by Yun Ko-Eun
‘What kind of trouble did you cause?’
‘Nothing big—just hitting, pushing, fighting with my younger siblings. That kind of thing. My mother would always say, “I’m going to hang you two upside down from that tree.” Whenever she said that, the fight stopped.’
‘Are there still kids afraid of being hung from this tree?’
‘It’s a little different now. No one talks about ghosts here any more. Now they say you’ll face your fears. According to the new legend, when you stand in front of the tree in the middle of the night, the thing you fear most appears.’
Yona and Luck walked in a circle around the tree. Even if the two of them stretched out their arms as wide as they could, they wouldn’t reach around the thick trunk.
‘What about you—what did you see?’
‘When I was younger, I saw my mum. It was really strange, because my mum was alive, so she wasn’t a ghost. But I saw her whenever I stood in front of the tree. It makes sense if you believe in today’s legend, because the person I feared most at the time was my mum. Then, after my dad died, I started seeing him instead. If you think of my dad as a ghost, it makes sense that I saw him, but the truth is, that isn’t why he appeared. I started to fear him after his death.’
‘You must have thought of your dad a lot after he died.’
‘Yeah. Even though I couldn’t see him, it always felt like he was looking down at me, which I found a little scary.’
‘Can you still see your dad?’
Luck looked at the tree. A flock of birds flew overhead, causing the tree’s leaves to shake noisily. Yona stepped in front of Luck.
‘Shall we go now?’ she asked. ‘It’s pretty dark.’
When Luck walked ahead of Yona on the way back, she stepped in front of him.
‘I’m a little scared. Can I walk in front? I get nervous when no one is behind me.’
Luck slowed his steps. With Luck trailing her like a shadow, Yona asked, ‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-three.’
The answer came from behind her back.
‘How old do you think I am?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Well, then, how old are you?’
‘Thirty-three …’
Yona felt like she really was twenty-three again. As if the last ten years of her life had been erased. Night overtook the sun’s remaining energy, and the black silhouette of the palm tree in front of them looked like an animal, its long, flexible body shaking, its hair spiky and skin gleaming. They kept walking.
•
Yona’s Mui programme was the most exciting itinerary she’d come up with during her ten years at Jungle. It was extraordinary: she’d even included a one-night camping trip in the desert, where travellers stood below strangler fig trees and looked through telescopes at the sinkholes. Maybe the combination of disasters past and present made the trip so thrilling. This programme did have one weak point: it didn’t fit into any of Jungle’s disaster categories. People might call the sinkholes a natural disaster, but they weren’t really natural; maybe others would say the collapse was due to human error, but it wasn’t an error, either. Yona knew that the trip’s success depended on the intentional fabrication of all of it never being discovered.
Only three people knew the entirety of the plan. The manager, the writer and Yona. But if you counted the people digging the holes—the ones who could speak both directly and indirectly about preparations for the forthcoming incident—there were more like several hundred. Even so, the manager was confident that as long as the writer and Yona kept their mouths shut, no one would find out about the future disaster, because the other people involved were only partially complicit. There was a specialised system in place: the people digging holes didn’t know what the holes would be used for, and the people putting bodies in the crematorium freezers only knew that they had to put bodies in freezers. The truck drivers only knew their daily destination and arrival time. Those who would play survivors memorised their lines for future interviews like their lives depended on it. Everyone’s assignments fell under projects with different names.
Yona agreed with the manager. This was work. Whenever she heard the writer talking about the script, she felt as if she was reading a sad book or watching a sad movie. The situation still seemed formless enough that she couldn’t believe it was actually approaching.
What felt more real was the fact that her residence permit had not yet arrived. The manager told her that Paul was sometimes delayed during busy periods, so not to worry, but the assurance clouded Yona with anxiety.
‘If the permit doesn’t arrive, what happens?’
Yona had already spent almost two weeks in Mui, and with the field day only seven days away, she couldn’t tell what a residence permit was actually for. Hadn’t she been able to stay here even without one? The most important thing, the contract stating that this travel programme would operate only through Yona, had already been signed. And she’d already received the down payment, hadn’t she? Yona was doubtful that Paul could actually exercise any authority over her.
‘It’s a formality,’ the manager said, ‘but we’ve never had an outsider who stayed longer than one week. You could say the permits are a kind of rule.’
‘So right now I’m staying illegally?’
‘I said it’s a formality—don’t worry about it. The permit will be here soon. More importantly, how is the programme coming along? Show me what you’ve done so far.’
Yona said that she’d just finished initial research. She would need to investigate more before coming up with detailed plans. In reality, Yona was needlessly stalling. She wanted to make sure that she had her timing right, too, like she was playing a card game. The manager was nice, but not particularly trustworthy. In several ways, he reminded her of Kim. Yona planned to delay turning in the itinerary as long as possible, without letting the manager push her around.
She had a second reason for the delay. Every morning, Yona travelled around Mui on Luck’s motorcycle. These excursions meant more to her than the research. From a motorcycle, you could see another side of Mui. The desert wasn’t a desert, it was an enormous, gentle animal at rest. Its sandy winds no longer stung her. Most of all, Yona wanted to know more about her companion, Luck. When she looked at Mui through Luck’s eyes, it became a different place. Yona and Luck took frequent walks, teaching each other their native languages.
Luck knew a lot of stories. Things he had heard, things he had seen, things he had experienced. Mui was filled with empty alleys. The road and buildings had crumbled, or residents had moved out. Luck and Yona slowly walked down the abandoned streets. At one point, Luck stopped in front of a green gate.
‘This was Chori’s house,’ he said. ‘Everyone who lived here has moved away. Chori died three years ago, when he was eight. That was during Mui’s tourism boom. Visitors came in waves, and like most of the kids, Chori went out and worked in the tourist areas. His determination made him a hard worker, and he earned money carrying people’s luggage on his back during desert tours. He worked all day, even when he wasn’t feeling well.’
Eventually, a pile of tourists’ luggage fell on hardworking Chori and crushed him. It was a pointless death. On his last day, Chori had carried sixty kilograms—an easy load compared to the burden of being a poor child on Mui. The load that crushed Chori consisted of a pressure cooker, a grill and propane gas: gear for cooking chicken ginseng soup and frying pork belly in the middle of the desert. Chori collapsed, and the guide apologised for the subsequently delayed schedule. Chori died after the travellers left.
The stories continued, following Yona and Luck as they walked, taking larger steps than they did, threatening to overtake them. One day three years ago, a fisherman who lived in one of these houses had gone out to the coast for work, only to come home soon after looking grim. He’d been told he wasn’t allowed to fish there any more. Now that a resort had opened, only tourists could enjoy th
e area. Around the same time, a boy who made the most pitiful expression when he cried was suddenly ‘selected’ to work at the tourist homestay village. The child cried day after day, and tourists aimed their cameras at him. As he grew older, the tears he had produced so easily started to dry up. And so he was, of course, thrown out.
Luck began to talk about a house painter with a forty-inch waistline and the woman he loved. Because the painter’s forty-inch stomach stuck out so much, it was hard for him to paint things below his waist, so he and his partner always worked together. The painter painted the upper parts of walls and the woman painted the areas out of his reach and below his waist. The two had to be together to complete a wall. They were together when they died, too, because a wall they were painting collapsed. As the wall fell down and crushed them, the woman stared at the man and the man stared at the woman. Their lives were over before they could close their eyes. And that’s how they, along with the house, expired.
This was the story of Luck’s parents. The entire town had collapsed; some survived, but Luck’s parents died inside the house where they were working. Luck remembered the story better than he remembered his parents’ faces. The death scene was like a reel of film, worn out from being played too many times. Luck could retell it calmly. The home still existed, in crumbled fragments before them. It looked like a stage: it no longer had a roof, and one wall was overtaken by a gaping hole. Construction of the red sand desert tower had caused the sudden collapse. When the tower was first erected, nearby desert homes had crumbled en masse for some reason that no one understood, and this home was one of them: overtaken by heaps of dark red earth. Yona followed Luck into the house. The sandy winds followed.
One side of Mui was being turned into desert, and the other side was being turned into city. Urban and rural, growing larger simultaneously. But when you stood in the middle of the desert, none of this meant anything. It just seemed to extend endlessly, and every part of it was still. Intermittent cacti marked the land like warning lights. Occasionally the wheels of passing vehicles kicked up dust, or desert breezes blew.
The desert didn’t cover all of Mui, but desert sands carried by the wind mixed with the air that everyone on the island breathed. You’d find sand on the coast where fish were caught every evening, and over all the island’s roads. It found its way under sofas and beds in family homes. The desert was the centre of Mui. And in that centre, a whirlpool had begun to spin.
Yona thought back to the script, now so familiar to her, for the events of the first Sunday of August.
At 8.11 a.m., the first hole opens as the land below suddenly begins to sink. Earth is swallowed up, decorations and prizes for Mui’s field day are sucked in. People preparing for the events, and a wheelbarrow that was parked above the sinkhole, fall too. At 8.15, the second hole opens, and the workers above pour into it like grains of sand. The alarm begins to sound. Within a minute, countless people are swallowed up by the hole. In between these sentences describing sinkhole one and sinkhole two, other characters appear, like full stops or commas being stamped on to a page. These people play the important role of connecting the sentences, mediating actions. Some of them give the starting signal, others plunge into the holes, and still others drive cars into the openings; some people sound the alarm, some snap photos and some die.
Yona still couldn’t tell the difference between what she’d read and what would actually occur. When she thought about the script, she felt dizzy. Later in the day, as she looked down from the tower’s observation point, the idea of a tragedy striking this place seemed as remote as an old legend. Down below, daily life was continuing as normal.
But when she descended the spiral staircase and stuck her feet in the sloshing sand at the tower’s base, it all hit her, and the forthcoming disaster seemed close enough to touch. Reality was coming, and Yona was standing in its path.
Yona struggled to sleep that night. She felt worried when she went to bed, and she was still anxious when she woke up, but the sunrise improved her mood a little. The people of Mui needed tourists. Jungle needed tourists, and Yona needed tourists. As long as this plan succeeded, Yona would promptly return to her original job at Jungle, and maybe she’d even rise up to Kim’s level, or be assigned a position where Kim couldn’t bother her. While the sun shone overhead, those hopeful thoughts twirled about Yona’s head.
But sometimes even before dusk, she began to hear stories. A crocodile who’d trespassed on the resort’s beach and was run over by a truck. This travel programme wasn’t bringing as many benefits to Mui residents as the manager had boasted it would, or even as many as Yona had expected. It seemed to be doing the opposite. The manager had convinced people who didn’t care about tourism to construct a resort. After construction was complete and tourists began to descend upon Mui, the entire island bustled with activity. But only at the beginning; as time passed, unforeseen problems rose to the surface. Some residents had hoped to get richer when the island became a tourist destination, but nothing about their living standards improved; only restrictions increased. Mui’s most beautiful beach was limited to resort guests. No one else could walk on the shore without permission, and swimming and fishing had to occur in specified areas. If an outsider came to Mui and spent five thousand dollars on his or her holiday, only one per cent of the money would trickle down to people here. Four- and five-year-olds became merchants who went around hawking home-made bracelets and flutes. That was the only change. But now, even tourism had lulled. Yona doubted that a tourism revival would solve Mui’s problems.
Yona could now draw a proper Mui map. The Mui that Yona had seen over the six days and five nights of her Jungle tour covered only part of the island. The real Mui cast a shadow three or four times larger than the Jungle one. Both Muis existed one after the other in photos on Yona’s camera, but an invisible line divided them. The real tragedy, though, hadn’t been photographed at all. The tragedy facing Mui wasn’t the past or the future: it was the present. That couldn’t be captured in a photo. Until now, Yona had never thought about this kind of disaster.
The last photo on Yona’s camera roll was a portrait of Luck. She’d taken it in the desert. The image wasn’t focused, but Yona didn’t delete it. Luck’s expression seemed to be moving slightly beneath the screen. Yona scrutinised it for a long time.
Yona’s residence permit still hadn’t arrived, but she was clearly no longer an outsider. If she were, she wouldn’t be seeing trucks so often. Yellow trucks bearing Paul’s logo drove by her with particular frequency.
Sometimes the yellow trucks delivered mail, other times they transported goods, and sometimes they just caused accidents. Their drivers wore yellow vests and hats, like the employees at the crematorium. At one point, Yona overheard a conversation between two people getting out of a yellow truck. The conversation stuck with her because it was so normal.
‘It would be nice if we didn’t have so much overtime,’ one worker said, ‘but then again, when I’m not working, I get nervous.’
‘We’ve got to keep our feet on the ground. Like fallen leaves, soaked with rain and stuck to the pavement. We can’t let ourselves fly away, even when the wind is blowing.’
‘Fallen leaves soaked with rain? That’s a nice image. But the trees around here don’t have leaves.’
After the two men got in their truck and sat in the driver’s seat and passenger seat, the yellow vehicle darted forward at full speed. That night, Yona heard that there had been two traffic accidents on the ring road near the resort. Whenever a crash happened, people just sighed and said, ‘Another traffic accident?’
Kim got in touch, coincidentally, right as Yona was finishing up the new travel programme. He said that the guide, Lou, had contacted him. Kim knew all about Yona’s ordeal, but only now did he ask if she was okay, like this was the first time he’d heard about her situation.
‘Anyway, we’re not going to be able to renew Mui’s contract,’ he said. ‘Just finish what you’re doing as soon as p
ossible and then come back. What the heck are you doing there, anyway?’ Kim’s voice sounded a little tired.
‘I haven’t been replaced, have I?’ Yona asked jokingly, but the question made Kim lose his temper.
‘How many times do I have to tell you before you understand? The company’s in chaos right now. It’s all because of the fouls. Come back quick. You must have done more than rest during your break. Surely you’ve come up with some new ideas.’
Kim’s phone call felt like a threat, and it reminded Yona of the reason she’d initially resolved to stay here. After the call, she vowed not to let all she had achieved with the new itinerary be taken from her. Finally, the programme package was given a name.
Mui Sunday.
A five-night, seven-day trip.
6
ADRIFT
YONA HAD NEVER SWUM in an ocean. She only knew the sanitised waters of swimming pools. But now, she pulled off her T-shirt and waded into the night sea. Luck stood in front of her. He stared silently at Yona’s thick dark hair, and she moved towards him. Luck felt awkward staring continuously at Yona, so he closed his eyes.
‘Your eyes are closed,’ Yona said.
Enveloped by darkness, Yona continued to speak and began to touch Luck’s eyelids.
‘Does that mean you’re one of the bungalows? Should I not come in?’
Yona’s wet fingers traversed Luck’s eyelids and touched his cheeks and lips.
‘Is that really what it means?’
Luck didn’t say anything.
‘Why are your eyes closed?’
Finally Luck replied. ‘If I open them, I’m afraid you’ll look too big.’
The moment he raised his eyelids, Yona kissed them. Very briefly, and then she moved away. Next, Luck’s lips touched Yona’s neck for a moment. They spent a while together, eyes neither open nor closed, unable to let their lips meet for long. Yona wanted to hug Luck’s wet body a little more forcefully. Their breath came out rough and laboured, but the waves hid everything. The two were frozen, and nothing but the waves moved.