Bolt. The bolt that the mechanic turned aspiring singer was holding while auditioning onstage. While the young man continued singing fervently, Yunseok’s focus was on that solid metal part. If only my hand were holding something. Even a walnut, or a marble ball like the ones they used to sell in stationery stores when I was a kid. Yunseok stared down at his empty palm.
The store was crowded that summer day. It was just before a national holiday. The three of them—Yunseok, his wife, Mira, and their three-year-old son, Seongmin, who was seated in the shopping cart—took the escalator down to the basement-floor supermarket. It was a scene that would replay in his mind for the rest of his life, but he didn’t know it then. A sale was announced over the loudspeaker, and screaming kids raced past the cart. Yunseok had wanted to stay home and watch a baseball game on TV, he really had, but Mira, not he but Mira, had wanted to go grocery shopping.
“You can lie down all you want after you die! Come on. Get up and get the kid ready.”
He did what she told him to. Much later, he would often remind Mira that if she had let him finish watching that baseball game, nothing would have happened and they would still be living in their sunny, south-facing apartment. Each time, Mira would blame his careless, indifferent grip, the one that had let go of what was most essential and allowed their entire life to slip away between its fingers. Still, they knew nothing about this yet, and got into their new compact SUV. Their three-year-old son already knew what a supermarket was. He knew that colorful products, free-sample corners where you could eat your fill, awaited him, and chocolates near the checkout counter called to him. Seongmin was excited as soon as he was seated in the car.
Only after parking did Mira realize she’d left the loyalty card at home. She asked Yunseok, “What should we do? Should we just go back?” She always asked first. If Yunseok had said they should go home, she would have said, “Go back when we’ve come all this way?” He wanted to avoid such useless repetition.
Instead, he said, “You should have had it ready earlier. It’s not like the points add up to much. Let’s go in.”
He put Seongmin into the red shopping cart. The child was so excited that he couldn’t stay still. Yunseok pushed the cart behind the other customers, and halted at the mobile phone vendor. He’d wanted to replace his old phone now that his contract had ended, but with long days and late nights at the office, he hadn’t had time. “Is this the latest model?” he asked. He rubbed the Motorola that the sales assistant had handed him. It was plastic, but it felt as hard and cold as metal. The clerk continued his sales pitch, saying, “You won’t need anything else if you buy this. You can use it to make memos as well as take photos—it’s the best all-around phone. Have you used Motorola products before? They have the newest technology.” Yunseok’s right hand briefly let go of the cart to flip the phone open and examine the screen.
“How much are the monthly payments?” Yunseok asked.
The sales assistant promptly recited the many benefits offered by the phone company if customers signed a contract for twenty-four monthly installments. Yunseok was thinking that he could afford thirty thousand won a month. He might even be able to manage forty. The mortgage payments had gone down last month, and his overtime hours had increased. His company’s new car model that launched earlier in the year was a hit, and there was a three-month backlog of orders. The factory was operating continuously, with three shifts daily.
“How’s this phone?” He turned to his left to get his wife’s opinion. But she wasn’t there. He turned to the right. He didn’t see Seongmin either, who had been sitting in the shopping cart. Had Mira already gone into the supermarket with Seongmin? He returned the cell phone to the clerk and looked for his wife.
As he passed the security gate by the entrance, he heard Mira’s voice from behind: “Where are you going?” She was holding her purchases from the cosmetics department. Their eyes met and their facial expressions simultaneously froze. They were looking at each other but seeing nothing. Mira let out a short scream. She dropped the shopping bag. Cotton balls and cleansing cream rolled out. Mira leaned over, collected the items, and ran toward the escalator. Yunseok asked the clerk if he’d seen his son. The clerk shook his head. A three-year-old boy could hardly clamber out of a shopping cart alone and wander off. Someone had taken the cart. Mira looked for their boy around the food-sample corners, running into carts everywhere she went.
Wouldn’t there be surveillance cameras?
He followed a security guard into a room with dozens of surveillance monitors, but found that cameras were installed only within the supermarket itself. There wasn’t a single one installed to monitor the rented spaces just outside the entrance. A missing child announcement was broadcast three times inside the supermarket, but no one had responded. Just hundreds of carts peacefully rambling like a flock of sheep. Mira wanted to shove between them and shout, Why aren’t any of you listening to the announcement? Don’t you have kids, too? This can happen to anyone, can’t it?
Yunseok had looked down at his hand then, too. It had taken only a moment. As if someone had lain in wait, and as soon as he had let go of the handle, silently pulled the cart away and disappeared. Why had Seongmin stayed so quiet? Why hadn’t he resisted the stranger?
Ignorance imprisons man in darkness. The couple entered that darkness and began hurting each other. The vanished two to three minutes of their lives existed inside that darkness. He’d say, “You’re such a careless mother. You should’ve said that you were buying makeup.” Mira retorted, saying, “Who’s the man so crazy about mobile phones that he neglected his son?”
They spent the whole day going from the supermarket to the police station and back. By late evening, they couldn’t ignore the ominous feeling solidifying inside them. The sense that they had lost their only son forever.
Ten years later, Yunseok received the phone call. He had just returned from the night shift and assumed that it was the usual prank call. He didn’t even get angry anymore. Some—no, many—people enjoyed tormenting others.
The caller asked, “Is your son’s name Jo Seongmin?”
“Are you calling about the flyer?” Yunseok tugged off his socks with his free hand.
One got stuck, so he switched hands, pulled the sock off, and tossed it into the corner.
“Flyer? No, I’m not. Could you please confirm your son’s name? It is Jo Seongmin, correct?”
“That’s correct. Did you see something?”
Papers rustled in the background. It was a noisy place where phones rang incessantly.
“Yes, here it is. You registered your missing child’s information on the genetic database, correct?”
Was this a new type of scam?
“Yes, that’s right. Seongmin. Jo Seongmin, like the baseball player.”
“His name is different, but we have a child with a genetic match.”
“A different name?”
“The name was changed, but genes don’t lie. It’s a 99.99 percent match.”
“Where are you calling from again?”
“Daegu.”
“Daegu? Where in Daegu?”
“A police station in Daegu. Tomorrow, one of our employees will go up to Suwon with the boy. You will be at home, yes?”
“If it really is Seongmin, I’ll drive down right away.”
“Oh, there’s no need to drive down. These last few days, our employee and your son have developed a good rapport. He’ll be going up there anyway for work. We thought we would send them together.”
Yunseok hung up and went to the bedroom. Mira’s eyes were fixed on the television. He said, “Mira, I just got a call. Seongmin, they say he’s alive.”
Mira repeated Yunseok’s name a few times, gazed baldly at him, then looked back at the TV screen. Yunseok went and held her by the shoulders.
He said, “Honey.”
Still her eyes kept rolling to the right like a halibut’s. She frowned at Yunseok for blocking the television, so he released her and sprang to his feet. In his room, he hesitated, then made another call.
“Mom, it’s me,” he said. “I think they’ve found our Seongmin.”
Yunseok’s mother, who had spent the past seven years living in a prayer center in the mountains of Gangwon-do, was skeptical.
“No, really, it seems real this time. Seongmin’s mom, well, you know her condition. I told her, but . . . No, she understands. I think she understood. I think she’s listening, who knows, who knows . . . He said they’re bringing him to me . . . I’m not sure. I said it’s for real this time. He didn’t even mention a reward. I said it’s not phishing. I even called again and got the police station . . . Daegu, I don’t know either, how he got all the way to Daegu.”
He tried to calm his welling emotions by holding the phone away from his face. He breathed deeply.
“Mom, don’t cry. You don’t have a car. But what should I do now, with our son coming tomorrow and no spare room?”
When he suddenly looked behind him, he didn’t see Mira. The front door was ajar. He quickly slipped on his shoes and ran outside. “Mira, Mira,” he called.
Though he knew his voice would only drive her farther away, he always called out his wife’s name as he looked for her. His wife would scramble up and down the steep, narrow stairs in their neighborhood like a wild goat. The only way to catch her was to take a shortcut. Yunseok had already passed through several front gates of neighbors whom he now knew, climbed onto their roofs lined with clay jars, and headed toward a spring that his wife often stopped at.
He made excuses, saying, “My wife needs air,” but their neighbors knew that Mira was sick. That the schizophrenia had worsened.
The social worker who visited once a week had said, “Most likely the shock of your son’s loss isn’t the main cause. There are many causes.”
Yunseok, however, adamantly believed that his wife’s illness was a disease of the heart. If they hadn’t lost their child, she wouldn’t have become like this. When he arrived at the spring, the locals pointed and said, “She just left, the same way she always goes.”
Mira was sitting on a hilly slope north of the spring and gazing at downtown Seoul. Yunseok grabbed her arm and, panting, sat next to her.
“Why did you come here again?” he asked. “Do you feel good here?”
She looked suspicious. When he tried holding her hand, her fist shot out and punched him hard in the stomach. His wife was rapidly losing the capacity to sympathize with others. His solar plexus hurt so much he could hardly breathe. He collapsed into a crouch and stayed like that until he was finally able to say, “Let’s go. Seongmin’s coming.”
She said, “Seongmin?”
She was herself again. That was a good and bad sign. When Mira was herself, she was depressed and prickly. Her words and reactions slowed, and her eyes filled with doubt.
“Seongmin? How? Where?”
“He’s coming tomorrow. They found him in Daegu.”
Mira shook her head. “No, that can’t be.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s got to be another mistake. How could it be Seongmin? He isn’t able to come to us. He isn’t able to come and that’s why he hasn’t come yet. There must be a reason. If he could have come, he would have come earlier.”
As Yunseok led Mira back down, the madness overcame her again. She resisted returning home and threw a fit. She bit him and kicked him in the shin. He barely managed to shove her inside the house and follow her in. A huge mound of leaflets lay next to the shoe rack. On each flyer, a photo of Seongmin squinted upward.
The past eleven years of Yunseok’s life were summed up in the flyers. He made a living so he could print the flyers, and he stayed healthy in order to distribute them. Each morning, he waited beside the subway and grabbed commuters by the sleeve; on weekends, he visited child protection centers and inquired about his son. He now knew to order extra copies before printers became busy during election season. There were flyers in every corner of his home, in the bathroom, their one bedroom, and stuffed in Mira’s worn-out, overflowing handbag. There were so many that it appeared as if a species of insect called “flyer” was slowly devouring the house.
At first, Mira used to take a bundle of flyers and do the rounds with him. Yunseok quit full-time employment at the motor company in order to find their missing son, and Mira also quit the bookstore. If they had known that their son would be missing for nearly eleven years, one of them would have held on to their job. Instead, like an investor trying to recoup stock losses in one big gamble, they risked all to find their son. They lasted a few years by depleting their modest savings, cashing in their insurance policies, then selling their apartment. Three years later, Mira began work as an insurance salesperson, but performed poorly. Customers instinctively detected the scent of repressed, unbearable anxiety. A mother who loses her child is nervous, on edge; people sensed that they would be better prepared for imminent disaster in the company of a bright, energetic salesperson, and more readily signed insurance policies with them. Soon enough, Mira quit insurance work and devoted herself once again to flyer distribution.
Yunseok hopped from job to job, working night security details at construction sites and as a general night guard. He got less than five hours of sleep, but he never complained. As if he were performing a religious ritual, he dutifully distributed flyers each morning and on weekends took their old car across the country. And Mira, Mira thoroughly searched the neighborhood surrounding that supermarket. Every year, Yunseok’s friend who ran a photography studio photoshopped a new rendering of Seongmin, one year older than the last. The photoshopped picture had an overly polished, finished look that ended up resembling a funeral portrait. Mira would stare attentively at the children in playgrounds. Seeing her loitering, mothers would call the police, and the police always responded, though the flyers cleared up any misunderstanding. But inevitably, Mira was once nearly charged with child abduction. That day she became convinced that one of the children in the playground was actually Seongmin. She pretended to ask him his name and address, then suddenly embraced him.
A passing yogurt vendor intervened and demanded, “What are you doing?” The vendor called over the apartment building’s security guard, and soon the child’s mother rushed out to the playground. They released Mira only after Yunseok got on his knees and begged for forgiveness, and promised that they would never see his wife again.
A year after that, Mira returned to that very building, climbed onto the playground slide, and began floating paper airplanes made out of the flyers. She had originally despised anyone who folded the flyer, since it creased her son’s face. She had even fought with commuters who crumpled the flyer and threw it away. So Yunseok found her making paper airplanes out of the flyers difficult to believe.
A friend had introduced Mira to Yunseok the same year he’d gotten full-time employment. His first impression was that she was shy and introverted. Mira was raised by her aunt, and as soon as she finished high school, she started working at the bookstore. Looking back, Yunseok saw that something hadn’t been right. She was overly sensitive to what others said, or became terrified for no reason. She’d say that the other employees ostracized her, and she was convinced that they insulted her every chance they got. That’s unlikely, he said, trying to persuade her, but she remained unconvinced. Mira was his first real girlfriend, and he’d trusted that her ways were typical of a woman’s ups and downs.
Two women visited Yunseok, one a police officer and the other a social worker. He peered to see who was behind them, but they were alone; at first he assumed they were evangelizers. He led them into the living-room-cum-kitchen, filled with flyers he’d left in teetering stacks. When their son returned home, he wanted to show him: Look, this is how your parents lived.
He said, “Where is my son? Did something happen?”
“Please don’t worry. He’s in the car.”
“Why didn’t you come in together?”
The police officer picked up a flyer. “I’m very aware of how desperately you’ve searched for your son.”
Yunseok handed her several flyers with different designs. The social worker inspected them.
“Occasionally, a family will abandon their child, then report him missing. They couldn’t afford to raise . . .”
Yunseok had seen such coverage on the news. One woman had abandoned her child and reported him missing in order to remarry, but several years later the child was found through the national genetic database and returned. Only then, the woman confessed and begged for forgiveness. He knew that many were disguised as missing child cases; he now understood why the police station had insisted on escorting Seongmin from Deagu.
He said, “We weren’t so bad off then, to abandon our child.” He mentioned the name of the motor company he had worked for. “I was a full-time employee, and Seongmin’s mom also had a job at the time.”
The social worker said, “I didn’t mean it that way. If there’s been a misunderstanding, I apologize.” She added, “Before you meet your son, there is something you should know.”
“Is something wrong with him?”
“It could be a problem, or not. It’s that . . . you should know how your son’s lived all these years.”
Had Seongmin’s kidnapper chained him to a dog collar in a basement?
Yunseok said, “I’m not sure what it is, but we can gradually figure it out. What’s there to worry about when his parents are standing right here. Let me see my son first.”
The social worker glanced discreetly around the house.
“Is his mother here? The paperwork shows that he has a mother.”
“That’s . . . Something came up, but she’ll be back very soon.”
Yunseok took in the doubtful look exchanged between the two women: Their son returns after an eleven-year absence and the mother isn’t around?
“Has there been a change in family status or something similar?”
“No, I’m still very much married to Seongmin’s birth mother. We put everything into searching for him. She’s just out for—”
The impatient police officer cut him off. “Seongmin was kidnapped—let me make that clear. Abducted.”
“Of course,” Yunseok said. “The shopping cart didn’t roll away on its own.”
But at the time, the police hadn’t ruled out the possibility that the kid had clambered out of the cart on his own, then gotten lost in the busy weekend shopping crowd. The kidnapper hadn’t demanded a ransom, which supported their speculation.
“Yes, that’s right. But . . .”
“But what?”
“Seongmin had no idea that he was kidnapped.”
Yunseok had considered that possibility. Seongmin was three in the Korean counting system, and not yet two in the international counting system, so it made sense.
He asked, “What kind of guy was this kidnapper?”
“It’s not a man. She was a woman in her mid-fifties. At the time of the incident, she was in her early forties.”
He’d also never imagined the kidnapper was a woman.
“How did you catch her?”
“She wasn’t caught—she committed suicide. Jonghyeok found her first and called the emergency number.”
“Jonghyeok?”
“Ah, Jonghyeok is Seongmin. When we arrived on the scene we learned she had taken a large dose of antidepressants. The preliminary postmortem report also confirmed suicide. More importantly, we discovered a suicide note. It said she was sorry that she had taken someone else’s child but hadn’t done a good job raising him. She wanted the boy returned to his family. She’d written down the time and place of the abduction, and they matched the records for your case.”
The officer showed Yunseok a photocopy of the note. When he read the line about asking the boy’s parents to forgive her, he felt suffocated. Ask only for what makes sense to ask for.
The social worker said soothingly, “Anyway, Seongmin grew up believing that she was his real mother.”
Suddenly Yunseok’s chin trembled as if his body had gone chilly. He breathed deeply and tried to calm down.
The police officer said, “Your son is in shock. After all, he saw the person he believes is his mother after she killed herself. That alone requires years of therapy, but to make things worse, he learned that he was kidnapped and is now in a state of panic. I kept him with me for a few days, to help stabilize him, but all this is difficult to accept for a kid. I hope you understand how he must be feeling, given that he’s experienced great shock and now has to adapt to a new environment.”
“Why is my home ‘new’ when we’re his actual parents, the ones who gave him life? There’s no need to worry. He’s returned to his real family, so he’ll soon recover.”
“For your environment to dramatically change—that isn’t easy, even for a grown-up. I do have one request. Please don’t push Seongmin about the past, for now. It’s wise to accept him as he is.”
As soon as the police officer pulled out her business card, the social worker followed suit. Yunseok learned that the social worker was actually responsible for his district. It was clear that the officer had come up early from Daegu, conferred with the social worker on the handing over of Seongmin, and asked her to please watch out for him.
The front door flew open just as the two women were leaving. They stepped back, surprised by Mira, who ran in whistling, her wrist braceleted with dozens of filthy elastic hair bands. Yunseok leapt forward and grabbed Mira, and Mira, who despised being restrained, screeched like a trapped animal and kicked wildly at him.
“Let me go, let me go, you pig, you filthy son of a bitch. I said let me go!”
Yunseok just managed to calm her, then pushed her into the room.
He smoothed down his rumpled hair and said, “That woman is Seongmin’s mother. It was such a shock for her . . .”
As if caught in a dust storm, the two women pursed their lips and squinted toward Mira, then looked at each other. When the officer made her decision and nodded, the social worker said, “We’ll bring your son in, then.”
Yunseok felt numb. For so long he had lived for this moment alone, so why did he feel this way? He felt no excitement, no emotion. Those two women, his wife slowly going mad, this situation, all of it seemed surreal. Didn’t all this surreal evidence mean that the child they would soon bring in was fake? Shouldn’t parents instinctively know these things? Was it actually possible for Seongmin to return to them without any signs?
The two women returned, nearly pushing in a boy with dark fuzz under his nose. The boy stopped at the entrance and didn’t want to go inside. He looked nothing like the son whom Yunseok had grieved for. He looked nothing like his parents, and shared no resemblance with the face on the flyers they’d handed out for so long. The boy in the flyers had chubby cheeks, earnest eyes, and resembled a TV child actor; the boy in front of Yunseok had long, slanted eyes and a belly. He looked like a fierce, bad-tempered kid. If Yunseok were to run into him on the street, he wouldn’t recognize him. Still, he ran out and took the boy’s hand.
“Are you Seongmin? Don’t you recognize your dad? It’s me, your father.”
Seongmin averted his gaze as if he were suppressing his feelings. He kept looking back at the officer. She gently urged him forward and whispered, “Jonghyeok, it’s your father. Go on.”
The boy took off his basketball shoes and came in with an enormous suitcase. Yunseok signed several forms handed to him without reading them. The officer glanced back several times as she left. One look, and he could tell that the boy had been crying. As soon as the visitors left, Yunseok shut the door behind them and hastily grabbed Seongmin’s hand. Still uncomfortable, the boy immediately withdrew it. When Mira emerged and stared suspiciously at them, Yunseok brought Seongmin closer to her, still harboring a last hope that his return would bring back her sanity.
“Seongmin, it’s your mom. Do you recognize her?”
He gazed downward, looking perplexed. His eyes darted around as if he’d just been kidnapped. Mira glanced at him, then looked away indifferently. She collapsed to the floor, turned on the television, and sat so close to it that her nose nearly touched the screen. The boy kept sneaking looks at the house. The worn wallpaper stained and spotted with mold. Damp lingerie hanging on a laundry line that cut across the room.
“We didn’t always live here. You know, we used to live in a decent apartment. You don’t remember? You were already a real talker by then. It was south-facing, with good light.”
Yunseok took out the oldest flyer from the closet. “This is you. Do you remember?”
Seongmin looked at his image and mumbled, “Excuse me, but . . .”
“What is it?”
“Where is the bathroom?”
The boy had a strong regional accent, which made him seem even more of a stranger. Yunseok slid open the plastic door; he noticed the boy frown as he entered the narrow, moldy bathroom. Yunseok flushed with embarrassment. He had gotten used to putting life on hold. He had delayed wallpapering the house and doing repairs, even neglected his annual health checkups, until they found Seongmin. Problems piled up. He never had enough time or money; printing costs for flyers and gas prices inevitably rose, never fell.
He waited for Seongmin. He had so much he wanted to share with his son, but he didn’t know where to start. He was ready to stay up day and night answering Seongmin’s questions, if he would just ask. But Seongmin wasn’t interested. Yunseok’s stomach throbbed with pain. He’d had intestinal problems for over six months. He couldn’t remember when he’d had a good shit. His poop was watery and thin, and half the time he was either constipated or had diarrhea. Sometimes there was blood in his stool. His work colleagues said that stress does that to you, that stress irritates your stomach. Yunseok had gotten used to saying, “This isn’t a life worth living.”
When the boy didn’t emerge for over thirty minutes, Yunseok got a bad feeling. He called, “Hey, Seongmin.”
There was no response.
“Seongmin, what are you doing in there?”
Still nothing. Had he run away? Yunseok knew it was impossible, since the bathroom had no windows, but he couldn’t help himself. When he shoved open the sliding door, Seongmin was sitting on the toilet, crying with his pants pulled down. As soon as Yunseok went in, he whirled away from him. Yunseok shut the door, but he still heard the murmur of “Mom, Mom” in his ear.
He knew that Seongmin wasn’t asking for his birth mother, who was watching cartoons on television. Just then, Seongmin’s pleas went from muffled sobs to wailing: “Mom, Mom, Mom!” Yunseok plugged his ears with his fingers.
He went to give his wife a back rub. She giggled and said, “That tickles,” and fell to the floor. “Come on, just stay still for a minute,” he said, but she was unbearably ticklish. In her attempt to escape, her elbow smashed into his chin. It was so painful he almost cried. Sprawled hangman-style on the floor, Yunseok stared at the scattered bundles of flyers. He took a flyer and looked blankly at the face of the boy he had searched for everywhere for over a decade. The boy in the flyer felt far more familiar to him than the one in the bathroom. There had definitely been a mistake, because a stranger had shown up.
He was reminded of the movie Back to the Future, which he’d watched long ago. In it, the main character returns to the past and meets his future mother. In Yunseok’s case, it was the opposite situation. Eleven years ago, he was flung abruptly from the past, alone, into the future. In the future he meets his insane wife and his son who believes that Yunseok isn’t his father. Neither recognizes Yunseok. He viewed the house again through Seongmin’s eyes. Even to Yunseok it was unfamiliar and bizarre: the wallpaper streaks looked like burns, the dusty strips of cellophane everywhere seemed to just barely connect one worn object to the next. What is my mission in this strange future? What on earth do I have to do? His duty for over ten years had been clear: to find his missing child. The mission was so clear, so precise, that everyone made way for him.
They had sacrificed their apartment and good jobs, and stopped having sex. The child was the black hole of their life that swallowed everything up. They continued living this way until one day it became normal for them. Even after working all night long, he would feel energetic when, early in the morning, he took his flyers to a subway entrance. He knew the free-newspaper distributor well enough to greet him with a light joke. Factory colleagues who knew his story sometimes relieved him of the more difficult work. For over ten years he had been “the missing child Seongmin’s father,” but that ended overnight.
If it was true that he hadn’t experienced anything like happiness for a single moment, it was also true that he had become used to his misery. What do I need to do tomorrow? He had not once seriously considered this. It was always, If I find Seongmin, if I find Seongmin; he had never imagined what would happen afterward. If only they found Seongmin, he had believed that even Mira’s schizophrenia would disappear.
He somehow endured the unendurable, but what truly felt unbearable was this very moment. He once read an article about a marathon runner who had accidentally taken a shortcut and reached the finish line first, but was stripped of his medal. Whose fault was it when the ending was different from what you’d hoped for? Yunseok thought about this as he listened to the boy’s sniffling through the door. When, and why, had everything gone so badly? Was it his wife’s fault for wanting to go to the supermarket? Was it his fault for carelessly letting go of the shopping cart? Or his wife’s fault for buying cleansing cream? They had resented and blamed each other. Their fights crossed into dangerous territory by blindly probing one another’s weaknesses, their subconscious, deepest selves.
“You didn’t want children in the first place,” Yunseok said to Mira, who had once considered aborting.
Mira screamed, “That’s why I’m being punished instead!”
Yunseok criticized Mira in turn, saying, “You’re the one who hadn’t wanted a baby. What was so important about your work—didn’t you say that we should take our time having children?”
After the first few cruel years had passed, years of resignation and cynicism followed. Only the flyer kept them going as a couple. It became their unifying religion and their ritual. The printers they visited monthly became their church, and the flyers were the gospels that helped them forget their earthly struggles and would guide them to heaven. Every day, Mira’s condition worsened.
Seongmin hardly spoke. He took a video game console out of his suitcase and played it all day, filling the house with its electronic screeching. Then he sat in one corner of the room, propped up his knees, and buried his face in them for a long time. He spoke only to answer questions, and sometimes retreated to the bathroom to cry. He ate almost nothing prepared for him. At least he ate the instant noodles they bought for him.
Yunseok called his supervisor. “We found Seongmin. Yes, yes, thank you. It’s thanks to all your support. But I should stay home for the time being. The daily log is in the drawer, yes, I think I’ll have to stay the night with him. I’m sorry for all the trouble.”
Just the thought of the three of them sleeping together in the tiny room left Yunseok at a loss. Seongmin insisted on sleeping in a T-shirt and jeans. As soon as Mira finished splashing around the bathroom and came out in her nightgown, she ran into Seongmin and screamed.
Yunseok said, “It’s okay, it’s Seongmin, Seongmin,” but Mira was so frightened that she fled and crouched in the corner. Seongmin flushed with shame. No matter how many times Yunseok urged her to come to bed, she refused. She looked as if she would flee the house in just her nightgown.
Mira said in a low voice, “Who on earth is that?”
He said, “How many times do I have to tell you that it’s Seongmin?”
He gave up trying to persuade her and pulled her forcefully into bed.
“We’ve got to get your hairpins out if you want to sleep.”
At Yunseok’s nagging, Mira pouted.
Yunseok turned off the light and lay down. He couldn’t fall asleep thanks to his night shifts, and in the new environment, neither could Seongmin. Only Mira slept curled up in a ball as usual.
Yunseok opened his eyes around dawn. Seongmin was tossing and turning beside him. Definitely awake.
He said, “Seongmin.”
Seongmin stopped moving.
“Did you have your own room, over there?”
“Yes.”
“You can just say ‘yeah.’ Was it big?”
“What?”
“The room, was it big?”
Seongmin merely nodded.
“Did you have a bed?”
Again he only nodded.
“Also a desk?”
“Yes.”
Yunseok thought about the kidnapper, the woman who had taken her own life and escaped without punishment. A woman who stole someone else’s child and provided him with his own room, bed, and chair. Was chronic depression the cause of the kidnapping? Or the consequence?
Seongmin suddenly spoke up without prodding. “I also had a computer, but the police took it.”
“I see.”
“Could you find it for me?”
“I’ll buy you a new one.”
From then on, Seongmin was silent, even when asked a question. Each time Yunseok thought he might be asleep, he heard Seongmin rustling beside him.
Yunseok said, “Let’s look for a new place to live. But with your mother the way she is, I’m not sure if anyone will rent to us.”
Yunseok tried to fall asleep, but he couldn’t. Instead, he spent the night listening to his son’s heavy sighs.
Seongmin had arrived on Friday, and he spent Saturday and Sunday in the same state. It was making Yunseok crazy; he was suffocated by the feeling that he had trapped a wild animal. He had no idea what to ask him or how to talk to him. Officially, he had always been “Seongmin’s father,” but he had actually never played the role.
At the local mini-mart, Yunseok said to the owner, “I feel like I’ve become a child abductor.”
The owner had been in prison eight times and was a former gang member. He said, “It’s ’cause it’s a new environment for him. First-timers in the slammer act the same way. Shit, you don’t know a soul, you’re freaking scared. That’s why he’s like that—he’s scared, freaking scared.”
“What do you do in the slammer, to a newbie?”
“They make his life hell till he loses his mind. They roll him up in a blanket and stomp on him, slap him around, shove his head in a bucket,” he said enthusiastically, then stopped. “I’m not saying do that to Seongmin. Hell, I got no idea. Anyway, congratulations on getting your son back.”
The market owner tucked a sausage snack into Yunseok’s bag and said, “For your son.”
As he left the store, Yunseok saw his hilly neighborhood anew. It was a neighborhood of multi-unit buildings packed together in cramped alleyways. The cheap houses built by developers had slowly been converted to command high rents. Each house now had two or three separate entrances, and as many as nine people in a single unit. Yunseok’s unit wasn’t converted only because it was constructed illegally near a public road, so the landowner had trouble changing the zoning. That was why Yunseok and Mira continued living there. But the housing redevelopment board had all but confirmed the neighborhood’s demolition, and if that happened, Yunseok’s family would be forced to move, since the little compensation left them with few choices. They were pushed out of Seoul, and now they would have to move even farther out.
Money was an issue, but an even bigger problem was finding a landlord who would accept Mira. If he so much as hinted that his wife wasn’t quite right in the head, landlords refused them; they believed that a schizophrenic would murder someone or set fire to the house. It didn’t matter how many times Yunseok assured them that she was harmless. The real estate agent showing him houses told him to lie, saying, “You can send your wife to a mental ward for a little bit, then bring her back once you move in.”
Yunseok became furious because the advice tempted him. He was afraid that he would do just that, despite himself, so he unleashed his anger at the agent instead. If he put Mira in a mental ward, he would leave her there forever. What was more, the superstitions that had sustained him would collapse. He had tricked himself into believing that Seongmin would never return if he sent Mira to the ward, just as he had believed that Mira would fully recover upon Seongmin’s return.
But there were other reasons why he couldn’t abandon Mira. Others believed that he was burdened with his ill wife, but in truth he depended on her. The same way he handed out flyers daily that wouldn’t change anything, he sustained himself with the minimal energy left in his marriage. To him, Mira was like a camel in a caravan. They didn’t need to share their goals and hopes. She didn’t need to speak, or smile. Just stay alive till we cross the desert. If not you, my dear, who else would endure this barren hell with me?
On Monday, Yunseok took Seongmin to school to have his records transferred from Daegu. Seongmin should have been in middle school, but he was still a fifth grader. His abductor had paid a fine, reported him as a newborn, and belatedly legalized his fake birth.
Seongmin’s elementary school principal was younger and prettier than Yunseok had expected. She listened to the accompanying social worker’s explanation of Seongmin’s special circumstances, then approached the matter calmly. She was methodical and courteous, but she didn’t seem pleased about being responsible for a troubled kid. Yunseok’s working-class shabbiness also probably made her biased. The principal made her feelings clear: A low-income family’s child. The father too busy earning a living and the mother too unstable to raise him properly. On top of that, the history of abduction. Take your pick of potential problems. She added, “I’m worried whether he can adapt. If he’s going to struggle to adapt anyway, how about sending him up to middle school right away?
“He’s the appropriate age, and though his case is unusual, many kids these days also live abroad and return, so there’s increased flexibility in the system. Kids’ brains are more malleable, so they adapt quickly. But what Seongmin wants is most important.”
The principal looked at Seongmin and asked, “What do you want to do? Do you want to start fifth grade with kids two years younger than you, or, even if it’s challenging, go to middle school with kids your age?”
As Seongmin hesitated, the social worker cut in. “Won’t it be too stressful for him?”
“These days,” the principal said, “it’s common for students to go over school material at after-school classes beforehand, so most catch up with the curriculum. What do you think, Seongmin? Did you ever attend any of the after-school study programs in Daegu?”
Seongmin nodded.
“I guessed as much. Most parents have their kids go these days.”
The principal’s quick glance at Yunseok confused him. Did she want him to make the decision? The social worker and Seongmin also gazed at him. It became clear that they wanted him to decide, but he just couldn’t. It was his first time being a school parent.
The principal asked Seongmin, “What do you want to do? That’s most important.”
Seongmin said cautiously, “I’m not sure.”
Yunseok had assumed that the school would administer some kind of basic skills assessment test, that Seongmin would take an authoritative-looking multiple-choice exam and an official choice would be forced on them, but no such test existed. If he made a legal case of it, Seongmin would be allowed to attend the elementary school. His palms became sweaty. The situation was foreign and frustrating. How could he know what a boy wanted with whom he’d never had a real conversation? On top of that, he had no idea whether Seongmin was exceptionally intelligent, or if he was so slow that he didn’t know how to do basic math. With no information to go on and with no real relationship with the boy, he had to make a quick decision that could determine Seongmin’s fate. He was the legal guardian, but he may as well have been the principal or the social worker.
Yunseok awkwardly put a hand on Seongmin’s shoulder. “What do you want?”
Seongmin looked up with disappointed eyes. In the end he said, “I want to go to middle school. Actually, the chairs and desks here are too small for me.”
The principal looked delighted. “The decision comes after much thought by the concerned party, so we’ll have to respect it. You made a good choice. If you listen carefully in class and review the material thoroughly, you’ll quickly catch up.”
Then the vice principal came in and whispered into the principal’s ear, and her face darkened. The principal took out her cell phone and left to make a call. She quickly returned and whispered something to the vice principal. Then she said to the others, “I have a meeting to attend, but the vice principal will discuss the details with you.”
The vice principal’s take was different. The board of education had just told her that no matter a child’s circumstances, attending middle school without completing elementary school was nearly impossible. In other words, Seongmin had to finish fifth grade first.
Father and son left the principal’s office.
Yunseok asked, “Are you hungry? Do you want black bean noodles?”
The boy cautiously asked instead, “Could we get pizza?”
“But you used to like black bean noodles.”
“I like noodles,” he said, “but I like pizza more.”
Pizza was too greasy for Yunseok’s taste, so they went to the first-floor Chinese restaurant near their apartment. Pain stabbed his lower belly again. He splurged on a large plate of sweet and sour pork and two bowls of black bean noodles. He ate the pork and the noodles; the boy ate the noodles and didn’t even touch the pork.
Yunseok asked, “Did that woman often buy you pizza?”
The boy didn’t respond.
“What kind of person was she? She wasn’t cruel to you?”
The boy stared reproachfully at Yunseok before averting his eyes. “The same as any other mother, really. Sometimes she gave me a hard time.”
“I heard she suffered from depression.”
“What is depression?”
“Some signs are being silent all day long, being irritable.”
“I’m not sure. Sometimes she was like that. But I was usually at school or after-school lessons.”
“Was there a man?”
“A man?”
“A man she was living with.”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Why can’t I? The police said that the woman raised you on her own, but didn’t you feel that something was wrong? You didn’t have a dad, like everyone else.”
“She said he’d died. That as soon as she had me, he died in a car accident.”
“Then what did she do for a living? She had a job, didn’t she?”
“My mom is . . . never mind.” As if he’d made a mistake, the boy stayed quiet and weighed Yunseok’s reaction.
“It’s okay. Tell me.”
“She was a nurse, at a university hospital.”
A nurse.
“Sir . . .” Seongmin still wouldn’t call him “Father.”
“What is it?”
“To be honest, I still don’t believe what the policewoman said.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Was I really kidnapped?”
Yunseok stopped gazing at the ceiling and turned back to Seongmin.
“They’ve made a mistake,” the boy said. “She’s not that kind of person, I’m sure of it.” He chewed on his lip and held back his tears.
Yunseok ignored this and said, “It’s true. The police did say they did a DNA test, and that your DNA matches the DNA record we had for you. You know what DNA is, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t. How would I know? Do you know?”
I don’t know either. I’ve never seen it or touched it. Before, I wasn’t interested in this thing inside me that’s innate to all human beings, like the soul that Christians talk about. I started considering genes only after we lost you, after I’d crawled on all fours searching for strands of your hair. I believed that it would help us find you. And because of the test results, you’re sitting in front of me right now. But you’re a real stranger to me, just like I must be a stranger to you. If the DNA from the hair I finally found on your baby clothes matches the cells scraped from the inside of your mouth, it means that you’re the same person, and we have to believe it, we must believe it, we’ve got no choice but to believe it, but why can’t we see it with our own eyes?
Yunseok’s boss called him. He said he sympathized, but he couldn’t keep the night-shift position vacant any longer.
Yunseok sat Seongmin down and told him, “Your dad needs to work nights, so you’ll have to take care of your mom.”
Seongmin glanced over to where Mira was napping.
“Sometimes she leaves the house,” Yunseok said, “but the neighbors will tell you where she went if you ask them. She can’t take the bus because she doesn’t have a pass. Usually she just walks around, so you’ll quickly find her.”
“Shouldn’t she be in a mental hospital?”
“Your mother is fine.”
Seongmin looked confused. His expression said it all: You call that fine?
“It’s because of you she’s like that, because of the shock of losing you, so she’ll recover soon now that you’re here, now that our Seongmin is here. Everything’s going to be all right, so just keep studying hard.”
“I can’t study without a computer.”
“Things are a little tight right now, but I’ll buy you one later.”
“I want to go to a cybercafé.”
“Then what about your mom?”
“What did you do when I wasn’t here?”
“Sometimes I’d lock her in.”
“So can I lock the house up, then leave?”
“No. What if your mom’s alone when a fire starts?”
“You said that’s what you did before.”
“We’re family, and families have to help each other.”
“I told you, I need to use the computer.”
Yunseok lost his temper and shouted, “Stop talking about the stupid computer!”
His yelling woke Mira up from her nap. She looked around her. “It’s too noisy,” she said, and stared at Seongmin.
She said, “Why isn’t the kid going back to his house?”
Yunseok said, “It’s Seongmin. I’m telling you, it’s our Seongmin!”
Mira didn’t seem to believe him. Yunseok couldn’t delay going to work any longer, and once again, as he left, he asked Seongmin to look after his mother.
While Mira continued moving frantically from room to room, Seongmin cautiously tried speaking to her. “Mrs. . . .”
Mira paid no attention to him and continued pacing.
This time, Seongmin said, “Mom.”
Mira froze, as if a familiar voice had triggered something inside her brain. She collapsed onto the floor and pulled out flyers from underneath the wardrobe, then looked at them with a long face.
Seongmin gathered up courage and said, “Could you give me some money?”
She stared at him. He became a little bolder and said, “Mom, could you give me some money?”
She backed away from him as he approached.
“You rotten son of a bitch,” she cursed. “You lowborn son of a pig, son of a bitch.”
She kept cursing at him for no reason, then finally spit at him. She sprang up and opened the fridge. Seongmin watched her shove food into her mouth, then he fled the house. He wandered from alley to alley late into the night. Rumors about a crazy kid who carried a brick in his hand spread throughout his school. That he spoke funny, that he had some kind of southern accent.
Yunseok had to visit the police station three times in less than three months. The last time, Seongmin had fractured a kid’s skull with a brick.
“You could have killed him, you crazy kid!” Yunseok screamed at Seongmin, who was sitting blank-faced in a holding cell. Once they returned home, the little communication they’d had came to an end. Mira’s schizophrenia only worsened, with no sign of improvement. Yunseok began thinking daily about suicide. He had long before lost anything resembling a goal in life, and he felt that the possibility of finding meaning had never existed in the first place.
“What would happen if I die?” Yunseok asked Mira.
She was watching TV, and said, “You’re being noisy,” as she always did.
He even searched for something to hang himself with during his night shift. A construction site was the ideal place to do it. Electrical wire and steel beams were widely available, and there was no one around to stop him. Everything would end once he tied the wire to the beam and let go.
If he hadn’t answered the phone that night, the day crew would have discovered his cold corpse the next morning.
It was the police. They had found his wife up in the mountains, and he needed to come to the station to identify the body.
The body laid out in the morgue was indeed Mira. While Seongmin was out at a cybercafé, Mira had broken the lock on the kitchen door, got lost in the mountains, and had an accident. Several days later, when her family showed up for the first time in ages, Yunseok attacked them in the near-empty funeral parlor: “Were you all waiting for Mira to die? Why did you wait till now to show up? Why?”
His father-in-law apologized. When Yunseok asked what he was sorry for, he said for not raising Mira properly. This only made Yunseok angrier.
“Sir, what did Seongmin’s mom do? None of it was Mira’s fault. If anyone’s to blame . . .” He couldn’t finish. If anyone was to blame, it was probably Seongmin. For being born, for not crying even when kidnapped, for not helping his mother when they’d barely managed to reunite. But he couldn’t bring himself to say any of this, so he stopped. His brother-in-law nearly grabbed Yunseok by the throat and dragged him out of the funeral parlor.
But Yunseok returned later and waited for his son. He had sent dozens of text messages, so Seongmin would certainly know by now that his birth mother was dead, but his son never showed up. In the end, Yunseok managed the funeral alone. He had her cremated and took home the urn with her ashes. It felt as if Mira had somehow wanted to escape this house drowning in flyers.
Seongmin returned just after the funeral procession ended. Only his son’s gaunt appearance diminished his father’s hurt.
Yunseok asked, “Where were you?”
“Daegu.”
“Why Daegu?”
“I wanted to see my mother at the cemetery.”
“Mother? Which mother? Your mother died here, not in Daegu. All while you were in a cybercafé.”
“Why do you only act like this with me?” Seongmin gazed directly up at him.
“Why do I ‘act like this’?”
Seongmin said, “It wasn’t my fault. Did I want to be kidnapped? Wasn’t my kidnapping your fault, and Mom’s? So why do you keep acting like it’s my fault?”
“If anyone’s to blame, it was your abductor, her alone. That person you call Mom, that crazy woman did this to us.”
Seongmin said, “We can’t change the past, no matter whose fault it is. So can’t we return to living like before?”
“Living like before—how? That woman is dead. You can’t go back. You have to live here, with me.”
“I hate it here.”
“What do you want to do, then?”
Seongmin looked around at the flyers piled everywhere, and the moldy walls, then stared at Yunseok with disgust, making clear that he wanted Yunseok to see his disgust.
“I mean, I really hate it here.”
“Then this is what we’ll do.”
Yunseok had inherited a small plot of land and a storehouse in his hometown from his father. He had long before sold the field in his search for Seongmin; all that was left was the storehouse. It could be converted into a small home, and he still had a few relatives in the area. “How would you like to move out there, live off the land?” he asked. “We’ll make a fresh start together.”
Seongmin said, “Whatever. You’ll get to decide in the end anyway.”
A few months later, they moved back to Yunseok’s hometown. He had a heating system and kitchen installed in the storehouse. Though the structure wasn’t zoned for a residence like that, they were so deep in the country, there was no one around to complain. He rented an abandoned mine in the mountains behind the house and began growing mushrooms there. It wasn’t exactly successful, but life in the country didn’t cost much, and since he could grow basic produce, they were better off than in the city. Seongmin entered middle school, and soon enough started high school. Then one day he left and never came back.
Two years later, a young woman drove into the village, then waited on a wooden bench until Yunseok returned from the mine. She was young, her complexion still dewy, with a trace of pimples across her forehead.
Yunseok said, “Don’t I know you? You look familiar.”
“I’m Boram, Lee Boram. I used to live just south of here, in Maseok-ri.”
She had disappeared from the area around the same time that Seongmin left home. She had been raised by her grandparents, who cried and pestered Yunseok for months to find Boram. When they finally realized that it was useless to try, they stopped coming over.
He said, “What are you doing here, of all places? Where’s Seongmin?”
“Actually, I was looking for Seongmin. I thought he might be here.”
“No, I haven’t heard from him since he left.”
Boram dawdled, digging her heels in the dirt.
She said, “I need to get back . . .” Only then, she got to the point. “He—Seongmin—took my money with him. It was all my savings.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
He asked, “Was it a lot?”
“To me, yes.”
“How much was it?”
“Five million won.”
He paused.
She said, “I don’t understand. Why did Seongmin do that?”
“Humans are a mystery to begin with.” Yunseok looked straight into her face. “I can’t give you interest on it, but I’ll give you what he took.”
He told her to wait, and from the closet withdrew his savings from the mushroom business. Five million won was a large sum for a young girl. He withdrew the money from an envelope and slowly counted it out. After repeatedly checking that the sum equaled exactly five million won, he hesitated, then added an extra three hundred thousand won to the envelope.
But when he went outside, the girl was gone. Her car was gone, too. A baby’s car seat was on the bench by the door. A tiny infant gazed up at him, then burst into tears. The girl had tucked a pink slip of paper into the baby’s clothes. It read: The baby is Seongmin’s. Seongmin disappeared, and I’m incapable of raising her. Please take good care of her.
When his right hand grasped the baby’s left, the baby’s tears halted abruptly and she stared wide-eyed at him. He gently shook the baby’s arms from top to bottom. The baby’s feet squirmed as if she were ticklish.
Yunseok sat on the bench. Still holding the baby’s hands, he continued looking at the small, fragile life that had found him.