioning him?”

“Still, we have to write up a report. It could be an act for all we know.”

The younger detective says he’s had enough, and says to me, “Look here, Kim. Eunhui is not your daughter. She’s your caregiver, someone who assists the elderly with dementia.”

I don’t know what a caregiver is. The middle-aged one holds back the increasingly angry younger one, saying, “Your blood pressure’ll go up. Forget it. Nothing you say will make a difference.”

·

Confusion is watching over me.

·

I discovered my story in the paper. I tore it out and kept it.

The family of Kim Eunhui reported her absence to the police when Kim, who rarely missed work, was unreachable by phone and had missed work for four days. The police investigating Kim’s whereabouts focused on her work as a caregiver for dementia patients. They followed up on her patients, and after determining that Kim Byeongsu, aged 70, was a prime suspect, issued a warrant. On searching his property, they discovered Kim Eunhui’s corpse as well as dismembered parts of her body. Not only was Kim’s corpse found, but a child’s skeleton was also uncovered. Based on the skeleton’s condition, the police hypothesize that the child was secretly buried years earlier. Investigation of the child’s murder will continue once the identification results from the National Forensic Service are confirmed. The suspect Kim Byeongsu has no previous criminal record, and is known to have advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Interest is rising in whether the prosecution and indictment will continue.

·

I keep appearing on television. No one believes that Eunhui is my daughter. Since everyone is saying that, I wonder if I’m wrong after all. They say that Eunhui was a responsible caregiver who selflessly aided dementia patients without families. A scene of her colleagues crying during her funeral repeatedly flashes on the screen. They are sobbing so sorrowfully that even I almost believe that she wasn’t my daughter but an actual professional caregiver. The police are uprooting the area around my house. They mention words like “genetic testing” and “demon.”

I called the detective and told him to stop digging in the yard and start instead in the bamboo forest. The detective went outside, looking tense. From that point, the bamboo forest appeared on TV. My bamboo forest, whose brilliant leaves always sang melodies to me.

As waterproof bags filled with skeletons descended the mountain one by one, one of the locals reported, “What it is, is a—a cemetery, a cemetery.”

·

Incomprehensible things continue without end. Similar events in similar situations continue to repeat themselves, and I’m completely lost. I can’t remember anything anymore. Here I don’t have a pen or recorder. I think they took them away. I just manage to get a piece of chalk and record each day on the wall. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Everything is so mixed up.

·

I was dragged to an inspection of the crime scene, but I didn’t do anything. Meaning, I couldn’t do anything. How can I reenact a scene I can’t remember? One of the locals threw a bottle at me, saying I was no better than an animal. The bottle hit me in the forehead. It hurt.

·

Pak came for me. I’m so confused every time I see him. He said it was true that he had tailed me for some time. He said he’d suspected that I might be connected to the multiple murders in the district. As soon as he sat down, a psychologist followed and sat beside him. He resembled the man on TV who talked about the psychology of a serial killer, but maybe not.

Pak asked, “Do you remember my visit with the students from the Police Academy?”

“That was Detective Ahn.”

“There is no Detective Ahn. I was the one who brought the students.”

I strongly denied this. Pak looked at the psychologist. I didn’t miss them exchanging smiles.

“That’s not true,” I said. “You came with Eunhui. You said you were going to marry her.”

“I did meet Kim Eunhui. Since she was at your house regularly, I also had a few questions for her.”

“But didn’t I hit your car? Your jeep. How can you explain that?”

“That couldn’t have happened. I drive a Hyundai.”

“You’re saying you don’t hunt, either?”

“No.”

The more we talked, the more confused I got. Last, I asked, “Did the killings stop?”

“It’s too early to tell. We’ll have to wait and see.”

The psychologist and Pak exchanged meaningful smiles, then exited the room, leaving me alone.

·

Some days I’m alert, and others, I feel dazed.

·

The detective asks me, “Do you feel wronged?”

I shake my head.

“Do you believe you’ve been falsely accused?”

That made me laugh. The detective is underestimating me. That offends me the most. If they’d caught me in time, the sentence would have been much worse. If it was during Park Chung-hee’s regime, they would have immediately hanged me or sent me to the electric chair.

I killed Eunhui’s mother. After first killing Eunhui’s father at their house, I kidnapped her mother while she was leaving work and killed her. Eunhui was at daycare, so she escaped. I still remember each of those scenes vividly. But I don’t remember anything about Eunhui’s own death, though the police seem to have found the tools that I used to kill and bury her. I must have left some things out in the back. My fingerprints were apparently found all over the tools. When the cops decide to get you, there’s nothing they won’t do.

I once heard about an artist who had made so many paintings that he couldn’t tell if one of them was forged or not. While claiming it was a fake, he said, “It looks like one of my paintings, but I don’t remember painting it.”

The painter finally lost the suit. I knew exactly how he felt.

I said to the detective, “It seems like something I’d do, but I’ve no memory of it.”

He urged me to remember, adding, “How can you kill someone and not remember?”

I grabbed his hand. He didn’t push me away. I looked into his eyes and said, “You don’t understand. I want to remember what happened more than anyone. Mister, I do want to remember, because it’s so precious to me.”

·

People say my memories of Eunhui are false. No one’s on my side. I even heard a person say on TV, “After retiring as a veterinarian, he had little contact with his neighbors and lived the secluded life of a loner. I never once saw family visit him.”

One day I asked the detective, “Then did I have a dog? The yellow mutt?”

“The dog? Oh, that dog. Yes, there was a dog. The one that dug up your lawn.”

I felt a little reassured knowing that the yellow mutt did exist.

“What happened to the dog? After what happened to his owners . . .”

“What do you mean, ‘his owners’? There’s only you.” He called out, “Hey, what happened to the dog? The mutt?”

The young detective, carrying some papers for him, said, “The locals wanted to eat it, since it’s got no owner. But the village head said, ‘What would they become if they ate a dog that had devoured human flesh?’ So they let it go. Since he’s got no one caring for him, I guess he’ll end up a stray.”

·

I heard something about Eunhui on TV: “Colleagues are devastated by the death of Kim Eunhui, a woman who selflessly devoted herself to helping those with dementia.”

What about all my conversations with her? Had I made them all up? That’s impossible. How could the imagination be more real than what I’m experiencing right now?

·

I asked, “Did you find a lot of skeletons?”

The detective nodded.

I said, “Let me ask you one thing. Way back, I killed a woman who worked at the downtown community center and her husband. Could you find out if they had a child?”

He said he would. The cops aren’t hostile to me anymore. Sometimes they seem to have respect for me. They even seem to consider me some sort of courageous whistle-blower.

A few days later, the detective returned and said, “They had a three-year-old baby, but she was killed along with her father. With a blunt weapon.”

The cop went through his documents and grinned. “Funny coincidence. The dead kid’s name was Eunhui, too.”

·

I suddenly realize I’ve lost. I don’t know at what. I just feel as if I’ve lost.

·

Time passes. The trial begins. People swarm in. I’m moved from here to there. People rush in again. I’m moved here and there. They crowd in again. People begin asking me about my past. I’m able to respond relatively well to these questions. I talk about the acts I committed in the past without stopping, and people write it all down. I tell them everything except about killing my father. They ask me, “How can you remember things so clearly from long ago but can’t remember crimes you’d recently committed? That makes no sense.” And wasn’t I being open about the past because the statute of limitations had passed, but not confessing to recent crimes because I was afraid of being sentenced?

People don’t understand that I’m being punished this very minute. God has already decided how to punish me. I am stepping into forgetting.

·

Will I become a zombie when I die? Or was I already one?

·

A man who said he was a journalist visited me. He said he wanted to understand evil.

What he said was so clichéd, it amused me.

I said, “Why are you trying to understand evil?”

“I’d have to understand it in order to avoid it.”

I said, “If you can understand it, then it isn’t evil. Just stick to praying, so you can stay out of evil’s way.”

His disappointment was obvious.

I added, “Evil isn’t what’s terrifying. It’s time. No one can defeat time.”

·

I’m somewhere that could be a jail or a hospital. I can’t distinguish between the two anymore. Maybe I’m drifting between the two. It feels like a day or two has passed, or an eternity. It’s impossible to tell. I can’t tell if it’s morning or afternoon. Or if it’s this life or that life. Strangers visit and keep asking me about different people. None of those names stir up any images in me anymore. Whatever links the names of objects, people, and feelings has been destroyed. I am isolated on a tiny spot in the vast universe, and I’ll never escape it.

·

Over the past few days, a poem has been circling in my head like a swarm of mayflies by a riverbank. It was written by a Japanese death row inmate.

The rest of

the song

I shall hear in the afterlife,

over here.

A complete stranger sits in front of me and begins talking. He looks tough and scares me a little.

He questions me closely, saying, “Are you just pretending to have dementia? To avoid being sentenced?”

I say, “I don’t have dementia. I’m just forgetful, that’s all.”

“Didn’t you first claim you had dementia?”

“Me? I don’t remember saying that. I don’t have dementia. I’m just a little tired. No, not a little—I’m exhausted.”

While he shakes his head from side to side, he jots something down on paper. He asks, “Why did you kill Kim Eunhui? What was your motive?”

“Me? When? Who?”

He keeps talking about things I can’t understand, and I become unbearably tired. I hang my head and begin begging. I say, “If I’ve done something wrong, please forgive me.”

·

It’s hard to wake up. I have no idea what time it is, or whether it’s morning or night.

·

I can barely understand what people are saying.

·

Only now do I truly understand a passage from the Heart Sutra that I must have memorized. I sit on the bed and repeatedly chant it to myself:

So, in the emptiness, no form,

No feeling, thought, or choice,

Nor is there consciousness.

No eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind.

No color, sound, smell, taste, touch,

Or what the mind takes hold of,

Nor even act of sensing.

No ignorance or end of it,

Nor all that comes of ignorance.

No withering, no death,

No end of them.

Nor is there pain, or cause of pain,

Or cease in pain, or noble path

To lead from pain.

Not even wisdom to attain!

Attainment, too, is emptiness.

·

I’m floating in lukewarm water. It’s peaceful, tranquil. Who am I? And where is this place? A gentle breeze blows into the emptiness. I continue swimming, but no matter how much I paddle my arms, I can’t escape. This silent, still world becomes smaller and smaller. It becomes infinitely small until it becomes a single dot. It becomes a speck of dust in the cosmos. No, even that disappears.