Wu-sul had no choice but to finally ask, “Is that a job application?”
Se-oh gave the faintest of nods. Her head barely moved. She was not a small woman. Wu-sul’s wife was a big woman, but Se-oh dwarfed her. Whenever his wife moved even the tiniest bit, her large shadow swayed every which way, but Se-oh didn’t seem to move at all. She was a stationary object. Even her shadow appeared nailed in place. She didn’t actually nod her head so much as give an impression of having nodded. No part of her moved, except maybe for a slight fluttering of her eyelids.
“We’re looking for a help service planner. Do you know what that entails?”
Wu-sul asked because he wanted to hear what her voice sounded like.
“Is it not a sales position?” Se-oh asked languidly.
To his surprise, he liked her answer. He’d had a few answers in mind that would have been an automatic no. Specifically, anything that contained phrases like “happy customers” or “customer satisfaction.” He loathed answers that overpackaged basic business transactions. Grocery stores sold products, not customer service. There was no point in exhausting yourself emotionally with all that kindness this and friendliness that. He didn’t object to friendly service, of course, but running a grocery store came down to selling good products. He also wasn’t crazy about job applicants who tried too hard to dress up sales with big, multisyllabic words like capital, business, enterprise, marketing, and so on. He was tired of assigning useless meanings to things. It was fine to simply say that grocery stores were places where products were bought and sold.
That said, he was damned if he was going to hire Se-oh. As much as he downplayed the idea of friendly customer service, there was no way he could hire that gruff, shadow-like, mountain of a woman. As she said, it was a sales position, but sales meant exchanging goods for cash, and, in a grocery store, the one handing you their cash was, after all, a human being.
“We’re only hiring men.”
For some reason, he had to summon his courage to lie to her. The crushed silhouette of her oversized shadow seemed to give off an equally large presence. Wu-sul was struck by it, and he couldn’t stop staring. Se-oh didn’t seem particularly disappointed as she slowly put the envelope back in the pocket of her purple trench coat, which made no sense for the weather, and left the grocery store.
Jae-hyung stared accusingly at Wu-sul. Wu-sul tried to avoid his gaze but then gave up and ran out of the shop, calling to Se-oh as she headed toward the park. He called out twice quietly, then once loudly. Se-oh turned, her face devoid of any giddy hope or expectation that she might actually have a shot at getting the job. Nor did the flatness of her expression seem to have anything to do with the potential job being at a mere grocery store. It looked like it was the only expression she could make.
Wu-sul sat across from her in the cramped storage room where he conducted all of his job interviews and slowly examined her application. As he’d suspected, there wasn’t much to it. After dropping out of college, she hadn’t worked anywhere at all. At least five years appeared unaccounted for. What had she been doing during that time? Even as the question occurred to him, Wu-sul marveled at himself for wondering. Who cares? he thought. At the same time, he knew why he wondered. It was because she didn’t seem desperate or ready to beg for a job. Nor was it because she was calculating in some other way. It was simply how she carried herself. She seemed to have no attachments. That thought answered another question. The question of why he was about to hire her.
Wu-sul hesitated, and then held out his hand. Se-oh stared at him blankly. He wondered for a moment if he’d made a mistake, but he didn’t take back the decision. He had a good enough reason. Se-oh had appeared right when he could no longer afford not to hire someone.
“Help Service” was a meal prep delivery service. Customers called to order ready-to-cook meals, and they selected and prepped the appropriate ingredients, added the right seasonings, and delivered it to their doors. The apartment complex where the store was located held mostly smaller units with a high ratio of young, working couples. Jae-hyung was the one who’d suggested they start the service—essentially to grocery shop for their customers.
They’d flyered the complex and posted ads in local papers. As word spread that they prepped ingredients for you at a reasonable price, their customer base grew and they gained a good number of regulars. Most of the working couples they got ordered the evening meal prep service. They also took lots of orders for baby food prep and party food prep.
Se-oh was put to work at the cash register. In the afternoons, they sometimes asked for her help putting together the delivery orders as well. Her job was to prep the items and pack them in cardboard boxes organized by delivery area and time.
Orders for prepackaged food were easy: all she had to do was ask which brands they preferred and box them up. Naturally, she had to take care to check the expiration dates and the condition of the packaging. If the food was too close to expiring or if the box was dented or crushed, customers assumed the store was dumping their old inventory on them. Orders for vegetables, meat, or fish were tricky. The items had to be fresh, of course, but choosing the right size or amount was always difficult. If she wasn’t careful to ask plenty of questions, the customers were sure to pick a quarrel.
For the meal prep service, Se-oh took photos while prepping the ingredients and texted them to customers. In the delivery boxes she added notes that further detailed what she had done with the items. She never called attention to the care she put into her work, though. If Wu-sul hadn’t happened to open one of the boxes before it was delivered, he would never have known.
She kept the same wooden look on her face all the time, a look that wasn’t well suited to someone in a service position, but she wasn’t unfriendly either. She never chimed in when Jae-hyung and Wu-sul were having one of their pointless bantering sessions, but she listened. And there were many times where she said nothing all day except for greeting them when she clocked in and out. Wu-sul sometimes wished he could make her crack a smile. She seemed to yearn for the life in that supermarket even while acting indifferent to it, as if everything were meaningless to her. He marveled at how both impressions seemed to be true.
16
As demolition notices went up all throughout the area scheduled for redevelopment, including the old tenement flats near the store, the number of empty homes increased. The park had grown quieter in the early morning, and there were noticeably fewer elderly people lining up to do aerobics.
According to Wu-sul, it had started with a few old men and women scattered around the park, warming up with some light calisthenics. Then they were joined by a former aerobics instructor, and their numbers grew to the size of a flash mob. But as redevelopment began pushing residents out one after the other, they’d shrunk back down to a small group.
Though there weren’t as many of them now, it made Se-oh happy to watch the rows of elderly folk moving around wildly to loud music. It reminded her of how her father used to hoist dumbbells and bark out commands, though all he’d really exercised was his mouth.
After the aerobics squad was done, a badminton club took over the park. The members warmed up by swinging their rackets around at nothing and bending forward and backward to stretch their lower backs. As the shuttlecocks took to the air, Se-oh divided her attention between their steady back-and-forth flight and the tenement flats nearby.
Commuters rushed past the park on their way to the subway. Su-ho Lee was among them. By the time the first round of badminton ended, Se-oh spotted Su-ho coming out the front door of his flat. The back of his hair was still damp, and he shook it dry with his hand as he hurried toward the station. Se-oh stood to follow him.
Seeing him renewed Se-oh’s strength. But when she got within a meter of Su-ho, her heart froze, and she felt like someone was binding her limbs tight. There was no reason for him to notice her, but she made every effort to blend in anyway. Sometimes she was so self-conscious that she couldn’t take h
er eyes off of him. Other times, she didn’t dare look his way at all.
In the meantime, she had been keeping detailed notes on his daily schedule, what time he got to work and what time he got home, the people he met, his radius of activity. She’d used his mail to figure out his home phone number, his birthdate, and other information, and inferred his family relationships from it as well. She’d learned through observation what foods he preferred, what his habits were. She even knew which debtors he was pursuing and how much they owed. She’d thought that information would help her predict his actions.
But it didn’t. She could never tell how he was doing or what he was feeling. He kept going to restaurants she wouldn’t have guessed he would like. He didn’t touch a single bowl of red bean noodles all month, only to eat a bowl every day for a week. He would take the subway every day, only to abruptly switch to the bus. It was the same when he went home. He usually exited the subway station and walked along the busy commercial street, but now and then he would make his way through the apartment construction site instead. Some days after work he would drink his fill of booze with coworkers; other days, he didn’t touch a drop. Some days he cursed and swore at debtors; others, he coaxed them gently. Some days he kicked with abandon at their front doors; others, he rang the bell like a guest and waited calmly.
The one thing that never changed was his habit of spitting and rubbing the saliva into the ground with his shoe and then smoking a cigarette each and every time he came outside. He wasn’t a chain-smoker, but he smoked every time he was in a new location, as if to buy himself time to get familiar with the place.
When it came to Su-ho, neither a perfect set of statistics nor absolute certainties were possible. It took Se-oh a while to get this through her head. It made no sense for her to spend the whole day tracking him and not doing any work of her own. She was better off earning at least a little bit of money and making some sort of livelihood. And financially, she had no choice.
Her lack of funds meant she increasingly found herself unable to keep up with Su-ho. There were days she had only enough for bus fare. She would lose track of him while she waited, then go off in hot pursuit only to lose him once more. Whenever he took a cab, she lost him completely. The hunger gnawing at her stomach made her more tenacious in her pursuit. Malice so easily conspired with poverty and so willingly got into bed with it. Se-oh looked on powerlessly.
Her criteria for finding a job had been simple. It had to pay enough to keep her alive, and it had to be close to where Su-ho lived. She’d found the help wanted ad a few months earlier on a job search website. After she'd narrowed her search to the right area and to jobs she actually had a shot at, the grocery store had come up. She’d filled out an application, using the goshiwon’s phone number since she didn’t have a cell phone, but she never got called for an interview. That didn’t surprise her. Her resume might as well have been blank. Her best remaining option had been to apply for a part-time job at a convenience store nearby.
There were three convenience stores between the subway stop and the tenement flats. None of them were hiring, but she’d filled out job applications at each place anyway. The turnover at those places was likely to be high. After a couple of months, she got a call. She went for an interview and, on her way home, she happened to walk past the grocery store. To her surprise, there was a job ad posted right in the window.
She was even more surprised and happy to find herself hired. It’d been a long time since she felt that way. Knowing that Su-ho lived nearby was what made her happy. To Se-oh, malice was not a fleeting emotion that stirred temporary ripples as it passed. She confirmed this every time she accompanied Su-ho on his morning commute. Malice never grew bored of the daily grind. Instead, it gave daily life energy. Only by being close to him and knowing that she could do what she had to do whenever she put her mind to it made it possible for her to live a normal life.
It was fun working at the store. She especially liked pointing the scanner at items and seeing a number come up, then pointing it again and getting the total. Coincidence never meddled; logic was not required. Sometimes the barcode wouldn’t scan and she had to input the number by hand, or cancel out an order and redo it because of a minor glitch, but other than that, nothing unexpected ever happened.
Her favorite part was getting to see the things that customers brought to the register or ordered over the phone. She memorized all of it: which types of fruit, yogurt, or instant foods sold the most, which brand of gum or gummy candy they grabbed on impulse while waiting at the register, which batteries, which fresh foods, which detergents, which bottled waters. The grocery store register informed her that daily life was a process of consuming one small product after another.
For the past few years, Se-oh had not once comparison-shopped at different stores to get a better deal. She hadn’t stood in line for over thirty minutes at a government office or wandered from department to department in search of someone who could help her. She hadn’t argued with salespeople who refused to give her a refund or called customer service to schedule after-sales service, and then called again to confirm the appointment and pleaded for their technician to show up on time. Her father had done all of that. Se-oh had stayed home and avoided daily life. Of course, not everything about working at the grocery store was good. Sometimes she saw people whose faces resembled those of people she once knew. Still others, who looked like no one that she knew, would stare at her and make her nervous. Her face would flush, her hands would tremble. She was certain they would shout her name at any moment. But it never happened. They simply stared at her as they handed her their credit card or waited for her to make change.
When she summoned the courage to steal peeks at customers’ faces, she was consumed by pointless thoughts. Such as, how old was that face looking back at her? She herself was the only person whose exact age she knew. When she looked at her own reflection, she thought, Is this really a twenty-seven-year-old face? Not fat, but bloated. Exuding dissatisfaction, as if it had suffered some injustice. The corners of the lips drawn down, angry looking, and the rest of the mouth following suit, deepening the marionette lines. Eyelids that drooped even when she wasn’t tired, making her look sleepy and bored.
If hers was a typical twenty-seven-year-old face, then was Su-ho’s a typical twenty-nine-year-old’s? And if so, did that mean Se-oh would soon wear the same face—tired and dull, yet somehow also neurotic and so utterly dripping with victim mentality that he looked like a dog with its tail between its legs?
Se-oh often wondered, as she watched people choose between different items, what they were doing back when they’d turned twenty. How did they make it through their twenties that they should now be in this store, picking out bottled water and spinach and purchasing instant rice?
From there, she would find herself thinking about Mi-yeon Cho. In fact, she never really stopped thinking about her. There were simply times when thoughts of her floated right at the surface, and times when they didn’t. Where was she now, and was she living this kind of life? When did it become possible for her? How long did it take for her to be able to converse comfortably with others again?
Talking to Jae-hyung and Wu-sul made Se-oh acutely aware of just how much her own conversational skills had slipped. She’d had no problem talking to her father. While hiding at home, she’d watched a lot of TV dramas, news, and variety shows. She’d stayed on top of online trends. Sometimes, without even meaning to, she’d found that she knew all there was to know about some newsworthy incident. But real-life conversations were different from what you saw on TV or read online. She never blanked on any words, and yet she couldn’t seem to carry a conversation.
The problem wasn’t that she’d forgotten how to talk to people or what an appropriate topic of conversation was. It was that when she saw her two coworkers, she realized she was in no position to socialize. Her face went straight in reaction to jokes, and when she tried to laugh, she turned brusque instead. Talking unreservedly, w
ith no regards to the future, filled her with guilt. And thinking about what happened to Su-ho every day in her imagination made her fear becoming friends with her coworkers.
They lived in a completely different world from hers. The world of human beings with good intentions. But the thing about human beings was that the moment you let yourself get carried away with thinking people were essentially good at heart, they would prove you wrong. They would make comments at your expense, cut you down casually like it meant nothing to them, then laugh for no reason, and when your mood turned foul and you complained, they would suddenly have your back. Given that, human beings couldn’t care less about the line between good and evil.
When Se-oh looked at it that way, she wanted to turn herself over body and soul to the tiny grocery store. She wanted to live a life of small happinesses, little joys that came from knowing that not all relationships were based on people setting traps for each other, or being tied to each other in a brutal food chain, or harboring grudges and fury, but rather they could be based on discovering yourself through joyful work, through trying new things, and by conversing and joking with people you had the privilege of calling your coworkers.
A vain hope. It was too late for her. For starters, the malice she carried was not going anywhere. It ate away at her from the inside. Each time she thought about Su-ho, she was instantly returned to a world of wounds and lies and death and anger, a place of constant threats and mockery and violence and sarcasm. It was not just Su-ho’s world. Se-oh had already familiarized herself with it. It had been her world too, once.
17
The events of those days had a way of coming back to her at random moments. It got worse after she started following Su-ho. After all, part of her job back then was to keep a watchful eye on others.
The Law of Lines Page 10