I Hear Your Voice

by Young-Ha Kim

  A year passed. Jae turned seventeen on the streets. When he hadn’t washed for a long time, he resembled a beggar from the countryside. He no longer rummaged through trashcans; instead, he satisfied his dietary needs by eating uncooked rice once a day. He ate the bare minimum and moved quietly. He read books that he found at a recycling collection site, but spent most of his days in quiet spaces, thinking.

  17

  The café in the basement of the four-story building had a high ceiling, and was open and spacious except for the hall’s four supporting pillars. The black-finished walls and the alcove radiated a soft yellow light that reminded me a little of Mama Pig’s hostess bar. My gaze naturally strayed to the center. A bold ray of light beamed from the ceiling, and the air was smoky from cigarettes and clammy dry ice. The trancelike electronic music was thick in the air, dividing one person from another like a curtain. Though the space was crowded with customers, I felt like a solitary alien who had landed on a lonely planet. This made me think that the rays looked like columns of light from a UFO, and the people at the tables, earthlings waiting to greet the aliens.

  A hexagonal acrylic cube, about two-by-two meters in size, rested at the base of the columns of light. Inside the cube I saw a mannequin in skinny jeans and a low-cut white chiffon blouse, lying at an angle.

  I ordered a Coke from the approaching waitress.

  Just then, the mannequin began squirming then stood upright. She gazed coolly around her and yawned. The off-white beam of light moved slowly from her bare feet up to her face. She was clearly a human being. But because of the lights and the setting, she looked like a cyborg. I found myself gaping. We ordinary people emerge into the world as wet, bloody babies from our mother’s womb, but the being inside the cube was far removed from human impurities and our disgusting, frantic lifestyles. It was nearly perfect.

  Her work was simple. All she had to do was stay inside the cube and act natural, as if everything outside was a vacuum—a kind of outer space. She had earbuds in and read comic books, surfed the Internet on her netbook, and seemed to chat online with friends. When she was tired, she pulled a Hello Kitty blanket over herself and napped. She drank Welch’s juice and ate bites of cheesecake. The entire setup looked like experimental theater, or a popular reality TV show in America, or even a sacrificial offering. It was a space free of anything dirty or messy, a space where you could eat but where excreting was beyond imagination.

  I asked the waitress, “Excuse me, but Yeom Mokran—does she work here?”

  “If you call what she does work. I don’t think she’s off yet.” The waitress pouted as she pointed at the cube. Though sporadic gusts of dry ice blocked my view, the cube was definitely there.

  Once when I was young, my family went to the beach. It was probably somewhere by the East Sea. At night my father took us to a sashimi restaurant. A lone halibut was still alive on the fresh plate that the chef had skillfully prepared for us. I still vividly remember how desperate the halibut looked, with its gaping mouth and bleary eyes. My father said a man needs to know how to eat these kinds of things, and shoved a piece into my mouth.

  What I’d felt then came back vividly to me. Mokran’s experience in the cube clearly wasn’t cruel, but the café owner and the sashimi chef both exposed me to what I didn’t care to see—what I’d regret seeing—but was supposed to accept and enjoy.

  Mokran had called me the day before. I’d saved her number under Jae’s name in my address book, so I assumed it was him, and answered, “Jae, is that you?”

  “I’m not Jae,” a woman’s voice said.

  “Then who is this?”

  “You’re his friend, right?”

  “Yes, and?”

  “Sounds like you haven’t been in touch with him either. You asked right away if it was him.”

  She wanted to know where Jae was hiding. I wanted to know the same.

  “It’s weird, I keep wondering about him,” she said. “You know, he’s the first to get a hold of my number and not call me.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say so I waited for whatever was next.

  She asked, “Which school do you go to?”

  When I told her, she said that my school was near where she worked part-time, and that I should drop by when I was free.

  “Is it somewhere students can be?” I asked, cautiously using informal language back to her for the first time.

  “Yeah, it’s just a café,” she said. “What, you thought I was some wild chick?”

  And now Mokran was locked inside a clear cage, a cube, yawning. I was drinking my Coke with a straw when I recalled the woman trapped in the water tank. The helpless magician and the woman. The air bubbles frothing from her lips. Her swaying body. Thinking about the scene made me feel queasy. I wanted to scream, to run and shatter the cube. It was a stupid thought but I couldn’t stop myself.

  I shot up from my seat, but dry ice blasted out and the spotlights above dimmed. Like a UFO that had completed its mission, the ray of light aimed at the center of the floor; Mokran became fuzzy, then promptly disappeared. Like an alien temporarily come down to earth: mission completed as time warped.

  I went outside but didn’t see Mokran, so I leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. After two smokes I felt calmer, until I heard the rev of an engine. When I turned, I saw a girl on a Kawasaki, wearing goggles but no helmet. I wasn’t sure it was Mokran, so I approached cautiously.

  “I’m Donggyu, Jae’s . . .”

  The girl pushed the goggles up to her forehead and squinted at me. “I saw you come into the café. Good to see you.”

  I was relieved it was Mokran.

  “Your motorcycle’s . . . cool,” I stuttered out as casually as I could.

  Mokran looked different in sunlight. Without the lights dramatizing her three-dimensionality in the cube, she didn’t feel as mysterious, but she was as pretty as ever.

  “It looks like . . . you’re going somewhere?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got another part-time job.”

  As she leaned over the bike saddle, I couldn’t take my eyes off her profile.

  I asked, “Are you going to be inside something again, like here?”

  “No, this time I’ve got to dance with a bunch of girls for a new store opening. I just have to get on a table and move around.”

  “Oh.”

  I saw the hem of her plaid school uniform through the gap of her backpack. So she would change into the uniform and dance.

  Mokran asked, “But Jae—so you really haven’t been in touch with him?”

  “I’ve been wondering about him. The last time was on your phone, a year ago, I think.”

  “I thought you guys were besties. He was a strange kid. If he was hanging around this area, I’d have run into him at least once. If you see him, can you tell him I’ve been looking for him?”

  “He might have caught the devil by now.”

  Mokran turned back to me. “What are you talking about?”

  I told her about how Jae had set two mirrors facing each other in the redevelopment district—and how he had tried to use black magic. She giggled but looked intrigued.

  I quickly added, “If he really caught the devil and is ordering him around right now, he might not be in the area.”

  “You saying that to make me laugh? I get it, you two are a little weird. I’m taking off now.”

  “Um, if you end up seeing Jae first, tell him to call me.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Mokran roared away on her Kawasaki. From that day onward, I began dreaming about her. In my dreams she’s always inside the cube. She’s masturbating with a long-haired Jae beside her, looking out of the cube at me. Jae gestures at me to come in, but I can’t find the entrance and keep circling. The more he insists, the more stressed I get. Finally Mokran stops touching herself and glares at me. Then she hurls the glass in her hand and screams, “This isn’t juice! It’s semen!”

  18

  The next day on my way
back from lunch, a kid from my class called out to me, “Hey, Farty Donggyu.”

  That was my nickname at school. My class standing was so low that I ranked just ahead of a kid so fat he could hardly stand on his feet. Still I felt like I was dead last. I was no good at studying, no good at fighting. I was a wuss—the ultimate idiot.

  “Some weird homeless guy’s looking for you,” he said. “Maybe he’s your dad.”

  “Where is he?”

  “The stationery store across the street. Get us some pastries while you’re at it.”

  When I approached the front gate, a guy as skinny as a skewer was waiting for me.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “It’s me, Jae.”

  He’d left Seoul for the orphanage two years earlier, at age fifteen. Though it was more than enough time for a teenager to change, I was shocked. I barely recognized him. He had shot up to nearly six feet in height and didn’t have an ounce of fat on him. His cheekbones were burnt red underneath his shaggy beard, and he had the taut appearance of a knife pinned to a cutting board.

  “Is it really you?”

  He was a seventeen-year-old guy who looked like a grownup—which meant he would no longer be let off the hook if caught breaking rules. But his eyes and cheekbones resembled the Jae I knew, and he had the same aura that I remembered from childhood.

  He said, “I’ve changed that much?”

  “If we’d accidentally run into each other, I wouldn’t have recognized you.”

  Jae asked me how I was, but I couldn’t bring myself to return his question. His appearance was answer enough. We sat on some plastic chairs in front of a convenience store.

  “You want something to eat?” I asked.

  He shook his head and showed me some uncooked grains of rice that he had pulled out of his pocket.

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t know what rice is?”

  Jae tossed a few grains in his mouth and chomped on them. “This is enough for me.”

  I bought a rice ball from the store and came back out.

  “You should have some,” I said.

  He glanced at it but, as I’d expected, shook his head.

  “I saw you in my dream last night,” he said.

  “That’s strange. Yesterday I met a girl named Mokran and we talked about you.”

  “Mokran? Who’s that?”

  “She said you’d met a year ago in the Daehangno area. You even called me on her cell, remember?”

  Only then did Jae seem to recall her. I told him how we’d met.

  “Can I use your phone?” Jae asked. Then after checking, he said, “So it is a three.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Her number. Long story.”

  Jae returned the phone to me and I asked him, “Why don’t you call her? Now that it’s come to this . . .”

  “I wasn’t planning on getting in touch with you.” He was still chomping on the rice grains.

  “Why?”

  “You turned me in.”

  “That’s . . .”

  “I don’t need excuses. I like who I am now.”

  “Where are you sleeping?”

  “There’s a lot of places, if you’re fine with sleeping in the cold.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want some?”

  I passed the rice ball to him, but again he shook his head. I finally crammed the rest into my mouth.

  “So how’ve you been?” he asked again.

  “My father got remarried. My stepmom has two of her own kids—they’re both scared of me and act shocked every time they see me. Their memories seem to reset every morning. It’s like they always have a ‘Who are you?’ look on their faces.”

  Jae said, “I had a dream yesterday. You were in front of a see-through room. I was inside, but no matter how many times I asked you to come in, you wouldn’t. No, actually, it was like you couldn’t come in, like you were watching me in a movie.”

  “Was there a girl there too?”

  “No, I only saw you.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Your body exploded. Bang! Like a bomb. It made me hurt all over.”

  “You felt pain?”

  “I’m often in pain these days. It feels like someone’s squeezing my heart, like it’s a dishtowel.”

  “Do you think you’ve got heart problems or something?”

  “There’s a pattern to it. It doesn’t make a difference whether it’s an object, machine, animal, or human. If a being experiences extreme suffering, I feel it too.”

  Jae’s sunken eyes became shiny and glowed with an otherworldly energy.

  “You just feel pain?”

  “Happiness too, if they’re happy. But that’s less common. It’s usually pain.”

  He recounted all he’d experienced in the past two years. Just listening to his story made me feel terrible, especially the parts about being with the kids who’d run away from home.

  “Yesterday I was under one of the Han River bridges, hiding from the rain, when my heart started hurting. I thought of you and I realized you must be in pain.”

  Jae had once been the interpreter of my desires and now he said he could read my pain. But I didn’t want to be such an easy read—like something you could throw away after finishing.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “Things aren’t great with my stepmom, but if I just put up with three more years I’ll be off to college.”

  As soon as I uttered the word “college,” guilt overwhelmed me and I looked away.

  “Why’re you going to college? Do you want to go?”

  “I have to go.”

  “Who said so?”

  “The world says so.” I felt defensive.

  “You really think so?”

  “Just because you can’t go doesn’t make it meaningless. There’s a reason why everyone goes.”

  “All I’m doing is asking questions. This past year I’ve been asking myself questions over and over. It’s habit now, I guess. Why am I suffering? Why does someone else’s suffering become my suffering? Why has God given me this fate? What does it mean that even though I was meant to die at the bus terminal, I’m still alive? I wake up early in the morning and wander around all day, reading and thinking. Still, I never have enough time.”

  “So?” I said. “Did you find your answer?”

  “There’s something strange growing out of my back. You know, don’t you?”

  “I know. You used to say it was a vestigial organ, a degenerate wing bone—like our tailbone.”

  “I was joking, but really, I kind of believed I had a half-formed wing on my back and that someday it would start growing again.”

  “So has your wing grown out?”

  I touched Jae’s back. It didn’t feel any different from when he had been a kid.

  “It’s the same,” I said.

  “I thought I would be like a winged animal from a folktale, but it wasn’t like that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “In our world, there are machines with unique goals called sensors, whose goal is to feel. Sensors all around the world measure the temperature, humidity, and wind speed. Some sensors hang from the branches of fir trees and react and take pictures when a Siberian tiger passes. There are way too many sensors. They read the flaws on a CD, or use infrared light to measure distance between a subject and a lens, but there are no sensors to detect suffering.”

  “So you’re saying that’s what you are?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I think I’m made that way. In the morning when commuters pass by me on the street, their suffering weighs down my soul. My heart feels like it’ll explode with the heaviness of their lives.”

  “Can’t you escape it? Don’t you want an easier life?”

  “It’s impossible. This is my fate.”

  “You’ve got to come to your senses. You’re not a machine, right? God couldn’t have just made you feel pain without giving you the power to
overcome it.”

  “This is God’s nature. God’s an unbalanced sadist. He gives you an unlimited sex drive, but makes it difficult to satisfy. He gives you death, but makes it impossible to avoid. He gives you life, but doesn’t tell you why you were born.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “No.” He laughed and shook his head.

  “Really, if there’s something I can do, just ask.”

  Jae silently took another handful of rice grains from his coat pocket and handed it to me. The grains of rice looked whiter on his dirty palm. I took a few grains and shoved them in my mouth. The bell signaling the end of lunch rang. Jae gazed up at the school’s clock tower with the eyes of a sailor looking back at the port. As I ran toward class, Jae’s last words seized me by the neck.

  “You don’t need to run,” he said. “You’re the center of the universe.”

  Those words made me feel defensive, but I wasn’t sure why until later. Something lurked deep inside me and stayed there for a long time.

  19

  On a TV in a subway station, Jae saw the b-boys who had bullied him in Daehangno. The group, Crew Something or Other, had just returned from winning first prize in an international b-boy competition in Germany. They were guests on a talk show, and their excitement was still at a peak. The host kept repeating that the competition was the World Cup of b-boy competitions, dropping mentions of “Korea” and “our people” as he spoke.

  He mostly emphasized the last round, a face-off between their team and the Americans. At one point, as he talked about the climax of the match, a sentimental symphonic melody started up and the Korean national flag filled the screen. Jae realized why the b-boys had pushed him out of Daehangno the year before. He was too different from them. He didn’t have a spectacular homecoming dream like they did, and he lacked a place he could call home—or anyone to welcome him—so he didn’t need fancy clothes or medals. He didn’t have fantasies of hard-won success. What Jae had instead was a vague sense of mission, though this energy inside him hadn’t yet found the means or the right time to emerge.