Pop Singer: A Dark BWAM / AMBW Romance

by Asia Olanna

  Suddenly, it started cooking in my head what was going on. There must’ve been splintering in their factions, group divisions. She must’ve hated this “Bit-na” woman. They must not have liked each other at all.

  I could only imagine the tensions between them, the drama that must’ve started at night or in the morning, over dinner or over breakfast. All of the passion they had in them spoiled because they could not put aside their petty struggles.

  I envisioned a prettier woman, someone with a dainty face, or maybe stronger features, attracting the lead gangster of their group.

  And they were gangsters.

  They were in my eyes.

  The bitch sitting on me was a jealous type, wasn’t she? The type to put down other people—especially women—just because she could not handle others having more.

  It disgusted me the longer I thought about her, the more this woman pressed her ass against my nose.

  Ming.

  This had to be Ming.

  As if reading my mind, she said, “Did you ever think that there really was a Ming? In Korea? I made the name up. It was all a trap.”

  She sounded almost guilty. Like she was toying with the idea of telling me more, but in reality, I only could fathom her toying around with me like she did with food. A lion in her den, strong and never subservient. Commanding and ready to thrust her teeth deep into my skin, sink all of her effort into destroying me.

  “You are stupid to have even thought that your artwork was any good,” she said. She stamped the heel of her foot into my ankle, and I screamed. Bloody murder, I screamed. “Your artwork is horrible. I’m not sure why anyone would even want to see it. So we destroyed it all. We could’ve left it alone on the American side, but you might have gone to see it off.”

  Tears. They streamed down my face now, over the bandage, washing over the medicine she had administered to me. The antiseptic gels.

  “If there’s anyone who can do good art,” she said. “Then it would have to be Oh-seong. He has really good taste. Classical stuff. Not whatever you were trying to do. Imitation. Like imitation crab in sushi.”

  Why would anyone do this? The words swirled around in my head over and over. Why would anyone do this?

  “Seeing you struggle is delicious,” she finished off. One last strike of her heel into my ankle. A bone breaking? The sounds of her heel cleaving skin from muscle? Pain everywhere, radiating out in waves. “The struggle is absolutely delicious.”

  Time seemed to stop. In place, there spanned eternity. I could do no more than try and black myself out by suffocation.

  Really, how would I escape now? Who would rescue me?

  Shadows blackened my vision, but gave me no reprieve.

  I would have to wait, but not like I had before—before I knew hell on earth.

  ♦♦♦

  The woman got up. The truck stopped. She yanked me back up again, and I fell against her. She pushed me off to the ground, the bare dirt forest floor.

  I was on my side now, my eyes half opened. Why bother keeping myself awake? Feigning sleepiness was better for me. Feigning that I was drifting off elsewhere, to a better realm where I could be happy.

  “Get up,” the woman said, smirking. When I did not—couldn’t—she grabbed my ankle, and dragged me across the floor. My head smashed into rocks, as if she was playing the xylophone. My body being the wand. “Oh, the things that I have to do.”

  The man was behind me; I could hear his footsteps. I could see his muscular body, the shadow of him.

  A helper. A wheedling helper. I imagined him trying to get with this woman, and both of them being so sociopathic and crazy.

  Absolutely repulsive.

  By the time we stopped, I nearly blacked out once more. My nose felt like it could fall off at any given moment. Fiery breath escaped upwards into my nostrils, pulled at my hairs.

  I wanted to die.

  I needed to if I was going to get any relief.

  So I did something drastic.

  I lifted upwards with all of my strength, flopping over and ready to smash my head into a rock nearby.

  I could take the pain no longer! I had too much pride to be handled like this…

  Wherever they were going to bring me—I did not want to see…

  But the man caught me. He stopped me before I could go any further. Then he wrestled me onto his shoulder, throwing me across his back.

  My legs hung in the air, my face now stared at a wide open canvas of trees and forest. A clearing of sorts where they had driven down the road. There was another pathway forking off into a different distance, far away. Traveled frequently.

  “She’s so stupid,” the woman said. Then in Korean, something else. The man talked to her, and she was unimpressed. “Whatever.”

  We walked inside of a building. Since I was facing backwards, I could see nothing except a doorway, and then a living room, all in reverse.

  There were windows. And plenty of people around me. Men in suits and ties. Staring looking down. At me. Groping me with their eyeballs.

  Women in skirts, their manicures perfectly done.

  “We only need to wait for Kyung-min to return,” the woman said. “You’re our special joker card. Our ace in the hole, you know that?”

  I didn’t want to respond. I would’ve rather her think that I was dead instead.

  “I’m shocked though. He hasn’t come back on time.”

  The man laid me down on the couch.

  I cranked my head to the left for comfort. The damage to the right side of my face was brutal. Pain bled out of my cheeks like blood.

  I noticed a sandwich—unfinished—on a table in front of us.

  Odd. Someone had not finished up lunch.

  Would they feed me?

  At the very least?

  A stupid thought, but what else could I want for in those moments besides empathy, compassion and mercy?

  A sandwich was the very least they could do.

  JONG-SOO

  The van rolled across the ground, familiar territory, although my heart sank.

  “There’s going to be a lot of them,” I said to Bit-na. “How are we going to get rid of them all?”

  “I’ll deal with it. You stay in the car and play lookout.”

  “I don’t trust you,” I said. Trying to be frank, of course. How else could either of us continue without a bit of honesty? “You might go back in there and then come back for me with all of your cronies. And then what? No. You need to take me along. I need to know that you’re also in danger along with me.”

  Bit-na shook her head. “I don’t see how you can come along with me without us getting into a lot of trouble together. Is that the kind of ‘along’ you want?”

  “Well,” I said, thinking to myself. “I have a plan. I’ve got a plan, if you’re willing to listen to it.”

  Bit-na stopped the van for a moment, nothing more than a crawl. We stared at one another, calculating the risks. If it would be worth it to go on like this.

  Would it be? To have her by my side, to take this huge leap of faith?

  I had no idea what she was thinking in her head. But by the way she nodded at me, smirking, I knew that she was willing to invest some time.

  “Show me the money,” she said. “Because I want results.”

  ♦♦♦

  We inched forward in the van. I sat in the back wrapped up in a bag, like a knapsack that you might use for flour. Bit-na found the bag in the front of the van’s glove compartment: the idea was to stuff my body parts in there, if I got too rowdy. Or at least, that’s what she told me Kyung-min had intended.

  Gruesome and cruel.

  “Can you breathe back there?” Bit-na said, stroking the outline of my body. I could hardly, but I had to suck it up: we were almost back at the house. I could see out of the bag, the brick and mortar, the open clearing, in the forest—the roads leading inward to this immaculate and mysterious site. “If at any moment you feel like fainting…”

&n
bsp; “I’m not weak,” I said. “Just keep going.”

  I had done a little bit of acting before during my popstar days. Commercials on television.

  Whitening strips, suits and ties, expensive cars—name any sort of luxury good, and my face was probably plastered on the front of a product.

  That’s also how the Double Dragons made extra money on the side. Through product placement and endorsements. Through the use of big corporations to help cover our tracks.

  Because why would anyone question you and your business if you were right in plain sight? Not in hiding.

  “When we get there,” Bit-na said, taking in a deep breath, “I need you to stay completely still. And then you need to not say a word. And then you need to come out when I give you the signal. A double thumbs up”

  “Are you nervous?” I said.

  I heard a tremor in her voice. She was repeating what I already knew. Something that nervous people do. “A little bit,” she admitted. “Maybe. I’m doing something hugely detrimental to myself—possibly, I mean. If this goes wrong, then my head is going to be on the chopping block. Literally.”

  “I still don’t know why you’re doing this,” I said, “but you’ve already dug yourself a grave if you don’t follow through.”

  “I may have fallen for you,” she said, turning the steering wheel back onto the main road of the house. A driveway of sorts. The van was slowing down. “Not fallen for you in a loving kind of way. But fallen for you in the pitiable way. I pity myself for having come this far. And I pity the people who have gotten trapped in these kinds of situations. It sucks, what we have to do to live and survive. What I’ve had to do.” She pulled the van to a complete halt, a screech. “I didn’t want to have to live this life for so long. There was an escape plan, always. And I’ve never had the chance to execute it except for, well, now. My vendetta.”

  I nodded, understanding her. It was the same story on both sides: the Double Dragons or the Twin Swords.

  On either end, you would hear these kinds of sob stories. The general public would never understand us.

  They wouldn’t get coming from foster home systems, being abandoned or possibly aborted at birth. The struggle it would take to immerse yourself in poverty, because no one wanted to be there in the ghettos by choice.

  No one wanted to.

  I was lucky, considering I had a father and mother. “Lucky,” in the sense that they planned for me.

  They wanted me, a child.

  “If it weren’t for you,” my mother had told me once, “then your father and I might not have lasted. It was because of you that we stuck together. It was because of you that we had meaning in life. An objective and a goal.”

  I was sitting back in her arms one summer evening, near the outskirts of Beijing. We were tying up business, loose ends with North Korean dealers. For a long time, North Korea had been a source of black-market trade. It was never publicized—by either the government or the media—for fear of crackdown and scrutiny. Bad reputations would sorely impact business. And neither government wanted that.

  “I don’t mean to say that I had you as an accident,” she said. “And it’s not like we purposefully had you so that we could stay together. But you were always our glue. You were always what held us together.”

  I looked at Bit-na one last time. Then I shut my eyes. She was opening the door, escaping from the van. Going to the other side and opening the passenger door. She called for her friends—her former friends or coworkers—and then walked the rest of the way to the door, dragging me along the ground.

  I could hardly breathe now, truly. She squeezed shut the opening of the bag. My ass hit a couple of rocks along the way, my feet clutching the soil. The soles of my shoes practically bursting out from the other end of the knapsack. There was just not enough room to keep me all bundled together.

  “Guys,” she said to the house, asking for backup. “I need your help.”

  I heard the whispers of the others. The ones from before in the house. The ones who kept this place on lockdown. Twin Sword lockdown. Brutality and gruesome behavior.

  “Get over here,” she said, heaving me up onto the threshold of the door. I felt hands grope me, reach underneath me. Talking, lots of chattering. Bit-na trying to tell them what was going on. “Where is the black woman?” I heard Bit-na say.

  This was new to me. I did not know of other captives besides Hae-il. She had an ace up her sleeve. Sweat crawled down my skin, greasing up my palms. Was she planning a double trick? A betrayal against Oh-seong and me? Hyun-jun and the rest?

  I heard a woman’s voice. Unfamiliar. “She’s upstairs,” the woman said. “With Hae-il.”

  “The artist and criminal,” Bit-na said. “What is her name? Henrietta? So pretty. It’s too bad.”

  The woman said, “I think she’s an ugly sack of shit. She actually thought her artwork was any good. Despicable. These Americans.” The woman stepped closer to the bag, her heels resounding against the floor. Boots? Not high heels. But boots of sort, combat ready. “Who is this? What happened to Kyung-min?”

  Bit-na told her a fake story: I had escaped from the cuffs somehow, and killed Kyung-min. This happened right as we neared the city perimeter. I practically escaped from the van, but she caught up to me and grabbed me tight. Good thing I didn’t have food, or else she might not have been able to handle my weight.

  “Jesus Christ,” the woman said. “Guys, let’s carry him upstairs on. We’ve got to tell Oh-seong and recalibrate our plans.”

  With a heave and a little effort, they hauled me up a couple of stairs, and then down a hallway, their boots and well-heeled soles echoing off of wooden flooring.

  Down we went, past several doors.

  Sunlight shimmered through open doors, through open windows. Humidity of summer saturated the air. My hair stuck to my scalp, drenching me in more sweat. This was the height of Daegu’s brutality, the beating down of nature herself.

  “Here we go,” the woman said. It was just her and Bit-na now. The others had gone downstairs to continue their watch of the area. “I’m going to go check on the rest. Can you handle him by yourself?”

  “Of course,” Bit-na said. “Oh, Jam-neum?”

  The woman turned.

  Jam-neum.

  “What?”

  “I might need some help. He weighs a lot more than I thought.”

  This was it. My chance at striking back some more heavy vengeance.

  Jam-neum’s hands gripped around my neck, and she tried to pull me out. Bit-na’s hands were around my waist. Together, they pushed me inside a room, large, where other people lay down. Hae-il? And another woman.

  They were not saying a thing though. Were they dead? Had they already killed Hae-il? Exacted vengeance against him?

  Jam-neum and Bit-na laid me down on the ground. Then Jam-neum made the mistake of opening the sack, her curiosity gripping her tight around her neck.

  I lunged out with all of the adrenaline coursing through my veins, my heart beating between my ears, bloodflow giving me strength for second round.

  I leapt forward, my legs wrapping around hers, my thighs gripping her thighs, my hands sinking the knife into her throat, my hands grappling with the microphone I knew that would be on her shirt.

  Bit-na lurched forward, steeling herself, pressing herself against the floor and her body. She acted as a sound muffler, as I landed against Jam-neum’s core.

  Jam-neum screamed, or at least tried to. But it was quickly cut off, her voice, by a flow of red-hot blood. I dragged the knife over and over her throat. Her eyes swam up to the top of her head, and then she doubled into Bit-na’s arms, and we laid her down quietly.

  Bit-na went quickly over to the woman wrapped up in rope and tape. She told the woman to shush, placing her finger over her lips. “Stop,” Bit-na said in English. “You’re going to give us away.” Then, in Korean, to me, “Good job.”

  I stretched my limbs, wondering if anyone had heard us. I crept by the
door, no. No one there. They were too busy worrying about the ground level. And it seemed that Jam-neum and Bit-na had seniority over them. If they had commanded them to stay below, then that’s where they would stay.

  “Now on to the next part of the plan,” I said. “What are we going to do with the woman?”

  “We can free her,” Bit-na said.

  I knelt by the woman’s side. Glancing over her, I looked at Hae-il. His eyes were wide open, but his mouth was shut with tape as the woman’s was.