by Ae-ran Kim
“Yes?”
“Will all of this be on the show?”
Seungchan laughed. He must hear this question a hundred times. “No, not everything. That’s why we’re interviewing you now, so we can pick the best parts.”
“Can you not use the part about ripping the poem out of a library book?”
“Sure. But when we film we may ask you to repeat what you said today. Does that sound good?”
“I’ll try.”
Narae looked at her list of questions and continued. “I understand you went to school for a time.”
“Yes.”
“Do you wish you could go to school?”
“Of course. I keep thinking they must be learning something important that I don’t know about. Even right now.”
“Not necessarily,” Narae murmured.
“No?”
“You’re not missing much.”
She must not have enjoyed her time at school. “I knew it,” I said, deciding to agree with her.
She looked at her notebook again. “What kind of thoughts did you have during your long years of treatment?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you have a particular feeling, one that came to you the most? Did you have any specific thoughts?”
I glanced at Mom. “Well…”
She looked nervous.
“I had the feeling that I was alone,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Not like my parents left me by myself and I felt lonely,” I clarified. “It’s just that when I’m sick I feel completely alone.”
“What else has been hard for you?”
I hesitated. “It’s hard not to have any friends my age.”
Mom bit her lip.
“What else?”
I smiled. “Does there need to be more than that?”
“Oh, no, no. Not at all. Let me ask you something else. What does it feel like to grow old?”
Mom and I stared at each other. Seungchan looked startled. Narae’s attempt to ask about my symptoms and how I accepted them had come out wrong.
“Well, what does it feel like to be young?” I asked.
“What?” Narae was taken aback.
“I’m asking because I’m genuinely curious. I don’t remember what it was like to be young.”
“Oh.” She wiped the sweat off her nose. “Um, I guess I don’t really know.”
I shrugged. “I don’t really know what it’s like to be old, either.”
Narae was silent, her face red.
“But I can tell you this. I heard two girls talking at the hospital. Maybe they were around twenty-one or twenty-two? Anyway, one of them confessed something to her friend in a low voice. She probably didn’t realize a small whisper can be heard more clearly sometimes.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she was in love with her professor.”
“Her professor?”
“I couldn’t tell what her major was or whether he was married, but I understood that he was twice as old as her. Maybe even three times as old.”
The three adults glanced at one another, maybe worried about what I might say next.
“They weren’t seeing each other,” I clarified. “She just respected him and had this long-standing crush on him. She was telling her friend how she touched him once.”
The mood in the living room turned unbearably awkward. Mom looked puzzled.
“And?” Narae asked cautiously.
“She told her friend how surprised she was.”
Everyone was silent, waiting for me to continue.
“She was drunk and reached out to touch his cheek. She said she was shocked when she felt his face.”
“Why?”
“Because it was so flabby.”
“Ah…” Seungchan murmured.
“I guess it felt different from what she had been imagining. I still think about how she described it, like she was burned by his age. And she instantly fell out of love.”
An undefined quiet settled over us.
“But I don’t really understand,” I said, addressing Narae.
“Which?”
“It goes without saying that someone who’s older wouldn’t have firm skin.”
“Right.”
“It’s all so natural. Going gray, losing teeth, eyesight dimming, getting wrinkly.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“But she was so in love with him. If she was going to turn away so firmly, as if she was going to get contaminated by his oldness, with just that one touch … what did she think being old is?”
Nobody spoke.
“I can’t figure it out,” I continued. “And it makes me really sad sometimes when I think about it.”
Narae tried to sound upbeat. “Well, you’re only sixteen.”
“That’s true. I’m the youngest here.”
“Yes, you are.”
“But I’ve probably lived the longest.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I’m really sick, the days feel so long. One minute feels like one hour. Sometimes it feels like an eternity. I’ve lived that so many times. So when you think about subjective time, I’ve certainly lived longer than you or Mr. Chae.” I laughed a little, feeling awkward.
Nobody joined me. A moment later, Seungchan asked cautiously, “Have you ever blamed God for this?”
“Oh, we don’t go to church.”
“Well, then someone like God?”
“Um, sometimes I think that he forgot about me.”
Everyone was quiet.
“Because he’s so busy.”
There was another long silence.
“But sometimes I think about all the benefits we have because we’re not God. If there are things only God can do, then on the other hand there must be things that only we can do. Even if we can’t ever outdo God, maybe we share something, among us humans, that even God would be envious about.”
“What made you think that?” Narae asked carefully.
I just smiled, thinking about my mom and my dad. My young, immature, adorable parents, who would look like me in several decades. We continued talking for another hour. Narae asked me and my mom more questions, then finally closed her notebook. “Areum, tell me something you’ve always wanted to do.”
I paused before answering. “To go where my parents met for the first time.”
“Yeah? Where is that?”
“It’s gone now. It’s underwater.”
Mom and Seungchan nodded in unison.
After the interview, Seungchan and Narae looked happier. We exchanged warm goodbyes outside our house, but Seungchan’s SUV was surrounded by other parked cars and was now stuck. We lived off a small lane crowded with multifamily housing, without many parking spots. Our street was so narrow that drivers ended up in arguments, even in the middle of the night. Seungchan’s gentle expression suddenly stiffened. We didn’t know who had parked him in, and he was late to his next appointment. Flustered, Mom apologized as though this was all her fault. Seungchan kept telling her it was okay. Mom turned to me and told me to go on inside. I bowed to our guests and headed in to read a novel, sitting against the wall in my room.
“License plate 2744! Please move your car!” Seungchan hollered from outside.
“License plate 3578! You’re blocking us in!” Narae shouted.
Eventually, I heard loud honking. Having grown impatient, Seungchan was leaning on his horn. A few neighbors opened their windows to yell at him, but Seungchan kept it up. None of this was special; these things happened all the time, all over the place. Mom took it upon herself to try to find the car owners and rushed over to the next street. As they waited, Seungchan and Narae took a cigarette break right under the eaves of our house. I could smell their cigarettes from my room. I didn’t pay them any attention until I heard the following.
“Mr. Chae?” Narae said.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think he … well, do you think he feels lust?”
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I detected surprise in Seungchan’s pause. “What makes you think that?” he asked.
“I know he’s sick, but he’s sixteen. So … I was just wondering.”
“His mom says he didn’t go through puberty, so maybe he doesn’t have a sex drive.”
Seungchan rubbed his cigarette out on the ground. Through the bars on my window I caught flashes of his red Converse sneakers. “It wouldn’t be that weird for him to be different from most kids his age, right?”
“But Mr. Chae,” Narae said.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“What is it?”
“I shouldn’t say this. I know I’ll go to hell for saying something like this…”
Seungchan was quiet, waiting.
“The way he speaks…”
“Yeah?”
Narae sounded excited. “This episode, it’s totally going to blow up.”
About twenty minutes later, the car owners appeared and the situation was resolved.
11
Ten years ago, when I was six and my dad was twenty-three, we left the hospital after a visit, hand in hand. My parents took turns bringing me to appointments, but around that time my dad was doing something behind my mom’s back. We’d hit an arcade before going home.
Looking back on it now, it didn’t seem like he really enjoyed playing those games. He was ill at ease in that dark, dirty arcade teeming with students. But we’d stop by after every hospital visit, as if it were a form of tax payment, and he would perch on an uncomfortable stool, playing Galaga or Street Fighter for an hour. He’d shoot down aliens, charge up, jump, duck, and flip in the air. Whenever he did a flying kick or punched, the game made crashing noises or trills. When he was nervous his leg would jiggle restlessly and he would cry out, “Yes!” and “Oof!” and “Aw, man!”
Initially, I would play Bubble Bubble or Tetris, but I quickly realized I wasn’t very good. So I’d end up sitting next to my dad, bored out of my skull, fetching him more coins when he ran out. Sometimes I would venture into the karaoke room and sing along to hits, but that also was boring after a while. Tugging on his sleeve, I would complain that I wanted to go home. He would drag his feet, saying he wanted to finish one more round. He would shove money in my pocket to shut me up. I would stare up at his face, flashing lights reflected on it, as he hunched over, his fingers whizzing. His eyes would remain dull. Sometimes we wouldn’t get home until quite late, but since hospitals made you wait around all the time, my mom didn’t seem to suspect anything. This continued for about a year.
There was another time in my life when my dad was right beside me but felt distant—when my mom left us. She was gone for just a week, but the act of her leaving formed a gaping wound in our family. After she came home, we pretended it never happened. None of us talked about that time or asked questions or offered explanations or reminisced. Maybe they thought I didn’t remember it, since I was so young.
My mom was the one who finally brought it up a few months ago, when I was hospitalized. That day, everything felt different. My heart rate monitor was going crazy, and my parents spent all night awake, watching over me. I wanted to say something to them, anything, since that could have been the end, but I couldn’t say anything with the oxygen mask over my face. I had thought so frequently about the moment of my death, but now that it was in front of me it felt more real and more physical than what I’d imagined. I was focused solely on the function of my organs and couldn’t gather my thoughts. Pain gnawed away at me. Watching me breathe raggedly, Mom burst into tears. She said she was wrong for leaving us that time. “I’m sorry, Areum. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m so, so sorry.”
I blinked my lashless eyes slowly, my breath fogging my mask. “Mom…” I whispered the words that had been taking shape in my heart for a long time. It wasn’t to make her feel better, or to make myself feel better. I just wanted her to know what I believed.
“What? What did you say?” Mom leaned in. My dad put his hands on her shoulders.
I tried to speak more clearly. What I was trying to say was this: “Sometimes, when you love someone so much that it hurts, you have to run away. I know how true your love is because you tried to run away from me.”
Mom placed her ear to my lips, her eyes swollen from crying, but I couldn’t say it again. Instead, I held her hand, and fell into a deep sleep. The next day, shockingly, I was still alive.
* * *
So ten years ago that spring, as my dad and I walked out of the hospital, he shoved all seven pages of the receipts in his pocket and looked up at the clear sky. His face was unshaven and brittle, his skin flaking under the chin. “Shall we?”
“Yes.”
He walked slowly to match my gait. I walked along glumly, figuring we were heading to the arcade. My dad was a little different around that time. Once, I was reading a book about a magician and asked, “Dad, is what you see everything there is?,” and he had uncharacteristically said, “No, sometimes you can’t believe what you do see.”
That day, something unexpected stopped my dad in his tracks. Far away, a bunch of kids would appear and disappear on the horizon before appearing again, like air-popped rice. We stood there, blinking, before going down the hill to take a look. Colorful play equipment was spread out on the grass, including an inflatable bouncy slide, plastic horses that went up and down, and a dartboard. The hospital must have set these out for the month of May, the month for families. The most popular attraction was a big, round trampoline. We watched as the kids bounced up to the sky and fell back down, laughing. A few of the kids were wearing hospital gowns. I wanted to do that, too.
“Areum, want to go on the trampoline with me?” Dad asked.
I thought about it for approximately three seconds before nodding fervently.
And jump—
And jump again—
I remember that sensation even now. That spring day I bounced—boing—then my dad—boing—then me again—boing—and then my dad—boing. That was the brightest moment of our lives: the cool, refreshing breeze, our pounding hearts, the bouncy give underfoot. We laughed as we fell and we tumbled as we giggled. The other children surrounded the trampoline and stared up at us, their mouths hanging open. I didn’t care. We laughed and laughed, our faces turning red. We hadn’t done that in a long time. That was the first day in a year that we didn’t stop by the arcade on our way home.
People sometimes dream the same thing over and over again. Usually the dream is about something unpleasant, but the recurring dream I have is about that day. Me, still young, tumbling with my dad, dancing and singing. My dream has changed little by little over time, offering different variations. Sometimes I jump up—boing—and come back down as my dad. Or my dad flies up—boing—and returns to earth as me. Sometimes I grow younger each time I jump, going from eighty to sixty to sixteen, returning to my own age. I see my face as I have never seen it before, but it’s so hazy I can’t see it clearly. I want to touch it, to know it’s really mine, but my face falls away into the distance. Still, I know that I’ve grown young—and then I wake up.
12
The day before filming was to begin, the whole family lay in the living room with moisturizing sheet masks on. It had been my idea; I was worried that they would be nervous for the next day. The sheet fit Dad’s face perfectly, was a little big on Mom, and was huge on me. He spread the mask flat on his face, looking into a mirror.
“Is this a bad idea?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood. “Shouldn’t we look a little worn out?”
“I told that writer I would clean the house and she said we should leave it,” Mom said. “She says it’s better that way. She must not understand how embarrassing it is for me.”
“Oh, that reminds me of Anne Frank’s diary!” I cut in. “Her mom is frantically cleaning the house right before the Gestapo bursts in. I guess she wanted the Germans to think, ‘The mistress of this house kept a neat house,’ even as they ransacked the place.”
“My god,” Mom said.
“I don’t think we need to look sad and poor,” said Dad, changing the subject. “If all things are equal you’re drawn to good-looking people. I saw this experiment on TV. All the animals go over to the pretty girls.”
What was this nonsense? I wondered, but mumbled, downcast, “But I’m not handsome.”
Dad grinned. “That’s okay. I’m very handsome.”
* * *
They filmed in three separate locations: our house, the hospital, and the playground. First up was at home. Hope for Our Neighbors wasn’t a huge ratings hit, but embodied a strong civic purpose that was more important than simply being entertaining. In other words, they didn’t have to make much of an effort. But Seungchan poured a lot of work into our episode, maybe because of his friendship with my mom or due to his producer’s instinct. My parents stood behind the camera, watching anxiously, as Seungchan fussed with the camera angle and Narae coached me on what I should keep in mind.
“Let’s do it here,” Seungchan said, indicating the corner of my room, even though the director kept grumbling about how tight the shot was. That spot drew in the nicest light, with a square patch of sunlight moving and changing shape depending on the time of day. “Are you ready, Areum?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Okay. Do you want to take your sunglasses off?”
I saw my parents hovering in the doorway. “It’s hard for me to keep my eyes open because the lights are so bright.”
“Oh, it’s always like that. You’ll get used to it. You’ll seem more approachable if people can see your eyes.”
I nodded and took my sunglasses off. I put them on my desk, then straightened up and looked into the camera.
Seungchan flinched at the sight of my bare face, but recovered like a pro. “Can you take your hat off, too?”
“Um…”
Dad cut in. “Can he just keep that on?”