I Hear Your Voice

by Young-Ha Kim

  He said, “You came alone?”

  “Why’re you acting like this?”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Your homeroom teacher.”

  He relaxed but he also seemed somehow disappointed. After my eyes adjusted to the dark, I looked around carefully. Compared to the mess outside, the house was surprisingly tidy.

  “Why’re you here, and not in your family’s place?”

  “There’s no such thing as my place here. You can live anywhere in this neighborhood now.”

  “It’ll be demolished soon.”

  “True.”

  “Is your mother out?”

  Jae’s face went blank. His eyes closed and his neck jerked back, and he looked excruciatingly bored; he did this whenever he was furious.

  “What’s that?” I pointed at two full-length mirrors standing behind him. The mirrors were upright and facing each other so that within one mirror there was a mirror, and within that another mirror, and within that mirror yet another mirror, endlessly multiplying themselves.

  “I found them. A lot of people get rid of their mirrors when they move.”

  He dodged the point of my question. I wondered why he had two mirrors facing each other, but he changed the subject. “You remember Meth Head?”

  “Of course I remember him.”

  Even before we’d moved, Jae’s face had been purple with bruises. Meth Head had beat him up, but Mama Pig was so high that she didn’t care what happened to Jae. Everyone was shocked at how the tough, determined Mama Pig had fallen apart in the blink of an eye, but no one called the police or reported the beatings. I wondered if maybe Meth Head and Mama Pig were still on the second floor and left Jae alone in the semi-basement.

  As if he had read my mind, Jae said, “I found the house clean after coming back from school one day. Since those two started using meth, the house was always a mess. I thought it was weird, and when it got dark, no one returned home.”

  “When was that?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “You’ve been living alone here a whole month?” I thought, In these spooky ruins?

  “I have to find the bastard.”

  “And when you find him?”

  “I’ll get even.”

  “Get even?”

  His eyes flashed a flaming blue.

  “You see what it’s like here now, don’t you? If anything happens to someone, no one will know.”

  “What about reporting them to the police?”

  Jae smirked. “First thing they’ll do is lock me up in an orphanage.”

  A stepmother who’d abandoned her child and made a run for it wouldn’t be worth a minute’s attention from the police; for women without money, applying for a divorce was a bother, and they just slipped out of the house and split.

  “Do you know what this is?” Jae pointed at the mirrors set in the center of the room.

  “No.”

  “It’s a device to catch the devil. A kind of trap.”

  “It catches the devil?”

  “I read about it in a book. The devil can move between mirrors if they’re facing each other—he comes out to cross over to the other. If you cover the second mirror with a cloth just then, the devil can’t finish crossing and ends up stuck here. That’s when you grab him.”

  He sounded like a salesman talking about the features of the latest TV set. According to him, the devil was most active crossing between mirrors on Fridays at midnight.

  “If he’s so easily caught, how can he be the devil?”

  “The devil doesn’t know how he was captured. That’s why if he wants to return to his world, he needs the help of the trap-maker.”

  “What in the world are you going to do after you catch the devil?” I found myself saying this seriously.

  “Weren’t you paying attention? I said I’m going to get even.”

  “Okay, but you can’t keep living like this. Do you have food?”

  “There’s a lot of leftovers in the empty houses. People leave everything that’s past the expiration date, so whenever a family moves out, I go over at night and clean the house out.”

  My guess was that he wasn’t just hitting empty houses.

  “You’re not going to tell the school you saw me, right?”

  “I won’t say anything. But this area will be redeveloped soon anyway, and a bulldozer will raze it all down.”

  He nodded somberly. “That’s why I have to find the devil, quick.”

  He showed me weird phrases that he had written down, and explained that they were commands for the devil that he had found on the Internet. He was utterly sincere.

  I couldn’t leave him like this, so I said, “I heard fires have been breaking out in the neighborhood.”

  There were a lot of wild rumors about the area. As one household left, then the next, the number of abandoned buildings grew. The association wasn’t pleased about opponents to the redevelopment plans, and ignored the growing disorder in the area. In fact they encouraged it.

  “You mean the random fires? They’re started by the shits from the redevelopment association.”

  Jae was sure about this. He pointed at the stacks of dry-powder fire extinguishers beside the table, and said he’d collected them from the empty houses.

  I added, “I even heard that someone kidnapped and killed a girl, and put her in a water tank.”

  “All kinds of rumors get around.”

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  Instead of answering, he pointed at the mirrors and grinned. There was nothing cheerful about his smile.

  I stood up. “I skipped out on one cram school already tonight, so I’ve got to make it to the next one.”

  Jae went out first and scouted the surroundings like an advance guard, then let me go.

  Jae still didn’t show up at school. I lied to Bald Eagle and told him I hadn’t been able to find Jae. Sometimes I packed food and brought it to the basement where he was hiding out. He didn’t make much progress capturing the devil, but he said that something was definitely moving between the mirrors and he just hadn’t caught it at the right moment. Like the alchemists who had spent their lives mixing different ingredients with lead in order to make gold, every Friday at midnight, Jae made small changes to his method. He made adjustments such as revising his commands, making microscopic shifts to the mirrors’ angles, or lighting a candle between the two mirrors. If he failed, he had to wait another week. He hadn’t cut his hair for a long time and it had gone shaggy, which made him look like a retired rocker.

  “How long are you going to live like this?”

  “Till I catch him.”

  Jae was stubborn. His cheeks had hollowed out and his arms were bones. Each time I opened his door and went in, I was afraid I’d discover his cold, stiff corpse.

  8

  One day during a late April snow, I sought out Bald Eagle. The snow stuck to the windows of the staff room in random patterns before quickly melting.

  I asked, “If, let’s say, Jae was living alone without any grownups taking care of him, what would happen to him? Would he be sent to an orphanage?”

  “So you saw Jae?” Bald Eagle said, picking his ear.

  “No, sir, I’m just asking. I’m just curious what would happen.”

  “Have you seen Jae, or haven’t you?”

  “Do I have to tell you?”

  His eyes narrowed. “No, you don’t have to say anything. But if Jae is living alone in that neighborhood—as you would know since you’ve been there—it’s very dangerous. He’d have to be taken somewhere safe. For his sake.”

  “Even if he didn’t want to go?”

  “If he didn’t want to go, we’d have to find another solution. This is a democracy, after all.”

  A few days later when I went to meet Jae, I was being followed. I had no idea until I strode over to the basement room and knocked. As soon as Jae opened the door, the police, a social worker, and redevelopment association board members shoved
me away and flooded the room. Jae, sprawled across the floor in front of me, was dragged out like a dog. He struggled, but they were too much for him. He glared at me, his eyes filled with resentment. I still remember what he said as he clung to the rusted doorknob: “Just give me one more day! Today’s Friday the thirteenth!”

  Only I understood what he meant. As the police officer unlocked the door to the car, Jae used all his strength to shake off his captors and escape. He dashed up to the multi-unit’s rooftop and leaped from roof to roof, balcony to balcony. He moved easily, as if he had done this often. It looked like he could run forever. Everyone separated and began combing the area.

  I went to Jae’s room and stood between the two mirrors. I saw countless copies of myself. What if Jae hadn’t been trying to catch the devil and had wanted to enter the mirror instead? Or what if he’d given a part or all of his soul ​to that other world? When I consider his life from that point onward, it seems to me that the moment he had stood between the two mirrors, he broke away from the rules and the ways of the world that had twice abandoned him and entered a different, eternal sphere. Jae didn’t really need to capture the devil leaping between the mirrors. The only object reflected in a mirror is the self; and a person who persists in continuously gazing at himself is actually looking at the devil.

  The next day, Bald Eagle summoned me. He said that they had caught Jae and sent him to a facility. This was a good thing in all respects, he explained, and he praised me for having done something difficult for my friend’s sake.

  “Where did they get him?”

  “They say he returned to the house. One of the board members staking it out caught him.”

  Within the next month, bulldozers razed the area. The last resistance came from the elderly and the sick, those without money, power, or mobility. As the machines advanced, 119 rescue workers drove in and carried people out on stretchers. Within days, they buried the memories of all the former residents in the red flatland that now resembled Mars. A construction company erected a temporary barricade decorated with appealing photos around the area. The apartment was branded something like Dream&Green, or maybe it was e-Convenient World. My memory’s shaky.

  Despite rumors, no middle school female’s corpse turned up in the water tank. The construction firm wasn’t actually worried about a decaying corpse but about what didn’t decay—the remains of ancient kingdoms. Construction halted if a worker discovered a thousand-year-old fragment of a tiled roof or the smallest trace of a fortress wall from the Three Kingdoms.

  That winter, I sent Jae a Christmas card. Bald Eagle gave me the address after he made a few calls to some bureau of education and learned which facility Jae had been shipped off to. I remember thinking that for grownups, everything was so simple.

  “Where is Nonsan-ri?” I asked.

  “It’s near Daejeon.”

  It was less than a two-hour drive away, but to a middle school kid like me, Daejeon might as well have been another country.

  I had wanted to visit Jae, but Bald Eagle said, “Maybe just send him a card.”

  There was something offensive about the way he phrased it. He didn’t say “Why don’t you send him a card” or “You should send him a card” or “How about sending him a card?” Instead, he said, “Maybe just send him a card.” His flippant tone tainted my innocent plan, but it was also an idea that hadn’t occurred to me. By then I owned a cell phone; but Jae had never had one before and there was even less of a chance now, with him in a facility in Nonsan-ri.

  At a stationery store near school, I bought a card picturing Rudolph dancing. Inside there was hardly any space for writing, but I needed to clear up any misunderstandings, ask Jae how he was, and tell him how I was. There just wasn’t enough space for all I needed to say. Oh, whatever, I thought, and started writing. I ended up with a typical Christmas greeting. How are you? I’m doing well. How is it there? Merry Christmas.

  Looking back, I can see that Jae probably felt I was taunting him. It was obvious he would think I’d told the school everything and landed him in the facility, and then had the nerve to send him a Christmas card casually asking him how it was there, and wishing him a merry Christmas! But a small part of me hoped that no matter what I wrote, he would understand me. After all, hadn’t he been my interpreter when I couldn’t speak for myself?

  I went to the post office and mailed the card, then headed to the Gwanghwamun district. After buying some study guides at a bookstore I headed home on the subway, where I ran into a group of deaf people. Five kids around my age were using sign language together. I’d forgotten a lot, but I still got the gist of what they were saying. Four of them mercilessly teased the fifth, signing: You’re dating her, aren’t you? There’re rumors all over school. The kid being teased fought back: Who knows, maybe she’s got a crush on me, but that’s her problem! The kids shook their heads and laughed. They abruptly began talking about movies. They must have just come from watching a foreign-language comedy that they couldn’t hear, but they would have read the subtitles like anyone else. Though it was quiet and only their expressions hinted at laughter, I’m sure everyone on the train sensed elation surging from the group. The kids mimicked the actors’ expressions and jabbered on about the movie’s climax. The other passengers had no idea how many words were flooding out of them.

  If they would only accept me, I wanted to be a part of them again. But if there’s a sadness that inflames the heart, a sadness akin to resentment and grief, there also exists a judge, a cousin to sadness, who chills it. That day I felt the latter, as if my heart had frosted over with snow. My eyes prickled with pain as my heart went cold. I turned up the volume on my MP3 player. The kids got off at the next subway station, and birds—their wings flapping—rose up from their hands.

  9

  A dog-breeding farm stood behind the orphanage. The owner had sold his cows after their value collapsed, and bought dogs instead. Though he crammed hundreds of dogs into the small fenced-in area, the dogs stayed quiet because he had punctured each of their eardrums with an air gun. It’s said that if you shoot an unloaded gun into a dog’s ear, the penetrating air tears the dog’s eardrum. The dog breeder drove a truck. Sometimes he stopped by to meet the director of the orphanage. He looked at children the same way he looked at dogs, so the kids instinctively avoided him. Once a girl disappeared, and everyone suspected the dog breeder. Rumors spread that he had killed her and fed her to the dogs.

  A mushroom grower, the dog breeder’s sworn enemy, lived behind the breeding farm. He grew mushrooms in an abandoned mine that Jae had once sneaked inside, along with a few other kids. It was dark and damp and sent chills up the spine. The smooth white mushrooms spiraled bleakly up thick blocks of wood. When one of the kids claimed that all the mushrooms were poisonous, they started arguing.

  Jae protested, “Why would he spend money growing poisonous mushrooms?”

  The other kid picked a mushroom off the wood and handed it to him. He said, “It’s because the owner’s totally psychotic. Eat it, asshole. What, you won’t scarf it down? You said it wasn’t poisonous, didn’t you?”

  Jae stared blankly at the mushroom, then handed it back. “You eat it.”

  “Why should I eat it? You said it wasn’t poisonous, so you should eat it.”

  Jae said, “Now I think they’re poisonous too.”

  “What?”

  “Now that I think about it, I think you’re right. It is a poisonous mushroom. It’s poisonous, all right.”

  The kid, confused by Jae’s sudden reversal, stared at him. Jae held the mushroom close to the kid’s nose. He said, “Here, I said try it. What’s the matter? You can’t eat it since it’s poisonous?”

  The kid stepped back, shouting, “Asshole, are you crazy? Why should I eat it?”

  “Try it, asshole. What, you scared?” Jae brought the mushroom to his own lips. “Watch carefully. This is how you eat a poisonous mushroom.”

  In front of all the kids, Jae chewed it thoroug
hly and swallowed. But though the mushroom wasn’t poisonous, Jae was still racked with diarrhea all night long.

  The mushroom grower had put up a hut where he lived right beside the damp tunnel sheltering a variety of mushrooms. Prostitutes from the coffeehouse sometimes came by, so the older boys peeked in through the window. The man lived with a twenty-four-hour news channel on at all times, so the news became the background noise even when he was having sex with these young women. The prostitute’s mechanical, insincere moans rode over the anchorwoman’s serious voice mostly relaying what politicians were doing. Whenever the couple finished having sex, they poured coffee from a thermos and drank it together in silence.

  The coffeehouse girls always arrived on scooters with weak engines. And when they departed, they left behind smoky exhaust from the burning engines and the scent of cheap perfume. Both were toxic, but this illicit smell captivated Jae early on. Sometimes he followed it down the road, but the scent was inevitably masked by the time he arrived at the dog-breeding farm. From there, the world of dogs took over. The whole area reeked of dog shit and urine. When the owner wasn’t around, Jae sneaked into the farm. Each time the tense dogs, raised for fighting, came at the fence as if to tear it apart, Jae backed off. They stank with the smell of creatures living a dire, doomed existence. He felt strongly sympathetic toward the trapped dogs, and was especially taken with a red-eyed Tosa Inu who limped because of a bad hind leg. For a time the two merely gazed at each other as if in a staring contest, and whenever that happened, even the other dogs calmed down.

  You could say that Jae had a rare ability to communicate with animals, but he had trouble talking to people while he lived at the orphanage. People who met Jae for the first time, especially girls, were interested in him, but it didn’t last long. He didn’t know how to hold a person’s attention, but he was surprisingly able to make deep connections with animals. And the more this happened, the less he expected of people.