by J. M. Lee
“Life is a game, Gil-mo,” Mr. Kang said suddenly. “You can win if you know the rules and play it well.”
But hadn’t he purposefully lost by returning home? “You didn’t,” I pointed out.
“Sometimes you have to play a game that you’ll lose.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Sometimes you have to lose. Have you wondered why numbers are lined up beginning from number one? Nine is larger than one, right? But if one is smaller, why is being ranked first better than ninth?”
We started talking about beautiful sequences that could come out of those numbers. I suggested a sequence of prime numbers, but Mr. Kang said it didn’t count, as it didn’t include all the numbers from zero to nine. I came up with another sequence following the number of curves and straight lines that form Arabic numerals, but Mr. Kang said the rule was too arbitrary. I contemplated a few more sequences, until we came upon the most beautiful one.
“The game isn’t over,” Mr. Kang said. “Even though we’re stuck in this camp. And it will continue until we die, maybe even after we’re dead. We’ll get out of here one of these days. Yong-ae will get out of here alive, I’m sure of it. When that happens, I’d like you to take care of her.”
I must have looked puzzled.
“Gil-mo, you’re a good person,” Mr. Kang said. “A strong person can save himself, but protecting someone else is a different matter entirely. A good person has the ability to look out for someone else.”
It grew windy. His long, thin frame seemed to hover, like a dragonfly.
One night, as we tried to get to sleep, I turned and asked Father, “How do you think they found out about your blue book? It was hidden deep in your closet.”
Father twitched in surprise, but quickly recovered. “I’m not sure.”
“Someone must have told the SPSD that you were hiding it there. I think I know who.”
Father stiffened. “Gil-mo, whoever it is you’re thinking of, it’s not that person. I’m positive.”
I was hungry, and my hunger kept growing. “I can’t sleep,” I mumbled.
“Try counting the stars.”
I counted rice kernels floating in the space of my hunger. Father began snoring. He inhaled and exhaled 126 times. I wanted to sleep—when I was sleeping, I could forget how hungry I was. Numbers floated in the darkness, then trickled down in rainbow hues. Zero was a clear raindrop, 7 was blue, 5 was reddish-brown. I stuck my tongue out to drink it. It made me want to pee. I got up quietly.
Father’s bed was empty. I smelled something savory and heard a noise in the kitchen. I found Father there. “I have to pee, Father.”
“Oh—yes, I do too. Let’s go together.” His voice was muffled.
We turned the corner of the house and stood side-by-side to pee. The white moon grew overhead.
“Tomorrow we’ll receive our rations. We’ll have plenty to eat,” Father reassured me. He must have treated a high-level guard or SPSD agent. Or maybe he delivered a death in their family. I couldn’t wait.
But the following day, Father didn’t make his way home. I was called to the treatment rooms in the mortuary. Father was lying on a bed, looking up at the white, peeling exam room ceiling. “Gil-mo, promise me you’ll be a good person. It’s hard to be a good man, but I know you can be one.”
“I will.”
“Good, I’m glad.” He moved, looking pained. The rusted bedsprings creaked. Then Father powered down, turning from 1 to 0. He met his death where he had delivered other deaths. I was told that he had died of acute septicemia.
Instead of Father, his portion of corn came home. On paper, he was still alive; Mr. Kang handed me the ration, and I noticed people huddled around, angling for food without an owner. They looked at me, and then at the corn I was holding.
“Your father was a great man,” Mr. Kang said sympathetically. “And he made sure you would be provided for at least another three days, until the next ration.”
I looked down at the 350 grams of corn Father left me. I was confused—I knew he wanted to live, to look after me, to make sure I made it out in one piece. I had figured that was why he had eaten the crusted rice last night without sharing it with me. But he had failed. Staring down at the wrinkled yellow kernels, I realized that I was alone.
“Who was that awful person who informed on your father?” Angela is curious and enraged at the same time. “Who sent you and your father to the prison camp? They made it so that you don’t even know where your mother ended up.”
What she doesn’t realize is that everyone in the republic is an informant. A father watches his children, a son spies on his mother, a wife keeps tabs on her husband. Neighbors, lovers, and colleagues are watched and informed on, so that they don’t inform on you first. So it’s hard to tell who informed on you. But not in this case, because I know exactly who informed on Father. “It was me.”
Angela’s lip twitches in surprise.
“Near the end of fall, a classmate’s father passed away. He was a high-level official in the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces, and Father delivered his body. When the boy came back to school, I told him that his father was delivered to heaven so he shouldn’t be sad. He grabbed me by the throat, shouting that his father wasn’t a parcel. I explained to him that my father delivered the dead, telling him that you stamp the dead with a prayer to send them to heaven.”
“So it wasn’t you, it was him,” Angela exclaims. “Your father would have known that when he was being interrogated.”
“No, he didn’t know. He didn’t tell me he knew.”
“He just didn’t tell you,” Angela says gently. “He didn’t show that he knew.”
I look down.
She places a few pages of paper in front of me. The yellow, ragged edges smell of wet dirt, the sea breeze, strong liquor, and sweat, the stench of my long voyage. She studies the symbols written on the sheets. “What are these? What is this, a code?”
“It’s a language.”
“What language?”
“Mine. I made it up.” It’s an amalgam of the languages I know—Korean, English, Russian, Chinese—and math signs and numbers. Sigma is used as a prefix, to mean adding or building something. Σenergy means cooperation or solidarity, and Σknowledge signifies refinement or knowledge. My language uses +, –, x, ÷, ∫, , √ to mean something specific or, when joined with existing languages, to turn into prefixes or suffixes. I have 1,600 words, various derivatives, and a grammar system, and their location in a sentence changes their meaning.
“So what does this mean?” She’s pointing to a sentence: 475 ∞ 92. It’s written four times in a row.
“It means arrest.” The infinity sign looks like handcuffs, and the numbers compose a simple grammar.
“Why use this complicated language when you know so many others?”
“I think the world needs a brand-new language.”
Angela looks puzzled.
“I think we need a pure language,” I explain. “So many words have lost their true meaning, and people cut words up and bind them together. Look at the word hell. The true meaning of that word has been diluted, since people use it to describe where we live now.”
“So what’s the use of a language that nobody else can understand?”
I hesitate.
Angela narrows her eyes. “Someone else knows it?”
I look down at the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting. I remember foxtails and dandelion seeds floating away.
“Who is it?”
“Yong-ae.”
3 + 1 = 0
The first time we spoke to each other was December 12, 2000, when she came to feed the rabbits, though I knew who she was since we were neighbors. Her face contained the golden ratio of 1:1.618—the distance between her eyes to the tip of her front teeth, the length of the tip of her teeth to the point of her chin, the distance between the middle of her nose to the edge of one eye, and the length of her eyes. I raised a finger to estimate
the width and length of her face. Her part was exactly at 1:1.618, and the middle of her forehead, the ridge of her nose, and the center of her chin formed that beautiful symmetry. “Your face contains the golden ratio,” I blurted out.
She smiled. Her two front teeth were big, like the rabbits’, and their ratio was also 1:1.618. Her shirt collar was threadbare and her shoes were holey, and her rough hands were dirty. The wind ruined the part in her hair. Unsettled by the disturbance, I reached out to smooth it in place. We walked home together. She was surprisingly frank. She said the Great Leader was an asshole and the Dear Leader killed people like he was a machine gun. We became inseparable.
One night, on our way home from the labor review session, Yong-ae showed me how to ingest light. She looked around then charged ahead, striding confidently into the darkness. Wet grass twined around our calves. She headed through the thicket, toward the slope. Pebbles slipped below our feet.
“Make sure no one’s coming,” she whispered. She snapped off a branch and began digging the black, wet earth. White rounds popped up. “Potatoes!” Yong-ae gathered them up and slid them down her shirt. She covered her tracks and we bounded quickly back to the path. The wind had stopped; the branches were still. The grass smelled pungent. Stars murmured and darkness grew softer as it hid us more completely. The potatoes filled our dark stomachs with light, white and warm. But the sudden ingestion of raw potatoes upset our stomachs. We visited the toilet frequently that night and darkness returned to our stomachs; hunger was our destiny.
“I wish we had rice to eat,” I said. Rice was merely a concept by now, an electric storm sweeping through Uranus ten thousand years ago or territorial fights among dinosaurs. “One day I’ll make sure you get to eat rice,” I promised.
She held out her pinky and I hooked mine on hers.
Soon, I introduced her to my language, starting with the easiest problem. I scrawled a simple expression on the ground and looked up at her expectantly.
3 + 1 = 0
She looked down at it.
“This tells the story of one gold bar and three people. It could also be written as 3P + 1G = 0. P, of course, is people, and G is gold,” I explained.
“What’s the story?”
“Three thieves decide to steal a gold bar and divide it equally among themselves. They are successful and they come back to their den. They want to celebrate. One goes out to buy liquor. On his way back, he becomes greedy, and decides to poison the liquor so he can take the whole bar for himself. But when he gets back, the other two attack him. While he was out, they’d decided to kill him to divide the gold between them. They then celebrate by drinking the poisoned liquor. Then they die. A person passing by takes the gold and leaves. So in the end, nothing is left. Not the three thieves or the gold bar.”
“How does this become a language?” Yong-ae looked puzzled.
“Any situation where you lose everything from greed can be described as 3 + 1 = 0.”
Yong-ae nodded, her face brightening. She learned a concept or sentence every day, and six months later, we were able to have simple conversations in Gilmoese.
Yong-ae began to change—the balance and harmony in her face became more distinct as her body took on new geometric curves. Rabbits continued to grow and their pelts were delivered abroad to make clothes for people living in cold climates. Without pelts, the purplish rabbits looked smooth, and without their long ears, they looked stunted. Were soft rabbit ears hanging from coats worn by people abroad?
“The rabbits must be happier,” Yong-ae muttered. “At least some part of them was able to cross the border. I wish we could leave, too.”
We were in her house, making gruel out of 100 grams of corn. We finished it, but were still hungry; we waited for her father to come home. “Father was based in London,” Yong-ae said. She was starting to open up to me. “I remember going to Sunan Airport when I was around eight, waving goodbye. We didn’t know if he would remember us, or if he would return. He never forgot us, though. A letter would come once in a while. Sometimes it had a dozen pencils enclosed. I’m sure many other letters were confiscated on their way to me. I started to collect the stamps on the letters he sent home.” Yong-ae looked through an old wooden bag in the corner of her room, and took something out gingerly. Shiny square stamps were wrapped in thin, crackling oilpaper. They were mostly from Great Britain, with a handful from Switzerland.
“I was so impressed by them,” she continued. “They brought all these heavy letters and gifts all the way home to me, you see.” She picked each up and smelled it carefully.
I followed suit. They smelled slightly fishy and sweet, of a faraway world, a mysterious place. They didn’t have the Great Leader or the SPSD or guards there. People probably ate white rice and beef soup anytime they wanted.
“I forgot what my father looked like eventually,” Yong-ae said somberly. “I don’t know if I wanted him to come back, if I’m honest with myself. But he did. We went to greet him at the airport, but we weren’t allowed to see him. Then the SPSD told us to pack. We thought he was being heralded as a hero for his work in England! Maybe we were moving to a bigger house. I guess we did end up moving to a bigger house, since the camp is so big.” She looked up through the gaps of the roof, at the stars. “I don’t want to die here. I want to live my life.”
“What would you do if you left?”
“My father told me about The Odyssey. He said if I read that book, I’ll understand why he came back. But he didn’t tell me more. As soon as I leave this place, I’m going to go to a library and read that book.”
I didn’t tell her that Mr. Kang had told me the story. “How will you get out of here?”
She hesitated. “When the offender dies, his family is allowed to leave,” she whispered.
I knew that was why wives wished their husbands dead, and children hoped their fathers would keel over. Every night, I heard people pour out their resentments to their family members who had brought them here. “If you just died we could get out of this hellhole!” “Just go die, you asshole.” “Please, Father, for us . . .” Was Mr. Kang going to die?
Yong-ae caught my worried look. She smiled bitterly. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “He’s not an idiot. He’s never going to die. If he commits suicide, he’ll be buried in the streets and his family will be considered traitors. He knows that. There’s no suicide in this paradise of ours.”
We fell silent and stared out the window, watching a group of men walk by. They had hollow eyes and were bony, with slumped shoulders and pale, thin ankles. They seemed near death.
We worked on increasingly difficult problems, trying to prove things that hadn’t yet been proven. She peppered me with questions as I scribbled formulas to find the answers. “What if we added you and me?” she would ask, then wonder, “What are we going to be when we grow up?” which led to, “What are the chances we’ll survive into adulthood?”
I scratched the calculations in the dirt, my numbers melding with rabbit droppings. My calculations didn’t reveal any answer. Chaos disappeared and quiet filled the space around me as I kept working at them.
“So many people have died,” commented Yong-ae. “But there are more and more prisoners here.”
I tallied the number of families and individuals in our work unit as well as the number of work units within the prison camp. I estimated the number of prison camps in the country. I substituted the number of people leaving from the camp with the number of people entering, calculating the rate of increase. I discovered that it would take less than twenty years for every citizen of the republic to enter a prison camp. But if people continued to die off at the same rate as they did now, it would take 128 years for the prisons to reach capacity, and more would surely be built before that happened. I explained all of that to Yong-ae. Even though I wasn’t certain that she understood me and Gilmoese in our entirety, she understood enough. An expression that meant nothing to anyone else was significant for the two of us. We continued t
o develop our language like that.
Angela glances at the pages on the desk. “So what does this say?”
“It’s a letter to Yong-ae. I kept writing to her in our language so it doesn’t become extinct.” Does Angela realize that now half of the native speakers of Gilmoese are accused of murder? The disappearance of our language means that a world, an entire universe, is vanishing. Our collective recognition of the world, our mutual approach to life, would be lost.
“So where is she?” Angela asks.
“I don’t know.”
Angela narrows her eyes.
FINDING PERELMAN
One day, Mr. Kang disappeared. He didn’t come home, and he wasn’t in the office. I curled up in the corner of the office, my head in my hands. After I while, I went to his desk and focused on the numbers. I finished all the calculations for the day and went to Mr. Kang’s hut.
I was over there three days later when someone pounded on the door. I buried my head between my legs. The latch broke open and cold air stormed in. Men strode in without taking their shoes off and threw something heavy wrapped in straw mats on the ground. Yong-ae ran over and lifted a corner of the mat. It was Mr. Kang, his face crushed, a mangle of bloody bruises, the swelling and blood clots throwing his face off balance.
“What happened?” she screamed. “What did you do to him?”
“He’s under suspicion of manipulating the books,” an official snapped. “He stole the foreign currency we’ve all been working so hard to earn.”
Instead of trying to figure out what money went where and how, they resorted to beating him. In the camp, it made no difference whether someone starved or was beaten to death. The officials walked out.
Yong-ae rushed to the kitchen to boil some water.
Mr. Kang looked around, making sure she was out of earshot. He smiled. His teeth were broken. “Gil-mo,” he whispered. “Don’t forget your promise, all right? Look after her for me. Follow her wherever she goes.”