“You haven’t asked me once how Jangsu died.”
I lifted the beer bottle and filled the glass. The dark liquid reached the top and spewed thick foam.
“Aren’t you curious? Whether he died from a disease, a car accident, suicide….”
We were at a nightclub now, at the very top of a hotel. Loud disco music played in the dance hall. Red and blue lights flashed convulsively, and a crowd of men and women were tangled together on the dance floor, shaking their bodies.
“That’s not important,” Mija said as she lifted her glass. I watched her long pale neck as she gulped down the beer and emptied the glass. “You said on the phone that his death was peaceful, didn’t you? I don’t believe that. His death must have been wretched. That suits him better.”
We filled each other’s glasses again and emptied them at the same time. A light chill shot up my spine and settled in my head. I knew I was getting drunk. Mija gently licked the beer suds from her lips as she looked straight at me. Then a light tickling sensation made the hairs on my body stand on end like metal shavings being drawn by a magnet. And something started bobbing inside my body like a fishing float, and the line connected to that float grew taut. I knew what it was. It was my desire ambushing me while my guard was down.
“We always thought that Jangsu was so strong he never even caught a cold,” I said. “But we never realized what he was hiding. His insides were a wreck. It was liver cirrhosis.”
“What kind of disease is that?”
“It hardens your liver like cement, according to the doctor. He said the cause was malnutrition from when Jangsu was an infant.”
Mija stared for a long time in the direction of the stage where people were dancing. A woman was moving frantically, as if she had disassembled all her limbs and was now putting them back together. Under the suggestive lights, her expression looked like someone moaning with fever.
“Do you know how he got the name Jangsu?” Mija asked, her eyes still turned away from me.
“I know a lot about his childhood. You know he was born in ’53, right? He told me his father died just before the end of the war, accused of being a communist. When his mother saw her husband’s bloody corpse, she had a miscarriage and passed out. I’ll tell you what Jangsu said: When they picked up that baby’s legs to throw it out, it started squirming and crying. That’s why they named him Jangsu. Jang, meaning long, and Su, meaning life, so he might live a long life since it was almost cut short.”
We emptied our glasses again. A chill, even faster and more powerful than before, rushed up to the top of my head.
“You said it was malnutrition from infancy? Then it’s like his death was preordained from the start. At birth.” She stopped.
I grasped the object in my pocket, one of the presents left behind by Jangsu. As we’d returned from the funeral, we divided them up among ourselves and each got a piece. I thought about what I was going to do with it now. As far as I knew, there was no way to take care of it, at least under the skies of this city. I wondered how the others took care of their presents. I watched the people dancing as if they were possessed. I imagined each of them hiding the same thing in their pockets. They just weren’t showing it. Something like nausea circulated in my gut and surged upward.
I looked at Mija, who was clearly drunk now, and suddenly couldn’t restrain myself from saying something terrible to her.
“Jangsu didn’t just die. It was murder. We all killed him.”
“Are you saying we’re accomplices?” Mija threw her head back and laughed. Something flashed in her eyes—just a tear, tiny, like a drop of rat’s piss.
The string that had been pulled deep inside me was now so taut I couldn’t tell if what I felt was desire or pain. Every time I moved and the string shifted, pulled tight, and jolted me with an intense, unbearable sensation, I reflexively grasped the object in my pocket.
The only thing left at the bottom of the clock tower in the rotary was the pair of white rubber shoes that had fallen from Jangsu’s feet. Mija picked them up and turned toward us.
“You dogs!” she screamed at the students who hadn’t yet dispersed. She held the rubber shoes in one hand and pointed the index finger of her other hand at us. Her face was blotchy, flushed red with rage and sadness. We watched the barrel of that gun slowly draw a semicircle as it took aim at us, one by one. We all remained silent until her finger made a full 360-degree circle.
“You dogs!” she screamed again. “You’re all fucking accomplices.”
“You’re right,” Mija said when she stopped laughing. “We were all complicit.”
The more I drank, the more parched I became. Mija tilted her head back and drank slowly, as if to say, Just look how beautiful my neck is. I could see it clearly, of course, and at the same time I fitfully imagined wrapping my arms around that long neck and kissing it—once, twice, three times.
We were listening to Jangsu’s breathing. It already sounded like a worn-out compressor, too rough to be called respiration, and it came in two distinct parts: a sharp metallic noise with the inhale followed by the sound of congestion.
All the parts of his body were now being used for the task of breathing. It sounded like water was being pumped from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head before sinking back down, deep underground. The tense part was that, after taking a breath, he would be entirely silent for a moment, and then we had to wait, intently watching his throat, fearing that the silence might go on forever.
But what followed—as if to mock our concern—was the quiet sound of a phlegmy exhale. It fooled us every time, and yet we couldn’t help but tense up each time, only to taste both disappointment and relief whenever his breathing stopped and started again.
The sound of his congestion didn’t seem to be coming from his throat but leaking out from somewhere much deeper. Whenever there was a sharp vibration of his larynx, like a scratch on a metal plate, we felt horribly congested, as if that gelatinous yellow phlegm was filling our own mouths.
I bolted up and went to the open window. The backyard of the hospital was visible below. I hawked up my phlegm, as if to wring it out from my whole body, and spat it out. I watched it draw a long arc and fall to the ground far below.
Then one of my friends ran up next to me and spat as well, and before his ball of phlegm even hit the ground, another one was launched. In the end, we were all hanging out of the windows, straining our bodies to spit, each trying to outdo the other to make our wads of phlegm arc wider and land farther away.
“How long has it been?”
“It’s been seven hours and twenty minutes.”
“Just like him to hold on for such a long time.”
“You think maybe we’re being fooled?” the insurance agent asked. His eyes were still watery from all the hawking up.
“Jangsu’s actually sleeping. Passed out in a very deep sleep. And he’s gonna get up any minute and go, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing over there?’ Just look at that peaceful face.” He went on excitedly as if he’d made a great discovery. “Or he might not be sleeping. He’s tricking us. He’s pretending to sleep and listening to everything we say around him. I’m right, aren’t I, Jangsu?”
Then he collapsed into a chair.
“Ahhh, if it would only rain….”
I looked at Mija. She was holding a half-full glass and had her head down. Each time she took a deep breath, her breasts heaved, and I realized what I had been wanting.
I was going somewhere, supporting her, to a room that was sealed on all four sides. She was completely drunk, almost passed out. I laid her down and took her clothes off. They came away, one layer at a time, like onion peels, and that whole time she mumbled, constantly, “Darling, darling.” I imagined the body heat transmitted when my fingers touched her skin. I imagined that elasticity and the softest texture that might rub off like flower pollen against my fingers….
“What time is it?” she asked, instead of looking at the watch on her wrist.
“It’s a little past eleven.”
She vaguely nodded her head, as if she wasn’t much troubled by the late hour. I thought about whether I should call the waiter and order more beer. I knew she could drink, and the amount of alcohol we’d consumed already was surely approaching the limits of safety. But in order to get her drunk enough to lose control, I needed to get more alcohol into her. I knew very well that what I was thinking now was completely inappropriate, and yet I could not let it go. But what if she realized that it was getting late just when I ordered more beer….
“Jangsu isn’t dead,” she said with her head down.
I picked up the lamp in front of me to call the waiter, hoping she wouldn’t notice.
“He’s alive,” Mija said. “Only him. He won’t commit any sins or fall into temptation. He lives forever.”
The light of the lamp cast a red glow over her face, and she didn’t see the waiter approaching. I held up two fingers, and to make sure he understood that I meant two bottles of beer, I pointed to the empty bottles in front of me. He nodded and went back.
“If he’s alive, then we must be dead,” I replied half-heartedly as I casually put a cigarette in my mouth.
Mija placed her hand on top of mine, and the warmth of her body instantly summoned the heat of desire in me.
“Yes. We’re the dead ones,” she said, her voice just above a whisper.
Just then, the waiter appeared with the bottles of beer. I stopped him before he could distract us by noisily popping the caps and opened them myself. When I filled Mija’s glass halfway, she stood up, staggering a little.
“What’s wrong?”
“I should go,” she said.
“The beer just got here.”
“I need to go, first. The rest…” She smiled with just one side of her mouth, and—perhaps it was just my perception—it looked like she was mocking me.
“You can finish it,” she said.
“Uh, wait for me. I’ll see you out.”
I picked up her purse. She was definitely drunk—her neck, exposed by her low-cut dress, confirmed that fact. I stared vacantly at the red patch, mottled into an exotic design, beneath her pale skin. In that moment, I wanted to lie down, spread-eagle on the floor. It seemed the only way to stop her was to have an epileptic seizure.
“Sir.”
Someone tapped my shoulder as we were about to leave. It was the waiter, looking at me, smiling. “This is yours, isn’t it? It was left on your seat.”
He placed something in my hand, and I quickly shoved it in my pocket. Then, as he was about to turn away, I asked, “Do you know what this is?”
“Not really,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, sir, but it looks very strange.”
He was smiling, wearing a slippery expression. I couldn’t tell what he was really thinking.
“Please come again,” he said, bowing at the waist.
I stepped out of the club.
“Are you alright?” I called out to Mija.
She was standing in front of the elevator waiting for the door to open. She looked at me with indifference, her face seeming to say, Who is this guy, exactly? Then she nodded slowly, as if she finally recognized my face. I looked at my watch. It was eleven thirty. I thought to myself how great it would have been if the national curfew was still in force.
“You don’t look good,” I said.
“You, Bonsu…” After studying me carefully, perplexed for some reason, she slurred the end of her sentence. “Look very good.” Then she quickly turned away and stared at the number display, looking uncomfortably stiff.
The lighted numbers were slowly counting up. I stole a glance at my reflection in the hallway mirror. My face was very red. Not just my face, but every part not covered by clothing was red. As I was about to turn away, I was startled to see that something was bulging from the crotch of my pants. To anyone seeing it—no, even when I saw it—it looked like my pants were tented by a shameless hard-on. But, actually, it was the thing I’d shoved into my pocket earlier.
The elevator opened, and a very fat, old woman staggered out with a very thin man, both of them drunk. We got in, and with the door closed, even when it was just the two of us inside the cramped space, Mija did not say anything. With her back turned to me, she was fixated on the number display.
I suddenly felt laughter welling up. I had just realized why she was suddenly ignoring me and acting so awkward. I looked down at my pants. The bulge was still there, standing tall. I hastily covered my mouth with my hand and suppressed the laughter. Somehow, this was all so terribly funny I could hardly bear it.
“Taxiii!” I called out as soon as we exited the hotel. A pair of headlights was rushing toward us from the other end of the street. I ran out into the middle of the road and waved it down.
“Hannam-dong!”
The taxi slowed momentarily, then drove off.
“It might be tough to catch a cab,” I said to Mija, putting on my best worried expression. She was lost in thought over something, not budging from the hotel entrance. A light was approaching slowly in the distance—a taxi, obviously looking for an additional fare, a rideshare customer.
I raised my hand to stop the cab and saw the driver stick his head out the window.
“Hannam-dong,” I said.
“Hannam-dong? Good!”
There was a middle-aged man in the back seat. He looked like he could be passed-out drunk, but he shouted as if he were talking in his sleep. “Get in!”
I left the taxi door open and called out, “Mija!”
She approached slowly. But instead of climbing into the cab, she bent over at the waist and spoke to the driver. “Just go,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m not getting in, so just go.”
“Are you people drunk?” The driver gunned the car forward, as if to say, Good riddance.
“I’m not going home tonight,” Mija said.
“What are you saying?”
“Don’t you know what it means when a woman says she’s not going home?”