Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  “Any plans for marriage, Wonjjang?” Had someone talked to his mother? He scowled, and more flashes went off in his face.

  “Come on, Umma, I’ll warm it up when I get home,” he said in a resigned tone.

  “Bring Zolaman along if you want,” she added.

  “He doesn’t work with us anymore … ” It had been three years since he’d gone freelance.

  “Okay, then, that cat girl. She isn’t married, is she? The Japanese one with the furry white costume?”

  “Uniform, Umma. And I think she has plans already … ” he said. He was sure she had plans. With Blastman. “Anyway, she already has a boyfriend.”

  “With the recent news of cuts to shoopah sponsorships, do you have any new leads on nongovernmental funding?” Flash, flash.

  “Whatever. Force her to come. You’re her boss, right?”

  “Yes, Umma.”

  “You can do that. It’s your right!”

  “Yes, Umma.” But, really, he couldn’t.

  He must have sounded dubious. His mother said, “Maybe she has a sister. I want to see my grandchildren before I die.”

  “Yes, Umma.”

  “And don’t take too long. The food’s going to be cold soon.”

  “Yes, Um … ”

  The connection cut before he finished saying Umma, which was what he’d expected: she’d said everything she wanted to, after all.

  Jang Won turned to look at his teammates, all of them chatting with the friendly, loving mob of otaku, reporters, and other maniacs. Neko stood with Blastman; E-Gui stood with Laotzu. Even the lawyer in the fancy suit was chatting with the crowd. Jang Won stood alone in his sweaty slamdex uniform.

  He stayed to watch Kim’s shock cage being removed from the cargo hold and banged into a high-security truck before he turned his back on the cheering crowd and hurried through the terminal in search of a toilet. He could come back to talk to the reporters, he supposed, and sign a few autographs. But, first, nature called.

  He found a washroom that was mostly empty and went in. The worst part about wearing a slamdex bodysuit as a uniform was that you had to pull most of it off, even just to pee. He went into a stall, shut the door, and peeled the bodysuit open slowly, so it wouldn’t lock into shape. Then he lowered himself slowly down onto the toilet, vowing to himself to cut back on the Pocari Sweat ion drinks in the future, even if they were complimentary.

  After relieving himself and sliding his uniform back on, he stepped out of the stall and found himself face to face with a tall, slim young woman. Her hair was cut in a neat bob, and she had big, pretty, limpid brown eyes.

  “Hi-i-i!” she said excitedly, waving the way teenage girls do when they see an old friend from elementary school. She was wearing a Wonjjang uniform, same logo as his, but tightly fitted to her body. She couldn’t be a day over seventeen, he guessed. Maybe less. She stepped forward, toward him, and he felt a rush of attraction to her, which he quickly suppressed. She was a high-school girl, for heaven’s sake. But he felt just a little drunk being near her like that.

  “You’re in a men’s room,” he said carefully.

  “I know, I just wanted so much to meet you.”

  “You can’t be in here,” he said, just as a man in a business suit hurried into the washroom. On the way to the urinals, the businessman stared at the two of them. Wonjjang caught a whiff of hard liquor, but he couldn’t be sure whether it had come from the man … or the girl. The guy settled down to business at the urinal farthest from them.

  “I just wanted to tell you how much I admire you,” she said, poking a finger into his chest and then tracing soft little circles.

  The businessman glanced back over his shoulder at them while he urinated, eyebrows raised.

  “Thank you, but now you need to go,” Wonjjang said.

  “Let me give you my name card,” she said. “And can I trouble you for a signature?” She pursed her lips pleadingly and leaned forward, looking him in the eye. She held out a pen.

  Wonjjang forced himself to breathe, and said, “Okay.” He took the pen in one hand, and the name card in the other. “Where do you want me to sign?”

  “My suit, of course. On the tummy.” She spread her hands out on her belly, thumbs and forefingers framing the spot she’d chosen.

  Wonjjang stuffed the namecard into one of the pockets inside his cape and bent forward to scribble a signature onto her tummy. He was about to sign when he realized that the businessman was still standing there, at the urinal, but he wasn’t peeing anymore. He was just watching. Wonjjang hesitated, looking at the girl suspiciously.

  “What?” she said.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  The businessman cleared his throat.

  “How old do I look?”

  “Um … ” He hated that response. “Maybe … seventeen?” he lied. His first impulse had been to say sixteen.

  “Ohhh,” she giggled. “Thank you! I’m a college girl, a sophomore. But I’m glad to hear I look so young!”

  Wonjjang relaxed and leaned forward again. He braced the suit with one hand and wrote with the other, guiltily trying to ignore the soft, smooth flesh beneath the spandex.

  “Thank you,” the girl said. She leaned forward and gave him a peck on the cheek, and suddenly he could smell the alcohol again. Then, after a long, very deliberate look, she turned to go. “Sorry, sir,” she called in a high-pitched, well-rehearsed cute voice to the man at the urinal, and hurried out.

  The guy didn’t respond but simply zipped up and left, leaving Wonjjang alone, blushing, in the middle of the airport washroom with the girl’s forgotten black pen in his hand.

  He fished out her card. It read:

  YOU THINK YOU’VE WON?

  WE CAN GET TO YOU ANYTIME.

  WE HAVE AGENTS EVERYWHERE.

  REMEMBER THAT.

  It was signed, too, in scribbly blue ink: KIM NOH WANG.

  Then the pen exploded all over his clean spare uniform.

  An hour later, when Kim and his thugs had been locked up tight in an LG transport bound for the downtown headquarters, Jang Won leaped off the usual spot on the roof of a Samsung highrise a block away from his home. He aimed his body at the balcony adjoining the apartment where he lived with his mother.

  He landed there with the normal, complaint-provoking thud. His mom was lucky: she’d moved the cheap new plastic balcony furniture around since he’d last been home, and he’d only barely escaped crashing right into it. The last set had been fine wicker, smashed to pieces after just such a surprise rearrangement. He sometimes suspected she’d done it as an excuse to go furniture shopping, and that the scoldings had been just to keep up appearances.

  She popped her head out the kitchen window and called out, “So noisy? Come on, hurry up!” She pulled her head back inside quickly.

  “Yes, Umma,” he replied. He wasn’t a particularly dutiful son, just hungry, and he knew better than to talk back when food was waiting on the table.

  He slid open the balcony door and slipped off his shoes. Carrying them with one hand, he rushed to the apartment’s front door and slid them into the shoe rack, and then hurried to the kitchen. The heady scent of fermented bean-paste stew filled the air.

  Just as he reached out for the water faucet and soap, his mother said, over her shoulder, “Wash your hands, Jang Won.” Her back was turned to him, and she was stirring the stew.

  “Yes, Umma,” he said. Suddenly he didn’t want to wash his hands. He wondered whether maybe she’d developed some kind of mutant superpower when he wasn’t looking, maybe telepathy? She’d been drinking the same water that had transformed him, after all. He put the soap down before lathering his hands, a little annoyed.

  “Use soap,” she said, without turning around at all.

  “Eugh,” Jang Won muttered, annoyed. He grabbed the soap and lathered his hands up, rinsing them quickly.

  “Too bad you took so long. It’s never so good, overcooked.” The table was set out with
utensils, side dishes, and ridiculously heaped individual bowls of steamed rice.

  “Sorry, Umma,” he said, sat down at the table, and started picking with his chopsticks at her still fridge-cold side dishes. His mother’s talent for making delicious side dishes was her most attractive quality, his father had always said … until he’d passed away from stomach cancer. The kimchi was perfect: spicy and mind-numbingly sour. Around the table were laid out dishes of anchovies in red pepper sauce, silky tofu with red pepper and soy sauce, and fresh cucumber slices beside a small dish of red-pepper paste.

  “Watch out, this is hot,” his mother said, and turned. From the stove to the table she carried a gigantic ttukbaegi—a kiln-fired clay bowl, heated right on the stove and bubbling with soup—with a curved pair of metal kitchen-pliers, setting it down on a soft table mat. In the enormous bowl, pieces of potato and slices of green hot pepper swirled in a thick brownish broth.

  As he raised his chopsticks to nab one of the hunks of potato from the broth, his mother whacked at his right hand with the hot pliers. “Put those down. Can’t you see we’re expecting a guest?”

  He winced and looked around the table. Place settings for three. The jjigae wasn’t just for him after all.

  “Who’s coming over, Umma?”

  “Aigo,” she lamented. “You know, when I was your age, I’d already had you. You don’t want me to see my grandsons?”

  Jang Won shook his head. “Umma! I’m too busy to get married … ”

  “And who will cook for my chaesa?” She was too young to worry about death-anniversary ceremonies, but Jang Won knew better than to point that out and spoil her fun.

  “Look, I promise I’ll get married someday. But now’s just not a good time.”

  “Good time, good time,” she mumbled, and switched to heavily accented English: “Have a good time.”

  “Um-ma!” He put his chopsticks down, ready for yet another argument. “Look, the LG Shoopah Division is going through a refocusing period, and working closely with the government now … ”

  “Yes, son, I read the newspaper, too. I think you should hurry up and get married now, while you still have a job. If only you’d taken government work while you could have. In my day, men jumped at government jobs … ”

  Of course, in her day, very few of those men she’d known had been mutants capable of jumping a kilometre into the air.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Go answer that,” she commanded Jang Won. He hesitated, but before she could repeat herself, he rose and went to the front door.

  There’s a common saying in Korea, which is that there are three genders: male, female, and ajumma. Say that to your average country ajumma, and she might just whack you. Most younger Koreans take that as proof of the claim: ajummas—middle-aged women—somehow stop being simply women and become some kind of scary, dangerous curly-haired hybrid of the scariest traits of masculine and feminine.

  What Jang Won found standing at the door when he answered it was an ugly little ajumma sporting the most mercilessly permed head of hair he’d ever seen. The ajumma-perm to end all ajumma-perms.

  “Park Jang Won-sshi!” the little ajumma said in a deep, rasping little voice, and she coughed out a nasty-sounding, high-pitched cackle.

  He nodded—politely enough for her to take it as a bow of greeting—even though her smile was perhaps the most revolting one he’d ever seen.

  “Do I know you?” he blinked. He hoped not.

  She shook her head vigorously, and said, “Not yet, but you will! I’m Mrs. Oh, your mother’s newly hired matchmaker,” she said with a wicked grin, rubbing her hands together as she pushed in past him. “And, my dear bouncing boy, I’m going to marry you off pronto!”

  Jang Won shuddered with a dread that even the threat of a chicken-plague outbreak hadn’t brought over him.

  3. Soju Wanna Be a Hero?

  The day after his team caught Kim Noh Wang, the Madman of Pyongyang, and saved the world from the looming threat of a chicken-plague pandemic, Jang Won did what he did most days: he bounced his way over to the LG Diversified Central Office in downtown Seoul and spent half the day sitting at his desk, signing off on reports and wondering what the next assignment would be.

  It was weird, such a normal day after such a massive success. No celebration, no party … just scattered rumours about new policies, constant congratulations, and piles of paperwork—in triplicate.

  But around lunchtime Big Myoung stopped by his desk.

  “Hey,” Big Myoung said, and grinned. He grinned a lot, probably to show off his gold teeth. He was an old telepath from Jang Won’s hometown, Gumi. He had probably been mutated, like Jang Won, by the phenol and other toxic pollutants that the Doosan Corporation had dumped “by accident” into the Nakdong River, which ran through the town. Jang Won called him “Elder Brother” though they weren’t related: actually, they’d never even met back in Gumi. Already a fixture in the office by the time Jang Won had gotten hired, Big Myoung had come on board twenty years before—in the 1970s, when LG had still just been Lucky Goldstar, a growing electronics, household goods, and superhero-services corporation. His style probably hadn’t changed much since those days, from the look of his flowery shirt and his purple fake-leather jacket. The top few buttons were open, showing off his thick gold chains. He’d been dressing this way since he’d finally discovered that, unlike most men, a telepath never had to dress trendy to impress women. The pendant on the biggest of his gold chains was composed of English letters jammed together: Cambidge Nebaska Hottyz.

  Jang Won wondered to himself what the hell that meant.

  Hi, Elder Brother Big Myoung, Jang Won thought at him. What’s up?

  Office party, tonight, Big Myoung replied telepathically.

  Really? Jang Won tried to convey his relief mentally. Great! My mother’s got this matchmaker coming over again tonight. He picked up an action figure, modelled on himself, from its spot beside his computer. It was a long-ago gift from one of his old co-workers, Wang “Two Blades” Ji Hyun, whose prowess with longswords and shapely behind had won her tons of sponsorships and ad deals and driven her to the peak of shoopah-stardom long ago. No more paperwork in triplicate for her. When she’d quit her job, she’d given him a goodbye present for being a nice boss: a custom-made Wonjjang action figure. Jang Won pressed down on it, and the springs in its legs compressed.

  Big Myoung grinned. Maybe it is time you got married, Wonjjang.

  “Not a chance,” Jang Won said aloud, and released the figurine. It bounced into the air. Luckily, he caught it as he turned to see his boss strut into the huge shared office. Big Myoung followed his gaze.

  Lee Dong Jae, the operations manager for the Special Talents Division of LG Seoul, had entered the room with a serious look on his face. Cupping his hands to his mouth, he hollered: “Everybody!”

  Once the whole office had stopped what it was doing and turned to listen, he said, “Good afternoon! We’ve decided that this evening we’ll host an important dinner meeting to celebrate recent successes and discuss the future of LG Superheroes Division. All food and drinks will be complimentary, of course. Everybody is expected to attend. That is all. Thank you!”

  As Lee left the room, applause crescendoed and then died out, replaced by the soft, continuous murmur of voices.

  “Here we go again,” said Jang Won aloud.

  “Mmm hmmm,” replied Big Myoung. I guess you won’t have to lie your way out of the matchmaker appointment this time.

  I never lie … , Jang Won thought-mumbled.

  Big Myoung pushed his sunglasses up his nose and grinned so wide you could see the gold crowns holding his molars together.

  In five thousand years of culture—or so high-school teachers had always claimed—many wonderful things had been created, invented, and conceived by the genius of the Korean people: the world’s first movable metal-type printing machine; the Hangeul alphabet; the miraculous dish known as kimchi; the most complex realization o
f Confucianism on Earth. But to Jang Won, none of these creations even held a candle to soju.

  Soju was magical: a glue for friends, a remedy for anger, a succouring balm in times of pain and heartbreak. Soju warmed the heart on lonesome, rainy nights and dampened the fires of hopeless passions and sorrows. Jang Won had occasionally heard foreigners compare it to vodka, but it was nothing like that measly Russian stuff. It was miraculous, an almost holy liquor: made from the rice, pale sweet potatoes, and wheat of his homeland, distilled in the blessed factories of the Hite and Chamisul corporations. And it was dirt cheap.

  Chilled green bottles of the stuff cluttered all the tables at which Jang Won and his co-workers were seated: soju and grilled meat, they were as inseparable as man and woman, hammer and nail, baby and mother’s breast.

  Soju plus meat was a tried and true formula. But Director Lee’s latest discovery was a coup—a restaurant that offered the best soju, delectable pork, and private rooms where food and liquor could be accompanied by the other remaining joy of life: singing. A karaoke restaurant: this was a revelation!

  “There are only a few of these in Seoul,” said Lee. “It’s a new kind of business … So everybody, let’s enjoy! Great job, everyone, especially Park Jang Won and his team! Kombei!” he bellowed his toast, raising his tiny soju glass.

  “Kombei!” the entire staff roared back joyfully, glasses raised. In unison, they knocked back their soju in a single shot and applauded.

  Jang Won politely grabbed a bottle and refilled Director Lee’s glass first. Lee nodded appreciatively, and declared loudly, “Let’s eat!”

  With that came trays of raw pork and beef to be grilled at the tables and, with the meat, more soju and, with the grilling, singing and drinking and mouthfuls of grilled pork wrapped in lettuce, the bite of garlic and hot pepper paste … and singing, and again and again the little cups of soju.

  The shop-talk at the managers’ table, though, bored Jang Won. He made an effort to nod at all the uninteresting observations, polite and insincere flatteries, and uptight jokes, but his eye kept straying to the foreigners’ table, off to one side. They seemed to be enjoying themselves less than their Korean co-workers, who were vigorously drinking, singing, and eating. Neko especially drew his gaze. Dressed in a blue pinstripe pantsuit, she was speaking politely to Kevin—that is, Blastman, who had come to the party in typically undignified American street clothes: jeans with holes in the knees, and a T-shirt. Real shoopahs wear suits, Jang Won thought viciously, and noted that, in street clothes, Blastman even had a bit of a potbelly.