I picked up the handset, inserted a coin, and slowly dialed. A long, thin signal wailed for several seconds before the gulp of the coin being swallowed, and then, in a singsong voice bright as day, a woman’s voice flowed from the receiver.
“Hello?”
I instantly hung up, as if I’d heard a horrible profanity—or seen something I should not have after accidentally opening the door to the ladies’ room.
It was a hot afternoon in August. The entire city was cooking, and the hottest place of all, as far as I was concerned, was the inside of the phone booth in front of the Majang-dong intercity bus terminal, where I was desperately wishing my sweat-soaked underwear would stop sticking to my butt. After I put down the receiver, I stood there like an idiot for a moment, tugging at my underwear. This was really unexpected. I had completely forgotten that the place was a residential area for Americans until after I’d dialed the phone, and only then had I realized that the whole neighborhood around Hannam-dong had become a foreigner’s ghetto. I was trying to call a woman who lived there.
I looked down at a business card, soaked from the sweat of my hand, and tried to remember the few English words I knew. I composed a simple sentence in my head and awkwardly tried pronouncing it out loud:
Hello. Please. Give. Me. Number….
No. Instead of please, shouldn’t I start with would you?
In middle school, I’d been in an English class taught by an American woman—a Peace Corps volunteer—and I was always terribly shy in front of her. I still cannot believe how tall she was—like the pines along the hillside behind the school—or how her eyes were blue like the sea, or her sympathetic smile, unbelievably wide and pliable. And I never understood why it was that I could never relax in front of her. I couldn’t even answer the simple question, “What is your name?” All I could manage, my face bright red and turned downward, was to steal glances, through the corners of my eyes, at her slender white arms covered in golden fuzz. She would wait patiently, then walk away, shaking her head as if to say there was nothing more she could do. All I managed to remember from that English class was the assortment of lewd graffiti, on the dim and musty walls of the school bathrooms, depicting her private parts.
In any event, I had to make the phone call. The more the time passed, the hotter it would get in the booth, and my damned underwear was getting plastered to my butt.
After coming up with the best sentence I could and mumbling it to myself several times, I inserted another coin and turned the dial. The long signal again, then the phone swallowing the coin, and then the cheerful voice of the woman, who didn’t seem to have a care in the world.
“Hello?”
My mind went blank and the sentence I had struggled to assemble in English instantly evaporated. Before I knew it, I found myself shouting in Korean, “Can you put me through to number 42? It’s exchange 42. Number 42! Do you understand?”
Damn it, I thought. I felt as if my strength was draining from me. I waited for the woman’s next response with a sense of desperation. But then, surprisingly, she continued in an even more cheerful and melodic voice, in Korean:
“Yes, wait one moment please.”
It was only then that I finally realized the operator was a Korean woman. I let out a long sigh, grateful that the place where I stood was a part of the Korean peninsula and its affiliated islands. The signal stopped, and the sultry voice of another woman came on.
“Hello?”
Why did that word make me jump every time I heard it? At that moment I actually had to restrain myself from flinging the handset with all my might.
“Is Miss Oh Mija there?” I said, silently hoping it was not a breach of courtesy to say “Oh Mija” instead of “Mrs. So-and-so.”
“Who is this? This is Oh Mija….” The pitch of her voice rose.
Once again I let out a long sigh, and finally—as if to conserve my native tongue—I calmly pronounced one word at a time. “How are you, Miss Oh? It’s Gu Bonsu.”
“Wow! Hello, Mr. Gu Bonsu. What’s going on? I mean, really, what’s going on that makes you call me after all this time?”
I hadn’t expected her to be so excited to hear the three syllables of my name.
“It’s really great to hear from you,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I heard ‘Is Miss Oh Mija there?’ over the phone. Where are you?”
“I’m in the Majang-dong intercity bus terminal parking lot.”
“Oh my, you must be going somewhere on holiday. Or on your way back? Are you with someone? A friend? Girlfriend? How are you doing?”
Now, I suspected that—of all the numerous and unexpected difficulties I had to go through since picking up the phone to call her—only the final crucial task remained.
I briefly paused. “The truth is,” I said, “I’m calling because there’s something I need to tell you. Kim Jangsu is dead.”
For a moment, there was no sound. In case she hadn’t heard, I once again breathed an ominous breath into the tiny holes that perforated the handset. “Are you listening? Kim Jangsu is dead.”
Not a peep. I patiently waited for her to say something after the shock wore off, but the truth was that I might have secretly wanted to savor the length of that shock. After a long silence, I could finally hear the kind of pained moans I’d often heard before while watching Hollywood films.
“Oh, God.” Her voice was slightly hoarse. “I’m s-sorry, Bonsu,” she said. “C-could you call me back in a little bit? Right now, I don’t know what’s what.”
“Alright. I’ll hang up and call again.”
I put the receiver down. My palm was slick with sweat. I slid my hand into my front pocket to pull at my underwear, and I felt something.
I had completely forgotten it was there. When I’d gotten off the long-distance bus and found my way to the phone booth, that small object must have rubbed continuously, with every step, against my sweaty thigh in my thin summer trousers. But strangely, I had been unaware of it. It was hard and light, like some kind of solid fuel with a bit of warmth left to it.
As I felt its rough texture with the tips of my fingers, I realized that I had an unanticipated problem. This wasn’t something I should be carrying around in my pocket and playing with. It was too hard to keep in my pants pocket and certainly not something I could just carry around in my hand.
Suddenly I felt the subtle signs of movement in my body, something quietly lifting its head from deep within: an unexpected and inappropriate arousal, as if it were from the object in my pocket transmitting warmth, like a person’s breath, as it pressed into my thigh.
I frowned, watching the steamy August streets and—like a pauper made uncomfortable by a sudden windfall—struggled with the erection that tented my pants.
And I thought of Oh Mija, the obvious object of that lust. I had sworn that I would meet her. And the truth of it was that I hadn’t called her only to tell her the news that Jangsu had died.
He was dead. I still could not actually grasp that fact, and before feeling sorrow or pain, my first reaction to his death had been this preposterous and inexplicable lust for Oh Mija. I scowled. I scowled and scowled, thinking about that night when Jangsu had had his first fit.
At the nurse’s station at two in the morning, the nurse on duty was alone, reading. She took off her glasses and placed them on top of her book, forcefully blinking her tired eyes as if to ask, What brings you here?
“He’s having a fit,” I said.
The nurse looked up at me, her expression saying that there was no point in me trying to frighten her in the middle of the night.
“What room?”
“319.”
She flipped slowly through the medical charts, her hands not showing the slightest sign of haste. I felt embarrassed for having run from Jangsu’s room down the dim corridor to get there.
“319…Kim Jangsu, cirrhosis of the liver, age twenty-eight…. Right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So, what did you say happened to the patient?”
“He’s having some kind of fit. He’s talking nonsense and laughing hysterically, like he’s lost his mind or something.”
I suppressed the urge to imitate the strange stuttering noise—a sound like Jangsu was tapping at the root of his tongue—for the expressionless nurse. The fact that someone would suddenly make such a sound was surely the sign of a fit, but I couldn’t find the right words to describe it to the nurse, who was already exhausted from the night shift, at two a.m.
“Wait here a minute,” she said. “The doctor on duty should be here soon.”
“Just a moment, please. I’ll connect you now.”
I almost said thank-you in response to the operator’s consistently kind voice. I heard the familiar signal and then the same voice again.
“I just can’t believe he’s dead. When did it happen?”
“Two days ago at one thirty in the afternoon. I’m on my way back from the funeral, just now.” I paused for a second to tug at my underwear. “Can’t even call it a funeral, really. Since Jangsu didn’t have much in terms of family, a few friends got together and took care of it with a simple ceremony. The person who really should have been there is you, Mija.” Now I paused to give her time to respond, but she did not say anything, one way or the other.
“After the cremation, we went all the way out to Hantan River,” I said. “Because we thought the water near Seoul might be dirty. We spread his ashes with our own hands. In the blue waters of Hantan River.”
As I spoke, I felt like we were in sync. And then, before I had even finished talking, guffaws erupted out of nowhere. Incomprehensible, rapid-fire English, mixed with laughter, continued for a long time.
“Hello. Hello?”
“I’m listening, Bonsu.”
“What did you just say?”
“Never mind. Our phone lines must be getting crossed.” When she stopped talking, the rapid monotone of foreign speech was audible again. “Was his death peaceful?” she asked.
Her voice was very calm. I guessed she must have wracked her brain while we were disconnected to come up with that one line, and then her voice, too, sounded like it was straight out of a play. As I replied, I felt an extreme animus toward the sweat drenching my palm while I held the phone, the August heat steaming up the phone booth, and even myself—because I couldn’t just swear at her and hang up.
“He was twenty-eight,” I said. “How would he have to die for it to be ‘peaceful’ at that age?”
“What was that?” Mija raised her voice over the background noise. “Hello? I can’t make out what you’re saying.”
I enunciated every word clearly—as if I were doing a voice-over—so that she would understand. “It was a very peaceful death. He died painlessly, like he was falling asleep.”
The gloom that permeated the third-floor hospital hallway made it feel like it was suffering some sort of internal injury. The strong smell of ether that emanates every time a surgical patient exhales, the smell of disinfectant, and all sorts of other foul odors were tangled together there amidst the ominous silence in the heat of a late summer night. The faint light from fluorescents, cast here and there on the hallway ceiling, was the only thing eating away at the darkness. At least one of the lamps, with a faulty bulb, just blinked continuously, struggling to light up. All the way at the end of the dim hallway, in room 319, on an old metal bed, lay Kim Jangsu.
When I stepped inside with the doctor on duty, the hospital room was already terribly quiet. The constant random buzzing of a flying bug—trapped by the window screen—only seemed to emphasize that ominous silence.
“Why’s he so quiet?” I asked. “He was throwing a fit just a little while ago.”
“Let’s have a look.”
With skilled hands, the doctor opened Jangsu’s shroudlike hospital gown and put a stethoscope to his chest. Still, Jangsu—his eyes open vacantly—did not show any reaction.
I could already see that his eyes had lost the ability to focus. They were frozen, unable to move in the slightest, and they had a dull luster as they reflected the fluorescent lights. If it wasn’t for his belly, moving quietly up and down under the sheet at regular intervals, I would have thought he was dead. In fact, his belly—though it was swollen like a woman’s in her ninth month of pregnancy—looked like a grave mound, evoking not birth, but death.
But the thing that caught my attention was his close-shaved head. It shone blue like a knife blade and, compared to everything else in the hospital room, the color was so pure, almost tragic. A month had passed since his release, but every morning he still painstakingly shaved his head with a razor. Had he decided to be a seeker on some personal path for the remainder of his life? Or was he saying he was still just a prisoner in an enormous prison cell?
The examination dragged on, and during the whole time, the expression on the young doctor’s face was grim. It looked as if he were frantically flipping through a thick medical textbook in his head and comparing what he read there to the complex symptoms in front of him. Finally, he spoke decisively, as if he were certain about what he said, but it was so unexpected that I was a little dumbstruck.
“How many do you see?”
He raised two fingers and waved them in front of Jangsu’s eyes as if he were playing with a kid. Of course, the patient showed no response. Yet, despite that, the doctor stubbornly continued with the child’s play, and with an utterly serious face asked, again and again, “How many is it? How many?”
The doctor’s sad efforts were thwarted by a strange sound that leaked from Jangsu’s mouth. It was a barely audible laugh. It must have been unexpected for the doctor as well, or maybe he perceived it as his patient mocking him. He glared at Jangsu with a look of betrayal.
“Why is his head shaved like this?” the doctor asked me.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s not an escaped convict.”
“What?”
“He was in prison until just recently….” I paused to see the doctor’s reaction. “He was released a month ago with a suspended sentence.”
The doctor’s face, already long, seemed to grow even longer to express his shock. “Is that right?” the doctor said. “He seems…” and there was definitely a little fear in that long face “…like a nice guy…. What was he in for?”
Jangsu’s hand went up just then, slowly, and bobbed in the air a couple of times. I assumed it was a signal for me to come closer. His lips bulged slightly as if he were trying to say something. I took his hand and brought my face right up to his. He spoke in a low but clear voice:
“Find Oh Mija.”
“What’s he saying?” the doctor asked impatiently.
Still holding Jangsu’s hand, I gave the doctor an unreadable smile. Jangsu’s knuckles were stiff and shockingly cold.
“Don’t look for Oh Mija,” I told Jangsu. “There’s no use, no matter how much you look for her. She’s already dead.”
I didn’t tell Jangsu that for any particular reason except that I thought his story was totally ill-suited for the serious atmosphere in the hospital room at two in the morning. Just to be sure, I hammered it in again. “Do you understand? That woman is dead and gone.”
What Jangsu did next was probably enough to wash away any doubts the young doctor might have had. Jangsu suddenly broke out into laughter, as if he had heard something unbearably funny—he was surely having a fit.
That insane, cackling laugh continued without any sign of letting up. Jangsu rolled around in the rickety hospital bed, wrapped in a sheet, the dark pupils disappearing from his clouded eyes, which had rolled back in his head. He was foaming at the mouth.
I couldn’t tell if this new attack was from the shock of what I’d said or just a symptom of his physical pain. But, all the same, it appeared there was no way to stop it, regardless of what had caused it. I looked back at the doctor’s face, and he was shaking his head as if he were thinking the same thing.
“Thank you, Bonsu. Really. For taking the trouble to contact me.” It sounded like she was about to hang up.
“Mija, wait!” I exclaimed. The persistent arousal that had come out of nowhere poked at my thigh. The object was still warm in my pocket, and the heat in the phone booth was becoming unbearable. My voice came crawling back in shame.
“I…really need to see you,” I said. “I have something to tell you about Jangsu, and I…”
There was no response.
“Is that not possible?”
Instead of an answer, I heard a loud guffaw. The American woman, with whom our lines had crossed, was laughing now. The only thing I could understand in her rapid-fire foreign tongue was “Darling, darling,” which she repeated in a soft, nasal whisper. I mouthed the refrain, Fuck, fuck, at the ends of those words.
“Alright,” Mija said. “When should we meet?”
“I’d like to meet now.”
She hesitated, and the soft and sweet darlings continued. “Do you really need to see me?” she said after a long pause.
“Well…so…Jangsu…like I said…”
I wanted to scream into the handset until I was out of breath, right then and there, but barely managed to suppress the urge. Instead, I shoved a hand down into my pocket and tightly clenched the part of me that was hard.
“I really need to see you right now.”
“Fine, let’s do it, then. Where should I meet you?”
Damn it…. I swept my sweaty hand down my sweaty face. No suitable place came to mind as I anxiously searched my memory.
“How about this, Bonsu?” she said. “Let’s meet in front of school. I want to visit it again. The Ivory Tower across from the front gate should still be there, right?”
“Alright, I’ll wait for you at the Ivory Tower Café.”
“Okay.”