No, his wife did not remind him of his mother. Nor was she her complete opposite. In some ways, she encompassed both of his parents’ personalities. She looked insecure but was full of confidence. She was self-righteous but easygoing. He marveled at her contradictions. It seemed an impossible combination. Whenever he thought about his parents, he pictured them sitting alone and sad in their own separate frames. They existed independently, cut off from each other, and yet they coexisted naturally in his wife.
His wife was the reason he went to grad school, but she dropped out halfway through her master’s program. She claimed that she preferred to acquire real-world work experience and got a job at one of the online newspapers that had recently been launched. But she quit after just six months. After that, she sent her resume everywhere she could, trying to find other work as a journalist, but no one would hire her. She had no choice but to take a job at a magazine that no one had heard of where she lasted barely a year, churning out twelve articles a month until quitting that, too. Over and over, she went through the motions, sending out her resume again, or using the money she’d saved from her last job to do a little traveling first, before eventually finding another job at an even smaller magazine than the last, where she churned out the same number of articles with nearly the same content. In the meantime, Oghi completed his master’s and finished his PhD.
Three years before they married, Oghi’s father passed away. He suffered for six months before dying. The night the pain began, Oghi’s father had met with some business connections. They were men who had worked under him before he retired. Even after his retirement, Oghi’s father had kept busy as a supplier for the parts production company he’d started. He had followed their advice to increase production, but the international financial crisis led to a series of market slumps, and his father ended up taking a big hit.
His former employees had met him over sushi to tell him the bad news. The stomach pain started late that night. Oghi’s father said that when he tried to stand up straight, it felt like a metal wire threaded through his intestines was being pulled taut. He blamed it on the sushi. It had been absurdly expensive, and when he’d gone to pay the bill, his guts had tightened into a knot.
The housekeeper arrived in the morning to find Oghi’s father collapsed on the floor. She called an ambulance. At the hospital they told him it was kidney stones and that they had to operate immediately. The doctor scheduled an emergency surgery, but they didn’t figure out until after they’d cut him open that kidney stones were not the problem.
Oghi finished his lecture at a university in Pyeongtaek and rushed to the hospital in Ulsan. It was the middle of the night, but his father stubbornly insisted on going to a hospital in Seoul immediately. They bounced from hospital to hospital, being told by first one doctor that it was irritable bowel syndrome, then by another that it was just constipation, and on down through a laundry list of commonsense diagnoses.
After a while the pain returned, but this time his father went immediately to a big university hospital in Seoul. It was diagnosed as an intestinal obstruction and he was sent into the operating room. Oghi was teaching at his alma mater when his father texted him the name of the condition. At the thought that his father’s intestinal walls were in danger of rupturing because he had a piece of shit stuck up his ass, Oghi couldn’t help breaking into random laughter in the middle of his lecture.
What emerged from his father’s large intestine was not a hardened lump of feces. It was a tumor the size of a golf ball. His father was relieved to know that it had been removed, and he even joked about it. He said with a chuckle that at his age it was either going to be cancer or Alzheimer’s, and since he now had cancer he didn’t have to worry about Alzheimer’s.
The doctor gave Oghi a convoluted explanation. Though the tumor had been removed, another could grow back in the same spot, and if that were to happen, the tumor could invade the muscle fiber and spread to the adipose tissue. Oghi had no idea what any of that meant, so the doctor added that by that stage the cancer would be untreatable. And before long, that was exactly what happened.
After his father, who had spent his whole life handling iron, was laid to rest in a hard wooden coffin made from hemlock, Oghi received several documents. It was not a will. Just as his father had warned him, some of the documents would bring Oghi money while others would require him to pay back money. After doing the math, he found that he was left with debt. His father had spent a tremendous amount of money getting his business off the ground. But the amount wasn’t so terrible as to make Oghi resent his father for passing away and bequeathing him nothing but bills. In fact, he couldn’t help but wonder whether his father, who had always kept his ledgers meticulously balanced, hadn’t planned it that way from the start: it was nearly the exact same amount that his father used to say he’d spent on raising Oghi while insisting that Oghi pay it back to him.
The year they married, Oghi’s wife landed a job at a sizable publishing house, only to rage about her new boss’s unbridled sexual comments. She quit after eight months but not before compiling testimonies from other women at work who’d been sexually harassed by him and posting an open letter to the company intranet detailing her boss’s indiscretions—her version of a letter of resignation. Around that same time, Oghi had just taken his new PhD advisor’s suggestion to change his dissertation topic and cut back on teaching hours.
Oghi and his wife were more or less scraping by. They didn’t dare dream of having insurance or setting aside savings. The future was an unpromisingly distant thing, and the present was a repetition of similar, humdrum events. But day-to-day life was peaceful. They entertained themselves by taking turns reading the same book and talking about it when they were both done. His wife landed a contract to write a nonfiction book for a leading publishing house and started commuting back and forth between their home and the Yeouido library to write. In the evenings when Oghi came home from a day of teaching, she tried out new dishes on him. Oghi ate every last bite that his wife cooked, not caring whether it tasted good or not. They washed the dinner dishes together and took their full, sluggish bodies for a walk around their unremarkable neighborhood every night before returning home and sleeping soundly.
In the end, his wife never published the book. She didn’t even finish the manuscript. Oghi had looked over his wife’s rough drafts at least six different times. The opening chapter kept changing. The most interesting was the third draft, but she seemed to take Oghi’s feedback—that it seemed too much like fiction for nonfiction—a little too hard. She defended it at first, saying that was precisely her intent, but she didn’t keep it up for long. As if in direct response to Oghi’s feedback, the fourth draft was a faithful litany of facts. Oghi told her it was about as fun to read as a newspaper article. The fifth draft combined both styles, which resulted in an introduction that sounded more like the opening to a familiar and clichéd genre novel, while the sixth draft was altogether different and written in an interview format, which led Oghi to scold her for being so inefficient.
After that, she stopped showing Oghi any of her drafts. She missed the agreed-upon deadline with the publishers, and in the end she gave up on the project. The publishing house suggested that she write a different book instead, but his wife broke her contract by wiring the advance back to them along with the not inconsiderable breach of contract fee. By then, Oghi had completed his dissertation and, at the perfect age for entering the profession, landed a full-time position at his alma mater.
They soon moved. The place they chose together was located in a townhouse complex. The house had the biggest yard in the neighborhood but was somehow below market, perhaps because of the state the yard had been left in. Nevertheless, the price was still too high for Oghi, who had just started his new job.
In the yard were the unsightly remains of a large vegetable garden that, had it been looked after properly, would have produced a sizable harvest, but was now buried beneath dead leaves that had withered an
d yellowed on their stems. As the elderly lady of the house’s dementia had progressed, the garden had fallen into disrepair, the vegetables left in the ground to rot. Oghi wasn’t sure if it was the fault of the dying garden, but the house struck him as gloomy and bleak. He felt the same about the elderly landlord in his shabby clothes and his crone of a wife who stared at them through vacant, addled eyes.
Oghi didn’t care for the house, but his wife clung to the fact that it was below market. The old man was eager to sell it off, as it would be too big for him to look after on his own once he sent his wife to a nursing home. Oghi’s wife talked him into it. Even so, he wasn’t easily persuaded. He looked at several other places with the realtor, without his wife’s knowledge. There was a house he preferred. But the price was more than he dared. After seeing that house, the house his wife stubbornly insisted on grew on him. Oghi decided once more to take a chance on his wife’s certainty.
The day they moved in, Oghi and his wife turned on all of the lights inside and outside the house. There were a lot of lights to be turned on. After flipping every switch, they set the motion-activated light over the front door to stay on continuously. In the yard were fourteen lanterns of varying sizes. They turned those on too. Their plan was to leave the lights burning all night. Oghi and his wife wanted to congratulate themselves on their bright future.
That night the lights burned as brightly as the lights in the hospital room where Oghi now lay. Their plan was to leave the bedroom lamp on as well, even if it meant tossing and turning in their sleep. But when Oghi awoke in the middle of the night, the lights had all been turned off.
When did all that light first start to fade?
3
HOW DOES A LIFE GET so turned around in an instant? How does it fall apart, vanish, dwindle to nothing? Had Oghi secretly been helping this life in its plot to do exactly that?
Ever since struggling to raise his eyelids, Oghi had been asking himself a question. Now and then he got the same question from others: What on earth happened? He got it from his friends, from the insurance company employees, from the police officer who wanted to close the case, from people visiting him in the hospital. His mother-in-law had not yet asked him anything, but their conversation would probably be the hardest of all.
Oghi hadn’t been out of his coma long when he received a visit from a claims investigator at the insurance company. The investigator had already been to the hospital once while Oghi was unconscious, and now that Oghi’s condition had turned, he was back.
The claims investigator understood that Oghi was incapable of expressing himself with any sort of precision. The nerves and tendons in Oghi’s jaw were damaged, leaving him unable to speak, and when he did manage to part his dry lips, the only sound he could produce was a faint whisper. Oghi’s only means of communication was to blink his eyes for yes and no.
When asked, “Where were you going?” Oghi could not answer. He could only respond to “Were you going to Gangwon Province?”
Oghi and his wife had planned to take a short trip. She’d been shut up in the house for too long, while Oghi spent long hours away from home but wasn’t able to relax when he was there. It was a peaceful trip, unlike the ones they’d gone on when they were dating. There was no need to rush around preparing food to take with them or to spend a lot of time hunting down some place that would be both cheap and clean. His wife had chosen the date and the destination. She had even squared away all of the reservations. Oghi was so busy with work that they were nearly unable to go and didn’t leave until late in the evening.
When asked, “What was the weather like that day?” Oghi could not answer. He blinked once in response to, “Did it rain?”
“Oghi, were you driving?”
This time as well he blinked once and started to blink again, debating whether or not he should, but kept his eyes open after a brief hesitation. The investigator appeared to take that as a yes and wrote it down in his notebook. It wasn’t a lie, nor was it the truth. His wife was driving when they left Seoul, but after a quick break at a rest stop, Oghi had taken over at the wheel.
Oghi would have liked to add that detail. It seemed very important to him. Because it was the sort of thing he would blame himself for and regret for a long time. If his wife had continued driving, if he had not been in the driver’s seat himself, then the person lying in this bed right now answering questions, the person spending the rest of their life in the hospital paralyzed would not be Oghi, it would be her. He had no idea which scenario was better, but he was alive regardless. And he knew that, in order to stay alive, he had turned the steering wheel toward his side of the car at the decisive moment. Unconsciously. Just as any other driver would have done. To protect himself.
“It seems you accelerated suddenly. Do you know how fast you were going at the time of the accident?”
Oghi stared at the investigator. He might have rolled or circled his eyes. It was not a question he was physically capable of answering, and in order for him to provide an answer the investigator would have to rephrase it. But the investigator dropped the question instead.
“Did you see the car in front?”
Oghi blinked once. He’d seen it, but it was too late. If he could have talked, that’s what he would have said. He was unable to brake in time. The rain had started sooner and fallen heavier than forecast. The road was slick and the braking distance short, and though he slammed his foot on the brake as hard as he could, the car had skidded helplessly forward. It was a common story, an everyday occurrence, and precisely what had happened to Oghi.
None of the investigator’s questions technically required an answer from Oghi. All that was required was his signature for the insurance settlement. There were always more accidents on the freeway when it was late at night and raining, and in the event that the car smashed into a guardrail and rolled, the fatality rate jumped higher. Oghi and his wife were the victims of a run-of-the-mill traffic accident that raised no suspicions.
The investigator named a hotel and asked Oghi if that was where he and his wife had been planning to stay. Oghi tried not to blink. All he and the investigator had agreed to was that one blink meant yes and two meant no. He did not know how to indicate when he did not know, and so he simply rolled his eyes.
“No?”
Another question. This time as well Oghi kept his eyes open.
“Do you mean you don’t remember?”
Oghi slowly blinked once. He was familiar with the name of the hotel. Of course he was. He’d gone there three years earlier for an academic conference. Then he’d gone back twice more after that. But it caught him off guard to learn that his wife had chosen that hotel. She hadn’t told him the name, and he couldn’t remember whether he’d asked.
If he could talk, would he have been able to fully explain? He remembered some things clearly. But there was so much more that he couldn’t remember. The doctor had already given Oghi the clinical explanation for his memory lapses. He’d said it was very common to experience temporary memory loss or mental derangement whenever there’d been a severe impact to the brain.
Oghi remembered the moment when the car hit the guardrail and tumbled down the dark slope. He’d never before experienced that much speed and that much terror—it was impossible now to forget. He sensed that in the future, whenever faced with a crisis, he would retrace each and every move from that night. Oghi had been afraid, but since there was nothing he could do and no one who could help him, he did not scream. The close, sticky air had hemmed him in. He’d mistaken it at first for the texture of fear, but it wasn’t. The airbag blocked out Oghi’s vision and slammed into him. Overwhelmed by the unfamiliar pressure, Oghi, even in the midst of his terror, prayed for it all to come to a quick end.
He thought he would be floating when he finally came to. He thought it would be a textbook near-death experience—him looking down at himself with his face shoved into the airbag. But he saw nothing. Everything was dark and he smelled something burning and h
eard a faint groan. The sound was coming from him.
Where was his wife? He tried to reach for her but couldn’t move. As if he’d been locked inside a small, dark, narrow box. The unpleasant sensation of claustrophobia and the anxiety of being separated from his wife filled him with despair. Perhaps the person who’d floated up out of their body and was looking down at everything was her. Sorrow overpowered fear, and Oghi lost consciousness again.
That day and everything related to it would come back to him little by little. As his memories returned, staggered and a little bit jumbled, he would piece together the events of that day into a convincing arrangement. It would happen naturally, with time. He’d suffered a temporary shock, and would remember everything eventually.
The sharper his memories grew and the clearer his situation, the sadder and more miserable and more heartbroken Oghi became. He found himself wishing for some memories to never return. Because the more he remembered, the more he would have to accept that he had lost his wife, and that he would never see her again.
The whole time that Oghi was fielding fruitless question and answer sessions with the claims investigator and others, his mother-in-law did not ask him a single thing. She simply stood in silence next to whoever was asking the questions. When she saw that he was growing tired, she asked them to stop or to continue later. When his interrogators left and it was just the two of them in the hospital room, she took Oghi’s impassive hand and wept silently. Some of these moments lasted a long time, but she never so much as whimpered. If the doctor or a nurse came in, she just as quietly wiped her eyes and moved off to the side.
Each time Oghi watched his mother-in-law silently draw forth her sorrow, Oghi wanted to cry with her. If he could have moved his jaw or made a sound, he would have. He regretted not being able to tell her how sad he was. He wanted to apologize for the fact that her daughter died while he survived. He was sorry that they couldn’t talk about his wife together. He felt an ache in his chest. It churned there and grew hot, and his throat closed up like he was going to vomit. It made Oghi think he was crying. He thought at first that there were tears on his face, but it turned out to be drool. Oghi’s jaw moved a tiny bit, his dry lips cracked open, and instead of sadness, spit spilled out. Oghi kept drooling. He had no choice, as he could not yet close his parted mouth on his own.
The Hole Page 2