by Ha Seong-nan
“She’s crazy about fresh cream cake. I’m a huge fan myself,” he snickers. “You think we’ll ever eat it together again?” he mumbles, as if talking to himself.
The fellow nods goodbye and begins to make his way down the stairs. The cake is heavy. While the man is opening his door, he hears a curse come from the third floor. The fellow must have tripped on the higher, second step.
“Excuse me,” the man calls down the center of the stairwell.
Several levels below, the fellow’s broad face emerges over the railing.
“You know …” the man starts to say.
The fellow has no clue that she doesn’t like fresh cream cake. It could have even been the cause of their breakup. But how could he tell the truth without giving the wrong idea? If he confesses he digs through other people’s garbage, the fellow will think he’s crazy. And if he says that she told him herself, the fellow is bound to grow suspicious.
“What if something happens?”
The fellow gives him a blank stare.
“I mean, what if I don’t run into her?”
The fellow smiles brightly, revealing yellow teeth. “Then you go ahead and eat it!” His laughter grows distant.
The woman is on a diet right now. She doesn’t hate the guy; she just hates his enormous body that weighs close to a hundred kilograms. She’s sick of eating fresh cream cake, and she’s sick of his mistaken belief that she also shares his love for this cake—it’s the reason they broke up. If only the fellow had dug through her garbage, who knows? They might still be together.
•
Inside the man’s fridge, the cake is slowly spoiling. He still hasn’t run into her. They have narrowly missed each other each time. Whenever he scrambles out into the corridor after her, she is already gone, leaving behind a trace of mimosa-scented fabric softener. He opens his address book. Choi Jiae. 012-343-7890.
“Did somebody page me?” says a bored voice on the other end of the line, chewing gum.
“I’m supposed to give you a cake, but you’re impossible to run into.”
She blows a bubble and the gum pops. “What are you talking about?” She chews again.
“I live next door to you, Miss Choi.”
“That’s it, I’ve had enough,” she snaps. “A man man kept calling, leaving weird messages and now this! I’m not, what’s her name, Choi Jiae. I’ve had this number for over a month now.”
The door of 507 is wide open. He takes the cake out of the fridge and rushes inside. A middle-aged couple is repapering the walls. With all the furniture taken out, the unit looks bigger than he imagined. The smell of adhesive stings his nostrils. A man with a strip of pasted paper in hand is climbing a ladder. He glances toward the entrance.
“Can I help you?” his wife calls out. She smiles at the man, holding a brush dripping with paste. “Do you want your walls repapered? We offer very good prices.”
The man moves out of the doorway as two workmen carrying a large sheet of glass come up the stairs. They go out to the balcony and remove the broken shards and start to put in the new pane.
•
The drunk fellow is in the back lot looking for something. He raises his crimson face when the man calls out to him. The man steps into the lot. Overgrown weeds come up to his knees.
“I’m sorry. I ended up eating the cake. It took a whole week to finish it.”
The fellow is out of breath. In his hand is a broken branch.
“She moved out,” the man continues. “But I guess you already knew that?”
The fellow nods, whipping the overgrown weeds.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Last summer, we went on a trip to Jeju Island,” the fellow says, his eyes taking on a far-away look, as if he’s reminiscing. “You see, Jiae likes the ocean.”
It’s not the ocean that she likes—it’s the mountains.
Fixing his gaze into the distance, the fellow keeps mumbling. “We bought a dol harubang there. You know the Jeju souvenir—the stone statue with holes punched in it like pumice? The night we got into a fight, she went crazy and threw it out the window. It should have landed somewhere over here. I’ve looked everywhere, but I can’t find it.”
They search, but it’s not easy to find a little statue in a thicket of weeds.
“Then why don’t we look again from opposite ends?” The man searches for a stick.
“You sure you’re not busy?”
He picks up a branch and walks over to the other side. “I’ve got lots of time.”
He whacks the grass as he examines the ground. He glances up to see the fellow wipe his red face with his sleeve. It’s sweltering. At noon the temperature hits about 28 degrees Celsius. Tonight’s going to be the last time. Just once more and I’m calling it quits. He takes off his tie and shoves it in his suit pocket. He unbuttons the top button of his dress shirt that’s choking him. But there’s no other way to know. You know why? Because the truth is rotting in the garbage somewhere. Savagely, the man beats the grass.
Toothpaste
A giant billboard stands atop a high-rise tower. A maiden in a floral-print bikini with a lei around her neck smiles down at the intersection twenty stories below. Stretching out behind her is the Pacific Ocean, where a motorboat cleaves through the greenish waves and copper-skinned young men balance themselves on surfboards, bending their bodies like bows. The fruit at the top of the palm trees is the size of rugby balls.
He stands clutching a bus strap and looks out the dusty window at the billboard. The laughter and raucous sounds of a foreign language ring in his ears. The water looks clear, but if you waded in, shards of coral would pierce your bare feet. The bus doesn’t budge. Once apartment buildings started to go up on this reclamation ground, the road, which runs parallel to the coastline of the West Sea, wasn’t able to handle the sudden increase in traffic volume. Today’s high tide was at 4:10 A.M. The water is starting to recede already, backing away from the breakwater. Once again, the bus didn’t arrive on time that morning, and the station swarmed with twice as many passengers as usual. The bus suddenly cuts into the left-turn lane, and a woman standing close behind slams into him with the force of a heavy suitcase. His hand is wrenched from the strap and he falls, his face mashing against the window.
For the past year, whenever he’s passing through this congested area, he has stared up at the billboard. He keeps staring, until he can read the writing at the bottom. Paradise on Earth. It’s Closer Than You Think. The left-turn signal comes on twice, but the bus is still stuck in the intersection.
The girl on the billboard smiles her same smile in the sleet and in the winter rain, and he looks up at her, whether he’s dressed in his fall suit still reeking of chemicals, or in his down parka and leather gloves. Someone behind him has already claimed his plastic strap when he’d let go. He keeps his gaze fixed on the billboard, all through the bus’s lurching. The ad was already old when he saw it for the first time a year ago, with colors fading from direct exposure to the sun and the paint peeling in places. Even the maiden’s smile has lost its luster.
Foam is poking through the rip in the nylon seat. Once the bus is able to escape the intersection and enter the freeway, it will speed all the way to Seoul Station. He peers through the tangle of arms that block his view. The bus is now right in front of the tower. He can no longer see the top part of the billboard, but can make out the smaller print. Various destinations and their prices are stamped on the maiden’s thighs.
Bankok/Pataya - 5 Days - 499,000
Boracay - 5 Days - 749,000
Langkawi - 5 Days - 649,000
Hawaii - 5 Days - 999,000
These unfamiliar destinations are like the different items on a menu at a French restaurant. Day and night, the maiden casts inviting glances at passersby, saying, “For a million minus a thousand won, you can come to Hawaii and spend five days with me.”
What the man is actually looking at is the high-rise rooftop, blocked by the bill
board and spotted only by the helicopters and low-altitude airplanes flying above. He had spent most of his thirty months of military service atop a 25-story tower in Yongsan, behind rooftop billboards just like this one.
Before stepping into the building three to four times a day, he’d stared up at the gigantic billboards. Dressed in full military gear, he’d had to tilt his head all the way back to see the red convertible, with a blonde woman in the passenger seat wearing an off-the-shoulder top. Countless times in his mind, he’d gotten in the empty driver’s seat and sped along the road. He stepped into the elevator and took it to the very top. He then needed to climb the emergency stairs. On the wall where the stairs suddenly stopped, a sign bore the words NO ADMITTANCE. Attached to the wall was a steel ladder leading to a square metal hatch in the ceiling. When he pushed open the hatch and poked out his head, he saw gigantic water tanks and exhaust fans turning ceaselessly. Surrounded by colossal billboards, the rooftop was like a cardboard box without a lid. Beams crisscrossed on the backs of billboards, and rusted pegs protruded. There on the roof, hidden by the billboards, the man guarded anti-aircraft missiles in two-hour shifts. Beatings and punishment were meted out endlessly. Groans escaped his lips every time the club struck his behind, but they were absorbed by all the outside noise. At night, the moon rose in the square night sky. When he got off duty and stepped out of the building, the beautiful golden-haired woman was still there in the sports car. It was from this period he began to suffer from a mild case of claustrophobia.
The bus finally rounds the tower. Since he isn’t holding onto a strap, he falls as people are swept to one side. As his face hits the window, spittle flies out from between his lips and lands on the glass. Out of one eye, he sees the rearview mirror stuck on the side of the bus. Reflected in the convex mirror is a girl’s face. Though her face is distorted, he notices her right away, amid all the unfamiliar faces. It’s a face he’s seen before. People press up behind her, but she holds herself up by pushing against the back of a seat. Her face is devoid of makeup, and there are dark smudges under her narrowed eyes. The bus finally enters the freeway and he manages to straighten himself up. When he glances at the rearview mirror again, the girl is gone.
•
A crumpled Coke can bounces off his foot and flies forward. When he steps on a discarded ice cream wrapper, the melted content spews out and soils his shoe. Sun Villa is situated next to its twin, Moon Villa. A warning in red is posted on the stone wall: Those Caught Littering Will Be Fined. As if to mock these words, foul-smelling garbage bags are piled up beside the wall. The man cuts across the villa courtyard, which reeks of urine. It’s only been a year since completion, but thin cracks, like plant roots, run up the walls of the building.
The man purchased this apartment outside Seoul for various reasons. He’d first seen the advertisement for the pre-sale villa units in the morning paper. Amid tedious advertisements with phrases like high investment value, a low price per square foot, 15% finishing options, equipped with top-grade gas range, and twelve mineral springs, this particular advertisement had caught his eye.
Open your window to the West Sea. Every evening, be treated to the sunset. Take the #24 from Incheon and get to Seoul in 40 minutes. Have a seat. Relax all the way to Seoul.
On the day he moved in, he slid open the window that faced west. Instead of the horizon of the West Sea, he was greeted by the view of someone else’s balcony, crowded with laundry. Except the laundry wasn’t on the balcony; it was hanging over the railing above a street so narrow that a white undershirt grazed his nose every time it flapped in the wind. This apartment tower across the street blocked his view of the West Sea. Until late at night, pop songs and the clamor of machinery from Songdo Amusement Park drifted into his bedroom, and on rainy or cloudy days, the air carried the smell of animal waste from the park zoo. Sometimes when he passed his window, he made eye contact with the people watching television in the living room behind their balcony. He hung a large print of the Hong Kong nightlife over his window. The photograph portrayed neon signs that said Coca-Cola refreshes you best and Dry, Drier, Driest, which was probably a Dry Gin ad. Since then, it was always night outside his window, glittering with bright lights.
The small window of the guard booth slides open and an old security guard sticks his head out. “Hold on, I’ve got a letter for you!”
While the guard searches for the letter, the man leans against the aluminum booth and gazes up at the villa windows. The laundry draped over the balcony is hovering in the dark like ghosts. He is reminded of back alleys in Hong Kong where people would string laundry on a bamboo pole and hang it over the street. He’d learned only recently that people here hung their laundry over the balcony because their apartments hardly got any sun. The guard rummages through the desk drawers and even riffles through a stack of paper. Then as if he’d just remembered, he pulls out a folded envelope from his back pocket.
“I found it a few days ago in the courtyard.”
He spits toward the dark flowerbed. The envelope is marked with a boot print and is damp from the humidity. It’s addressed to Park Seongcheol, a name that’s identical to his own, except for the middle syllable. The bottom consonants are so tiny that the characters look like circus performers balancing precariously on a unicycle. He stands under the security light with his briefcase wedged between his knees and rips open the envelope. Insects flutter around the security light. It rained off and on for the past several days, so the ink is smudged and has bled through the paper.
“I went through a lot of trouble to find your address. I spoke to HR at your company, but they wouldn’t tell me. In the end, I had to lie. I said I admired your work, that I worked for a magazine and wanted to interview you. Where do I start? Of course I know it wasn’t all your fault. After all, we were both spring chickens back then. But everything went wrong for me after that. I wilted before I could even blossom. All because of you, Mr. Park. Don’t waste your gift on useless things. I’ve told a lot of lies, but I’m not lying when I say I was your admirer once.”
The man holds the letter up to the light and reads it several more times. He can’t understand it. He feels as if he’s reading a news article where the beginning and ending have been removed. Judging by the writing, he’s certain a woman had written it. He turns over the envelope, but the name and address of the sender are missing.
“Sorry, but I don’t think it’s for me.”
The old guard is watching television with his feet propped on the desk. “I searched the whole villa for two days.”
The man glimpses a tiny bathroom inside the booth. The guard hacks and spits into the toilet.
“I realize there’s no one by the name of Park Seongcheol, but look—Sun Villa, Building B, 201—isn’t that you?” the guard says, pointing at the address on the envelope.
He sucks in his sunken cheeks, sending his mint candy clacking against his teeth. Each time he opens his mouth, the smell of mint, unable to mask his stale breath, hits the man in the face.
“But I told you my name isn’t Park Seongcheol,” he says.
He tosses the letter on the guard’s desk and climbs the stairs to his apartment.
There is dried toothpaste smeared on the side of the kitchen sink from this morning. His desk is strewn with tubes of toothpaste. Since the product name hasn’t yet been chosen, the word toothpaste marks each white tube. They have about twenty days to come up with a TV commercial concept and script. Through the wall he hears the clatter of plates from the apartment next door. He squeezes toothpaste onto his brush, puts it in his mouth, and paces the living room. Ever since a large stain formed on his bathroom ceiling from the apartment upstairs, he has carried out his morning and nightly routines at the kitchen sink. Not much has changed from his days in the army seven years ago. Just as before, he finds himself enclosed in a cramped, square space. From here, he can’t even see the moon. With his mouth full of toothpaste foam, he walks to his desk and scrawls a few words into an op
en notebook. Gum disease, bad breath, cavities, triclosan, control, refresh, kiss—though featuring a kiss in a toothpaste commercial became a cliché a long time ago. Foam drips onto the floor from his mouth. He rinses, spits, and then squeezes toothpaste on his brush once more. The mint flavor makes his tongue and mouth go numb.
•
He gently pushes open the heavy, padded door to the screening room. The light from the hallway spills into the dark room where thick curtains have been drawn to shut out the light. The dust swirling over the screen is illuminated for a moment, and Mr. Kim, standing beside the screen with a pointer in hand, grimaces and covers his eyes with his hand. Images flash on the screen, as the film makes its way from the feed reel into the projector. His hunched shadow wavers on top of the screen.
When he got off the bus at Seoul Station, he was already late for work. The words from the advertisement—get to Seoul in 40 minutes— were true only if you were traveling in the middle of the night when there was no traffic, or when you were racing along the freeway at 120 kilometers per hour. Because of his frequent tardiness, he once nearly had to submit a written apology.
Even this morning in Incheon, his bus had come late. It had then started pulling out of the terminal with people hanging out the door. A few who had managed to climb onto the steps were forced off. When the doors couldn’t close, he had no choice but to come down and wait for the next bus. He sprinted the two blocks from Seoul Station to his office building. He almost got run over by a car darting out from an alley.
He trips over a cord and frantically puts out his hands to break his fall. Every gaze that had been glued to the screen is now on him. With his own eyes still not adjusted to the darkness, he gropes along, searching for a place to sit. The screening room floor is sloped like a movie theater. He manages to find a seat in the back. Light from the projector penetrates the face of Mr. Kim, who stands brandishing his pointer.
Toothpaste commercials parade by tediously on the screen. A woman with curly hair bites into a green apple with a loud crunch. The brand appears across the screen with a close-up of the woman’s red lips. She runs her tongue over each white tooth that gleams like porcelain. Words flash across the screen: So clean.