The dozen or so fish swimming around in the tank looked like they were made out of yellow construction paper. There was a bigger one, with blue spots, hiding among the long aquatic plants, waving its fins. There was also a small mill, with its wheel endlessly turning, spewing bubbles that rose vertically toward the surface.
“Are you here to buy an aquarium?” An old man’s bald head suddenly appeared above the miniature seascape.
“Do you take care of the installation yourself?” Junshik asked.
“Is it for your home or someplace like a restaurant entrance?”
“It’s for an apartment. In Sanggye-dong.”
“I can’t go out that far for free. I’d be losing money….”
“What’s this one called?”
“That one? Sanctus or something or other…I don’t really know. We just call ’em tropical fish.”
“Can we raise this kind at home?”
“I suppose…How big is your apartment?”
“Not very. It’s only twenty-three pyeong.”
“Then I recommend you come over this way and pick a goldfish, instead. The big ones costs five hundred won and the little ones are two hundred. Aquariums go for thirty to sixty thousand. Which one would you like?”
Junshik picked the thirty thousand won model. He bought three medium-sized goldfish at three hundred won apiece and two black ones at two hundred won each. But once he was outside the store with the aquarium on his shoulder, he realized it was going to be harder than he’d thought to carry it all the way home. Sweating profusely, he stood out in the street hailing a taxi, but none would stop for him. An empty cab occasionally did come by, but as soon as the driver noticed the large glass box on Junshik’s shoulder, he would speed off. There was no choice but to take the train home.
As usual the train was packed, with hardly room to stand. The other passengers looked at Junshik with annoyance as he forced his way between them with the empty aquarium on his shoulder. He was also carrying the plastic bag full of the goldfish he’d bought. Each time the ceiling fans nodded their heads and wafted the stuffy air around the inside of the car, Junshik’s nose was assaulted by the hot, nauseating body odor of the other passengers. He wanted to get to a window and put the aquarium on the luggage rack, but he was hardly able to move. He also had to keep his arm up, holding the plastic bag above everyone to keep it from getting torn. Already, his elbow was throbbing with pain and it felt like his shoulder was being crushed under a lead weight.
A gurgling sound came from his belly. It might have been his IBS acting up again. If he kept living with this level of stress, his whole body was going to fall apart. He looked at the plastic bag. The five fish, in that tiny amount of water, were barely managing to breathe. They were watching him with their bulging eyes, and strangely, to Junshik, it seemed they were full of pity for him. Pity coming from the eyes of a fish? The thought made him burst out laughing.
For what possible reason would I go through all this bother to bring home an aquarium? he asked himself. After all, his wife had seemed to lose interest in it by now. What was he possibly hoping to fix with this aquarium?
“I think our marriage was a mistake.” That’s what his wife had suddenly blurted out last night. At those words, Junshik had felt as if his heart were collapsing in his chest, but he had done his utmost to hide his feelings.
“What are you talking about?”
“You call this a life? You think what we’re doing is living?”
“How do you think we should live?”
“Whatever it is, it’s not like this. You can’t call what we have an authentic life.”
“An ‘authentic life’? We’re people going on with our lives. How is that not authentic? We all live the same way. Real life isn’t like what you read in a novel. Life means having to adapt to reality and being content with that.”
“But I feel like I took the wrong path with my life,” she said. “It’s like I buttoned myself wrong.”
“And what do you propose to do about it now?”
“I don’t know. I need time to think about it.”
Junshik couldn’t understand his wife’s sudden transformation. Just a few days ago, she’d been preoccupied with buying a new wardrobe to replace the dilapidated old one, whose feet they’d had to amputate the last time they’d moved. She’d only been focusing on the problem of how to set up the apartment: the aquarium, the video, and the hi-fi. Now, suddenly, he was hearing her talk about things she’d never brought up before.
“Everyone needs to tell their own story sometimes,” she said.
“What do you mean ‘their own story’? What story?”
“Whatever story it is. Stories about their past, when they were children—any kind of story. What matters is that they have someone who listens and understands. I never tried to tell you any of those stories. You never wanted to hear them.”
“You just said it. You never tried to tell me. When did I ever say I didn’t want to listen to them?”
“I never told you because it’s useless talking to you.”
The train had just arrived in Nokcheon. The door opened and Junshik was pushed outside. He wanted nothing more than to get a breath of fresh air into his lungs, but all he got was the stifling humidity. His stomach was making strange noises and the pain was beginning to bother him. He needed to put down the aquarium and get to a restroom as quickly as possible, but he knew there was no such thing nearby. He had to endure the distress in his belly, heft the aquarium on his shoulder, carry the plastic bag full of fish, and start walking home. The heavy aquarium was a dilemma now—he felt like he couldn’t carry it, but then again, he couldn’t just leave it, either.
A long line of garbage trucks was kicking up dust, speeding along the edge of the construction site. They were using garbage as filler to raise a large depression at one corner of the complex. It was barren, dead earth, without a speck of vegetation, and not visible to the eye. But Junshik noticed that a lot of the garbage was plastic and, because of that, it would never decompose but remain there, under the dirt, for thousands—no, tens of thousands—of years. And on top of that, from the lifeless earth, steel-reinforced concrete structures were rising up. He didn’t exactly know if they were leveling the site with so much garbage because its elevation just happened to be lower than in other spots. But for Junshik, seeing that quantity of garbage gave him the disappointing feeling of seeing through a façade, as if the magnificent background of the drama he’d been watching had turned out to be a set made of threadbare fabric and cheap wooden planks. It seemed ironic to him that the ground that was supporting all those awesome high-rises was actually just a huge sedimentary layer of trash. Now people were living there, planting trees, mowing grass, landscaping. That was why he and his wife were going to decorate their apartment with an aquarium and put geraniums on their balcony. That was why he was sweating profusely now with this heavy thing on his shoulder.
And yet his wife had told him this was not an authentic life. What was life, then? His mind was racing as he struggled to keep the glass box propped up on his shoulder despite the increasing distraction of the pain in his belly. What would the rest of his life be like? Not that he hadn’t thought of such things before, but today was the first time that question had come up so urgently. When he thought about it, the trajectory of the rest of his life was pretty obvious. He would probably be teaching for twenty more years at the same school. He would have to go to work every day, give the same lessons, repeat the same thing dozens of times in each class, listen to the same endless complaints from the headmaster, repeat the same instructions and criticisms to the students. Nothing would change. Maybe he could hope to become a head teacher and buy a car or move to a more spacious apartment. But what sort of change was that? What kind of life was it if all he was going to do was grow old like this and then wait around for death to take him?
The truth was that, in the past, he’d dreamed of having such a life. Stable and unexciting, a life in which you knew where you were going to sleep each night, where you didn’t have to worry about getting fired from your job. It was all he had wanted, no more and no less. But now that he had finally achieved it, his wife was questioning the meaning of it all, saying it was a lie built on top of a filthy, stinking pile of garbage. As if their twenty-three-pyeong apartment, their bathroom with hot water, the aquarium and goldfish in the living room—everything—was just a stage illusion, painted over garbage.
What could he do about it now? What does she want from me? he wanted to scream.
His stomach was gurgling again. His lower belly felt like someone was stabbing him with a needle and he was afraid he was going to start leaking at any moment. He couldn’t hold it in any longer. But it was still a long time before the sun would go down, and there was no place to squat and relieve himself. The aquarium pressed down more and more oppressively on his shoulder, and Junshik was tempted just to fling it onto the ground. He looked in every direction for someplace that could serve as a toilet until he spotted what looked like a shabby little plastic shed in one corner of the construction site. On the door was a sign that read Toilet, and above that, someone had written Do Not Use. But circumstances being what they were, Junshik went ahead and put down the aquarium, then pulled the door open. What he saw left him speechless for a moment. There were piles of shit everywhere on the floor, so much there was hardly a place to put his feet. He already knew there was no working sewage system there, but there was so much excrement that it overflowed the tank and was spread all over everything. Junshik was bewildered by all the varieties of shit, some petrified and looking a decade old, others still fresh. He finally stepped inside, found a spot, undid his pants, and sat down. At first he wanted to throw up, but strangely, little by little, he began to feel indifferent to the smell. He began to feel that he was among countless living creatures who were protesting, showing their resistance in the bluntest way possible.
Suddenly, he remembered his mother’s face. When he was little, she would do any kind of work to feed her family. She took in sewing at home and she had a spot in the market where she spread out a ground cloth and sold odeng and gimbap—fish cake and seaweed rolls with rice. All day long at the market, she would clap her hands and call out loudly, in her husky voice, “Get your delicious fresh odeng and gimbap here! Delicious fresh odeng and gimbap!”
By afternoon, the market was so crowded there was hardly room to walk. They said the market was “standing room” then, and at those times the tone of his mother’s voice was all the more spirited.
“Delicious fresh odeng and gimbap! Get your delicious fresh odeng and gimbap here!”
In Junshik’s memory, there was no one in the market with a voice as loud as his mother’s. Clapping her hands and calling out all day long—whether or not there were passersby—she often had no time to eat or go to the bathroom. In those days, having to use a bathroom in the market was a problem. There was only one public toilet, located behind the market stalls, that was used by all the merchants. That meant there was always a long line.
Junshik’s mother, no matter how urgently she needed to use the toilet, could not wait patiently in that line. She found it impossible to stand there, tormented by the thought that she could be selling at least one more seaweed roll. But one day, the result of her impatience had terrible consequences. She had run urgently to the public toilet, only to return to her spot again after seeing the long line. And after returning several times, she simply could not hold it any longer.
“Aigo! What to do?” she said. “What am I gonna do?”
Standing in line for the toilet, between all the other people, she stamped her feet and contorted her body, but it was no use. Junshik, watching her, began to feel the same kind of urgency. Even so, his mother gave up and went back to her spot at the market. Junshik didn’t understand, at first, why she had gone back to squatting behind the mat where she had laid out all of her goods. She remained there, calm and quiet, and in a moment he smelled something that left no doubt about what she was doing.
“Aigo! What’s that?” said the mackerel seller, whose spot was just to the right. She crinkled her nose in disgust.
“Someone must have farted,” said the bean sprout seller to the left of his mother’s spot.
“A fart doesn’t stink like that. I think someone took a shit.”
“Who would do that? In the middle of the market!”
The two neighboring merchants went on and on, but Junshik’s mother remained quiet and expressionless. It was something she was good at—being confident in the most delicate situation while displaying absolute calm. Then she looked peaceful and content once again, her urgency having passed. The mackerel seller kept glancing at her out of the corner of her eye, obviously suspicious, but Junshik’s mother wasn’t concerned. Even now, Junshik could not forget the impudent and yet serene expression on his mother’s face.
Junshik got out of the toilet and lifted the aquarium back onto his shoulder. He had made it this far. He would make it all the way. For him, as it was for his mother, life was far from luxurious or grand or noble. It was a continuous stream of filth and misery and suffering, a never-ending race in which he could not sidestep the hurdles. Sometimes, when he was lucky, he could get a taste of a short vacation or be satisfied with an achievement. But when he thought about it, it seemed to him that those things were just flecks of foam atop a procession of unending waves that would eventually snuff them out forever.
When he was finally home, his wife took the aquarium, but her face was expressionless.
“Why on earth did you bring dead goldfish?” she asked.
She was right. They were all dead. Somehow, the plastic bag had gotten punctured and more than half of the water had leaked out. The fish were belly-up with their eyes still wide-open, staring up at Junshik. Those eyes, full of pity.