She’d made her way to J—by retracing her sister’s steps, beginning with the phone records the police had given her. She had fixated on Se-oh’s phone number and ignored the other numbers. All because she’d accepted her sister’s suicide as so much a matter-of-course that she didn’t even question it.
The phone records were sparse. Especially for a month’s worth of calls. Other than spam and telemarketers, most of the days had passed without a single call. When a call was made, it lasted less than a minute. All of the calls with Ki-jeong had ended very quickly. There was one record of a call around 8:00 p.m. that had lasted just over a minute. That was the longest.
Ki-jeong had probably finished dinner and sat down to watch a TV show with her mother. She usually dealt with her after-work stress by staring at the TV or eating. When her sister called, she would have gotten up and slipped into the other room to answer it. Her mother would have glanced over but pretended not to notice. She would have known who was calling. What would they have talked about in under a minute? She couldn’t remember. First, the standard greetings: How’ve you been? Good, you? Next: How’s teaching? Okay, how’s college? All the usual questions.
Her sister would have done the talking while Ki-jeong listened. That was how it went. After saying hello, Ki-jeong would wonder what to say next and, coming up with nothing, she would sit in silence until her sister started talking about things like the people she’d met in her latest student group or how she’d begun studying for the TOEIC exam again. Looking back on it now, her sister’s stories were all the same. It was always something about some new endeavor that wasn’t going as she’d hoped, or about how much she depended on her fellow group members.
As for the other calls, she’d been able to guess what had happened by the time stamps. Ki-jeong never took her sister’s calls when she was with other people. It was too much trouble to explain about her sister. Each time, she would answer just long enough to say, “I’ll call you later,” and then hang up. Sometimes she did call later, but most of the time she didn’t. Their last phone call had probably been the same. The last words Ki-jeong probably heard from her were, “Sorry, Sis.” That was what she said every time to her busy older sister.
Other than spam, telemarketers, Se-oh, and Ki-jeong, there were only three phone numbers left. When she’d dialed the first one, a man answered. He sounded rushed. She told him her sister’s name, but he said he didn’t know her. Ki-jeong explained briefly why she was having to call him out of the blue to ask who he was. He didn’t seem too surprised.
“I’m a deliveryman.”
“May I ask where you normally make deliveries?”
“Sillim-dong.”
Sillim-dong was the neighborhood in Seoul where her sister had lived. Ki-jeong let out a breath. The more she found out about her sister, the less she seemed to know her. She grew more distant as things grew more certain.
“If I come to the office, would I be able to see the delivery slip or find out what was delivered that day?”
“You can if you want, but it won’t be worth the trip.”
“Excuse me?”
“It would’ve been a book. I make deliveries for an online bookstore.”
Three days before she’d died, her sister had bought a book and planned to read it. Did suicidal people order books? Of course, Ki-jeong knew that some deaths came on impulse. She knew, too, that her sister didn’t lack the tendency. She saw her sister’s life as one of drifting from one unforeseen crisis to another without anywhere to anchor her heart. That was why she had been so quick to assume her sister’s death was a suicide.
But it was still far-fetched to assume that someone who’d shown no signs of suddenly tying up loose ends, someone who’d bought a book presumably with the intention of reading it, would choose death by drowning, and in J—of all places, where they had basically no connections.
Ki-jeong had kept asking herself questions she couldn’t possibly answer. As these unanswerable questions continued to pile up, she found herself abruptly questioning her sister’s death, which she’d regarded as settled.
Why had she been so quick to conclude, upon seeing her sister’s corpse, that this was a long time coming? She hadn’t even requested an investigation, so certain was she that her sister had committed suicide. She never even considered the other possibilities. Which was not to say that she thought someone had pushed her sister into the river to her death. That thought was more frightening than imagining her sister had jumped on her own. But it could have been an accident. Maybe, rather than drowning herself because she couldn’t overcome her despair, she’d simply slipped. An unintended mishap.
A woman had answered at the second phone number. She sounded relaxed, sleepy. She did not recognize Ki-jeong’s sister’s name at first. When Ki-jeong briefly explained, she said she didn’t know her but then double-checked and said, Aha, #216. It was the owner of the goshiwon where her sister had stayed. The woman said she had probably called Ki-jeong’s sister to try to collect on late rent. And that that was the only reason she would ever call a tenant directly.
When Ki-jeong told the goshiwon’s building manager her sister’s name, he handed her a cardboard box that had been tucked to one side in the storeroom. He said he’d collected the items from her room while getting it ready for the next tenant. The box contained a few pieces of clothing and several test prep books for the civil service exam. It also held a can of soda, some toiletries, and a partnerless slipper. And one book, in pristine condition. A Philip Roth novel.
Had this stuff really belonged to her sister? The only thing that had her name on it were the test prep books. The rest of it could have belonged to someone else, and Ki-jeong would have been none the wiser.
The manager would not let her into #216. It was occupied. They couldn’t keep an unpaid room empty for long. Ki-jeong stood in front of the door to #216, where her sister had lived for several months. The doors were so closely spaced together that she couldn’t believe how small the rooms must be.
The dark, cramped room would have a chair with a wonky leg. The desk organizer would contain a bottle of Tylenol, and the blankets would be in the same constant state of disarray. Inside the cabinet would be extra-spicy instant noodles, the smallest size container of microwavable rice, and a can of hot pepper–flavored tuna. Perhaps her sister, too, had had only a single electric blanket to get her through cold nights in the goshiwon. It was easy for Ki-jeong to picture the inside of #216. She simply pictured the inside of #433, Se-oh’s room.
Ki-jeong felt guilty that she’d taken an interest in her sister only after her final moments had come and gone. She’d never really known her. And now here she was, imitating a detective just so she could quell her guilty conscience. She didn’t have to look any further than herself to find someone who’d neglected her sister. She despised herself for it. Maybe that’s what Ki-jeong’s sister had wanted her to feel and why she’d continued to send her to Se-oh’s cramped goshiwon or off in search of this Bu-wi person.
Her sister’s life had been colored by her mother and father’s lives, and the lives of all the people she’d known or loved. By ending that life, her sister had made a choice, or perhaps had refused to make any further choices. Which was why Ki-jeong needed to find these two people who shared a final connection with her sister.
Her only recourse was Se-oh. She had contacted the private investigation firm again. The person on the other end was cheerful, unlike Ki-jeong, who tripped over her own tongue and took forever to say why she was calling. When Ki-jeong had hesitated, worrying over legal issues and what would happen if she was found out, the person reassured her that entering a goshiwon was not even on the spectrum of criminal activities. They’d added that a single piece of wire was all she would need for that type of door. Ki-jeong had made up her mind as gravely as if she were agreeing to do a favor for someone else.
She broke into Se-oh’s room twice. It was like an oversized shoebox. A room that had been built purely for e
conomy, without any space for rest or secrets. A room that was little more than a bed in a partitioned hallway. Like all things manufactured for simple efficiency, the slightest glimpse inside released an astonishing reek of poverty. The windowless room felt mercilessly isolated. The noise from neighboring rooms came through loud and clear.
The trench coat. It was the first thing that caught her eye when she stepped into the darkened room. She couldn’t tell it was purple until she turned on the light. The more she looked at it, the more strangely touching it seemed. Not because it sagged there like a person hanging by their throat. But because the color and design were so completely out of place in that room.
Se-oh never fixed her bed but simply left the blankets in the same spot as when she rose in the morning. Her O’s were shaped more like teardrops than circles. Judging by the size of her pants, she weighed a lot more than Ki-jeong. The items in the box were all jumbled together, suggesting that she went through it frequently. And judging from the burn marks, Ki-jeong guessed that the items had been salvaged from Se-oh’s house.
Being in the room told Ki-jeong how unfair it was to question Se-oh about her sister’s death. Se-oh was just a girl in her mid-twenties who’d lost her home in a fire and was now living in a goshiwon. Considering how many of the sentences scribbled in her notebook were about missing her father, Ki-jeong figured that she’d lost her father in the same fire. And she inferred from the fact that Se-oh wrote a lot more about her father that she must have lost her mother or been separated from her a long time ago. It wasn’t that she didn’t miss her mother. She just missed her a little less.
As a child, Se-oh would never have imagined this future for herself. She would never have guessed that she would lose her parents early, and that the best years of her life would be spent in a room hardly bigger than a coffin.
That thought made Ki-jeong want to straighten out the rumpled bed sheets and make the bed up neatly, fold a thick piece of paper and stick it beneath the wonky chair leg to balance it, attach a deadbolt to the flimsy goshiwon door, and take the purple trench coat off of the dingy wall, place it in a clean garment bag, and hang it in a closet.
While she was in the room, she read the notebook in the cabinet and the letters in the box, selecting them at random. The letters were old and from a girl named Mi-yeon Cho. They were mostly filled with her trying to prove she was a good friend. It was common for kids that age to force friendship on others.
Some of the lines written in the notebook were hard to overlook. Completely indeterminate sentences, such as “Not yet.” Short, abrupt greetings, such as “Goodbye, Dad.” Commonplace resolutions, like “Absolutely no mistakes.” And harder words with no context to aid understanding, like “hose cock.”
The more she read, the clearer it was that the contents of the notebook concerned Se-oh and Se-oh only. They had nothing whatsoever to do with her sister. Given the lack of a clear subject, most of it was impossible to follow. Either there was too little information or too much, making it useless for her. But there was one thing that caught her interest. The ongoing list of someone’s whereabouts. Even at a glance, it looked like several months’ worth.
The entries included specific times:
8:43 Station, convenience store
Lunch, octopus soup restaurant
17:45 Gojan 138-2
19:07 Rail station, Yangpyeong blood sausage soup
20:46 Office
22:13 Station
22:58 Through the construction site
23:04 Arrival
At first she thought it was Se-oh’s schedule. Though it was a slightly strange way to organize a daily itinerary. But she soon realized it wasn’t. No one would ever organize their day that way. Se-oh had been tracking someone who’d arrived at the subway station near work around eight forty-five in the morning, worked in Gojan-dong in the afternoon, and returned to the office where they’d stayed until ten o’clock at night.
Who was this Se-oh person following, and why? Since Ki-jeong herself had been reduced to sneaking into someone else’s room, she understood that Se-oh did not necessarily have some criminal intent or particularly strange predilections.
The express bus arrived at the final stop. While the other passengers disembarked, Ki-jeong sat stock still. It all felt so distant, the things that had happened here, the facts that would soon be uncovered. The driver gestured for Ki-jeong to hurry up. Ki-jeong slowly took her first step into J—.
She caught a taxi outside the station. The wind didn’t feel as cold as it had in Seoul. Ki-jeong had come over three hundred kilometers, nearly from one end of the country to the other. She was on the other side now, as if the distance traveled were a measure of the time that had passed since viewing her sister’s corpse. Meanwhile, she had learned the names Se-oh Yun and Bu-wi. She had been to the goshiwon where her sister lived and snuck into Se-oh’s room. And yet her sister was still a mystery. The more she learned, the deeper and darker the hole went.
But now, maybe, she would be able to fill in that hole a little bit. The third person she’d called would tell her something. Maybe she would also learn more about Se-oh. Ki-jeong got out of the taxi and headed for that person.
24
Watching the tenement flats at night on the weekend was like listening to midnight radio. Lots of quiet sounds that did not rattle the nerves. Lights turning on in one window and off in another like songs changing.
She heard movement near the entrance. Se-oh hid behind a corner of the debris netting that surrounded the place like a brick wall. It was especially dark there, as the glow from the streetlights did not reach. The sky was even darker. The air was so cold that the moon looked frozen. The footsteps passing the building grew fainter.
There were three or four households that hadn’t moved out yet. Lights flickered like distress signals in several of the windows, and every now and then she could hear the sounds of a television playing or a child crying.
The lights were out in Su-ho’s apartment. If she stared hard, she could just make out the colorful glow of a television through the window. That meant Su-ho wasn’t home yet. The old woman never turned on the living room light until he was. His apartment looked like a black wall. Which might have been why Se-oh found herself thinking about the pyramid’s dormitory.
By day, all she could think of was escaping, and yet by night she had flocked back with everyone else. Being with others enabled her to return. Though once she was inside and surrounded by other people, she could barely stand it.
The window in the dorm room had always been closed. It wasn’t left that way on purpose but had simply rusted shut with age. When they scrubbed the room from top to bottom once a month, they could crack it open a tiny bit with great effort. One day, while everyone was rushing around, busy cleaning, one girl had stood in front of the window doing nothing. It was the girl Bu-wi had brought in. She’d been holding out for several months without any success.
As she stared out through the crack in the window, others had asked her as they passed by, “What’re you looking at?”
What they really meant was that she should get to work, but she didn’t understand and innocently said, “The sky.”
“You can see it?”
“Yes, the weather’s very clear today,” she’d responded cheerfully.
Bu-wi had stroked her hair lovingly, as if she were his little sister. Se-oh had watched her carefully, and after they were done cleaning, she’d gone to the window. The sky was not visible. A gray wall surrounding a construction site had blocked it from view.
The view was probably the same from Su-ho’s apartment. Their veranda window no doubt looked directly onto the high debris netting. By the time it was taken down, the building would have been long demolished with not a trace left behind.
Se-oh had worked out the details of her plan one step at a time, like adding bricks to a wall. It had taken her a while, but now she was nearing the end. Her plan would soon be put into action. But it seemed like
something unexpected might interfere at any moment. The thoroughness of her plan might unravel, or her resolution might weaken. It was impossible to know whether coincidence would interfere at the decisive moment. All she could do was try to anticipate what was coming and wait for it.
As she imagined her labor coming to fruition, she realized how callous she’d become. She felt no sadness, no guilt. She admitted this without sentiment. She felt no compassion for Su-ho or his aged mother, either. Nor for herself, clinging hopelessly to this plan of hers. If she felt any emotion connected to her plan, it was envy toward Su-ho for the world he was about to reach. The unfamiliar world called death.
A little after nine, she left the shadows of the darkened tenement flats. On the way to the station, she stopped at a phone booth and slowly dialed her old number. It rang for a long time. She imagined it ringing to no avail inside the ruins of #157. But, of course, that didn’t happen. There was nothing left of #157.
Next she dialed another number. She’d pictured herself dialing it so many times in her head that she had it memorized. Someone answered on the third ring. Their wheezy voice traveled through the receiver. Se-oh said nothing. The other person breathed deliberately, like an animal sizing up its adversary, and then suddenly shouted.
“Who the hell are you? Why are you doing this to us?”
The old woman sounded terrified. She was breathing hard, her voice sharper and shriller than necessary. Se-oh didn’t respond.
“Why are you doing this to my son?” the woman yelled again.
Some animals raise their quills when they’re scared. Some change color. Some spit venom. The old woman screeched. She was still breathing hard. Se-oh couldn’t make out any other sounds. If Su-ho had been home, he probably would have grabbed the phone from his mother and yelled for her.
“Please stop.”
This time the old woman begged. Se-oh could practically feel her breaths through the phone. She did not hang up.
The Law of Lines Page 15