Everything Belongs to Us

  “I guess we’re all worried about our parents dying,” Sunam said.

  “But I’m not really worried about him dying. Not how you mean,” she said. “It just never seemed possible before. Not truly. It sounds like a joke—but I was surprised. I was actually genuinely surprised. And when he’s gone, that’s it. I’ll still be here.”

  She peered across the row of sink pipes and he finally caught her face. It was as swollen as if she’d been beaten. Purplish half-moons outlined her eyes. “Does that make sense?”

  He nodded. Not because he shared her sense of epiphany. His own parents had always seemed old to him; they had never inspired that threat of immortality Jisun attributed to her father. But he understood the end of things. Of premonitions that carried equal measures of dread and comfort.

  Sunam knew it was time to add his own confession. Perhaps she had already guessed.

  “I was there at the Mun-A strike,” he said tentatively, each word a step on untested ground. “But I didn’t know why I was there. It was before I met you and I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be looking at. But I was there with him. Juno, I mean. I was there the morning you were arrested.”

  “Did you see me?”

  “No. I didn’t know who you were.”

  “You didn’t know who I was until I told you.”

  “That night at the party. Outside.”

  “You thought I was lying. I had to have Namin say so. Why did you believe her and not me?”

  “She wasn’t lying on the ground, swimming in gravel.”

  “Was I doing that?”

  “You don’t even remember. You see why I didn’t believe you.”

  “But I remember you didn’t believe me.”

  “You’d probably wake up from the dead and remember being indignant.”

  “It’s true.” As if testing herself, she laughed. He could tell by the strain around her eyes that it hurt to laugh.

  “That was the only time,” Sunam said. “And that was before I met you. I wanted to tell you before you heard it from someone else. Are you angry?”

  “It wouldn’t have been the only time if he had given you the chance,” she said. “And you should have told me earlier. So I should be angry.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. She lay down on the floor, her legs curled into her stomach, her arm pillowing her head. She closed her eyes. “I guess I’ll remember tomorrow.”

  —

  JISUN FELL ASLEEP, shoulders jerking at intervals as if she were being poked with invisible rods. He took off his jacket and tried to cover her, but it didn’t stop the shivering. “You’d better sit up. It’s too cold on the floor, you’ll get sick.” Her eyelids flickered, but her breathing stayed deep. He shook her a little and repeated what he’d said, but there was no waking her. Finally he sat next to her so that his thighs lay against her back, sharing warmth.

  He kept watch, pricking his palm with the prong of his belt buckle to stay awake. They were under curfew for another hour.

  Jisun slept with her lips slightly parted, her breathing a low rumble at the back of her throat. Her back became warm against his leg. Eventually the unnatural colors drained from her face. He let her sleep.

  Around five, he started hearing activity in the lobby. “Jisun,” he hissed. “Wake up.” On leaden legs he crawled to the sink, turned on the tap, and cupped a generous well in his palm, which he let drop over Jisun’s face. Not all at once. A slow trickle that ran down her cheeks and into her blouse. Her eyes opened with blazing indignation. She scrambled to sit up, sputtering, “What are you doing?”

  “We have to go,” he said. “It’s time.”

  She gaped at her watch with a bewildered expression. “Did I sleep? Were you awake the whole time?”

  “Hurry,” he said. “I need you to check if it’s clear.”

  “Wait.” She stopped him with a hand on his arm. Sleep and grief were etched into her face, one indistinguishable from the other. “What we talked about? I’m not angry.”

  Sunam looked at her. He was so far past exhaustion, his eyes no longer blinked involuntarily. He had to remember to do it. Shut the eyes. Open the eyes. His stomach burned with acid hunger. He could not remember if he was still drunk or if he always felt like this. He remembered another morning when she should have been angry, when she’d said, You don’t have to say hello.

  “Jisun, hello,” he said. “Get me out of here.”

  August.

  It was the third week of jangma, the monsoon season, and the twelfth consecutive day of rain. Everything, everywhere, was wet or dripping. Roofs leaked. Basements flooded. Wallpaper that had withstood years of jangma finally capitulated in dramatic fashion, falling limp and yellow on the floor like old elastic pants. People hurried in out of the rain, wringing out handkerchiefs and towels that never completely dried. On the windows, condensation ran like tears.

  As usual, Namin was in the library studying, but neither Sunam nor Jisun had the heart to keep her company anymore. Far from being a sanctuary from the elements, the library felt like the belly of a ship packed with stale respiration. On the rare occasions that Sunam made up his mind to study, he preferred to do it at home in bare feet and boxer shorts. If he fell asleep, he would wake up feeling virtuous and improved, whereas dozing in the library made him feel like a degenerate.

  After the night in the hotel bathroom, he and Jisun had formed a sort of auxiliary friendship. Since they had nothing in common other than Namin, she became the center of their conversations, a kind of scaffold to their own fledgling friendship. It had the effect of making her seem less real, as if she existed only in their imaginations.

  “Our Namin is not the sort of girl who requires a constant escort,” Jisun told Sunam. She always used that moniker, “our Namin,” with a special look in her eye—as if they were the proud parents and Namin their crowning achievement. Now don’t you crowd her, she would say. Our Namin is far too intelligent and independent, and original, and modern to act like the typical lovesick coed.

  Sunam thought that actually Namin had looked a little hesitant about sending him off with Jisun to the movies. He had lingered, hoping she’d change her mind and join them. It was the summer, after all, and even the other diehards were taking it easy. But Namin had it in her mind to skip a year to make it easier on her parents. It would mean one less year of school fees. She worried constantly about keeping up. Even when she allowed herself an afternoon or evening off, Sunam knew she was secretly preoccupied with how many pages she had to read the next day, how many problem sets to complete. He tried not to hound her, but he seemed to lose track of his own feelings, especially with Jisun’s voice in his ear. He knew she was only teasing, making a show of possessiveness over Namin to put him in his place. But her words hit a nerve. Sunam couldn’t help thinking that Namin was simply neglecting him with her “intelligence and independence and originality,” not—as he at other times understood and admired—trying to make the best of a difficult situation.

  “It doesn’t matter what we watch. Actually, I prefer the bad ones, so I don’t get distracted….” Jisun was always talking, regardless of his attention. “What I like to do is…” They were approaching the theater, walking close under a single umbrella since she had shown up—in this weather—without one. Namin would’ve had a quick, biting comment about that: Jisun’s incurable rich-girl ways. Clearly, she was so used to being driven around that she couldn’t even remember to bring an umbrella during jangma. But Sunam kept quiet, thinking they were not friendly enough for such jabs. Instead he stored the detail in his mind, something he would tell Namin later if she seemed in a good mood, ready for jokes.

  Jisun had a way of hopping puddles that ended up splashing him or left him stranded outside the radius of their shared umbrella. “I get in early and watch the last fifteen minutes. Then, before it starts again, I try to guess what the film’s about. I make a bet with myself. I make it something really
specific, so I can’t cheat. The wager has to be really clever too. It’s no fun if you cheat.”

  “But you can’t exactly pay yourself.”

  “Of course not—what would be the point? So I wager something I want or don’t want. I make it really exciting. One time, I wagered cutting my hair this short—it looked absolutely awful, but every time I looked at myself I knew why I had done it, and it was kind of interesting. Like hiding a secret in plain sight, you know? Another time I wagered five sugar doughnuts in five minutes. They used to be my favorite food. Of course now I can’t touch the stuff. Another time I wagered stealing something from the housekeeper. That kind of thing. Nothing earth-shattering.”

  “But what’s the point of it?” he said. “If you lose, something terrible happens. If you win, nothing changes.”

  “I didn’t tell you everything,” she said meaningfully. “There were good things too.”

  There was a pause while they both wondered if he would take the obvious bait and ask. But Sunam felt uneasy about having left Namin alone to have fun with another girl. It felt too intimate to nudge Jisun to reveal the good things she had wagered and won against herself.

  “So,” he said, looking at his watch. “If we hurry, we can see the last fifteen minutes of the two forty-five.”

  “Don’t tell me the title,” she said. “I always try to avoid looking at the title.”

  “But I already know. It’s not fair if you don’t know and I do.”

  “Fine. So I’ll give you another game,” she said impatiently. “A variation. I have tons.”

  “Can’t we just watch the movie?” It was an irritating business, this need of Jisun’s to make everything into a game, as if ordinary pleasures were not enough for her. He just wanted to disappear into the theater, fold into those rickety seats, and forget about life for a while.

  “You’re just saying that because you’ve never tried this,” she said. “You’ll never want to watch a movie the normal way again.”

  They hurried to the Daehan, where Sunam bought two tickets while Jisun stood far enough away under a dripping awning so she wouldn’t accidentally hear anything. She carefully avoided looking anywhere beyond the circle of the umbrella.

  “I didn’t see one poster,” she bragged as they pushed into the dark theater. They found two empty seats in the very last row with their backs against the wall. The air was as suffocating as a steam room, the vapor clearly visible in the projector’s beam. Jisun sat down, hugging her handbag to her chest in a surprisingly childlike posture. Surveying the packed theater with a blissful expression, she seemed to forget him completely.

  On the screen was a night scene: a watery overlay of a woman’s crying face over an onward-rushing train. The actress was sitting on an overpass above the train. The close-up on her face filled the screen’s right side, the train filled the left. The wind whipped her hair around tearful cheekbones, the train cut through nighttime fog. Fade-out.

  The next scene seemed to open many years later. Two men chatted at a dry-cleaning shop and one mentioned that he had seen a woman named Young Ja. “Young Ja?” the second man said, visibly taken aback.

  “Must be an old lover,” Jisun whispered to Sunam.

  “Who?” Sunam said.

  “That guy!”

  Sunam shook his head.

  “Just watch,” she said.

  It turned out Jisun was right. Young Ja was the woman who had been crying on the overpass. The man was her former lover. She was married now, with a young daughter. Her new husband had a lame leg. Young Ja had a prosthetic hook for a hand.

  “What’s with the hook?” Sunam whispered.

  “Oh, this is going to be good,” Jisun said.

  The film closed with the two men—new husband and former lover—introducing themselves and making plans to share a meal together sometime.

  Appreciative sighs rose from the audience. Throats cleared expressively across the rows. Then the lights went up and a hundred people hurled themselves into the aisle, talking and laughing, melding into the fresh audience arriving for the next showing. Even after the crowds intermixed, you could tell by the set of the shoulders and the body language who was leaving the show satisfied and who was settling in with anticipation.

  “Would you ever miss this?” Jisun said raptly. She was standing on her seat to study the scene with shining eyes. “This is almost my favorite part. I always watch where people are shoving in opposite directions and see who gets out the fastest. You can’t always judge by size. The big ones do okay, but you have to keep an eye on the ones with the really aggressive perms. You know, the ramen-hair ladies? Those mamas really move….

  “Come on, try it,” she insisted. “Stand up, you’ll see.”

  Sunam stayed put. “I’m exhausted just thinking about it,” he said. “Anyway, I’m getting shoved good enough right here.”

  Jisun looked down at him with a pitying expression. “Are you like this with Namin too? You’re no fun at all. What does she see in you, anyway?”

  “Whatever it is, I guess she likes it,” he snapped without thinking.

  “Confident guy,” she murmured. She always sounded casual, the way he’d intended and failed. She laughed, showing perfectly even teeth. “Let’s have our little wager, then,” she said. “The plot is too obvious. So we need to make it more interesting.”

  “Obvious?” he said. “We saw a train and a couple of people talking. How is that obvious?”

  “Oh, come on. They practically gave us the script. The hook hand?” she said. “Really, Sunam. Use your imagination.”

  “Exactly, the hook hand!” he said.

  “Fine. Here’s what happens. That girl Young Ja and that guy Changsoo were in love, but something went wrong. She’s considering jumping in front of a train. But we have that full redemption ending,” Jisun mused. “So it must have been a pretty tragic past for poor Young Ja. Maybe she was forced into prostitution, maybe someone cut off her arm. So there it is, there’s our story.”

  Sunam shook his head in amazement, but Jisun plowed on. “Now for our objective,” she said. “We have to guess how many sex scenes there are in this movie. We already know there are none in the last fifteen minutes. But that doesn’t mean anything. There could be tons of sex in the beginning.” She paused as if solving a difficult equation in her head, then nodded in quick confirmation. “I call seven sex scenes. You pick too. Closest one wins.”

  He had already collected a bundle of objections. About the “plot summary,” which was so full of holes that he could only hope she was joking. And the suggestion about tallying sex scenes was absurd. The sheer bravado of the number seven seemed to him outrageous. Unless this movie was about a brothel and she counted every time a woman entered a room with a man, there were not going to be seven sex scenes.

  Sunam had all these objections at hand, but he didn’t say a word. Something wasn’t right; it was too obvious. It seemed that Jisun expected him to raise these challenges, to disapprove in just this way. She was watching him carefully, a playful set to her mouth. A splotch of red no larger than a thumbprint rose on her throat. And finally Sunam realized the true nature of this test, which was to see if he would keep up with her games, however childish or nonsensical her rules. It was his choice. Play or forfeit.

  “Define sex scene,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Obviously, there’s not going to be actual sex,” he said. “So where do we draw the line?”

  “When the director wants to imply they’re having sex…you know.”

  “Like a kiss and fade-out—you call that a sex scene? Because the director wants me to think so?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s crap. A kiss is not a sex scene.”

  “Fine, so that’s out. Groping and fade-out counts.”

  “Only if someone takes off some clothing.”

  “Fine. Groping with at least one article of removed clothing counts.”

  “The article of clothing
cannot be a jacket or coat.”

  “Fine!”

  “It’s starting,” he said. “Do you want to adjust your wager since kisses are out?”

  “Why should I?” she said. “I said seven and my intuition is always right.”

  He shook his head. She was crazy. “Fine. I pick four,” he said. “Four and under, I win. Five and over, you win. What are you doing?”

  “Here,” she said, handing him a pen from her purse. She ripped out a sheet of notepaper and waved it in his face. “Since we’re being so proper, you better keep a close count. Use your watch if you have to,” she said. “Mark the exact times so we can compare notes.”

  He made a show of smoothing the paper on his thigh. He licked the tip of the pen. “Ready,” he said.

  —

  THE OPENING SCENE was a police raid on a brothel. Women fled into dark alleys, pursued by uniformed men wielding clubs. Sunam gripped his pen, even though there was nothing to record. He refused to glance at Jisun, who was presumably waiting for him to look so she could gloat: the opening scene and already three prostitutes! He refused to give her the satisfaction. Jisun finally dug the end of her pen into his thigh. He backhanded her wrist, saying, “Watch the movie, will you?”

  “Rookie,” she said.

  The first sex scene was between Changsoo and Young Ja, who was a prostitute after all. But Changsoo had been in love with her from the time she was a wholesome housemaid in his foreman’s house. Visiting her at her brothel, he wanted to know what happened to her arm, but she wouldn’t tell. She was wearing a loose red dress like a smock, hiding her missing arm. She put out her palm for money, simpering: “Well, are we doing this or aren’t we?”

  Changsoo threw the money on the ground and dragged Young Ja onto pink and yellow quilted pillows. He fell on top of her, his face twisted with grief. Young Ja smiled and grabbed his crotch. End scene.