by Un-su Kim
Reseng looked out the window. The sun was going down. What if he was on a plotter’s hit list? His mind went blank. The inside of his head filled with smog. He had to think of something, but he felt as if he’d forgotten how to think. Someone had come into his home. Not just anyone’s home, but the home of an assassin. They wouldn’t have done it for fun. They had either planted a bomb or bugged the place.
Reseng began searching again, still with no clue as to what he was looking for. But this time he was much more thorough. He opened the coffee can, poured out the coffee and checked the bottom, took apart his Zassenhaus coffee grinder, emptied all of his spice jars and checked the insides, upended his garbage bin and sifted through every piece of garbage. He opened his computer, took out the components and checked them one by one, took apart his radio and TV set, pulled everything out of the freezer, ripped off the packaging, and even cut open the frozen fish and sliced open every frozen dumpling. He took all the shoes out of the shoe cabinet and turned the pockets of every article of clothing in the closet inside out. He pulled every book from its shelf and opened each one. He even opened every bill and letter, just in case there was something else in one of the envelopes.
Long after the sun had risen, Reseng was still taking things apart. For twenty-one hours straight, he ripped everything open and peeked inside without stopping to eat or sleep. His apartment looked like a bomb had already gone off, but he refused to stop. Now and then he wondered if maybe the intruder had left without leaving anything behind. But he didn’t care. His face filled with rage, he ripped and prised and wrenched, prodded and probed, and tossed his ruined belongings aside.
After gutting his wall clock, Reseng took a knife to the mattress. The grating of the blade against the metal springs made his skin crawl. He tore out a chunk of sponge, checked that there was nothing around it, and then hacked away at the mattress some more and tore out another chunk of sponge. He knew he was being stupid. But he kept going.
Sunlight crossed the verandah and illuminated Reseng’s face. He was crying. He gazed up at the sun through tear-filled eyes. Shame beamed down over his cheeks in tandem with the sun’s warmth. He looked down at his hands. The fingernails were ragged from all that plucking and prising, and the skin was bleeding from where he’d nicked it with the knife. His stomach growled. He’d spent twenty-one hours tearing his home apart nonstop, but now he had no strength left to make any food. He tossed aside the knife and screwdriver, leaned back against his bayoneted sofa and fell asleep.
He awoke in the afternoon. The sun was still shining. The room was filled with debris. He stared blankly at the mess he’d created. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he thought. But of the many, many voices inside his head, not a single one gave him an answer.
Reseng grabbed a garbage bag and started filling it with the objects he’d dismantled. Some were old; some were new. Some had sentimental value; others left him wondering how they’d got there in the first place. Reseng shoved all of it into the bag regardless. It took twenty 20-litre garbage bags to clean up his place. He put the bags in the dumpster in front of the building, and next to it the couch and broken mattress, the springs flopping every which way. If he were a target, then the plotter’s hired shadow would be watching right now. They might even take his garbage bags with them. But Reseng didn’t care. I don’t need this stuff anymore, so feel free to shove it up your arse, he thought.
Plotters never moved without a reason. He was certain he was a target. Could he survive this? Probably not. In all the time he’d been in the business, he’d never once seen someone evade the plotters. There were only those who died straightaway and those who managed to hold out slightly longer. But why the fuck am I a target? He sniggered to himself: it was a pretty stupid question. What he should’ve asked himself was: How did I make it this far? He’d lasted fifteen years in a business where the plotters made a point of regularly cleaning up after themselves. There were too many good reasons for him to be a target. If it weren’t for The Doghouse and Old Raccoon, Reseng would’ve been dead a long time ago. Thirty-two years old. Young compared to the average life span, but a long run for an assassin. His end was overdue. It was time for him to make like Old Orin in The Ballad of Narayama and bash his teeth out against a millstone and go into the mountains to die.
The first thing Reseng did when he came back inside was order ten boxes of beer. Whenever he was gripped by anxiety, whenever silent terror rose around him like a river in flood, whenever he found himself sinking into a bottomless swamp of depression, whenever he came home from a killing, and whenever he was confronted by a sticky situation, that old feeling of irresponsibility came over him and Reseng holed up at home and drank beer.
Beer Week. If he was going to drink cool, refreshing beer for a week straight, he’d have to do some preparation. Step one: throw out all the food in the fridge to make room for as many cans of beer as possible. Step two: order as much beer as he could drink. Step three: fill the fridge with beer. Step four: take the peanuts and dried anchovies out of the freezer and keep them handy so he would always be neither full nor hungry. Preparations complete. Now all he had to do was open the fridge, pull out a can of beer, pop the tab, guzzle it and crush the empty can.
He was a target. Shouldn’t he do something about that? The question occasionally crossed his mind mid-swig. But he kept swallowing. All he could do for now was: open fridge, take out beer, pop, guzzle, crush. Every now and then he chewed a few peanuts and stared at himself in the mirror while pissing in the toilet. Then he flushed and popped open another beer. Good thing I didn’t take apart the fridge, he thought, marvelling at his good sense.
He discovered the bomb two days into his bender. He had his head in the toilet, vomiting for the third time. Three or four rounds of vomiting were like a rite of passage for the proper observance of Beer Week. He threw up, drank more beer, threw up again and drank more beer. Eventually, his body got used to it and the vomiting stopped. The vomit in the toilet bowl consisted solely of yellow gastric fluids, beer and a few dried anchovy heads. He was in the middle of a dry heave when he spotted something stuck way down inside the hole at the bottom of the bowl. He stared at it for a long time before sticking his hand in and pulling out the object.
It was a tiny ceramic box. White like the rest of the toilet and made from a similar material, it wasn’t easy to distinguish at first glance. It reminded him of a hotel soap. He took a closer look. Definitely a bomb. The first thing he felt wasn’t shock or fear but relief. Not because there was anything good about it, but simply because what was supposed to be there finally was.
The phone rang. It was Jeongan, the tracker.
‘I asked around. They say these were pretty trendy in Belgium about seven or eight years ago.’
‘Toilet bombs were trendy?’
‘No, stupid! But what a great trend that would’ve been.’
‘Then what do you mean?’
‘They made pill-sized bombs—not big enough to take out a toilet, but enough to set off very tiny explosions inside the body, to look like medical accidents. They say the KGB used them to take out fat Russian politicians with pacemakers or insulin pumps.’
‘What does that have to do with this bomb?’
‘The basic structure is the same. The components are Belgian-made, and the fuse and sensor are both Belgian. Only the explosive is American—you can buy it from any junkyard. But it looks like it was assembled here, because the casing is Chinese. I’ve never seen such a mishmash. The bomb-maker must’ve ordered the parts from all over. You can’t find these on the black market, so they would’ve had to order it all online. Or they went to Belgium themselves to get it.’
‘What’s your point?’ Reseng said, getting irritated.
‘My point is that I can’t tell just from this who put it in your toilet.’
‘The parts have serial numbers on them!’
‘Hey, imbecile, if a staple had a serial number, would that mean you knew what else had been sta
pled? This was built from medical supplies!’
‘Then find out who built it.’
‘Do you have any idea how many bomb-makers there are? They hide out to avoid the cops. If you say you want to meet them, I’m sure they’ll all jump out dancing the can-can, singing, “Here I am!” But why are you so curious about this bomb anyway? It’s not like it was in your toilet.’
‘It was in my toilet! So keep looking!’
Reseng hung up and took another swig of beer. Jeongan would be turning in soon. He worked at night and slept during the day. Not because he was a night owl, but because most of the people he dealt with were only active at night. While the rest of the city was leaving for work, Jeongan was clocking off. Why did everyone in their line of work have to be so nocturnal? No one was forcing them to. It was exhausting, and the more tired you were, the more tired you got.
Reseng stroked the empty bomb casing. Jeongan had kept the components. He tilted his head and wondered who on earth would use such a silly little bomb. Had they meant for it to go off? Were they really hoping to see a dead man slumped in front of the toilet with his pants and underwear around his ankles and his arse blown off? Such a dainty bomb. It reminded him of the silver pill case Hanja kept in his pocket.
But it couldn’t have been Hanja. If Hanja had wanted to get rid of Reseng, he would’ve hired the Barber. For the past few years, he’d used the Barber every time he neutralised an assassin. The Barber neutralised them, and Bear cremated them. That was the cleanest method. Eventually, people might ask what had happened to the assassin and assume he was dead.
What’s Froggy been up to these days? He’s so talented. Is he taking a break?
Hey, you’re right. I haven’t seen him in forever. Maybe he’s dead?
Assassins went underground every now and then for their own safety, and would resurface after a long break. Sometimes a person you thought was dead would reappear looking perfectly healthy. And sometimes someone you were sure was alive never came back. But dead or alive, no one thought too deeply about it. They didn’t mourn, they didn’t get sad—and, what’s more, they weren’t the slightest bit curious.
Anyway, Hanja was simply too busy for a stunt like this. Nor was he witty or fun-loving enough to use such a ridiculous bomb. His sense of humour was shit. It wasn’t government spooks either. They weren’t the type to sign off on anything silly. Old-fashioned, they lacked imagination and were not at all flexible. Then who? Who put this damned bomb in his toilet? He couldn’t figure it out.
He took another swig of beer. He needed to think, but his head was a mess. What the hell’s wrong with you? he thought. Can’t you see your life is at the brink? But finding the bomb had not put a stop to Beer Week. He still had a can in his hand at all times.
He’d been in danger plenty of times before. He botched a job once, left evidence behind. Had a shadow watching his every move for a while. Even got a warning letter from the plotter for disobeying orders. But he’d never once been a target. No one had ever broken into his home before. Did Old Raccoon know? Up until a few years ago, a plotter would have needed Old Raccoon’s consent to kill Reseng. Was that no longer the case, now that Old Raccoon’s position in the industry was slipping? Or were they coming after Reseng and Old Raccoon at the same time?
But why such a ridiculous bomb?
Murder was quiet and simple in the plotting world. There were no huge explosions like in the movies, and rarely any messy car accidents or hails of bullets. It was as silent as snowfall in the night, as secretive as a cat’s footsteps. The killings almost never came to light. Since there was no murder case, there was no crime, no suspicion, no investigation. Naturally, there were also no loud news reports, no swarms of reporters, no cops or prosecutors. Only a quiet, melancholy funeral attended by clueless, sniffling family members. Or just a death with no funeral, witnessed by no one.
The rain suddenly grew heavy and splattered on the windowsill. Reseng got up from his chair to close the window. One side of the sky was still sunny. Strange weather. He finished his beer, crushed the can and set it on his desk. Then he opened a drawer, pulled out a bag of marijuana that Trainer had given him all those years ago, and stared at it. He could still hear Trainer saying, ‘It’s not the good stuff. This is the cheap stuff that Indian coolies smoke to shake off their fatigue.’ Reseng rolled a joint, but couldn’t bring himself to smoke it. It brought back too many bad memories, and sad ones, and filled him with regret for the mistakes he’d been too stupid to regret at the time. The memories he tried to keep tucked away would come creeping back like a bad smell until his whole body reeked of it.
X
The day, ten years ago, that Reseng had decided to try working in a factory, the weather had been as strange as today: raindrops flying around in an otherwise sunny sky. Reseng was following Old Raccoon’s orders and lying low outside the capital. It was a small, provincial manufacturing town belching smoke and lined with tiny factories. Reseng had rented a second-floor studio there and had been looking out the window at laundry on a clothesline. As the clothes whipped around in the wind, taking a beating from the rain and the sun at the same time, they had reminded him of Pierrot the clown: comical yet sad.
The streets were deserted during the day; everyone in that quiet, gloomy town seemed to be employed in the factories. In the early mornings, the streets flooded with bicycles and scooters, like something you’d see in China, and at lunchtime they bustled again with countless workers heading out to eat. The rest of the time the town was desolate, as if the inhabitants had suddenly emigrated to Mars.
Reseng sat at the windowsill and stared at the fake ID that Mun, the forgery expert, had made for him. He was in the middle of memorising the information he needed to live under his new name: Jang Yimun, male, twenty-four years old. Not much to memorise; it really didn’t take much to live under someone else’s name in a new town.
As Reseng was reciting his fake resident registration number, a group of laughing factory girls passed under his window. They looked bright and happy. His eye was drawn to the short one in the middle. She had a cute, round face, and had the most exaggerated body language of the four. She twisted around and wept actual tears as she laughed and said, ‘Oh, man, that’s too funny, that’s hilarious!’ while slapping the shoulder of the girl next to her. Her laughter echoed down the street. Reseng stuck his head out the window and watched as they went into the factory at the end of the street, laughing the whole way. Because of their bright smiles, he couldn’t help thinking that the factory looked as wondrous as Willy Wonka’s.
The next day Reseng applied for a job there. The Admin Section Chief had a face like a crowded balance sheet, as if he’d been born to oversee the administration of a factory. He scrutinised Reseng’s resume and asked, ‘Geumseong High? So that’s, what, a liberal arts high school?’
Reseng nodded.
‘If you went to a liberal arts high school, why didn’t you go to university? You weren’t an activist or anything like that, were you?’
Reseng laughed at the word activist. He wanted to say that he hadn’t even gone to elementary school, let alone university, but instead he just scratched his head, made a dopey face and said his marks were bad.
‘How bad?’ the Admin Section Chief asked.
‘Almost the worst. But not the worst-worst.’
‘Worst or worst-worst, you still need a brain to work in a factory. Nowadays you can’t do anything without a brain. Hmm…Twenty-four…Did your army service?’
‘I was exempt, sir.’
‘What? Okay, fine, so you’ve got no brains and you’re some kind of cripple. Then what have you been doing all this time?’
Flustered, Reseng replied, stammering, that after finishing high school he’d worked on some construction sites here and there. The Admin Section Chief narrowed his eyes in suspicion, so Reseng launched into a rambling explanation of how he hadn’t wanted to work in a factory and had gone into construction instead, but it hadn’t paid as
well as he’d thought it would, and he got tired of having to be on the move all the time, and so he’d decided to settle down and learn a skill. He’d broken out into a sweat and was sure he’d made a mess of his story. But the Admin Section Chief nodded and chuckled.
‘I swear, those foremen. They keep dragging off all the young guys with their sweet-talk about how good construction wages are, but it’s bullshit. Every guy thinks he’s going to make himself a little nest egg right away, but there’s no security and the cash is just a pipe dream. The monthly pay here may be smaller than what you get at a construction site, but no one’s going to bilk you out of a paycheck, you get severance and the overtime is pretty good. As long as you put in the work, you’ll save money. And you don’t have to work on Sundays. What more can you ask?’
The Admin Section Chief was preaching to the choir.
‘Work hard!’ he said, and he clapped Reseng on the shoulder, looking like the sort of pillar of industry you would’ve seen on one of those Daehan News newsreels back in the seventies.
‘Yes, sir! I’ll do my best!’ Reseng responded vigorously, feeling like he’d suddenly become a pillar of industry himself.
Reseng was assigned straightaway to Work Team Three, where he did chrome-plating. The work didn’t require any special skills. All he had to do was dip a die-cast metal frame into a chrome bath for ten seconds, pull it back out, give it a good shake and let it dry. Despite what the Admin Section Chief had said, it was the kind of work that didn’t require the use of a brain at all: even a monkey could have mastered it after ten minutes of instruction. But no one else wanted to do the work because the chrome bath smelled foul, and because it was rumoured that it would ruin your skin and leave you in agony for the rest of your life, or else reduce your sperm count and render you sterile.