by Claire North
She boarded the second train, a slower service that crawled through flat countryside and low, perfectly round hills towards Daegu. I sat a few seats away, discovered that my chair could turn one hundred and eighty degrees, giggled at this revelation, soon grew bored. In Daegu she took a room in a motel, and I took the room next to hers, and that night, when she went to find something to eat, I broke in and went through everything she owned, which was:
• Five pairs of pants, black
• Seven pairs of socks, grey
• Two bras, black
• Two shirts, one white, one grey, linen and cotton
• Two pairs of jeans, blue
• Three passports – one British, one French, one Canadian, in three names
• One combat knife, ceramic
• One toothbrush
• One tube of toothpaste
• One bottle of eyedrops
• One pair of reading glasses, flexible metal, powerful lens in the left, marginally weaker lens in the right, creating two different worlds as I peered through them
• One traveller’s guide to Korea
• One copy of the international edition of Die Welt, five days old
• One bottle of sleeping pills, unopened
• One laptop, password protected
A single hair had been stuck down with saliva over the laptop lid. I removed it, popped the laptop’s internal shell, inserted a tiny flash drive I’d purchased from a dealer in Seoul. I sealed the computer again, licked the hair to return it to its place, and photographed everything in sight.
Neither the Tokyo USB stick nor the napkin on which we’d written our bargain was anywhere to be found.
In a café across the street from Gyesan cathedral, a low building of red brick and fluted arches, I drank cheap coffee and gnawed on the tough, crackling curl of chicken legs served in a plastic bag, and contacted Byron14 again.
whatwherewhy: To remind you of our bargain. You will give me access to all your research into treatments. You will help me develop a protocol for myself.
Byron14: So I see from a napkin in my possession. I see it has my signature – though I do not remember signing it.
whatwherewhy: I trust you on this.
Byron14: Strange that trust should live amongst thieves.
whatwherewhy: You have an honest face.
Byron14: You have seen it? I would be fascinated to see yours.
whatwherewhy: I am the woman in the photo on your phone.
Byron14: I do not remember taking it.
whatwherewhy: But the photo is there. Contact me when you are ready to honour your side of the bargain.
Byron14: Are you following me, whatwherewhy?
whatwherewhy: No.
I logged off.
I sought company in Daegu, but the best I could come up with was a production of Turandot at the Daegu Opera House. The audience in the stalls wore black tie and silk; the Chinese princess was played by an Albanian, the Persian prince by a Korean, the desperate woman who dies for love by an Argentinian. As Liu stabbed herself to death for the sake of the man who wanted to marry the princess who was torturing her, a woman in the third row from the front screamed in horror, and I wondered what personal tragedy had driven her to such a big reaction to a bad plot. At the end of every act the leads came in front of the curtain to curtsey and bow, and when the final curtain fell the sopranos held bunches of flowers passed to them by a stagehand, and the audience stood to cheer.
I achieved only ten minutes of conversation with an old lady with flawless English who’d learned it, she informed me, from her time as secretary to an American general who’d stayed in Korea after the civil war.
“Then all we wanted was unity,” she sighed, “now people don’t think we are the same species as our Northern sisters, let alone the same country. We all say we hope the regime will collapse, but when it does, who will tell the people of the North not to rise up and kill us all? Perhaps things are best left as they are.”
“Do you believe that?”
She twisted her lips, tilted her tiny, bird-like neck forward and up, considering the matter. “I think it’s complicated. I don’t know anyone who tries to work out problems for people by numbers, except generals and prime ministers. I don’t think there’s good mathematics for what war does to people.”
I wanted to ask her more, but the bell rang and the interval ended, and at the end of the opera, the prince kissed the princess and I looked away, unable to stomach it.
In the morning, I woke to find Byron gone. The hotel hadn’t called her a cab, they had no idea where she was going, but there were only so many places she could be. I caught a taxi to the station, looked for her desperately, did not find her, cursed my arrogance in thinking I could track her, went to the nearest internet café, turned on my laptop and sat down to wait.
Four and a half hours of waiting, and when at last Byron came online I laughed with relief. The tracker I’d lodged into the internal hardware of her machine took a little while to pinpoint her, zooming steadily in on the map, but at last put her in a hotel in Gyeonju. By the time I reached the hotel, she was out I knew not where, but I stole the master door key from reception and slipped into her room, and all was at it should be, socks folded, a shirt drying by the sink, TV off, a single mattress rolled out across the wooden floor, sleeping bag open and ready for use. I couldn’t find her laptop, but checking my own I registered her in a café a few streets away, and went to watch her eating dumplings with one hand, attention all on the screen and her work. My USB stick was lodged in the laptop’s side, data being copied, transferred, digested. It was enough – for now, enough.
The next morning I was up at 5 a.m., and at 6 a.m. I heard her alarm go off. I sat a few tables away at breakfast, followed her into the streets, caught the train to Bulguk-Dong, watched as she surveyed the empty roads and quiet white hotels leading up to the temple on its hill. A town for tourists, hotels offering services in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, English, French, German, Spanish. A single supermarket for the few residents who remained, a tourist office, round with a sloping roof, a woman inside who handed Byron a leaflet and said, “It’s very long way for you to come.”
A car park, half full, a yellow dirt path heading uphill through the trees. I followed Byron fifteen paces behind, climbing towards the temple hidden on its hill, Bulgaska, ministry-designated Korea Historic and Scenic Site No. 1, do not forget to see visitor centre (newly opened) and grotto (sacred, hidden amongst the hills). Buddhist swastika carved into ancient timbers; autumnal red-leaved trees hanging over still ponds where ancient orange carp swim, watched by a curious grey kitten that senses supper.
There were no other humans on the winding climb to the grotto, just she and I, walking. A stone bench on the left, after a mile or so; a symbol of a boddhisattva carved into the cliff, a river running swiftly, trees loose in the breeze.
A pair of Korean tourists, descending the other way, all backpack and big camera, smiled at Byron as they passed, nodding their greeting. They smiled again at me, eyes bright, watchful, and continued on their way. I listened to their footsteps in the leaf and gravel behind me, a regular pattering of stones running downhill from their passage, and had walked another three or four yards before it occurred to me that their footsteps had stopped. I looked back over my shoulder, and there they were, staring up at me, still smiling their polite, interested smiles. I moved away, saw Byron ahead, her back to me, still, eyes down. I kept walking, then stopped. She turned, phone in her hand. My picture was on the screen.
“Oh,” I said, as she examined the photo, my face, comparing it to me, me to it. “Hello again,” I added, glancing over my shoulder – the tourists perhaps not tourists at all now, a definite something in the way they moved, the way they watched.
“Hello, Why,” said Byron.
A flicker of doubt, a moment where my stomach caught, but my voice was steady. “Hello, Byron.”
“Can I ask how man
y times we’ve met?”
“Only once, properly.”
“In Dadohaehaesang?”
“Yes. We had dinner.”
“I thought we must have. The bill seemed more than one person could eat, though I remembered eating alone.”
The two tourists, definitely not tourists, close now, an arm’s reach behind me, not exactly aggressive, neither about to go away.
“Any other times?” she enquired.
“We spoke on the phone in Mokpo.”
“Did we? I received a text message telling me to get on a ferry, but you weren’t there.”
“I was.”
“And on the ferry back?”
“Yes.”
“And on the train?”
“Yes – all the way.”
“You’re following me?”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“Not very successfully, at this moment, but that’ll probably pass.”
“As in… how do I not remember you?”
“I have a condition.”
“What manner of condition?”
“Wherever I go, people forget me.”
“You mean…”
“I mean,” I explained simply, “people forget me.”
A slow nodding, a time to think. Then, without looking away from my face, she reached into her pocket, and pulled out another mobile phone. Softly, “I recorded our dinner conversation. I have every word. I’m recording this now.”
Wind through the trees, the swastika carved into the path, symbol for lucky or auspicious object in Hinduism and Buddhism, symbol of death in Europe and the West.
I looked from Byron to the not-tourists, and back again. I said, “Close your eyes. Count to sixty.”
She hesitated, then closed her eyes. I closed mine too, felt the wind on the back of my neck, the slope of the path beneath my feet, time running by, and I didn’t need numbers, didn’t need to think, the time came and I was still.
Heard a little intake of breath, hard and scared, opened my eyes, saw Byron looking at me, her phone held knuckle-tight in her hand, hair ruffled by the breeze, mouth open, eyes tight.
Silence a while. Byron nodded with her chin, and one of the tourists took my rucksack from my back, and I didn’t fight her. She riffled through its contents, checked my phone, found nothing, patted me down, thorough, hands down my arms, my chest, my legs, feeling round my ankles, nothing of interest, looked through my wallet, passport, ticket stub from the train. No weapons were produced, but we were four strangers on a path through the woods, and I didn’t know what the tourists carried beneath their bright blue anoraks.
All the while, Byron watched. Fascinated now, unable to hide it, enthralled, until she blurted, “How do I forget you?” The tightness in her face was more than curiosity, more than a flush of success. It was almost erotic in its intensity.
I shrugged. “Just happens.”
“Please.” Contempt, insult, what an answer.
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have followed you.”
“I’m involved?”
“The treatments that Filipa developed made the only one of my kind I have ever met memorable. It erased his kindness, his intelligence and his soul, but I can remember him. That gives me two choices – I can go to Filipa and beg that she repeats the process on me, minus the eradication of my heart and mind – or I can give the information to you, with the understanding that you will one day do for me what I cannot do alone – make me memorable. As you cannot remember this bargain apart from the physical evidence it leaves behind, I’m here, following. Why did you record our conversation?” I asked.
An easy answer, sharp and true. “Because I’m getting old. My memory is excellent, but a nuance may make itself apparent in the second or third listening.”
“And how did you recognise me?”
“I have your photo.”
“That’s… never usually enough.”
“I stared at it for hours, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t remember you. So I remembered words. I created mnemonics to capture your description, and remembered the process of remembering. Gender, height, age, hair, eye colour, clothes – just words, useless without a face but, here, enough perhaps. Enough that if I led you to an empty path there could be no doubt. You don’t use a machine?” Incredulous, trying to fathom it out.
“No.”
“Have you drugged me?”
“No. You saw me,” I replied. “Then you forgot.”
“How?!”
“I said: it just happens.”
“That isn’t possible.”
Her eyes moved to the two tourists who stood behind me. “Do you remember me closing my eyes? Do you remember this woman standing here?” she demanded.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the woman, and, “Yes, ma’am,” said the man, their voices softly accented, a hint of American perhaps in their English.
“They had a physical contact with me,” I explained. “Their eyes were open, I did not fade in their short-term memory. People only forget when the conversation stops. You’ll forget this moment too, even though you have your recordings.”
She nodded, slowly. Questions came, questions went, none seeming suitable. For a minute, now for two, we stood. Now two minutes are three, now three are four, and I realise that Byron is counting. She is counting backwards slowly from sixty, and then from sixty again, using the rhythm of the numbers to settle her mind, to suppress a torrent of hypotheticals, of might and maybe, of impossible and probable, proven and inexplicable, boiling her thoughts down to just this moment, and the thing that must happen. The revelation brought a single gasp of laughter to the top of my throat, which I swallowed down before it could break, and so we waited.
Sixty, and sixty more. Then, as if time were nothing, and the wind had not blown and the present had not become the past, she looked up and said simply, “If I ask you to come with me, will you?”
“Probably not.”
“I won’t hurt you.”
“You might not remember that promise.”
“Please: come with me.”
“No. Sooner or later you’ll need to sleep, and when you sleep, you’ll forget.”
“I remembered our conversations online.”
“I leave a memorable footprint. You will remember reading words I’ve written – it’s just my face and my actions that vanish.”
“So I will forget this conversation, but if you transcribed it and emailed it to me, I’d remember it?”
“You’d remember the transcription; it’s a different thing.”
“You want treatments.”
“Yes.”
“Then as you say, you have a choice – either go to Filipa and let her wipe your soul, or stay with me.”
Seas eroded the land. Volcanoes rose from the centre of the earth, molten basalt turned to stone, ash fell, the world turned. The moon waxed and waned, waxed and waned, slowed in its orbit, drifted into space. The sun grew fat and red, the graves of the dead turned to fossilised stone.
I said, “I’m hungry. Do you know if there’s anywhere round here that does sandwiches?”
Chapter 59
Her helpers had managed to get a four-wheel drive up the muddy tracks to a small courtyard behind the grotto on the top of the hill. From the side of the road you could almost see the sea, a line of greyer grey where the sky stopped. The forest swayed below, the clouds rushed above, heading east in a hurry, trailing loose hairs as they ran.
The inside of the car smelt of chemicals and hire companies. On the back of every seat was my photo, pinned up large, and a note in the same stiff hand which read: She is _why.
The driver, a man in a baseball cap and owl sunglasses, was waiting, a cigarette burning between two yellow-stained fingers, a Manchester United T-shirt billowing around his skinny chest. He threw the butt away as we approached, nodded wordlessly and swung into his seat. I huddled in the back, between Byron and the woman, and said nothing.
W
e drove in silence, until the driver’s phone rang and he answered irritably, holding it in place under his chin. His mother, checking that he was all right. Yes he was, of course he was, he was always all right. Well, she’d heard… Mother, I’m working… Oh well yes dear but I just wanted to tell you…
The driver hung up. We drove in silence, Byron never taking her eyes from me.
At one point, the man in the front turned away, and grew enthralled by the passing of the forest around us, and when he looked back, he gasped to see me, and his colleague’s eyes flashed to his face and he mumbled in Korean, something about truth and memory – I couldn’t decipher more.
Then the woman’s eyes narrowed, and she looked away, and perhaps intended only to look away for a minute at most, but forgot that she was deliberately diverting her attention, so looked back five minutes later, and caught her breath, and held onto the handle above the door as she stared at me, in case she might bounce out of her seat.
Then she crossed herself.
Census, 2005, South Korea: Buddhism 22 per cent. Protestantism and Roman Catholicism combined: 28 per cent. Flaws in the survey, however: no one was asked if they practised Confucianism, or honoured their ancestors, or sought the guidance of shamans. In this corner of the world, it was perfectly normal to pray to both Jesus and Kuanyin, manifestations, perhaps, of the same entity, expressed in different manners.
I glanced over at Byron, unsmiling, who said nothing. She would not take her eyes from me, not permit herself to break awareness of my presence.
At a motorway service station, we stopped for burgers. There weren’t sandwiches to be found, and the burgers were hot halfway-houses between McDonald’s and bibimbap, but it was food. Byron ate in silence as we pulled away, and only when she’d finished every corner and I was licking the last of the pickle sauce from my fingers did she say, “How do you live?”