The Good Son

by You-Jeong Jeong

  Just a few hours ago, I’d believed that I had to know. I had wanted to hear it from myself. I’d thought I had to see the real me. I was human, after all; Hello could live happily without knowing that he was Hello, but I couldn’t keep on living without knowing who I was or what I had done. Now that I knew all of it, I realised it was a pointless exercise. No matter what I knew, I didn’t have a way forward.

  I turned my despair on Mother. Why hadn’t she kept calm even when she got angry? Why hadn’t she followed her original plan? Why hadn’t she just shoved me in the passenger seat and driven into the ocean? Then I could have left these secrets where they were. I wouldn’t be looking at myself with such hatred and misery. I wouldn’t have had to face the enemy inside that had pushed my life to ruin.

  I laid my head on my desk. My body went limp. I closed my eyes and listened to the creaking swing outside. Wait! My eyes flew open. The sound wasn’t coming from outside. It wasn’t the swing. It was downstairs, the intercom from the entrance of the building. I looked up at the clock: 9 p.m. Who would ring the bell at this hour? It wasn’t Hae-jin. Was it Auntie? The security guard? Maybe Hello’s owner? Sometimes she forgot to bring her entry card and rang us when nobody else was home. I’d rung her myself twice.

  The buzz was persistent. I swept the things on my desk into the drawer and went downstairs. It was the intercom. But it wasn’t Hello’s owner. When I turned on the screen, a man in a black cap and black jacket appeared.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked, pressing the speaker button.

  The man moved away from the screen and straightened up. ‘I’m responding to a call. Open the door, please.’ Another man in the same outfit was next to him. Police. Goose bumps spread on my cheeks. The giant man flashed in front of my eyes. I heard Mother say, Now what will you do?

  I took my finger off the speaker button and took a step back. Now what will I do? Should I run, Mother? Should I confess? Should I kill myself?

  III

  A DANGER TO OTHERS

  ‘We’re here from the Gundo Patrol Division. Can we come in?’ The police officer stood outside the doorway. He was young, at most in his mid thirties. His partner looked to be around the same age. Their question sounded rhetorical and so I nodded as they entered and walked past me.

  ‘Do you live here?’ asked the first officer.

  If I didn’t live here, why would I be here to open the door for them? ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is anyone else at home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is your relationship to the homeowner?’

  ‘I’m her son.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  Where was this going? If their purpose was to arrest me, they should have checked my identity, but they were focusing on the flat and the homeowner. ‘Kim Ji-won.’

  The two police officers glanced at each other. They both looked me up and down. I was wearing a T-shirt and jogging bottoms, nothing on my feet.

  I looked them over too. If the giant man had witnessed last night’s events and reported them to the police from a belated sense of justice, and if they had evidence that pointed to me, they wouldn’t send just these two. An entire investigative team would have descended on me.

  ‘So you’re saying you’re Ms Kim Ji-won’s son?’ the first officer asked.

  I nodded. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’d like to see your ID. We need to take a statement from you.’

  I quickly guessed that they hadn’t come at the giant’s urging. They were here to see Ms Kim Ji-won, so it couldn’t have much to do with what had happened last night. But no one knew Mother was missing, so what was going on? I stood in front of the interior door. ‘What’s this about?’

  The first officer craned his neck to look behind me. ‘About an hour ago, your mother called to say that there was a burglar in the house. She said she was afraid to go inside and asked us to come out immediately.’

  ‘My mother called?’ I didn’t have to try to look surprised; I was genuinely shocked. What was this ridiculous story? ‘She’s gone to a retreat. She’s praying.’

  ‘She’s praying? When did she go?’

  ‘This morning. Is this a false alarm?’

  ‘We confirmed the caller was her.’

  True, they wouldn’t have come blindly. They would have confirmed the caller’s identity first.

  ‘What was the number of the person claiming to be my mother? I can tell you if that’s her number or not.’

  ‘She called from a pay phone. Let me see your ID.’

  I didn’t want to leave them here and go upstairs. Who knew what they’d do? ‘It’s upstairs. I’ll give you my ID number.’

  ‘Go and get it,’ the first officer said, crossing his arms and squinting at me, clearly annoyed that I was dragging it out.

  ‘Wait here, please,’ I said, and went into the living room. I put my foot on the first step and glanced back. Just as I’d thought he would, one of them poked his head in and looked around. I ran up the stairs three at a time. Mother was inside the table on the roof, Auntie was at her office and Hae-jin would have arrived at Muan station. Mother couldn’t call and Hae-jin wasn’t a woman. Auntie. She knew Mother’s citizen ID number, she was around the same age, and she could easily pretend to be her. I’d have to figure out why she called them.

  It didn’t take me more than a minute to return downstairs. I handed over my ID to the first officer. He glanced at it, and then at me, before handing it over to his partner, who took it outside. I could hear him talking on his radio, asking someone to look me up. The first officer and I stood there, staring at each other.

  ‘All clear,’ the partner said, coming back in and handing my card to the first officer.

  The first officer slowly gave it back to me. ‘So, your family…?’

  ‘It’s the three of us. My mother, my brother and me.’

  ‘Nobody else living here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘By the way, how long have you been home?

  ‘Since yesterday.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you pick up the phone earlier?’

  ‘The phone?’ The unknown number I’d ignored earlier must have been the police calling to check before coming over. Maybe the fake Ms Kim Ji-won who’d called from a pay phone had given the home number as her contact information. It had to be Auntie. ‘I didn’t hear it. Maybe I was in the bathroom.’

  The first policeman’s radio went off. They were being called back to the station for an emergency meeting. The second officer held out his business card. Gundo Patrol Division. ‘When your mother comes home, please ask her to call us right away. If it turns out that she made a false report, she’ll be required to come down to the station.’

  I nodded and watched as they left, closing the front door behind them. I heard the lift whirr. I ran over to the living room balcony and opened the window to look down. The light on their patrol car flashed under the white fog. They soon disappeared towards the back gate.

  Considering that it hadn’t even been a day since Auntie had spoken to me, this was too risky a move. She knew she could get in trouble for making a false report. She must have had her reasons for doing it. I mulled over the possibilities: 1. She knew something. Or she knew something that could lead to the truth; 2. She wanted to check if what she knew was true but was too scared to come over herself; 3. She wanted the police to see if there was anything going on here.

  She would have chosen robbery from a list of possible incidents she could have made up to get the police to come over. She would have had to reveal her true identity to report a missing person, and it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since Mother had disappeared.

  I thought back to when Hae-jin had gone into his room and closed the door to talk to someone. That had to have been Auntie. What had she said to him? What had she said about Mother? About me? She must have been concerned about Mother’s safety, since she’d got the police to come. And since she’d called Hae-jin, the source of her worries must
have been me. I needed to work out what she knew.

  I sat back down at my desk. I took out the journal and flipped to 2015. Only a few entries that year. The same with 2014, 2013, 2012 and earlier.

  He says he wants to go to law school.

  He’s back in school.

  He’s working in public service instead of going into the military.

  He took a break from school.

  He got into an undergraduate law programme.

  He, he, he… It was all about me. There wasn’t a word about Hae-jin, the one she loved so much. Nothing about Yu-min, whom she missed so much. Nothing at all about Father. These records, for whatever reason, were focused entirely on me. But I didn’t see anything special. Most of the entries were only a sentence. The longer entries didn’t reveal much. But then I flipped to late April 2006.

  Thursday 20 April

  His eyes beg me every moment of every day. Please let me get back in the water. How can I ignore eyes like that, coming from my child? Just now, I called Hye-won to see if there’s any way we can let him keep swimming. She said the same thing: ‘No, it will happen again.’

  I know this. Of course I know this. I know my son. I’d basically asked her, Can’t we stop the drug regimen? She told me not to forget: the important thing was not whether Yu-jin became a champion swimmer but whether he could lead a harmless life.

  I have to accept that. That’s my life’s goal, after all, and the purpose of her treatment. For him to live as an average person, unscathed and harmless.

  I felt dizzy. Was I reading this correctly? I read it again, my finger tracing each word.

  I’d stopped swimming at the end of April 2006. That was when I’d approached Auntie, asking for her help to convince Mother to let me carry on. I’d told her everything because I’d so desperately wanted someone to help me. My hopes were crushed and my world was flipped upside down when she’d responded coldly, but I didn’t blame her; I just vowed never to trust her again. But I’d had no idea that the situation had been the exact opposite of what I had believed. Mother had been the one who’d wanted to let me swim and stop the medication. And Auntie was the one to disagree. The most important decision in my life had been made not by my mother but by her younger sister, a woman who hadn’t given birth to me, brought me up, or even loved me.

  I remembered how I felt on the day I was deregistered as an athlete. I remembered the anger burning in my heart and the sobs I had pushed deep down my throat. I remembered how Hae-jin had stood at the entrance to the roof, feeling awful for me and not knowing what to do, as though it was all his fault that this was happening. Mother hadn’t even come up to the roof. When I came down to the living room, she’d just asked flatly, ‘Have you had something to eat?’ And it was Auntie who made her do that.

  I pushed down the hot rage that bubbled up. I tried to keep a level head. I struggled to sift the truth from the confusing sentences. Did ‘live as an average person, unscathed and harmless’ mean ‘live without seizures’? But that didn’t make sense in my gut. I turned it and flipped it around in my mind, but I kept coming to the same conclusion. You didn’t become an unscathed, harmless being just because you stopped having seizures. That meant that the millions of people who went about their lives without having seizures were unscathed and harmless. The world wasn’t like that.

  So this was what that meant: for him to live without being dangerous, he has to take the medication. Which meant: with medication, he won’t be a dangerous person. Why would I be dangerous? And why did I need to be medicated? Was it to suppress the seizures, or was it to achieve Mother and Auntie’s goal? I had to figure out what the pills did to me.

  I typed in ‘Remotrol’ in the search bar on my phone. I already knew most of what I found. The medication was to treat epilepsy, manic depression and behavioural disorders. Nobody had said I had manic depression or behavioural disorders. But epilepsy… I could only remember having suffered two seizures. Then I found something that might contradict that diagnosis. Seizures in the temporal lobe have been reported for long-term patients who did not slowly wean themselves off the medication. Was this what had happened to me? Did the seizures come back when I stopped taking the pills, or were they mere side effects of stopping cold turkey? The answer had to be in the journal. I didn’t skim even a single sentence as I flipped back through the pages. The previous time Mother had mentioned medication was 2002.

  Thursday 11 April

  He was practically dead all week. The side effects are at their peak. He complains of headaches, tinnitus, lethargy. He competed yesterday, but feeling the way he was feeling, he came in 0.45 seconds too late to be considered for a medal. I can still see him looking up at the scoreboard after he hit the touchpad. His eyes were angry.

  He didn’t sleep all night. I could hear him in bed, groaning and moaning like his teeth were being pulled without an anaesthetic. Pure rage. He didn’t let me try to help. He is so angry at his situation. He probably hates me for making him take the medication.

  I paced in front of his room. I’m not sure I can live with this decision.

  She was wrong about something, though. The most painful thing for me wasn’t the side effects or losing; it was the punishment of not being able to go to the pool any time I broke Mother’s rules. I couldn’t go for two days if I broke one, four days if I broke two. Sometimes, if I broke three or more or a really critical rule, I was banned indefinitely until Mother felt like letting me go back.

  I swear I tried my best to follow her rules. But sometimes I couldn’t understand what constituted conforming to them. I couldn’t understand which behaviours were in the same category as a rule. Like how borrowing something in secret and forgetting to return it was the same as stealing, or how not acknowledging the truth was the same as lying, or how getting back at someone was the same as being violent.

  The autumn of my fourth-grade year, one month before we moved to Incheon, was when I was indefinitely banned from the pool for the first time. I got home after practice and Mother’s voice flew over from the living room. ‘Han Yu-jin. Come here and sit down.’

  She was sitting on the sofa with a box in front of her on the table. I knew that box. I knew what was in it, too – a butterfly hairpin, a sparkling headband, a plastic figurine, a key chain, a coin purse, a mirror, a sanitary pad, an eraser, a pencil case, a black one-piece bathing suit, a swimming cap that looked like a penguin…

  I put down my bag and sat next to her.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked, pointing at the box.

  I glanced at the name Han Yu-min written on the corner of the box with a marker.

  ‘Don’t disappoint me. Don’t lie to me. I found this behind your bookcase.’

  I wasn’t planning on lying. It was Yu-min’s box, given to him by Mother so he could keep small objects in one place, like blocks or screws or BB gun pellets. Mother would know that better than anyone: she was the one who’d written his name on it. All I did was put in random things I’d secretly borrowed from other people. Usually girls. A girl I liked or didn’t like or one I just knew or someone I didn’t know or a sloppy one who liked to toss her things around everywhere. At first I did it for fun. Then it became a game. I began raising the stakes, trying to grab things that were harder to get. Like that sanitary pad.

  ‘Yu-min gave it to me,’ I said, meeting Mother’s eyes.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I was in third grade.’

  We stared at each other.

  ‘So you’re saying you started this last year.’

  I should have told her that I didn’t know how the box ended up in my room. ‘No, this is all his stuff. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it. I forgot about it after Yu-min died.’

  Mother didn’t question me any further or tell me a story from the Bible about not stealing or lying. Instead, she told me I was barred from the pool. I had to miss practice. The sentence was indefinite. All because I’d broken important rules: I’d stolen, lied and insulted my brother
. Until we moved to Incheon, I wasn’t even allowed to go near a pool. Every night, I tried to quench my desire to be in the water by pretending to swim face-down on my bed.

  Mother knew exactly how to get under my skin, what to take away from me in order to get me to submit. The guilt coming from one part of her heart would have been offset by confessing in her journal just how painful it was to bully me. I turned the page.

  Monday 4 February

  I am realising how desire can make someone superhuman. He no longer complains about the side effects. He takes the pills willingly and doesn’t spit them out in secret. At 5.30 every morning he wakes himself up and gets ready. After morning practice he eats his breakfast in the car on his way to school. I thought he’d get exhausted and give up if I forced him to train and study at the same time, but he doesn’t even show how hard it is. It’s been like that since December, when he asked me if epilepsy was the disease where you foam at the mouth and have seizures.

  I understood what he was really asking me. Had he discovered what the medication is supposed to treat? Who knows? Maybe he walked into a pharmacy and asked someone. Maybe he looked it up online. All I knew was that he was afraid. He was afraid of foaming at the mouth and flailing in the pool. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to keep swimming.

  I didn’t correct him. It’s better to let him think that. I know what he was hoping I would say. I thought maybe he’d give up swimming, but he’s accepted the medication and the side effects as part of his life. He seems to believe that if he just takes the medicine he can continue to swim.

  I feel so guilty every time I see him completely spent. Hye-won says that now that it’s come to this, I should use his misunderstanding for our purposes. She says I should think of it as something that will keep him under control, like a braking system against the possibility of him stopping the medication. I asked her if that’s really the right thing to do, and she told me it was too late to talk about right or wrong.