She let out a long breath. She thought she’d be too nervous to breathe normally, but she was okay. The further inside she went, the less sunlight reached her. She felt like she was crawling deep into the earth. The strange smell and trapped heat didn’t help. The apartment didn’t seem to get any ventilation. The windows were so firmly closed they looked like they’d never been opened at all.
The fishy, muddy smell and the relentless heat and humidity seemed to be coming from the enormous pot boiling in the kitchen. Blue flames rising from a portable gas burner on a low table licked menacingly at the sides of the pot. It looked like it had been sitting there boiling away in the same spot for years.
Se-oh took a quick look around at the apartment overtaken by thick, fishy air. Two rooms. Kitchen in disarray. A tiny, ancient television set sitting directly on the floor. A mirror, the frame caked with dust. Photos and colorful fake flowers on top of a side table. A long floor cushion that the old woman probably lay on.
The old woman paused in the middle of scooting across the floor to look up at Se-oh.
“Did Jae-hyung quit?”
“No.”
“Then why didn’t he come?”
“Where do you want this?”
“My goodness, you’ve got a temper. What’s the big hurry?”
“These are the rough-skinned apples you ordered.”
“Let me see.”
The old woman took the apple that Se-oh handed her and slowly stroked it like she was stroking a child’s face. She did the same with all five apples. The palms of her hands looked rougher than the apple skins.
“I can’t use these.”
She rolled four of the five apples back to Se-oh.
“How dare you bring me rotten apples. My legs may be useless, but my hands and eyes still work fine. I can tell those have no flavor. I don’t have to taste them to know. I may as well eat a radish instead.”
She sounded bent on seizing this opportunity to nitpick.
“And look at these green onions. The ends are all yellowed. How am I supposed to make warm salads with these? It’d just be a waste of dressing. And the cucumbers. They’re no bigger than seeds. Can’t even fit a knife in there.”
Se-oh put the items the old woman rejected back into the basket. She’d been told that anything that wasn’t perfect or that displeased the old woman in even the slightest way had to be taken back and exchanged, including the packaged foods with expiration dates that were coming up too soon. Jae-hyung had warned Se-oh about her, but she had just figured the old woman was pickier than other customers.
But it wasn’t so much that the old woman was simply cranky. Bored from spending her days alone, she did what she had to do to find herself someone to talk to. Complaining about items from the store meant a chance to talk. And sending items back and placing multiple orders meant more opportunities to talk.
Wu-sul had told Se-oh to do whatever the old woman asked. The woman’s son had made a point of asking them very earnestly to be patient with his mother, and Wu-sul felt sorry for her, as the once-active woman who’d enjoyed poking her nose into everyone’s business was now confined to her home.
“Finding the right person for the job is everything. But where’d they find you? What a shame. Can’t believe they’d hire such a sullen brat.”
Se-oh knew the old woman was only trying to get her attention, but she pretended not to notice and asked, “Mind if I get a glass of water?” The woman scowled and gestured toward the kitchen.
From the pot on the gas burner came the awful smell of a once-living thing put through a long boil. Jae-hyung had told her it was simmered eel. Se-oh held her breath as she looked around the kitchen.
And then she found it. Brown, and stretched out long and thin like a snake. No bigger around than her thumb but as malignant as a viper. Se-oh stared, possessed, at where it clung to the wall. Worn-out and soft with age. Black with years of accumulated grease. Capable of sparking a tremendous blaze. It could happen now if she wanted it to. What had happened at #157. What had happened to her father. To Se-oh. And now, soon, to Su-ho.
“What’s the matter? Can’t find the water?” the old woman called out impatiently. Se-oh took her time filling a glass.
“Hang on,” the old woman said. “Take this to Mr. Kim.”
She turned off the gas burner and opened the pot lid. Steam filled the room. Se-oh couldn’t stop herself from gagging. The old woman clucked her tongue at Se-oh and filled a plastic container with hot broth.
“Stop making that face. This is health food. For my son. I always send some to Mr. Kim, too.”
The woman wrapped the container in a square of cloth and handed it to Se-oh.
As Se-oh was slipping her shoes back on, the old woman grabbed her ankle. Se-oh jumped. The old woman smirked and released her hand.
“You got nice, thick ankles. Bring me a daikon radish that looks just like them tomorrow. I’m going to slice it up and make a salad. I’ve been in the mood for radish lately.”
Her voice was soft, but the look on her face was hard. Though it could have been the fault of the darkness.
“You’ll suffer when you’re old.”
“Excuse me?” Se-oh asked.
Muttered under her breath, the old woman’s words sounded like she was casting a spell.
“When you get old, whatever you used in your youth is the first to go. Arms, legs, eyes—they all have an expiration date. When I was young, there was nowhere I didn’t go, and now look at my legs. I ran all over this city, selling my wares. . . . All the way to Hawolgok-dong, Uijeongbu, Mullae-dong, Cheolsan-dong, Sangwangsimni-dong, Myeonmok-dong . . . I’d put my basket on my head and take off for another place, put it down, hoist it back onto my head, and run off again.”
The old woman’s muttering went on and on. Se-oh understood bits and pieces of it. Luckily, it wasn’t a prophecy, foretelling Se-oh’s bleak future. The old woman was merely bemoaning her own bad luck.
But no matter how she tried to put it out of her mind, the old woman’s words sounded like they were meant for her. If you don’t mend your ways, your legs will fail, your arms will lock, you’ll drool each time you speak, food will spill down your shirt when you try to eat, you’ll mutter the same unintelligible thing over and over, and in the end you won’t remember who you are. . . . If what the old woman had said was true, then Se-oh’s heart would be the first to go. Because it had harbored malice, fostered hatred, and lived with sadness without a moment’s rest.
The old woman sat on the cold floor and talked and talked. Just to keep from being alone. Se-oh stared down at the woman, the smell from the plastic container filling her nose. She continued standing, silent and expressionless, until the old woman finally realized that Se-oh was simply waiting for her to stop talking.
22
Lying in the goshiwon bed, Se-oh pictured the moment when her father, having finished his preparations, must have sat on the couch and stroked the lighter. What went through his mind when he smelled the gas? Did he look around at the house to bid it farewell? Did he open the door to Se-oh’s room one last time before flicking the lighter? Did he take a final look at the framed photo on top of the credenza, the one of baby Se-oh and her young mother? She couldn’t stop picturing him then, after those moments had passed and it was time for him to sit back down on the sofa, staring around at the house in a daze, unable to make up his mind. It pained her that all she could do was try to imagine it, that she would never know for sure what really happened.
She had known, however vaguely, that something was weighing on her father. Every single day, someone had come to visit him, and her father had waited outside in the courtyard to keep that person from coming into the house, or had sent Se-oh away on errands to prevent her from running into him, though now and then the person’s voice had wormed its way through the closed front door anyway. And yet, Se-oh had never once asked her father what was wrong. She never even wondered who this person was who kept visiting. The voice t
hrough the door was sharp and angry, but she never bothered to think about who it might belong to. As if, the moment she started to care, she would lose the protection that she so needed from her father. Even when he sent her to go pick up the coat, she’d casually dismissed it as an unexpected birthday gift. She thought she was simply receiving something that was owed her.
It had taken Se-oh this long to understand why her father had sent her out on errands all the time. Back then, she’d assumed he was getting fed up with her never leaving the house. But now she realized those were probably the days when he had to suffer great humiliation at the hands of Su-ho. The days when he couldn’t pay what he owed, or when he had to push the due date back. Days when he had to grovel and beg.
She often tried to recall whether he’d hesitated before sending her out, and whether he’d tried to bring himself to say something. Even if he had acted differently than usual, she would have been too lazy to question it. She blamed herself. Why hadn’t she tried to make him feel better? Why was she so far away when her father was simultaneously wishing for death and hoping for rescue? Why did she never once ask her father anything? Why did she leave him on his own to suffer like that? Why did she allow him to see himself as incompetent and powerless and to become so convinced he was hurting his daughter’s future that he ended up mistaking the worst possible decision for the lesser of two evils?
She had been completely indifferent to her father when they were together. She was so busy seething about having spent several years of her precious twenties locked up in a tiny room, raging at the death trap Mi-yeon had dragged her into, and picturing in fear the resentment of those she’d dragged down with her, that she had no energy left to spare for her poor father.
Every time those thoughts haunted her, she grabbed the hammer. She wasn’t really aiming it at Su-ho. She was aiming it at herself for doing nothing but brooding over her own misfortune, for not paying any attention to anything around her because she was too busy wallowing in her own regret, and for ignoring her father’s loneliness and suffering. But she never brought the hammer down. She lacked the courage.
After leaving #101 with the smelly plastic container, the stench would not leave her hands. Even after handing it off to Wu-sul and washing her hands several times, then returning to the goshiwon and washing her hands several more times, the smell remained. The old lady had said she made that concoction for her son three or four times a month. The days she placed the pot on the burner, the smell would be especially foul. At last Se-oh had found a way to put her plan into action. The ever-present stench. It turned out there were days when it was even stronger. The smell would assist her.
If her goal was simply to inflict harm, then there were other ways to go about it. She could consider outsourcing. All she had to do was save up a lot of money. Then she could hire a talented and experienced hitman to arrange a car accident or toss him off a building. But the important thing wasn’t Su-ho’s death. What mattered was that Se-oh would be the one delivering the blow.
The intent to murder had no defense. Even if it did, it was still wiser to turn to the law than to pursue justice on your own. The law was a mechanism put in place to prevent people from doing so. Se-oh, too, could appeal to the law if she wanted to. Aiding and abetting suicide was enough to be taken in for questioning. If convicted, Su-ho would face anywhere from one to ten years in prison. But how was she to explain how he caused it to happen? There was no point in even trying. The law could not relieve her of the suffocating oppression she felt. It wouldn’t even so much as lend her an ear. It wasn’t the law’s job to do so.
The real problem was that Su-ho was technically innocent. Sure, he would have resorted to verbal abuse in the process of demanding payments. He would have called nonstop, dropped in unannounced, and disrupted her father’s daily routine. He would have overstepped his legal bounds. But there was no way to prove any of that.
The only people harmed by Se-oh’s father’s death were Se-oh and her father. Se-oh knew this. Su-ho’s death would not change any absurd laws, and it would not bring her father back. It would do nothing to lift the spirits of those like her father whose self-esteem had been damaged by debt.
And yet, by intending to see it through, by willingly fostering malice and contemplating and picturing murder, she was able to go on living even after losing everything. She would not have been able to get through the hours if she did not have a purpose. Everything had gone up in flames with #157. Including Se-oh. She was so convinced of it that she felt puzzled when other people looked at her or talked to her or tried to make her smile. Each time, instead of feeling the simple pleasure of being alive, she thought about how to put her plan into action. She obsessed over which method she would use, how she would make it possible, when she would do it, whether it was better to reveal her identity to Su-ho or keep him in the dark to the end, and what she would say to him if they were face to face.
The thought of Su-ho dying did nothing to alleviate Se-oh’s suffering. She knew the identity of the pain that gripped her insides. The truth was that it had nothing to do with Su-ho.
It was awful to sustain a life on thoughts of killing someone. Malice kept Se-oh alive, but it did not let her live. It fed her, but it also turned her stomach and made her throw up. It enabled her to bear the hours spent lying in the goshiwon, but it also gave her nightmares. It helped her to live among others, but each time she saw other people, she fantasized about death and felt guilty. She was skeptical. If all she could think about was murder, if that was what filled her head day in and day out, then what was to become of her in the future?
She decided that she would find herself another life later. Though, once it was all over, she would probably ask herself why she’d been so obsessed with this. She might even be so consumed by the question that she wouldn’t have any energy to spare to look for another life. In fact, when she thought about it, maybe a new life wasn’t something you were allowed to have anyway.
She could hear a television playing somewhere. On nights like this, she got no sleep at all. That background murmur was like someone whispering in her ear; her fear of it raised the hairs on the back of her neck. No matter how she tried to sleep, the muffled noise from the karaoke rooms downstairs never failed to wake her. The constant thumping bass sounded like someone rapping and rapping at a thin door.
Se-oh stared up at the bottom of the cupboard mounted above the bed, and tried to put everything that had happened to her father in order. At first her thoughts were just a jumble of sentences. She strung the related sentences together. As she did so, she invariably discovered holes, mistakes, and misunderstandings hidden among them. For example, lines like “Dad is hounded by debt collectors” and “The house isn’t enough for collateral” managed to connect with “Dad chooses suicide.” But “Dad chooses suicide” and “Se-oh is left alone” refused to connect no matter what. She had to figure out all of the missing lines between them. Some would never be found.
She got up, sat on the edge of the low, creaky bed, and took the items out of the cardboard box she’d brought with her from #157. She stood the porcelain figurine on the desk, slipped her feet into her father’s shoes, and put on the half-burned glasses. Then she clomped back and forth across the tiny room in the too-big shoes, the glasses distorting the size and texture of everything. The person in the next room banged on the wall to tell her to keep the noise down.
As she reached into the box for the bundle of letters wrapped in twine, a strange feeling came over Se-oh. Nothing was missing from the box. The problem was that everything was slightly different. She had always put the stack of letters back in with the knot facing down, but this time it was facing up.
She tried to chalk it up to her mood. She wasn’t the type to set trivial rules and then actually remember them and stick to them day after day. It was simply a fleeting sense of unfamiliarity, a feeling brought on by the fact that everything in the box now seemed to have been ruthlessly organized. Se-oh normally gra
bbed items spontaneously and put them back at random, but the items in the box had been placed there in a deliberate and orderly fashion. The idea that someone else might have touched the box left Se-oh feeling unsettled.
Of course, she might have only been feeling that way because of the notice posted in the goshiwon entrance. It stated that an occupant’s face lotion that they’d used just the night before was gone when they woke in the morning. In other words, someone had opened their door and stolen it while they were sleeping. The only people who would’ve been surprised by that were those who were brand-new to goshiwons. With time, goshiwon residents stopped being surprised when their toothpaste or slippers or toiletries got swiped.
Just to be sure, Se-oh opened the desk drawer and cabinet. Nothing else was amiss. There was no sign that anyone had rifled through the contents and taken anything. Not that there was anything worth taking.
She tried the doorknob anyway. It was locked. When she’d first moved in, she had frequently forgotten to lock the door. She kept thinking of it as just a room, not as a home. Every morning she would wake and open the door only to shock herself at the fact that she’d slept all night with it unlocked. She didn’t do that anymore. Enough time had passed for her to get it through her head that it was not a room, it was her home now. She had also, when she first moved in, done her best to walk as quietly as possible down the hallway so as not to disturb anyone. After getting hit a few times by doors opening suddenly, she’d acclimated to the goshiwon life enough to know that it was better to make noise.
Se-oh stared hard at the doorknob and did not move. As if there were someone standing on the other side.
23
As the express bus to J—passed through the tollgate, Ki-jeong stared out the window, her back stiff. Thinking about what had happened to her sister there revived the low thrum of horror she'd been feeling ever since that first call from the police.
The Law of Lines Page 14