The Good Son

by You-Jeong Jeong

  ‘Whatever,’ I said, glaring out through the windscreen. Red light.

  ‘I never imagined this when I got home yesterday,’ Hae-jin said. We stopped at the lights and Hello’s owner stopped behind us instead of pulling up next to us. ‘Or even this morning,’ he continued. ‘I never thought you and I would be in Mother’s car like this, in this situation. I could tell something was wrong. When I was waiting for you to come downstairs earlier, I was thinking, is this a dream? None of it feels real.’

  I bit on the inside of my cheek. It sounded so much like the kind of things Mother had written in her journal – I love you but I have to do this, this is harder for me than it is for you, even though you’re the one this is being done to, and I want you to know that.

  ‘And now I’m driving you to the police station.’

  The light turned green.

  ‘I have a request,’ I said as he pulled away.

  ‘What?’ He checked the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Can I just have twenty minutes?’

  He glanced at me suspiciously.

  ‘I want to go by the observatory.’

  ‘The Milky Way Observatory?’

  What other observatory was there? ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to run away. You’re the one driving anyway. I won’t get very far.’

  ‘I’m not worried about that, it’s just —’

  ‘I just want to stop there before going to the police station.’ I remembered the countless nights I had suffered from headaches and tinnitus. The countless mornings I’d sprinted to the observatory. The railing along the cliff, Yongi’s across the way. That was when I didn’t know anything, when I still dreamed of declaring my independence from Mother. The bridge came up ahead. ‘Just one last time. I won’t be able to come back here again. I don’t need to get out of the car; we can just drive past it.’

  Hae-jin drove past the bridge. At the sea wall, Hello’s owner turned right towards Incheon and we turned left towards the marine park. The road was darker and emptier than usual, with hardly any cars. The bus stop was deserted too. I glanced at Hae-jin. He could let me out here and I could do us both a favour and vanish. I knew he could feel me looking at him, but he just kept staring straight ahead. I looked at Yongi’s, still brightly lit even though it was closed. Mr Yongi would be inside, transforming himself into a businessman coming home from a trip. The patrol cars that had been parked in front of the ferry dock weren’t there now.

  Ten minutes later, we were on the suspension bridge; we had entered the point of no return. We passed a patrol car halfway across the bridge, on its way out after circling the park. Hopefully it would continue without paying attention to us. It disappeared behind us. But when we entered the park, it appeared again and began to flash its lights.

  ‘They want us to pull over,’ Hae-jin remarked.

  A bitter taste spread inside my mouth. This was the variable I’d been worried about. It was going to get harder. The sign we’d just passed indicated that the cliff was less than five hundred metres away, down a stretch of road as straight and wide as an airstrip. It was time.

  ‘Gun it.’

  ‘What?’ Hae-jin looked at me.

  I opened my window. ‘I said gun it, bastard.’ The wind whipped through the window and snow rushed inside.

  The patrol car switched its siren on.

  Hae-jin put a hand on the window buttons. ‘They want us to —’

  I rammed my left elbow into his eye. He gasped and let go of the steering wheel; his head and upper body snapped back. His foot slipped off the pedal. I shoved a leg into the driver’s side to slam down the accelerator, pressing my upper body into his face and torso. I grabbed the wheel and held him down. One, two, three…

  Mother’s car, with its powerful engine, let out a low roar and sped up. Hae-jin struggled under me but I didn’t budge. We raced towards the cliff. The yellow metal railing came towards us. I took my foot off the pedal and slid back into my seat just as we smashed through the railing and burst into the air, swirling white with snow.

  I felt myself levitate. Time slowed to a crawl, just the way it had done when I’d killed Auntie last night. All the nerves in my body became eyes, reading the situation moment by moment. Then the seat belt caught me as I lurched forward, and my head and neck snapped back. There was an enormous crash. The car pitched. The airbags deployed, then deflated as water poured in through the open window.

  Darkness and quiet descended on us. The car was nearly vertical in the water, about to flip over. The waves coursed in. The water was up to my neck. A chill seeped into my bones. I could hear the siren above us. Soon more would assemble, summoned by radio. It would take a little longer for them to get down to the water though, or for the marine police to mobilise. The car would sink before then.

  I unfastened my seat belt and escaped through the open window. I braced myself against the body of the car, held onto the roof, and took off my shirt and trousers. The searchlight cut through the water. That helped me figure out which direction I had to go in. It would have been easier if the police hadn’t shown up; I could have just climbed up the cliff. Then I wouldn’t have had to swim through open water in a snowstorm.

  I breathed deeply a few times, then closed my eyes. This wasn’t the ocean; it was a swimming pool. I was about to begin the 1,500 metres, my main event. This was the last competition of my life. I ignored the fact that I hadn’t trained since I was fifteen. I forced myself to forget that I hadn’t actually been in the water since last summer, in Cebu. I trusted the alluring voice of the optimist in my head: You can do this. At most it’s two kilometres. That’s nothing. Take your time.

  My heart settled down, beating regularly as it always did. I watched the ocean as it swelled. The tide would be rising at about seven to fifteen kilometres an hour, two to three times faster than my pace. If I rode along with the tide, it wouldn’t take me more than half an hour.

  Right before I took off, I looked at the darkened car, sinking below in the depths. Hae-jin was already underwater. I could see thick fog and snow above the surface. I didn’t have time to wait for the searchlight to loop back. The cold air felt like an axe. I pushed off and began my strokes. There was a long way to go, and my entire body felt like ice. I felt a sharp pain in my side, but I tried to breathe normally. Getting tense now would mean death. If I pushed myself too hard, I would sink before getting halfway to shore. I had to keep calm, not rush, and ride with the water. The searchlight approached me gradually and went past me. Then it became even darker. The blackness was so thick that I wondered if I could scoop a mound of it out of the air. The fog grew denser. I couldn’t see. The ocean sloshed heavily over me. I felt myself growing weak. I went under the surface often. I was having a hard time breathing. Cold salty water rushed in every time I opened my mouth, and my limbs stiffened. I wasn’t swimming; I was just splashing. My mind skipped through time and space, rushing towards the past.

  I was back at the cliff on that island, playing Survival with Yu-min. I was on the ground after being hit. I heard his laughter ringing out behind me as I held my head in my hands. And his voice: You’re still not dead?

  Just you wait, the voice inside me answered. I think I’m going to die soon.

  I could hear the bell ringing from far away.

  Stop there! he yelled. I said stop! A pebble flew past. Everything was disorientating. The bell was crashing in my ears. Stop, I said!

  My body rose and crested over a black wave. My head dipped underwater and managed to resurface. Yu-min’s voice disappeared. As did the cliff, the pine trees, the sound of the bell. Lights were moving quickly in the fog. I thought I could hear a faint motor. That must be the police boat, going out for rescue.

  Darkness pressed in on me. The ocean rushed over my body. The last breath of air leaked out of my lungs. My body was depleted, and I felt my will to live subside. Was this what it felt like for Yu-min and Father? Was this how they gave up? The waves turned me over. I let go and lay back in the shif
ting water. It had stopped snowing. The sky opened, and light from the stars poured down on me. As it touched my forehead, a voice whispered, Mother was right.

  EPILOGUE

  That night is still as vivid as though it was yesterday. Only the moments when death seemed imminent remain foggy. I’m not sure if I lost consciousness. What I do know is that I smacked my head on something and lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was draped on a mooring cable at the dock, like the girl with the earring. The sea was covered in white, the fog so thick that you couldn’t tell which way was up. I could hear the sirens in the park and boats criss-crossing out on the water. Patrol cars rushed back and forth along the road by the sea wall. The dock, though, was deserted. I had managed to return to the cold, dark banks of life.

  I didn’t have time to congratulate myself for coming back from the brink of death. I felt heavy, as though I was wearing cast-iron armour. It was hard to pick myself up out of the water. Everything was dark, and I couldn’t feel anything. My teeth were chattering and my joints creaked. Cold air slashed the inside of my throat. The same words were still ringing in my ears. Mother was right.

  Dozens of fragments floated by: me running determinedly towards the bell tower, Yu-min yelling at me to stop as he rang the bell, me leaping over the railing and throwing a punch, Yu-min staggering, one hand still on the cord, me kicking him in the chest, him arcing below the cliff, the cord fluttering in his grip. The ocean that opened its mouth to swallow him whole, how I felt as I watched him disappear. I remember what I was thinking: Don’t kid yourself. The person who stays alive is the winner.

  The street lamp by the dock was glowing yellow. I gripped the metal railing of the steps and forced my legs to climb them, breathing heavily. It was as if I were climbing the Himalayas while battling altitude sickness. Yongi’s, just above me, might as well have been Pluto. I kept going. It wasn’t a matter of will, and it certainly wasn’t a miracle. It was the power of simplicity; I concentrated solely on where to place my foot next. When I got up to the sea wall, the dark shack greeted me. I was grateful that Mr Yongi had gone home. I was moved by my luck: no cars or people were on the road when I emerged. I broke into the shack. It was easier to breathe in here. I was overwhelmed with relief. I was going to make it.

  I searched and found a thin lighter shaped like a gun. I clicked the trigger and a flame sprang up. Now I could see. I spotted Mr Yongi’s uniform hanging up as usual. I dried my hair and body with a rag and put on his trousers, jacket, cap, disposable mask, thick hiking socks and rubber boots. The trousers were too short, but now was not the time to worry about style. I was just grateful I managed to fit into the clothes at all.

  I dragged myself onto the intercity bus to Ansan, where I spent the night in a twenty-four-hour bathhouse, washing off the salt, sweating it out, and taking a deep nap in a room with a heated floor. The next day, at dawn, I caught the train to Mokpo. Twelve hours later, I boarded a shrimp boat as an apprentice. For the next year, I roamed the sea, sleeping in the belly of the boat, cooking, cleaning and helping with the nets.

  All I knew about what had happened to Hae-jin was what I’d seen on YTN News on the train. The police had recovered the car and his body. It appeared that he had tried to escape from his seat belt. So in that last moment when I looked back before swimming for shore, he had been struggling in the dark by himself. I took this in more calmly than I’d expected, though a lump remained lodged in my throat for a long time. What were we to each other? Were we brothers? I still didn’t know. What I did know was that if I had left just a little earlier, or Hae-jin had figured it all out just a little later, we could have kept our relationship intact.

  Beyond that, I was in the dark about the investigation. The boat had a radio, of course, but I didn’t have time to listen to the news. For the very first time in my life, I was scraping by, focused only on surviving.

  Early this morning, I stepped on shore with the little money I’d earned in my pocket. First I went to a public bath for the first time in a year. I washed, shaved and moisturised. Then I bought new clothes and a hat and trainers, ate something and drank a coffee. Hae-jin loved coffee. I went to a nearby internet café. Sitting among pathetic gamers, I scrolled through the news from a year ago.

  They’d called it ‘the Razor Killings’. Hae-jin had been pegged as the killer. The police concluded that he’d killed a stranger, his adoptive mother and her sister before trying to flee overseas. When he failed at that, he killed himself. All the evidence supported that conclusion, including the razor in his jeans pocket, the Private Lesson jacket discovered in the table on the roof of the flat, and the ticket to Rio he’d reserved with his mother’s card. A neighbour had reported seeing Hae-jin forcing his adoptive brother, who’d clearly been beaten up, into a car and driving him to the park. The brother was deemed missing. They searched for three days but couldn’t find anything other than his clothes. They thought it was possible he’d survived, since he’d once been a competitive swimmer, but no clues or witnesses had turned up to give credence to that theory. Reflecting the shocking nature of the crime, several hundred headlines had been posted over a couple of days, and each article had thousands of comments. The substance of many of them was the same: What do you expect when you bring someone else’s child into your family?

  I closed the browser. While I’d been roaming the seas, the shock had worn off, and by now everyone had forgotten about the missing brother. I was about to turn off the computer when I decided to log into Hae-jin’s email. It wasn’t hard to remember his password. There were hundreds of unread messages, most of them promotional offers. I flipped back twenty pages or so before I found the email that had been sent around this time last year, confirming the purchase of an e-ticket to Rio.

  Passenger name: KIM HAE-JIN

  Booking reference: 1967-3589

  Ticket number: 1809703202793

  He had never opened the email. He wouldn’t have had the time before he left the flat. And he wasn’t able to open it afterwards. If I could have said my goodbyes the way I had planned, I wouldn’t be opening it now either. The Christmas present he never received had been embedded deep in my consciousness over the last year. Many nights, as I floated out in the ocean, I thought of our final wishes. If he’d let me go that day, what would have happened? Would he have been in Rio for Christmas? But he hadn’t let me go, and because of that, only my wish came true. Granted, it was a shrimp boat, not a yacht, and I’d worked myself nearly to death every day. Still, I had found peace. For the past year, I’d lived like an animal, without a thought. Now I’d returned to the world, but I wasn’t so sure I could live as a human, among other people.

  I closed the browser and left the café. I walked around, looking for somewhere to sleep. The streets were deserted, the night was still and the sea air was wet with fog. Up ahead, in the mist, someone was walking. I heard her footsteps. The smell of blood wafted towards me with the salty wind.