It took three months for the employee’s voice to turn triumphant.
“We got a hit.”
They explained that Se-oh’s name had appeared on a job search website. She had responded to a grocery store’s help wanted ad and submitted a resume. The resume had the phone number for Sunshine Goshiwon.
Had Se-oh gone to school with her sister? How close were they? Se-oh Yun, formerly of #157. Se-oh Yun, aspiring grocery store worker. Se-oh Yun, resident of Sunshine Goshiwon. Se-oh Yun, who didn’t even have her own cell phone and had to use the goshiwon’s number instead. Ki-jeong’s heart raced as if it were her sister who’d surfaced on that job search website.
The hallway inside the goshiwon was lined so closely with doors, they were practically touching. Each door had to be a separate room, but Ki-jeong could not believe how little space there was between them. Less than a meter wide, the hallway stretched deep into the building and was dark despite it being midday. There was a relentless smell; whatever mishap had befallen the residents of #157, something similar had happened to the residents here. It smelled like disaster. The thought of those tiny rooms packed so tightly together was shocking. It was clear, though, that the real disaster waited behind the doors.
Ki-jeong knocked at #433. The sound echoed down the hallway. As silent as the room was, she was surrounded by noise. Televisions playing, radios blaring, water dripping, voices murmuring, someone humming, refrigerators running, fan blades spinning, water boiling, objects falling, chairs scraping, someone hiccupping. The noise came at her from everywhere. She couldn’t tell if any of it was coming from inside #433 or from the other rooms.
A door opened. It wasn’t #433 but the room to the right. A disheveled shadow slipped out. It looked at first like a puff of dark smoke, and then like something gelatinous, phlegmy. The object dragged its phlegmy feet and vanished into the darkness at the end of the hallway. Ki-jeong was alone again. She gave the door-knob to #433 a try, then headed back down the airless, stuffy hallway and out of the goshiwon.
14
At Ki-jeong’s mother’s house, the door to her sister’s room was always closed. It was closed when she vanished without a word a few years earlier, and when she came back. It was closed when she left home again, and when Ki-jeong held a simple funeral for her, alone. Ki-jeong had never once found the closed door strange. It seemed natural, as if it were a door to a utility room or a storage closet.
Ki-jeong didn’t even think to enter the room until after returning from Sunshine Goshiwon. The room was relatively pristine. Without anyone to occupy it, it felt chilly despite the summer heat, but it wasn’t the kind of chill you felt in an actual storage closet or a basement. It was more akin to a well-sanitized and organized hospital.
She poked around a little, but other than guessing from the layers of dust just how much time had passed, she didn’t think she’d learn much from it. It looked like its previous occupant had purposefully cleaned it out before leaving.
She didn’t skip over the locked drawer, though. She got a screwdriver from the toolbox and managed to pry it open after a few tries. She made so much noise doing so that her mother came running. Her mother stopped right before the threshold, as if something bad might happen if she crossed it, and clucked her tongue at Ki-jeong.
“That’s what all that racket was? What on earth are you looking for? And where is that girl, anyway? School’s out for the summer, but she doesn’t so much as call or show up? That’s disrespectful, even for her.”
Ki-jeong didn’t respond. She wanted to delay telling her mother about her sister’s death for as long as possible. Delaying it wouldn’t change the fact of her death, after all. She was pretty sure she would be hurt by her mother’s reaction. Her sister, already being dead, of course, wouldn’t be hurt no matter what Ki-jeong’s mother said or did.
There were no diaries or appointment books. The desk calendar was blank; she hadn’t marked so much as her own birthday on it. The locked drawer revealed two notebooks, neither of which had been used. Ki-jeong leafed through her sister’s books, but nothing was underlined.
She read the titles of the books out loud, hoping one of them might offer a hint. Aesthetic Theory. Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. The God of Small Things. Dog of the Underworld. First Love. The Silent Cry. The only thing those titles revealed was that her sister was interested in a lot of different things but didn’t delve deeply into any of them. She had left not a single clue behind that revealed anything of herself.
Ki-jeong had always considered her sister careless, sloppy, and incapable of expressing her own opinion, and thought she’d masked the low self-esteem that came from growing up in someone else’s house with a smile that projected innocence and confidence. It was possible, though, that her sister had chosen to conceal herself in order to live in harmony with the new family that she’d suddenly found herself a part of. In fact, maybe she was far more in control than Ki-jeong had thought, to the point where she’d foreseen what would happen and had meticulously erased all traces of herself well in advance.
On one of her rounds, Ki-jeong visited her sister’s old high school. Her homeroom teacher still remembered her. On the spur of the moment, Ki-jeong lied and said her sister was missing. She figured she might get further that way. Her sister’s teacher was shocked to hear it and helped her to find contact information for several of her sister’s old friends.
Of the people Ki-jeong contacted, only one was willing to meet her. Another had simply changed her number and was unreachable, and a third reacted coldly at the mention of her sister’s name and claimed she hadn’t known her all that well. From the way they spoke to Ki-jeong, she could tell they didn’t hold her sister in high regard and weren’t exactly itching for an update. They all seemed put off by being contacted out of the blue. Ki-jeong understood. There could be nothing inviting about getting a phone call from a family member of a friend you hadn’t spoken to in ages.
The one girl who agreed to meet Ki-jeong told her she had just graduated from college and was preparing for the civil service exam. Most people her age were doing something like that. It was the age at which you were in a constant state of preparing for something, or failing at what you’d prepared to do only to try again. The age at which you tried endlessly to fulfill something but had no fulfillment to call your own.
The girl, who’d been in the same class as her sister, told her they were only passing acquaintances and that they had not talked after graduation. Ki-jeong prodded a bit more, but the girl seemed unaware of her sister’s family life or the issues surrounding it. She couldn’t recall anything specific, like her sister’s habits or which celebrities she’d liked. No matter what Ki-jeong asked, the girl said, “You know, she was just quiet and smiled a lot . . .” Toward the end, she apologized for wasting Ki-jeong’s time when she clearly did not know her sister well at all.
When Ki-jeong asked if the girl could at least steer her toward someone who might know something, the girl hesitated and said, “Actually, there were rumors.”
“What rumors?”
“People complaining about how she tricked them. They said she would call and offer to hook them up with a part-time job, but when they met her in person, it turned out to be a multi-level marketing scam.”
“Multi-level marketing?”
“Yeah, everyone was talking about it. Even I heard about it, and I barely knew her. It was all over the news at the time, too. All this stuff about illegal pyramid schemes . . . What I heard was that they were treating college kids like slaves, feeding everyone scraps and making guys and girls who didn’t even know each other all sleep in the same room. Those stories had everyone so scared that whenever you got a call from someone you hadn’t heard from in a while, you automatically assumed they were trying to lure you into one. Then, one day, I really did get a call from her. I mean, we’d never once spoken on the phone before. . . . We really weren’t that close. I could bar
ely put a face to her name. It was the same for everyone else I knew, too. They said she was going through the yearbook and cold-calling everyone. I’d heard so many stories at that point that the moment she said her name I just hung up. I’m sorry about that.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“I was afraid that once she started talking, I would fall for whatever she said. They say those people really have a way with words. You can’t listen to them for even a second or they’ll have you. She kept trying to call for a while after that, but I never answered. And then finally the calls stopped.”
Was that it? Her sister’s tightly guarded secret? The moment Ki-jeong heard the words multi-level marketing scam, she could see how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. The debt the detective had mentioned made more sense now, too. Her sister had bet everything she had, hoping it would pay off, only to fail, and when she couldn’t get out from under her debts, she’d offered up her life instead.
From there, Ki-jeong was able to contact others who’d known her sister and finally meet some who’d been with her in the pyramid scheme’s so-called dorm. This time she told them right away that her sister was dead. It was the easiest way to explain why she was calling. Each time, they all expressed the same shock and gave her the same formulaic words of consolation.
Their stories were identical. How ardently she had tried to fool them, how big of a front she’d put up to keep them from leaving, how she kept rattling off the same words to try to seduce them over to her wild ideas. Ki-jeong wasn’t sure how much to believe. But whether she believed them or not, it wasn’t out of the ordinary. The fact that it was so different from the sister she’d known was no excuse. It was only natural that the sister she knew would be different from the person her sister’s friends had known.
When she failed to react with sympathy, one of her sister’s friends said, sounding aggrieved, “I was trapped there for three months because of your sister. I missed an entire semester and lost all of my tuition money. My mom was so mad at me.”
“The stuff my sister told you was that convincing?”
“At the time, it was.”
“Then who was the one who tricked my sister into joining?”
“You mean her upline?”
“Upline?”
“The one who recruited her. Wow, I can’t believe I still remember those terms. They really drilled it into us. Those are the terms they used. Upline for recruiters, downline for recruits.”
“So when you recruit a friend, they become your downline?”
“Yes, I was her downline.”
“Who was her upline?”
Ki-jeong’s voice trembled slightly. Maybe she’d finally found a link between Se-oh Yun and her sister.
“Some guy named Bu-wi.”
“Bu-wi?”
“He graduated high school before us. He was her boyfriend.”
Everything about her sister was new to Ki-jeong. Including the fact that she’d had a boyfriend.
“What about Se-oh Yun? Was there someone by that name there?”
“Who’s that?”
“You don’t know her?”
“Did she die with her?”
The girl looked apologetic as soon as the words were out. But there was nothing to be sorry for. It was normal for someone her age to be a little rude and insensitive when it came to death.
After returning home, Ki-jeong looked up a book on network marketing. According to the book, one could drastically reduce the number of years spent toiling simply by making a slight alteration to how one toiled. It said to utilize personal networks as a shortcut. Consumers could become salespeople, without the retail or wholesale middleman, and expand their markets through a chain of personal connections. As their downline increased exponentially, they could earn the equivalent of an ordinary officer worker’s thirty-nine-year salary in just one year.
The book didn’t explain where that thirty-nine-year figure had come from. Instead it kept repeating how the profit model worked. How you could increase your downline from one to two recruits, and then ten, and so on, and how those on the downline would command their own downline, earning you a massive, unbelievable profit ratio.
The core idea was that by investing a year’s work, you could rest easy for the next thirty-nine. That is, by enduring hardship for just one year, you were guaranteed to succeed, and so you had to view a few months of suffering as a kind of investment capital. It was only by clinging tenaciously to survival that you would accomplish whatever you set out to do. Giving up meant certain failure, but holding out for a year raised your chances for success.
Did people really fall for something so obvious? That not everyone would achieve success, but everyone would for sure work like a dog, and that, in the end, only a very few would be spared from total failure? Did they really buy the exaggerated description of ideal circumstances and the repeated tripe about how if you just worked hard enough, you could strike it rich? Ki-jeong was dubious, and yet considering how many people fell for it, there was clearly a convincing angle to it.
Ki-jeong kept going. She went back to the school to look for Bu-wi. It was relatively easy for her to do, since she’d been a teacher.
But while the process was easy, finding Bu-wi turned out to be another story. His phone number was out of service, someone else was living at his address, and the college that he’d claimed he was attending informed her that no one by that name had ever enrolled or graduated from there.
Ki-jeong repeated the name Bu-wi out loud. She wrote her sister’s name on a piece of paper, wrote Bu-wi next to it, and drew a circle around each name. She drew a line between the circles to connect them. She made an upline and a downline. Then she wrote the name Se-oh and tried connecting all three circles as many ways as she could. First, her sister, then Se-oh, then Bu-wi. She could change the order as much as she wanted. No matter how she drew the line—from Se-oh to her sister to Bu-wi, or her sister to Bu-wi to Se-oh—they were always connected. Everything was possible in her imagination, because she really didn’t know any of them. She stared hard at the lines that stretched off in all directions while simultaneously remaining in place. As if the owners of those lines were right there. As if by staring at their names, she was seeing their faces.
Back when their lives had connected, they’d probably had no idea that, in just a few years’ time, one of them would meet a lonely death. And that no one would mourn her.
15
Wu-sul Kim had been far too stubborn about hiring. He’d rejected out of hand nearly every job application that he’d received via the job search website. A few had appealed to him. A very small handful of applicants had struck him as outgoing and earnest. But they in turn had taken one look at his grocery store and lost all interest. They didn’t bother to hide their disappointment when they learned that their future place of employment was little more than a hole-in-the-wall grocery tucked inside a drab commercial arcade in an apartment complex. When he interviewed them, they responded to his questions with an obvious lack of interest, or fired back by asking how much his annual sales were.
After that, he realized he’d be better off hiring someone who applied in person rather than online. In large letters, he wrote NOW HIRING: HELP SERVICE PLANNER on poster board and hung it in the front window. Jae-hyung Shin smirked and called the job title pretentious. Wu-sul wasn’t crazy about it either, but he refused to change it. He liked the vagueness of it. His plan was to hire the first person who asked him what it meant. But no one asked, let alone submitted an application.
“That’s because you made it too vague. Employee, staff, assistant, worker—that’s what you usually see on a job ad. But ‘help service planner’? And in English, no less. What does that even mean?”
Jae-hyung, the grocery’s sole employee, wouldn’t stop nagging Wu-sul about the need to hire someone new. From the way he told it, the long days and heavy workload had him at the brink of death.
“I wrote it that way on purpose,” Wu
-sul said. “Whoever gets the job needs to be at least smart enough to get what I mean right away. And if not, then they should be confident and not feel embarrassed to ask. What’s so hard about asking, ‘What’s that? What does it mean?’”
“Okay, but what’s so hard about writing it the normal way instead? ‘Now hiring part-time.’ Clear and simple.”
“Absolutely not. This is a permanent full-time position.”
“You can’t be serious! That might not be what any of the applicants are looking for. Who would want to work in a place like this permanently?”
“You have no clue because you grew up sheltered. You don’t appreciate the woes of the disposable worker.”
“Sure, sure. I’ve also never been forced into an early retirement like you were.”
“Keep talking to your boss that way, and maybe you will be.”
“Don’t listen to me. Hire whoever you want! If you want a part-timer, hire a part-timer. You want someone full time, then hire them full time.”
“I will. And I’ll interview every applicant, no matter what’s on their resume.”
He’d said that last part jokingly, but when Se-oh offered him her application, Wu-sul couldn’t help stealing a glance over at Jae-hyung. Jae-hyung looked exhausted from rushing to one address after another, trying to keep up with the onslaught of afternoon deliveries. Wu-sul knew that when he said he was dying, he wasn’t entirely exaggerating.
Jae-hyung gave him a look that said, Hurry up and take it. Wu-sul pretended not to understand and looked back and forth between Se-oh and the white envelope she was holding out, as if he didn’t know what it was. Se-oh kept her eyes fixed on the floor. She did not bow and say, I would like to apply for the position, or add any unnecessary niceties like, I hope that you will consider my application, or smile politely so as to leave a positive impression. She acted like she didn’t know what it was she held in her hand either. Nor did she look like she was debating how she should react.
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