by Un-su Kim
By the time Reseng returned to his tent, the old man was watering the flowers again. Just as before, he tipped the watering can with care, as if pouring tea. Then, just as before, he spoke to the flowers and trees and gestured at them. Reseng made a minor adjustment to the scope. The familiar-looking flower grew sharp and distinct in the lens and blurred again. He still could not remember its name. He should have asked the old man.
It was a nice garden. Two persimmon trees stood nonchalantly in the courtyard, while the flowers in the garden beds waited patiently for their season to come. Santa came up to the man and rubbed his head against his thigh. The old man gave the dog a pat. They suited each other. The old man threw the deflated soccer ball across the garden. While Santa ran to fetch it, the old man watered more flowers. What was he saying to them? On closer inspection, he did indeed have a slight limp. If only Reseng had asked him last night for the story of what happened to his left leg. Not that it made any difference. Santa came back with the ball. This time the old man threw it further. Santa seemed to be in a good mood because he ran around in circles before racing off to the end of the garden to fetch the ball. The old man looked like he had finished watering. He put down the watering can and smiled brightly. Was he laughing? Was that carved wooden mask of a face really laughing?
Reseng fixed the crosshairs on the old man’s chest and pulled the trigger.
ACHILLES’ HEEL
Reseng was found in a garbage can. Or, who knows, maybe he was born in that garbage can.
Old Raccoon had served as Reseng’s foster father for the last twenty-eight years. Whenever he got to drinking, he liked to tease Reseng about his origins. ‘You were found in a garbage can in front of a nunnery. Or maybe that garbage can was your mother. Hard to say. Either way, it’s pretty pathetic. But look on the bright side. A garbage can used by nuns is bound to be the cleanest garbage can around.’
Reseng wasn’t bothered by Old Raccoon’s teasing. He decided that being born from a clean garbage can had to be better than being born to the type of parents who’d dump their baby in the garbage.
Reseng lived in the orphanage run by the convent until he was four, after which he was adopted by Old Raccoon and lived in his library. Had Reseng continued to grow up in the orphanage, where divine blessings showered down like spring sunshine and kindly nuns devoted themselves to the careful raising of orphans, his life might have turned out very differently. Instead, he grew up in a library crawling with assassins, hired guns and bounty hunters. Just as a plant grows wherever it sets down roots, so all your life’s tragedies spring from wherever you first set your feet. And Reseng was far too young to leave the place where he’d set down roots.
The day he turned nine, Reseng was snuggled up in Old Raccoon’s rattan rocking chair, reading The Tales of Homer. Paris, the idiot prince of Troy, was right in the middle of pulling back his bowstring to sink an arrow into the heel of Achilles, the hero whom Reseng had come to love over the course of the book. As everyone knows, this was a very tense moment, and so Reseng was completely unaware that Old Raccoon had been standing behind him for a while, watching him read. Old Raccoon looked angry.
‘Who taught you to read?’
Old Raccoon had never sent Reseng to school. Whenever Reseng asked, ‘How come I don’t go to school like the other kids?’ Old Raccoon had retorted, ‘Because school doesn’t teach you anything about life.’ Old Raccoon was right on that point. Reseng never attended school, and yet in all of his thirty-two years, it had not once caused him any problems. Problems? Ha! What kind of problems would he have had anyway? And so Old Raccoon looked gobsmacked to discover Reseng, who hadn’t spent a single day in school, reading a book. Worse, the look on his face said he felt betrayed.
As Reseng stared up at him without answering, Old Raccoon switched to the low, deep voice he used to intimidate people.
‘I said: Who. Taught. You. To. Read?’
His voice was menacing, as if he was going to catch the person who had taught Reseng how to read and do something to them right then and there. In a small, quavering voice, Reseng said that no one had taught him. Old Raccoon still had his scary face on; it was clear he didn’t believe a word of it, and so Reseng explained that he’d taught himself how to read from picture books. Old Raccoon smacked Reseng hard across the face.
As Reseng struggled to stifle his sobs, he swore that he really had learned to read from picture books. It was true. After he’d managed to dig through the two hundred thousand books crammed on the shelves of Old Raccoon’s gloomy, labyrinthine library to find the few books worth looking at (a comic book adaptation about American slavery, a cheap adult magazine and a dog-eared picture book filled with giraffes and rhinoceroses), he’d deciphered how the Korean alphabet worked by matching pictures to words. Reseng pointed to his stash of picture books in the corner of the study. Old Raccoon hobbled over on his lame leg and examined each one. He looked dumbfounded; he was clearly wondering how on earth those shoddy books had found their way into his library. Hobbling back, he stared at Reseng, his eyes still filled with suspicion, and yanked the hardback copy of The Tales of Homer from his hands. He looked back and forth between the book and Reseng for the longest time.
‘Reading books will doom you to a life of fear and shame. Now, do you still feel like reading?’
Reseng stared blankly at him—staring blankly was all he could do, as he had no idea what Old Raccoon was talking about. Fear and shame? As if a mere nine-year-old could comprehend such a life! The only life a boy who’d just turned nine could imagine was complaining about a dinner that someone else had prepared. A life in which random events just kept happening to you, as impossible to stop as a piece of onion that keeps slipping out of your sandwich. What Old Raccoon said sounded less like a choice and more like a threat, or a curse being put on him. It was like God saying to Adam and Eve, ‘If you eat this fruit, you’ll be cast out of Paradise, so do you still want to eat it?’ Reseng was afraid. He had no idea what this choice meant. But Old Raccoon was staring him down and waiting for an answer. Would he eat the apple, or not?
At last Reseng stiffly raised his head and composed himself, fists clenched, his face a picture of determination, and said, ‘I will read. Now, give me back my book.’ Old Raccoon gazed down at the boy, who was gritting his teeth, barely containing his tears, and handed back The Tales of Homer.
Reseng’s demand to retrieve his book did not come from an actual desire to read or to defy Old Raccoon. It was because he was clueless about this whole life-of-fear-and-shame thing.
After Old Raccoon left the room, Reseng wiped away the tears that had only then begun to spill and curled up into a ball on the rattan rocker. He looked around at Old Raccoon’s dim study, which grew dark early because the windows faced northwest, at the books stacked to the ceiling in some complex and incomprehensible order, at the maze of shelves quietly staked out by dust, and wondered why Old Raccoon was so upset about him reading. Even now, at the age of thirty-two, whenever he pictured Old Raccoon, who had spent most of his life sitting in the corner of the library with a book in his hands, he couldn’t wrap his head around it. For that nine-year-old, the whole incident had felt as awful as if someone with a pocket full of sweets had stolen Reseng’s single sweet from his mouth.
‘Stupid old fart, I hope you get the shits!’
Reseng put his curse on Old Raccoon and wiped the last of his tears with the back of his hand. Then he reopened the book. How could he not? Reading was no longer just some simple way to pass the time. It was now this boy’s Great and Inherent Right, a right won with much difficulty, even if it meant being hit and cursed to live a Life of Fear and Shame. Reseng returned to the scene in The Tales of Homer where Paris pulls back his bowstring. The scene where the arrow leaves the string and hurtles towards his hero, Achilles. The scene where that cursed arrow pierces Achilles’ heel.
Reseng trembled as Achilles bled to death at the top of Hisarlik Hill. He had been certain his hero would easily
pluck that damn arrow from his heel and immediately run his spear through Paris’s heart. But the unthinkable had happened. What had gone wrong? How could the son of a god die? How could a hero with an immortal body, unfellable by any arrow, unpierceable by any spear, be undone by an imbecile like Paris, and, worse, die like an imbecile because he hadn’t protected his one, tiny, no-bigger-than-the-palm-of-his-hand weak spot? Reseng reread Achilles’ death scene over and over. But he could not find a line about Achilles coming back to life.
Oh, no! That stupid Paris really did kill Achilles!
Reseng sat lost in thought until Old Raccoon’s study was pitch-black. He couldn’t yell, he couldn’t move. Now and then the rocking chair creaked. The books were submerged in darkness, and the pages rustled like dry leaves. All he had to do was stick his hand out to reach the light switch, but it didn’t occur to Reseng to turn on the light. He trembled in the dark like a child trapped in a cave teeming with insects. Life made no sense. Why did Achilles bother to cover his torso in armour, when he should have protected his left heel, his one-and-only mortal weakness? Stupid idiot—even nine-year-olds knew better. It burned Reseng up to think that Achilles had failed to protect his fatal weak spot. He couldn’t forgive his hero for dying like that.
Reseng wept in the dark. On every page of the sea of library books that he was either itching to read or would eventually get bored enough to read, heroes, beautiful, charming women, countless people struggling to overcome hardship and frustration and achieve their goals, all died at the arrows of idiots because they failed to protect their one tiny weakness. Reseng was shocked at how treacherous life was. It didn’t matter how high you rose, how invincible your body was, how firmly you clung to greatness, all of it could vanish with a tiny, split-second mistake.
An overwhelming distrust in life overcame him. He might fall at any moment into any number of traps lying in wait. His tender life could one day be struck by luck so bad it would leave him in utter turmoil; he would be gripped by terror he couldn’t shake off no matter how hard he fought. Reseng was possessed by the strange and unfamiliar conviction that everything he held dear would one day crumble in an instant. He felt empty, sad and completely alone.
That night, Reseng sat in Old Raccoon’s library for a very long time. The tears kept falling, and he cried himself to sleep on Old Raccoon’s rocking chair.
BEAR’S PET CREMATORIUM
‘If things don’t pick up, I’m in deep shit. Business has been so slow, I’m stuck cremating dogs all day.’
Bear flicked his cigarette to the ground. He was squatting down and the seat of his pants threatened to rip open under his hundred-plus-kilogram frame. Reseng wordlessly pulled on a pair of cotton work gloves. Bear heaved himself up, brushing off his backside.
‘Do you know some people are such morons they’re actually dumping bodies in the forest? Your job doesn’t end when the target’s dead—you also have to clean up after yourself. I mean, what day and age is this? Dumping bodies in the forest? You wouldn’t even bury a dog out there. Nowadays if you so much as tap a mountain with a bulldozer, bodies come pouring out. No one takes their job seriously anymore, I swear. No integrity! Stabbing someone in the gut and walking away? That’s for hired goons, not professional assassins! And anyway, it’s not like it’s easy to bury a body in the woods. A bunch of idiots from Incheon got caught dragging a huge suitcase up a mountain a few days ago.’
‘They were arrested?’ Reseng asked.
‘Of course. It was pretty obvious. Three big guys carrying shovels and dragging a giant suitcase into the forest. You think people living nearby saw them and thought, “Ah, they’re taking a trip, in the dead of night, to the other side of the mountain”? Halfwits! So my point is, instead of dumping bodies in the mountains, why not cremate them here? It’s safe, it’s clean and it’s better for the environment. Business is so slow, I’m dying!’
Bear pulled on work gloves as he grumbled. He always grumbled. And yet this grumbling, orangutan-sized man seemed as harmless as Winnie-the-Pooh. That might have been because he looked like Winnie-the-Pooh. Or maybe Pooh looked like Bear. Bear provided a corpse disposal service, albeit an illegal one. Pets, of course, were legal. He was licensed to cremate cats and dogs. The human bodies were done on the sly. He was surprisingly cuddly-looking for someone who burned corpses for a living.
‘I swear, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. Not long ago this couple came in with an iguana. Had a name like Andrew or André. What kind of a name is that for an iguana? Why not something simpler, something that rolls off the tongue, like Iggy or Spiny? Anyway, it’s ridiculous the names people come up with. So this stupid iguana died, and this young couple kept hugging each other and crying and carrying on: “We’re so sorry, Andrew, we should have fed you on time, it’s all our fault, Andrew.” I was dying of embarrassment for them.’
Bear was on a roll. Reseng opened the warehouse door, half-listening to his rant.
‘Which cart?’ he asked.
Bear took a look inside and pointed to a handcart.
‘Is it big enough?’ Reseng asked.
Bear sized it up and nodded.
‘You’re not moving a cow. Where’d you park?’
‘Behind the building.’
‘Why so far away? And it’s uphill.’
Bear manned the cart. He had an easy, optimistic stride that belied his penchant for grumbling. Reseng envied him. Bear didn’t have a greedy bone in his body. He wasn’t one to run himself into the ground trying to drum up more business. He got by on what he made from his small pet crematorium and had even raised two daughters on his own. His oldest was now at college. ‘I stick to light meals,’ he liked to claim. ‘To stretch my food bill. I just have to hold out for a few more years until my girls are on their own.’ Bear spooked easily. He never took on anything suspicious, even if he needed the money. And so, in a business where the average lifespan was ridiculously short, Bear had lasted a long, long time.
Reseng popped open the boot. Bear tilted his head quizzically at the two black body bags inside.
‘Two? Old Raccoon said there’d be only one package.’
‘One man, one dog,’ Reseng said.
‘Is that the dog?’ Bear asked, pointing at the smaller of the bags.
‘That’s the man. The big one’s the dog.’
‘What kind of dog is bigger than a man?’
Bear opened the bag in disbelief. Inside was Santa. His long tongue flopped out of the open zipper.
‘Holy shit! Now I’ve seen it all. Why’d you kill the dog? What’d it do, bite your balls?’
‘I just thought it was too old to get used to a new master.’
‘Well, look at you, meddling with the instructions the plotter gave you,’ Bear said with a snigger. ‘You need to watch your step. Don’t get tripped up worrying over some dog.’
Reseng zipped the bag back up and paused. Why had he killed the dog? When he’d gone back to collect the old man’s body, the dog had been quietly standing watch. With his back to the sun, Reseng had looked down at the sunlight spilling into the dog’s cloudy brown eyes. The dog didn’t growl. It was probably wondering why its master wasn’t moving. Reseng stared at the dog that was now too old to learn any new tricks. No one’s left in this quiet, beautiful forest to feed you, he thought. And you’re too old to go bounding through the forest in search of food. Do you understand what I’m saying? The late-autumn sun cast its weak rays over the crown of the dog’s head. It gazed up at him with those cloudy brown eyes as Reseng stroked its neck. Then he raised his rifle and shot the dog in the head.
‘Pretty heavy for an old man,’ Bear said as he grabbed one end of the body bag.
‘I told you, this one’s the dog,’ Reseng grumbled. ‘That one’s the old man.’
Bear looked back and forth at the bags in confusion.
‘Ah, this damn dog is heavy.’
After loading the bodies onto the cart, Bear looked around. The pet crematorium was
a quiet place at two in the morning. Of course it was. No one would be coming to cremate a pet at that hour.
Bear opened up the gas valve and lit the furnace. The flames rose, peeling the black vinyl bag away from the two bodies like snakeskin being shed. The old man was stretched out flat with the dog’s head resting on his stomach. As the furnace filled with heat, their sinews tightened and shrank, and the old man’s body began to squirm. It was a sad sight, like he was still clinging to the world of the living. Was there even anything left for him to cling to? It didn’t matter, it was over. In two hours, he’d be nothing but dust. You can’t cling to anything when you’re dust.
Reseng stared at the contorted body. The old man had been a general back in the days of South Korea’s military dictatorship. He was the figure behind the throne who’d written the list of targets for assassination and used the people’s tax money to hire hitmen from Old Raccoon’s library. And now his own name had made it onto the list. That’s how it went. The good times came to an end sooner or later, and in order to survive, those who found themselves dethroned had to sort out what they’d done and sweep up the scraps. As always, time had a way of circling around and biting you on the arse.
Once, when Reseng was twelve, the old man had come to the library dressed in uniform. It was a fine uniform. The old man came right up to Reseng.
‘What’re you reading, boy?’
‘Sophocles.’
‘Is it fun?’
‘I don’t have a dad so I can’t really understand it.’
‘Where’s your dad?’
‘In the garbage can in front of the nunnery.’
The general grinned, the two stars on his cap sparkling, and ruffled Reseng’s hair. That was twenty years ago. The little boy remembered that moment, but the old man had probably forgotten.
Reseng took out a cigarette. Bear lit it for him, took out one of his own and started whistling birdcalls through a cloud of smoke. On his way out, Bear checked their surroundings again, as if expecting someone to suddenly appear. Reseng watched the bodies of the old man and the dog meld together in the heat.