It had been so hard for her to leave, even though she’d known she wasn’t getting anywhere with it. She thought if she could at least scrape by, then that would mean she wasn’t failing. Thinking back on it now, even what she’d considered success had been pathetic. It was like a thin, iridescent film barely maintained by surface tension. As flimsy as it was, she’d fought so hard to hold onto it.
If Mi-yeon was the reason she’d joined, Bu-wi was the reason she left. Typical dependent, cowardly Se-oh. Right around the time that Bu-wi had been in the business for eight months, and Se-oh for a year and five months, Bu-wi slipped out of the room during a progress meeting. Se-oh followed stealthily. Bu-wi crossed the street during a break in the traffic. Se-oh hurried her steps. Any second now he’d be gone. She worried he would be put off by the convenience store cashier’s inhospitality. And feared that he would be wounded by the police officer’s indifference, would give in to his emotional injuries, would eagerly choose a path of self-torment.
She couldn’t help feeling heartbroken, too, that Bu-wi seemed poised to leave without saying a word, just like Mi-yeon. She figured his cheerfulness, his laid-back attitude, his displays of enthusiasm, had all been an act to keep her reassured. Or maybe she was being too negative. She’d been through so much hardship already.
What she’d felt that day wasn’t betrayal. It was pity. Bu-wi was someone she could depend on completely, but he’d only just turned twenty-two. He was barely a man, the last traces of boyhood having just left him. Se-oh imagined what would become of someone like him, who projected nothing but strength and resilience, once they were subjected to acute anguish. She feared Bu-wi would become exactly what she pictured.
She wanted to stop him. Just to hold on to the person who’d become her pillar. She did not want to stop him. Everyone else in that place was already half-dead. As was Se-oh. She didn’t want to turn Bu-wi into the same. Both things were true. And that contradiction would make her stop him, despite feeling racked with guilt.
As Se-oh waited across the street, shuffling back and forth among pain and pity and anxiety, Bu-wi entered the convenience store. He did not hide. He looked around at the items for sale. He picked something up and put it down. He did not plead with the cashier for help or stare out the window looking hunted. After a moment, he stood at the counter in front of the window, where customers could snack on their purchases, and rested his chin in his hand. Then he began eating something. It looked like it could be a triangle kimbap. Or a small chocolate bun.
Four minutes passed. Se-oh decided to go back inside the training center. She did not want Bu-wi to know that she was secretly watching him. As she turned, she met the eyes of the team leader, who had been secretly watching her. She wasn’t surprised to see her. The team leader didn’t look surprised at being caught. They were all tangled up together. Just as Se-oh kept an eye on Bu-wi, the team leader kept an eye on Se-oh. If Mi-yeon hadn’t left, it might have been her watching Se-oh instead. There’d been a time when the thought of being so tightly linked to other people had made it easier for Se-oh to bear living in such a cold, dark, lonely place. But she realized in that moment that she wouldn’t be able to bear it much longer.
Later still, another thought would occur to her. The pyramid was little more than a pawnshop. With herself as collateral, she’d sold off every personal relationship she could. The more she worked, the more certain failure became. Whenever she told people the line of work she was in, they got angry at her, ordered her to stay away from them, and warned her to never call again. From the way they reacted, she may as well have been carrying an infectious disease.
No one in the pyramid was independent. They were all connected, above and below, in every direction. The more interconnected they were, the more they were praised for their independence. The people connected to you were your seed capital. Fickle seed capital that could blow away at any moment. Se-oh didn’t hesitate to take advantage of whoever she had to, either. At the time, she didn’t have the leisure to even question it. The only regret was having no one left to use.
Naturally, pawnshops did not return items in hock free of charge. A price had to be paid. And the price was always much higher than what you had received for the item. It was the same in the pyramid. Though she did not know it at the time, being promoted to ranks named after jewels, like diamond and sapphire, was not payment.
Bu-wi returned to the training center a short while later, breathing hard and smelling of something sweet and spicy. His parted lips looked full and dewy. His flushed cheeks gave off a boyish playfulness. Se-oh had known Bu-wi a long time. Despite what he thought, she’d never been in love with him. But in that moment, she truly adored him.
The people Se-oh had met in that business were the type who would never help others, not even a blind man they’d bumped into on the street. She doubted that Bu-wi would offer anyone help, either. Not that Se-oh had a preference for the kind and compassionate type. If anything, Bu-wi seemed more likely to tell a blind man to step aside and stop blocking his path.
People accustomed to acting as a group and living closely with others will suppress their true selves in order to comply with group decisions, but Bu-wi wasn’t like that. He would have grown tired of the monotonous, flavorless meals and longed for something sweet. He would not have felt guilty about ditching everyone to eat alone; in fact, he would never have considered it a selfish act in the first place. He had probably gone by himself simply because he didn’t have enough money to pay for anyone else’s snacks.
Bu-wi had the innocence of someone who’d never been unfairly taken advantage of. Se-oh lacked that naivety. Which was good. Se-oh hated Mi-yeon, but Bu-wi would probably never think that he’d wasted his life because of Se-oh.
Bu-wi had turned to Se-oh, who was standing in the doorway and staring at him, and asked, “Were you waiting for me?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Waiting to go to the bathroom.”
Bu-wi glanced over at the bathroom door. The women’s bathroom had only one stall and was always busy.
“Yeah, you look like you have to pee. Your face is turning yellow.”
Se-oh smirked and then laughed out loud.
“I know a thing or two about making you laugh, don’t I?” Bu-wi crowed, mistakenly thinking that Se-oh had been laughing at his joke.
But he was wrong. She hadn’t been laughing at his joke. She would have laughed no matter what he’d said. He wasn’t very tuned in to other people’s moods and often missed social cues, but he would find out soon enough that he could make Se-oh laugh without any effort at all. Not that she was planning to tell him that. She liked having a secret.
Sharing was the rule there. Recruiting was done openly, reasons for success were explained, reasons for failure were analyzed in detail, case studies were examined, and strategies were plotted together. In the process, Se-oh forgot that they were all individuals with their own ideas and their own preferences. In fact, she was even forgetting to think about herself. Because they all shared one thought and moved with one purpose and will.
Bu-wi never complained about it, but he didn’t exactly put up with it either. If he was hungry, he had no qualms about eating alone. He solicited glares by pointing out things he thought didn’t make sense. He said there were better solutions to housing and feeding everyone and gave unwelcome suggestions, much to the irritation of everyone else, who’d put up with the hardships without complaining.
Se-oh kept a close eye on Bu-wi. She was so used to thinking of everyone as interconnected that she couldn’t conceive of herself as an independent individual, but Bu-wi always put himself first. He knew what he liked, did what he wanted, and was intent on leading his life as he pleased.
Bu-wi had not asked her to go with him. He’d left first, and Se-oh had followed. I’ll help you leave. He’d said those words to her once but had since forgotten.
Later, Bu-wi slipped out of the training center again
. By then, he’d been doing it so often that Se-oh barely even looked up. Nor did the team leader, who kept an eye on Se-oh, or Ha-jeong, who secretly kept an eye on Bu-wi behind the team leader’s back. Nevertheless, Se-oh went out to the stairwell to glance out the window and verify where he’d gone. Then she put on a friendly face, went back inside, and resumed spewing empty words to win the trust of the new recruits who’d arrived the day before to receive training.
After a while she saw Ha-jeong check the time. Se-oh spoke louder, laughed harder, and eyed Ha-jeong for her assistance. Ha-jeong hesitated a moment before bolting upright, her face stiff. Se-oh grabbed her arm. She could still remember the way it felt. Bone-thin and scaly with dried skin. “I’ll go get him,” Se-oh said. Ha-jeong nodded anxiously. She wouldn’t have wanted Bu-wi to know that she’d been watching him.
Se-oh crossed the street. She didn’t bother checking the convenience store. Bu-wi wouldn’t be there. She knew. She’d seen him catching a taxi in front of the store. Right before the cab door closed, he’d glanced back at their building. Se-oh thought he’d spotted her in the window. She’d waited. For him to wave at her to join him. For him to smile and mouth the words, Come on, let’s go. But Bu-wi did not. He’d left by himself. Without saying a word, just as Mi-yeon had done.
An empty cab pulled up. Before the door closed, she glanced back at the building, just as Bu-wi had done. This time she made eye contact with no one. Se-oh went straight home.
After returning home, she kept getting angry. While she had been trapped there—sleeping with too many strangers in a too-small room, eating food with zero nutritional value, washing dirty dishes in the bathroom because the kitchen was too tiny, washing her face over a utility sink, calling friends and people she barely knew to try to convince them to join her downline, falling deeper into debt; and failing over and over and over—all that time, the world had remained completely unchanged. The TV stations beamed out the same nonsense and drivel day after day. Students went to school and took their tests on schedule. Even her father, amid all his worry over his daughter, still slept in a warm home and landed a job as a shop assistant and went to work every day and earned a paycheck and chipped away at his interest payments. Just the thought of it all made Se-oh lose it.
When her anger finally subsided, it was replaced by worry. As if worry had been hiding right around the corner, waiting for that very moment. Only one thing worried her. She was afraid Bu-wi would wake up and realize that Se-oh was the reason for the time he’d lost. Sometimes she even found herself thinking she should go back to the pyramid and try harder, really make a go of it this time. That thought occurred to her every time she started thinking of herself as completely useless. Too scared to crawl back alone, she went searching for Bu-wi again.
Bu-wi had changed his home phone number, and there was no point in calling his cell since the team leader had confiscated everyone’s. She worked up the courage to drop by the training center. It turned into quite the ordeal, but she was able to confirm that Bu-wi had not gone back. She went to his old church, but they told her he’d stopped coming a long time ago. Then she started loitering around his old college, hoping to run into him by pure chance. But wandering randomly around campus didn’t help her to find out anything new. After targeting a few specific locations and lying through her teeth to multiple people, she learned the truth: Bu-wi had never really been a student there.
It made her feel better. Bu-wi wasn’t hiding from her. She simply didn’t know where to look. Which meant that she might still bump into him one day. When you’re hoping for a coincidence, luck pretends not to see you, but when you don’t want one, it extends a helping hand.
Just as she hoped she might bump into Bu-wi one day, she figured there was also a chance she could bump into Mi-yeon. Entirely by coincidence, of course. For all she knew, Mi-yeon might be out there searching for her, just as she was searching for Bu-wi. And if she was, Mi-yeon would find out that she had driven herself into a corner. She would know then that she’d been cut off from Se-oh completely. Just as Se-oh had learned the same through Bu-wi.
She didn’t breathe a word of any of this to Ki-jeong. The only thing she could bring herself to comment on was Ha-jeong’s skinny arms. Nevertheless, she found herself starting to talk. She told Ki-jeong that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Ha-jeong; that she’d figured she would never see Ha-jeong again; that Ha-jeong didn’t have a knack for the business; that at first she’d seemed incompetent, but later it seemed she was simply bad at lying and had no interest in the work in the first place; that she looked like she was doing it against her will; that she seemed to feel guilty about having to lure her reluctant friends out with lies and beg and plead with them to join her; that she seemed like the quiet type and so they’d never opened up to each other, but Ha-jeong seemed genuine; that she was kind and friendly and popular with the others in the dorm; that she was optimistic and witty and made others laugh; that she was thoughtful enough to buy medicine for others when they weren’t feeling well. . . .
As Ki-jeong listened, her head suddenly fell. She sobbed quietly. Se-oh wasn’t sure why she was crying. Did she feel bad for what her sister had gone through? Was she sorry she hadn’t taken better care of her while they were together? Or maybe she just missed her. It had been the same for Se-oh whenever she thought about her father. At first, she’d felt guilty for not having been there for him, but now she simply missed him.
Se-oh placed her hand on top of Ki-jeong’s without thinking about it. It’d been so long since she’d initiated such a gesture that she felt awkward. She could feel every single quiver of Ki-jeong’s hand. Ki-jeong began to weep loudly, like a child. After a moment, the person in the next room started banging on the wall. The sound startled Ki-jeong, and she stopped.
“I’m sorry. I’m causing trouble for you,” Ki-jeong said, as she took a deep breath to calm herself. “I can’t be sure, but I thought maybe Ha-jeong was trying to get hold of you to tell you something.” She gave Se-oh a kind look. “Something about Bu-wi.”
Se-oh faced her directly, hoping Ki-jeong would break the news to her slowly, to delay the moment when she would hear what had happened to Bu-wi.
Se-oh often despaired over the time she’d wasted. But all she could do was comfort herself with the thought that at least she’d left when she did. It was behind her now. She’d already forgotten so much of it. The people she’d met, the things she’d said, the places she’d stayed. It was easy. She willed herself to forget by pretending not to recognize people she knew and by lying whenever someone asked what she’d been doing with herself. What she didn’t know was that memory could not be fabricated, sealed, or transformed that way.
While talking to Ki-jeong, she allowed herself to recall for the first time, calmly, the history she’d tried to conceal, the many types of failures, the names of those who’d suffered with her. It seemed Bu-wi remembered all of it. Or to put it more precisely, he hadn’t tried to forget. Anyway, that was the impression she got from what Ki-jeong told her.
According to Bu-wi, the last time he’d seen Ha-jeong was when they happened to bump into each other at his new college. She was there to meet someone. He was sitting with friends in a small park behind the medical school when he saw Ha-jeong walking toward them.
Ki-jeong paused there. Bu-wi had said they met by chance, but it struck her in that moment that her sister had probably been looking for him. After quitting school, she’d kept going from place to place, and it hadn’t seemed like she was simply traveling.
The thought didn’t last long. Se-oh was staring at her like she was waiting to hear what was next. Ki-jeong decided to jump straight to explaining Bu-wi’s personal circumstances. That seemed to be what Se-oh really wanted to hear anyway.
When Se-oh had met Bu-wi to recruit him, Bu-wi was homeless. He would have gladly agreed to any job offer, even if it had been a crab boat instead of a multi-level marketing scheme. As long as it came with room and board.
His troubles had begun during the summer vacation of his third year in high school. His father had expanded his business a couple of years earlier and overextended himself. The ensuing financial trouble was like a runaway train. Bu-wi knew there was no money for him to go to college, but he took the entrance exam anyway, and despaired to learn that he’d been accepted into the top medical school of his choice. If only his father’s business had crumbled a year later, he’d thought pointlessly. He would have been in college already by then, and they could have figured something out. Or better still if he’d been ruined a year earlier. That would have bought them time to save up money for his tuition.
While he was working with Se-oh, word got out among the pyramid members that Bu-wi was a premed student at a prestigious private university in Seoul. Bu-wi hadn’t told anyone. That was the doing of one of his high school friends, who’d stayed one night as a potential recruit and took off the next day. All of his high school friends had thought he was in college, and Bu-wi hadn’t bothered to set them straight. It wasn’t that he lied. He simply kept silent about what had happened to him and his family, and all of the things that had changed as a result.
The work did not go well. One by one, he called up everyone he knew. He trusted them, talked to them, and kept switching up his strategies, but it made no difference. He wanted to earn an astronomical amount of money that was possible in theory. A short-term part-time job wouldn’t be enough to cover the tuition at that school and living expenses. He figured the others had failed because they’d resorted to lying and saying outlandish things in order to recruit new members. He thought if he just explained himself well enough and didn’t force a choice on people, then he would do fine.
He did earn some money. Enough to buy a triangle kimbap. But it was absurd of him to think he could make enough to go to school and help his parents out. Every day he spent at the convenience store trying to satisfy his hunger, he realized this.
The Law of Lines Page 17