by Lee Ki-ho
As soon as I went into the teachers’ office I asked the young woman sitting by the door. “Hello, I’m looking for the English teacher who disappeared some time ago.”
The young woman looked up at me blankly from the newspaper she had been reading.
“I’m sorry?”
“Uh, well, I was just wondering if I might be able to meet with the English teacher who disappeared.”
“I don’t quite understand what you mean . . .”
A gray-haired man came over to the desk where the woman was sitting. The gray-haired man asked her.
“What is it? What’s he looking for?”
“The gentleman says he’s looking for an English teacher who disappeared . . . but I have no idea what that means.”
“An English teacher who disappeared?”
The gray-haired man brought his face closer to mine. He asked, “So, you’re looking for Mr. Jun? Might you be looking for Jun Byeong-su?”
I couldn’t answer. That was on account of not being able to remember my father’s name. I asked the gray-haired man back.
“Would that be the English teacher who disappeared?”
“Well, you could say that . . . May I ask why it is that you’re looking for him?”
I rubbed the back of my head as I answered. “It seems as though that man is my father.”
The gray-haired man and the young woman looked at me for a long time, speechless. I gave them a slight smile as I looked back at them. That was on account of it being all I could do.
The gray-haired man guided me into a room just off of the teachers’ office. It was a room with a couch and a few cabinets. The gray-haired man made a call somewhere. A few moments later, a man missing most of the hair on the top of his head and holding a magnifying glass came into the room. The man held up his magnifying glass and looked at my face for a long time. Then he looked at the gray-haired man and said:
“Yes! Yes, it is! It’s Mr. Jun’s son!”
Sitting on the other side of the glass wall, on the steel bench, the superintendent looked much healthier than before. His cheeks looked pink like someone who had just recently taken a hot bath, and the few hairs that were left on his head shone in the fluorescent lighting. On his forehead I could see bluish veins. The man in the uniform I’d met last time was sitting at the steel desk behind me.
The superintendent sat with his arms crossed and said, “Huh, you again. What, stopping by because there’s something else you’re curious about?”
For a moment all I did was sit there and look at him. That was on account of not knowing what to say, or how to say it.
The superintendent asked, “Hey, why are you here all alone this time? You guys were always inseparable.”
I lowered my head. I still did not answer.
“Hmm . . . I wonder if maybe the caretakers went looking for you? Ahh . . . that’s it! They did, didn’t they?” The superintendent gave his thighs a slap. Without a word, I nodded my head.
“Okay, so what about you? What happened? You haven’t run into them yet?”
“No, I met them, too.”
The superintendent scrunched his face and examined me closely. “Okay, but then . . .”
“Si-bong apologized for everything for me. For all of my share.”
Now it was the superintendent who had nothing to say. He simply continued to glare at me.
“That’s not the reason that I’ve come to meet with you. Actually, there’s something else that I wanted to ask you about.”
The superintendent crossed his arms again. He glanced at the clock that was on the wall of the visiting room. I took a deep breath and spoke.
“Sir, why was it that you had me and my father stay in the same room?”
The superintendent cleared his throat. Then he spoke. “What are you talking about?”
“Why did you make it so that my father and I lived in the same room at the institution?”
“Wow, I really have no clue what you’re talking about right now.”
The superintendent did not look at me as he spoke. He brushed the dust off of his shoulder.
“I’m talking about the man who lived in our room with us, the one who hung himself. Wasn’t he my father?”
At the middle school I opened up a yearbook that the man with the magnifying glass had handed me. It was from a number of years ago. The man with the magnifying glass pointed out one of the pictures in the yearbook and said that that man was my father. I put my face right up to the picture. The face in the picture was one I already knew. It was the same middle-aged man with the large birthmark on the left side of his jaw, the one Si-bong and I had asked from time to time about his wrongs. We had asked about his wrongs and just one time, exactly once, he told us not to worry, that he would apologize himself. As soon as I saw the photo I let out a short “Aha,” and laughed a short laugh. That was on account of it being, in any case, good to see that face again.
“It seems like you’re mistaken about something. Who said anyone died at the institution?”
The superintendent looked at the man in the uniform as he spoke. I looked at him, too. The man in the uniform did not look at us, and instead seemed to be writing down something diligently.
“I’m talking about the man who tore up his undershirt and hung himself. You know, Si-bong and I buried him on the mountain behind the institution. It’s the man you wrote about in your diary, too, that man.”
“Haha . . . well, haven’t you really . . .” The superintendent let out a slight laugh. Then he looked at me for a moment and spoke.
“This is exactly what I’m talking about. You still need a lot of help. You’re sick. You’re sick, so you’re only seeing problems with people.”
I thought about how the superintendent might just be right. I was still someone who was taking medicine. Taking medicine is something that sick people do. But I was still curious.
“So, that man wasn’t my father?”
The superintendent raised his voice. “Hmm . . . I told you, I don’t know your father.”
The man in the uniform rang the bell. The superintendent got up as if he’d been waiting for it. I stood up as well. The superintendent turned around and walked toward the door on the other side of the room. He took a few steps back to the glass wall and spoke.
“You know, if I were your father . . .”
He stopped midsentence. The man in the uniform was waiting for us.
“If that were the case . . . maybe I would have done something stupid, like come to the institution and ask if I could live with my son.”
I asked him quickly, on account of the man in the uniform, who was still waiting, “But why?”
“Because sometimes your wrongs only go away if you pretend you never knew them.”
After finishing his sentence the superintendent let out a chuckle. Then he opened the door on the other side of the room and walked out. Facing his back, I bowed my head once again to say goodbye.
8. Cultivating Wrong
I sat quietly in the dark hospital room, watching Si-yeon as she slept. The other patients were all asleep. The fluorescent light coming in from the hallway, together with the light of the streetlights outside, lit up each side of the room. From one of the beds I could hear a constant noise like bubbles bursting. From another, I could hear the sound of someone snoring. From the hallway, I could hear an occasional sound of slippers dragging across the floor.
I tried carefully to grab on to Si-yeon’s wrist. It was so thin I could wrap my hand all the way around it. She didn’t wake up. Si-yeon had kept looking through her notebook and making calls somewhere late into the night, then fell asleep. She looked a bit exhausted.
I touched Si-yeon’s forearm as well. Si-yeon’s forearm seemed firm with the veins showing, but was still soft. I liked that feeling. So I kept caressing Si-yeon’s forearm. For some reason, the more I petted her forearm, the more I thought of Si-bong. I thought about what Si-bong had said to me. Still, I kept caressing Si-yeo
n’s forearm. Si-bong’s voice kept growing louder and louder in my head, but I didn’t take my hand from Si-yeon’s forearm. Then, all of a sudden, Si-bong’s voice simply disappeared. Without realizing it, I suddenly clenched Si-yeon’s forearm with all the strength I had. Still, Si-bong’s voice did not return.
Si-yeon awoke from her sleep. She looked at me, and then she looked at the hand that was grabbing her forearm. She lifted her head and took a careful look around the room. All of the patients and all of the guardians were asleep.
Si-yeon sat up in bed. She took another look around the room and quickly pulled the IV from the back of her hand.
Si-yeon spoke to me with no sound, only moving her lips.
“Let’s go now.”
I didn’t know what Si-yeon was saying, I simply sat where I was. Si-yeon put on the clothes she’d worn from home over her hospital clothes. She wrapped her head in the towel that had been hanging on the edge of the bed.
Si-yeon spoke again in a quiet voice, “Gimme a piggy back.”
I did as Si-yeon said. Si-yeon wasn’t even wearing any socks and had her handbag and her shoes in her hands as she got on my back.
“If we go out the emergency exit there’s a door through the morgue. Let’s go out that way. I checked it all out during the day.”
Si-yeon put her mouth right up to my ear as she spoke softly. I liked that feeling. I could hear Si-bong’s voice again, but I didn’t listen to it. I held on to her thighs tightly with both of my hands. Her body was light.
With Si-yeon on my back I headed toward the emergency stairwell at the end of the hallway. Halfway down the hall was the nurses waiting room, but there was no one there watching. An older patient came out of the bathroom and our eyes met, but he hugged his lower abdomen and disappeared back into the bathroom.
I descended the dark emergency stairwell. The sound of my footsteps echoed throughout, but I didn’t stop. I had Si-yeon on my back and passed the morgue, then went into the underground parking garage and, from the stairs there, exited the hospital. The entire time Si-yeon just let me carry her, her cheek against my back, without saying a thing, just like someone sleeping. Of course, I enjoyed that feeling as well. For that, I wished that the hospital would go on forever—no, that the entire world would be the inside of the hospital.
Once we were off of the hospital grounds, Si-yeon removed the towel from her head. Si-yeon tried to get down from my back. I squeezed tighter with my hands. Si-yeon couldn’t get down.
“I’m fine now. You can let me down.”
I looked straight ahead and said, “It’s okay, we can just keep going.”
Si-yeon seemed like she was about to say something else, but she didn’t. I didn’t say anything either. I walked along, keeping to the farthest edge of the street where we wouldn’t be touched by the glow of the streetlights. There wasn’t anyone at all out on the street. There was only the occasional taxi that drove by slowly. Si-yeon spoke to me.
“If you hadn’t have woken me up I would have just kept sleeping. Guess we were thinking the same thing?”
I didn’t answer. That was on account of my not having intended to wake her.
“What am I, crazy? Like I’m going to give any of those doctors money. What a load of crap . . .”
She was talking to herself. Every time she spoke, I could feel her breath come in waves and brush against the back of my neck. I kept walking.
“Come to think of it, why hasn’t Si-bong come back yet? He really knows how to make me worry . . . What if they took him away again to another weird place?”
I couldn’t answer. That was on account of no longer knowing where Si-bong was.
Si-yeon asked me, “Hey, so are you just gonna walk the whole way? Shouldn’t we take a taxi or something?”
I replied to her in a soft voice, “I’ll just keep walking.”
“All the way home? It’s too far to walk. Since we saved the hospital money, let’s take a taxi.”
“It’s not that far.”
I stopped and stood there for a moment to boost Si-yeon up again. Si-yeon followed what I did quietly.
I continued walking. Si-yeon put her cheek against my back again without saying a word. I didn’t know the way home. Still, I didn’t stop and kept on walking. I looked back once and gazed at the neon blue cross of the hospital. I thought about how we’d gotten pretty far, but that still, the cross, from someplace high up, from someplace close, was still looking down at us.
Without saying anything, I turned my head back around.
LEE KI-HO debuted when his short story “Birney” won the monthly Modern Literature New Writer’s Contest in 1999. He is currently a professor in the department of creative writing at Gwangju University.
CHRISTOPHER J. DYKAS graduated from Oberlin College. After five years working in Seoul as a teacher, radio host, and translator, he returned to Los Angeles to pursue graduate studies in Applied Linguistics at UCLA.
THE LIBRARY OF KOREAN LITERATURE
The Library of Korean Literature, published by Dalkey Archive Press in collaboration with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, presents modern classics of Korean literature in translation, featuring the best Korean authors from the late modern period through to the present day. The Library aims to introduce the intellectual and aesthetic diversity of contemporary Korean writing to English-language readers. The Library of Korean Literature is unprecedented in its scope, with Dalkey Archive Press publishing 25 Korean novels and short story collections in a single year.
The series is published in cooperation with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, a center that promotes the cultural translation and worldwide dissemination of Korean language and culture.
MICHAL AJVAZ, The Golden Age.
The Other City.
PIERRE ALBERT-BIROT, Grabinoulor.
YUZ ALESHKOVSKY, Kangaroo.
FELIPE ALFAU, Chromos.
Locos.
IVAN NGELO, The Celebration.
The Tower of Glass.
ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES, Knowledge of Hell.
The Splendor of Portugal.
ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON, Theatre of Incest.
JOHN ASHBERY AND JAMES SCHUYLER, A Nest of Ninnies.
ROBERT ASHLEY, Perfect Lives.
GABRIELA AVIGUR-ROTEM, Heatwave and Crazy Birds.
DJUNA BARNES, Ladies Almanack.
Ryder.
JOHN BARTH, LETTERS.
Sabbatical.
DONALD BARTHELME, The King.
Paradise.
SVETISLAV BASARA, Chinese Letter.
MIQUEL BAUÇÀ, The Siege in the Room.
RENÉ BELLETTO, Dying.
MAREK BIECZYK, Transparency.
ANDREI BITOV, Pushkin House.
ANDREJ BLATNIK, You Do Understand.
LOUIS PAUL BOON, Chapel Road.
My Little War.
Summer in Termuren.
ROGER BOYLAN, Killoyle.
IGNÁCIO DE LOYOLA BRANDÃO, Anonymous Celebrity.
Zero.
BONNIE BREMSER, Troia: Mexican Memoirs.
CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE, Amalgamemnon.
BRIGID BROPHY, In Transit.
GERALD L. BRUNS, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language.
GABRIELLE BURTON, Heartbreak Hotel.
MICHEL BUTOR, Degrees.
Mobile.
G. CABRERA INFANTE, Infante’s Inferno.
Three Trapped Tigers.
JULIETA CAMPOS,
The Fear of Losing Eurydice.
ANNE CARSON, Eros the Bittersweet.
ORLY CASTEL-BLOOM, Dolly City.
LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE, Castle to Castle.
Conversations with Professor Y.
London Bridge.
Normance.
North.
Rigadoon.
MARIE CHAIX, The Laurels of Lake Constance.
HUGO CHARTERIS, The Tide Is Right.
ERIC CHEVILLARD, Demolishing Nisard.
MARC CHOLODENKO,
Mordechai Schamz.
JOSHUA COHEN, Witz.
EMILY HOLMES COLEMAN, The Shutter of Snow.
ROBERT COOVER, A Night at the Movies.
STANLEY CRAWFORD, Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine.
Some Instructions to My Wife.
RENÉ CREVEL, Putting My Foot in It.
RALPH CUSACK, Cadenza.
NICHOLAS DELBANCO, The Count of Concord.
Sherbrookes.
NIGEL DENNIS, Cards of Identity.
PETER DIMOCK, A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family.
ARIEL DORFMAN, Konfidenz.
COLEMAN DOWELL, Island People.
Too Much Flesh and Jabez.
ARKADII DRAGOMOSHCHENKO, Dust.
RIKKI DUCORNET, The Complete Butcher’s Tales.
The Fountains of Neptune.
The Jade Cabinet.
Phosphor in Dreamland.
WILLIAM EASTLAKE, The Bamboo Bed.
Castle Keep.
Lyric of the Circle Heart.
JEAN ECHENOZ, Chopin’s Move.
STANLEY ELKIN, A Bad Man.
Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers.
The Dick Gibson Show.
The Franchiser.
The Living End.
Mrs. Ted Bliss.
FRANÇOIS EMMANUEL, Invitation to a Voyage.
SALVADOR ESPRIU, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth.
LESLIE A. FIEDLER, Love and Death in the American Novel.
JUAN FILLOY, Op Oloop.
ANDY FITCH, Pop Poetics.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Bouvard and Pécuchet.
KASS FLEISHER, Talking out of School.
FORD MADOX FORD,
The March of Literature.
JON FOSSE, Aliss at the Fire.
Melancholy.
MAX FRISCH, I’m Not Stiller.
Man in the Holocene.
CARLOS FUENTES, Christopher Unborn.
Distant Relations.
Terra Nostra.
Where the Air Is Clear.
TAKEHIKO FUKUNAGA, Flowers of Grass.
WILLIAM GADDIS, J R.
The Recognitions.