‘What’s going on with you?’ Mother said, sliding out from under my arms and regaining her usual calm.
As I stepped inside and took off my shoes, I felt deflated.
‘Did something happen?’
I didn’t bother to look back. I shook my head. As I walked through the living room, I nodded lightly at her. ‘Goodnight.’
She didn’t stop me. ‘Want me to help you upstairs?’
I shook my head again and climbed up the stairs, not too fast or too slow.
I remembered taking off my clothes as soon as I got to my room, lying on my bed without washing, and hearing Mother go into her room and close the door. As soon as I’d heard that click, I sobered up. After that, I probably looked up at the ceiling for forty minutes or so, until I got too antsy and slipped out through the steel door on the roof.
I just woke up and saw that Mother had called in the middle of the night. I thought it was a little weird – she should have been asleep. That was what Hae-jin had said on the phone. I hadn’t thought anything of it, but now I wondered… Why did she call him? Because I was acting strange? Did she know I’d gone out again? What time did she call him? Eleven? Midnight? If she was up for a while after that, did she hear me come back?
If she’d heard me, she wouldn’t have left me alone. She would have made me sit down and grilled me, just the way she got me to confess to my transgressions when I was young. She wouldn’t have let me go to bed until I told her everything. Where are you coming from at this hour? When did you leave? How long have you been sneaking around? Though I’d graduated from punishment a long time ago, it could have been back on the table – kneeling in front of the statue of the Virgin all night and reciting Hail Marys. If she’d seen me this bloody, prayers wouldn’t have been the end of it. No, the fact that I woke up in my own room was evidence that she hadn’t seen me looking like this.
I got out of bed. I needed to figure out what had happened. Taking care not to step in the bloody footprints, I inched towards the door. I stopped still in front of my desk. Behind the desk, in the sliding glass doors to the roof deck, I saw a man. His hair was standing up like horns, his face was red and raw, and the whites of his eyes glinted nervously. I felt faint. That red beast was me?
I couldn’t see anything outside, thanks to the fog coursing in from the ocean. Yellow light flickered faintly from the pergola Mother had built when she’d created her roof garden. I would have turned it on as I left last night. I should have turned it off on my way in.
I noticed that the sliding door was open a crack. It locked automatically when it closed, so whenever I went out to the roof deck, I left it open a little. I should have closed the door behind me when I came back in. I wouldn’t have opened it again no matter what state I was in: it was December, and my room was on the second level of a duplex on the tenth floor of a building by the ocean. I wouldn’t want cold air flooding in, unless I was Mother, who was going through the menopause.
That meant I hadn’t come back in through this door last night. I’d returned through the flat’s front door, judging from the direction of the footprints, the open sliding door and the pergola light. But why would I come in through the front door? Why did I look like this? What did the state of my room signify?
I looked over at my bedside clock again. Three red numbers were glowing against the black background: 5.45. I didn’t hear running water, but Mother could still be in the bathroom. In ten minutes she would come out of her bedroom and go into the kitchen. I had to see what things looked like before she emerged.
I opened my door and went out into the hall. I flicked on the light. Bloody footprints stretched from my doorway down the hallway, all the way to the stairs. I leant against the door. The optimist in my head whispered to me: It’s a dream. You haven’t woken up yet. There’s no way something like this could happen in real life.
I forced myself to move away from the door, and followed the footsteps reluctantly. I stepped onto the top of the darkened stairs, triggering the motion sensor. The light turned on. Bloody handprints were smeared all over the railing, with footprints stamped on each step. Dazed, I looked down at the blood-splattered wall beside the stairs, and the rivulets and puddles of blood pooling on the landing below.
I looked down at my blood-drenched hands, sweater, trousers and feet. Had I got covered in blood on the landing? Who had done this to me? I began to panic, unable to think, hear or feel.
I went downstairs sluggishly. I passed the puddle of blood on the landing and turned to continue down the next flight. I gasped; my head jerked up and I stepped backwards. I closed my eyes. My mind suggested an acceptable option. Nothing’s wrong. This isn’t real. Go back to your room before Mother comes out. Get some sleep. Once you wake up again, it’ll be like any other morning.
The realist in my head disagreed. No. You can’t gloss over this. You have to find out if it is a dream or not. If it isn’t, you have to figure out what happened downstairs and why you woke up looking like this. If it turns out to be a dream, you’ll still have plenty of time to get back to bed.
I opened my eyes. Downstairs, the lights were blazing. Blood had pooled along the dividing wall between the stairs and the kitchen. In the puddle was a pair of bare feet, heels resting on the marble floor and toes pointing up towards the ceiling. The wall blocked my view of what else was there, as if the feet had been cut off to be displayed like sculpture.
Whose feet were these? A doll’s? A ghost’s? Looking down from above didn’t provide any answers. I had to figure out what was going on.
I gritted my teeth and continued ahead. Blood and footprints were on each step; the rivulet of blood had coasted down the stairs and reached the living room. When I got to the last step, all I could see was the physicality of real, human feet – bumpy toes, high arches, an anklet with a dangling charm hanging from the left ankle. My stomach flipped and I began hiccuping. I wanted to go back to my room.
I forced myself to continue. I hesitantly turned to the right, towards the front door. Blood formed an oblong swamp from under the stairs to the kitchen entrance. A woman lay neatly in the middle of it, her feet closer to the stairs and her head pointing towards the kitchen. She was wearing a voluminous white nightgown. Her legs were straight, her hands were clasped on her chest, and her long hair covered her face. She looked like a hallucination straight out of a delusional mind.
I took a step towards her, then another, stopping near her elbow. Her head had been jerked back and her neck was severed. Someone strong must have done this in one swift motion, with a sharp knife. The flesh around the wound was red, like a fish’s gills. For a moment I thought I saw it throb. Dark irises met my eyes from under the tangled hair, ensnaring me, ordering me to come closer. I obeyed. I bent my stiff legs to crouch next to her. I reached out and pushed her hair out of the way, my hand trembling. I felt as though I were committing a crime.
‘Yu-jin!’
Mother’s voice again, the same one I had heard in my dream. This time it sounded faint. I couldn’t breathe. Everything in my mind was crashing down; everything swam before my eyes. My spine crumpled and my feet slipped on the blood. I sat down heavily, breaking my fall with my hands.
The woman’s eyes were bulging like a startled cat’s. Droplets of blood clung to her long dark lashes. Her cheeks were thin and her jawline was pronounced. Her mouth was open in an O shape. Mother. The woman who had lost her husband and elder son sixteen years ago, who had clung to me and me alone since then, who’d given me her DNA.
Everything turned dark. I felt sick. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Hot sand had filled my lungs. All I could do was wait for the light to turn on in my dark brain. I wanted it all to be a dream; I wanted my internal clock to ring its alarm and pull me out of this nightmare.
Time crawled by. Everything was chillingly quiet. The grandfather clock began to chime – six o’clock. Thirty minutes had passed since I’d woken up. This was when Mother would finish clattering in the kitche
n and head up to my room with a smoothie made of milk, banana, pine nuts and walnuts.
The clock stopped chiming, but Mother was still lying next to me. Was this not a dream after all? Had Mother really called out to me last night? Was she calling for help? Or begging for her life?
My knees began knocking. My lower abdomen suddenly grew heavy. A sharp pain stabbed below my belly button. My bladder swelled, and I felt an urgent, intense need to pee. It was the same pressure I’d felt as a boy when I dreamed I couldn’t move and the freight train was bearing down on me. I sat on my knees, pressed my thighs together and leant on them with both hands. Cold sweat trickled down my back.
Cold sweat trickled down my back. I felt stupid. My blankets and sheets were soaked through, my pyjamas were plastered to my bottom. Everything pulsated with the stench of urine. I’d made the same mistake three nights in a row. Mother would be annoyed. What are you, a baby, wetting your bed all of a sudden? She might sit us down and interrogate us. Tell me honestly. Where did you go after school two days ago? What happened?
My older brother, Yu-min, and I were in the first grade at a private elementary school near Sinchon. Mother drove us to school every morning on her way to work as an editor at a publishing house, which was nearby, behind Yonsei University. After school, we went to an art studio near her office, which was more of a day-care facility. It was close enough to school that we always walked. We often stopped to buy snacks and got distracted on our way there. Mother always worried about us. ‘Don’t go near the train tracks,’ she would admonish. ‘Stick to the main roads, okay?’
‘Okay,’ we said, but we didn’t. Sometimes – no, often – we walked along the Seoul–Uijeongbu Line rails, our ankles sinking into the weeds. Of course, we didn’t just walk. We came up with games and competed to see who would win. We played Scarecrow, where you spread your arms out and walked along the rail as you looked up at the sky; we did long jumps, where the person who leapt over the most cross-ties won. The best was Survival. We always tied, since we had the same weapons: Mother-approved toy sub-machine guns that made loud rat-tat-tat sounds without doing much else.
But three days ago, we had packed our backpacks with goggles and BB guns with plastic pellets that Father had brought for us from a business trip to America. Mother didn’t like them, but the pellets didn’t leave marks on our bodies, and she was more relaxed in the days when Yu-min was around. We were thrilled. We didn’t pay any attention in class that day, as we were both thinking of Sinchon station.
As soon as school finished for the day, we put our goggles on and roamed the tracks and the adjacent wasteland that overlooked the station, shooting at each other; the one who was hit the most would lose. Mother and the art studio receded in our minds and we didn’t realise how much time had passed. We’d used up all the bullets and the game was a draw but we weren’t ready to call it quits, so we came up with a tiebreaker: a race to the station; the first one there would win.
One, two, three, we counted, and I shot ahead. I was a little ahead of Yu-min to begin with, but soon we were side by side. Near the end, I was behind him by a few strides. By the time I got to the last hurdle, the tracks, he was already running down the slope on the other side. A train was barrelling towards us from a distance. I knew I’d already lost, but I didn’t give up. I leapt over the tracks. My backpack hit my elbow as I jumped, making the gun slip out of my sweaty hand. On the other side, I rolled to a stop, shot up and looked behind me. The train was still rushing forward, steam curling upwards from the engine. It was going to grind my gun to dust. Without thinking, I bolted back onto the tracks. By now, the train was close enough that I could see it was a freight train. But I couldn’t give up and lose my gun.
‘Yu-jin!’ Yu-min screamed.
The horn blasted, but I didn’t look at the train. I threw myself forward, my eyes only on the gun. As the train clattered and whooshed by, I rolled back down the slope, my gun in my hand.
I heard Yu-min shouting, ‘Run!’
I took off at speed, in case the conductor stopped the train to come back and catch me, or a station agent watching from somewhere called the police. I felt electrified, fully expecting someone to grab me by the scruff of my neck.
I caught up with Yu-min in front of the art studio. My uniform was torn, my face was covered in dirt, and my hair was standing on end. The art teacher mended my trousers and washed my face. We insisted that we’d fallen in the yard while we were racing each other; we didn’t tell anyone what had really happened.
The problem started that night. The moment I fell asleep, I found myself on the empty waste ground next to the tracks. I grabbed my gun as the train rushed towards me. When I opened my eyes, my bed and my body were drenched. The same thing happened the next night too. On the third night, I took off my wet pyjamas and threw them on my bed, then went into Yu-min’s room, hugging my pillow. I slipped under the blankets and sidled next to my brother. I could smell the grassy scent of that afternoon. The stench of urine clinging to me vanished. I closed my eyes. I had the same dream, but this time, Yu-min appeared beside me and yelled, ‘Train! Train’s coming!’ right before I was about to run onto the tracks.
I slept in his room for the rest of that year and continued until the spring I turned nine, the year he died.
Now, I wished I could crawl into Yu-min’s bed again. He would help me deal with this nightmare, if only I could just lie down next to him.
He died a long time ago, a voice inside my head reminded me. You have to handle it yourself.
Outside, the wind howled, its reverberations burrowing into my ears. I could feel my pulse behind my eyes. I swallowed the spit that had pooled in my mouth. Yu-min was gone. I pressed my knees together to suppress the urge to pee, and sat up straight. I lifted my hand to bring it to Mother’s face, but the world spun and I felt as though I might vomit. My shoulders were so stiff that my elbows would not move. The tips of my fingers trembled in the air. My body was frozen. The distance between my hand and her face seemed to stretch; it would be a million years later by the time I touched her.
It’s not as if you are going to rip into her and eat her, the voice in my mind snapped again. It’s just to check if she’s really not breathing, if her heart has really stopped, if her body is cold. Just put your hand out and touch her.
I exhaled. I placed my middle finger under her nose and waited. I didn’t detect anything. Her cheek, coated with dark purple blood, felt cold, dry and hard, like touching a stiffening mound of clay. I felt the middle of her chest, then moved my hand to the left and then to the right. I couldn’t feel her heartbeat anywhere among her twelve pairs of ribs. I didn’t feel any warmth. She really must be dead.
My shoulders drooped as despondency settled over me. What was it that I was hoping for? That she might still be alive? That this might all be a dream? It wasn’t. I was in the middle of a murder scene.
‘Everything’s okay, right?’ Hae-jin had asked. If I had known that something like this had happened, I wouldn’t have emerged from my bed until he came home. It wouldn’t have changed this ‘something’ into nothing, but at least I wouldn’t have been sitting by myself next to Mother’s body, shell-shocked, lost, not knowing what to do.
My eyes flitted around the flat. Everything looked strange. Questions echoed in my head. Who had done this? When? Why?
Someone must have snuck into the flat. Perhaps there really were thieves and muggers running rampant in Gundo; it seemed believable, aside from the fact that I’d just made it up.
It was true that people had begun to move into the newly developed city, though nearly half the flats were still empty. The area didn’t have much infrastructure yet, with no shops, public transport or communal facilities. Given that only one police patrol division oversaw the two districts it encompassed, it would make sense if all kinds of criminals were running wild through the streets. Among them would be the sort of intruders who entered your building by simply walking through the front door behind a reside
nt. The top floors had their own private roof decks that could be accessed both from inside the flat and from another door leading straight to the central stairwell facing the lift; so there was a sliding door to the roof garden in the bedroom and then there was another door – made of steel – from the roof garden into the stairwell; those units would understandably be their primary target. Such thieves must have visited our home last night.
They would have come through the roof door off the main stairwell. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to pick that lock. After all, I had snuck out through that very door just a few hours before, leaving the deadbolt unlatched. Having entered, they would have ransacked the place – my room, the downstairs bedrooms and the living room. Mother, who was a light sleeper even when she took sleeping pills, would have woken up. She would have known it wasn’t me or Hae-jin; she had a keen intuition. If she’d got out of bed, then…
Would she have opened her bedroom door to look out? Would she have gone out into the living room, calling, ‘Who is it?’ Or maybe she’d called me on my mobile first, but I hadn’t seen her request for rescue because I’d left my phone at home. She would have tried Hae-jin next. That would explain why she called him last night. The thieves, who had searched through all the other rooms by that point, would have come into her room. What would she have done? Maybe she had pretended to be asleep. She might have run into her dressing room or the bathroom to hide. Or maybe she’d dashed onto her balcony. Maybe she’d screamed, ‘Don’t hurt me, please!’ She might have run into the kitchen to resist, perhaps looking for a weapon. They might have caught her in front of the island, and they would have struggled. However it happened, it was clear that everything had gone down in front of the dividing wall between the kitchen and the stairs. It would have ended in just a few minutes. No matter how quick Mother was, no matter how weak that old goat of a thief was, it was still a woman against a man.
The Good Son Page 2