I picked my glasses up from the table and put them back on. Their sparkling eyes once again poured into my own.
When Myungsuh called to tell me Professor Yoon was dying, I didn’t go to the hospital for three days. I was ready to leave, but the phone had rung a second time: it was Nak Sujang. After college, he had left to study architecture at a university in Pennsylvania, where the real Fallingwater is located. Since then, he had returned and was running an architectural design firm not far from where I was living. He must have heard the news about Professor Yoon from someone else and called to tell me about it. Everyone’s telephones—those of us whose lives were connected through Professor Yoon—must have been ringing off their hooks. When I heard it again from Nak Sujang, the news finally sank in. He suggested that we go together and offered to pick me up in his car, but I told him that a guest had stopped by right when I was getting ready to leave for the hospital and that I would go later. He started to ask about my “guest” but instead said he would see me there. After we hung up, I sat at my desk for the rest of the night. I stared at the clean surface of my desk for a while before spreading out the documents that I had been collecting for a long time to send to Dahn’s older sister. I pored over them closely. They were from an NGO that was investigating suspicious deaths. Reading about people who had died before their time was painful. How was I to accept the fact of so many people driven to sudden and riddling deaths? I picked out the documents that pertained to unexplained deaths in the military and spent the next day photocopying them to send to her. My plan was to convince Dahn’s family, who were unable to overcome the shock and pain of losing him and who still refused to talk about it, to petition for a reinvestigation into his death.
Though postponing my visit to see Professor Yoon in the hospital would change nothing, I avoided going anyway. It felt less like he was in the hospital and more like he was handing me a blank sheet of paper and asking: What are you doing with your life? I suppressed the guilt that welled up inside of me and did everything I could to put it off. I knew that the moment I went, I would be accepting Professor Yoon’s death as a fait accompli. Outside the window, the snow was still coming down. I wanted Professor Yoon to turn his back on death and return to us, the same way I had once turned back in defeat while making my way through a blizzard to see him. I spent two days in this standoff with myself. By the third day, my tightly wound nerves loosened, and a strange sense of relief came over me. Then, by the evening of the fourth day, as if to defeat my desire to let time slip by without having to hear that Professor Yoon had died, I got another call. The moment the phone rang, I knew it would be Myungsuh. And I knew what he was going to say.
“He’s not going to last the night.”
Professor Yoon had once said that knowing you are alive means knowing you will soon change into a different form, and that that is the source of our hope. All beings, from human beings to the most insignificant creatures, experience a moment of radiance between birth and death. A moment that we call youth. When Myungsuh called me for the second time in eight years and told me Professor Yoon would not last the night, when he said my name and then nothing more, the memory of those long-forgotten words, Let’s remember this day forever, came rushing back to me like a school of salmon swimming up a cataract.
I took the elevator to the ward where Professor Yoon had been admitted and walked toward his room, my footsteps echoing loudly in the hallway. Once I started paying attention to it, the clacking of my shoes grew louder until it filled my ears and I could hear nothing else. It was so unbearable that I had to stop for a moment. At the other end of the hallway, someone was leaning against the wall. He straightened up when he saw me. It was Myungsuh. Even from that distance, I recognized him at once. I took a step toward him but hesitated and stared at him instead. He stared back at me. We started walking slowly toward each other until we stood face-to-face in the middle of the hallway.
“You came,” he said.
He was wearing a suit. His eyes locked on my face. I gazed back at him. I started to plunge headlong into memories of meeting him for the first time, so I stood up straighter and shifted my gaze down to his necktie and the oatmeal-colored button-down shirt he wore beneath a navy suit jacket. The photos I had seen of him in newspapers and magazines always showed him with his camera. He had become a photojournalist. I had learned, either from a newspaper I subscribed to or from randomly coming across it in a magazine, that he went into photography, rather than writing. There had even been an interview with him about a train trip he took with an installation artist across the East Coast of the United States. In the accompanying picture, Myungsuh was down on one knee taking photos. Beside him was a backpack the size of a small child. The reporter wrote that he tried to pick up Myungsuh’s backpack, but it was too heavy for him to lift. He described how Myungsuh had run as fast as a tiger up to high ground with that heavy pack on his shoulders so he could get a photograph of an oncoming train. The article even said that the scar tissue in his knees, which formed from years of kneeling to take pictures, was as hard as caked-on layers of dirt. The first time I stumbled across his picture in the papers, I couldn’t take my eyes off the page, but over time I got used to seeing him. In his photos, Myungsuh looked like he was constantly on the move, which was probably why it seemed so strange to see him in a suit.
“Let’s go,” he said.
He walked ahead of me. When I turned the corner, I saw the familiar faces of old friends. They stood together in pairs and in groups; one stood by himself, lost in thought and staring down at his shoes. Some greeted me with nods, while others reached out to pat me on the shoulder. One asked reproachfully, “Yoon, what took you so long?” Myungsuh kept walking one step ahead, guiding me to Professor Yoon’s hospital room door. There, he turned to look at me. He took his hands out of his pockets and rested them on my shoulders.
“Prepare yourself.”
He started to say he would wait outside the door but then changed his mind and suggested we go in together. The moment I entered the room, I understood why. I grabbed Myungsuh’s hand. Professor Yoon was encased in a kind of glass-sided iron lung. His face and arms lay outside the glass. Breathing and feeding tubes hung from his nose and throat. His body was so swollen that there was no trace of the old Professor Yoon, who had been as thin as a plaster skeleton. I stared at his arms where they lay outside of the glass, away from his swollen body, at his hands lying motionless at the ends of arms so riddled with marks that there was nowhere left to insert a needle. Only his hands were as I remembered. His fingers were rough, but in the light, the skin was as translucent as a baby’s. His fingers were as slender as the wooden holder of a dip pen. My hand longed to touch Professor Yoon’s hand but held on tight to Myungsuh’s hand instead.
“Talk to him,” Myungsuh said, his eyes locked on the professor’s face. “He can hear you.”
He could still understand us in his condition? I didn’t move, so Myungsuh went to Professor Yoon’s side and said, “Professor, Jung Yoon is here.” The professor did not react; his face was motionless. It was hard to believe he was even breathing. His eyes, which were once sharp yet kind, remained shut. Someone nudged open the door and gestured to the aide by Professor Yoon’s side. The aide left, and it was just the three of us in the quiet stillness of the hospital room. I reached out and took Professor Yoon’s hand. His skin felt loose but warm.
“Open your palm,” Myungsuh said quietly.
I thought I felt Professor Yoon’s fingers move. I did as Myungsuh said and held my hand open beneath Professor Yoon’s wizened fingers. His fingers curled and moved gently over my palm. All … things … must … My eyes widened, and I stared down at his fingers, which had turned into a pen against my hand. He wrote on my palm: All things must come to an end.
More old friends came to the hospital to see Professor Yoon and stayed instead of returning home. Myungsuh and I stayed, too. I took a cab home in the evening to refill Emily’s food and water bowls and rushed
back, but Myungsuh would not leave the vicinity of the hospital room for even a moment. I alternated between staying at Myungsuh’s side and joining the others, who were gathered in the hospital cafeteria and coffee shop. I kept my hands in my pockets and hoped that someone would start talking and never stop. I didn’t wash my hands, either. We ordered food and let it grow cold, drank alcohol on empty stomachs. After three days, Professor Yoon passed away. The sky was overcast that day, and a snowstorm struck around dusk. Snowflakes coated the hats and shoulders of people coming to visit. I was standing outside the hospital room with Fallingwater, who came by in the mornings and evenings, when we were told that Professor Yoon was gone. I walked down the long hallway away from his room, my heels clicking, took the elevator to the ground floor, and walked behind the building. My knees threatened to buckle. In an out-of-the-way spot away from people’s eyes, I leaned back and stared at my shoes. They said that Professor Yoon had not allowed anyone to get near him for the first three years of his illness, but then he must have sensed his death was near because he called his older sister and asked her to take him to the hospital. They said that even after he was hospitalized, he wanted to be left alone, and it was only after it was too difficult for him to speak that he allowed us to be notified. Despite being only half conscious, he had traced messages on the palms of everyone who visited him. He wrote Just as I came into being, so must I pass out of existence on the hand of the person who saw him before me, and That’s where the stars are on Fallingwater’s hand, and Do the flowers not bloom and fade on the hand of the person who had tried to visit Professor Yoon one night but drove in circles instead, and They are always shining there on Myungsuh’s hand. What would he have written on Miru’s and Dahn’s hands, if they had been there? Professor Yoon’s final tracings were: Bury my ashes under the tree.
After he quit his post at the university, Professor Yoon never returned to his office. We assumed he continued to write poetry, but none of his writings were ever published. He passed the time at his cottage by tending to the trees in the mountains, planting things in the earth, and sharing the fruits of his labor with us whenever we visited. His last request was to be interred “under the tree,” but he had not said which tree, or even which kind of tree. As a result, what we talked about the most during his three-day wake was, to our own surprise, trees. An oriental oak in Uljin on the east coast was mentioned, as well as a six-hundred-year-old white pine in Hyoja-dong in Seoul. Fallingwater told us that the tree was no longer there. That it had fallen one year in a storm. He said people in the neighborhood tried everything they could to save the tree, but to no avail. After it was removed, other pine trees were planted around the site. People listed off the names of arboretums around the world. Everyone had a tree that was special to them: pine, oak, wild cherry, Japanese torreya, Chinese parasol tree. All throughout the funeral, we whispered names of trees to one another. One person described an enormous silver magnolia growing in a field overlooking the water in a certain small village in Namhae on the southern coast. One day, five hundred years ago, a fisherman from the village had caught the biggest fish anyone had ever seen. He found seeds inside the fish’s stomach and, without knowing what they were, planted them in the earth nearby. That spring, the seeds sprouted and grew into the enormous silver magnolia. The more we talked about trees, the more we found that we knew the same trees by different names, depending on where we were born and where we grew up. When that friend brought up the silver magnolia, Fallingwater said, “Don’t you mean a Japanese magnolia?” He even brought in a book to quibble over it. Silver magnolias were common near the southern city where that friend had grown up. Those who grew trees but had never seen a silver magnolia added to the confusion by continuing to call them Japanese magnolias. We became so engrossed in it that we forgot we were at a wake. After someone brought up the oriental oak in Uljin, someone else countered with an oriental oak in Andong. They said that if a scops owl flies to the tree in the spring and hoots, there will be a good harvest that year, and someone else said that the oriental oak in Uljin grew from a sword that a Goryeo Dynasty general had stuck in the ground after losing in battle. Professor Yoon’s wake was like a classroom filled with students of trees. The discussion went on and on: ibota privet, guelder rose, Japanese yew, Korean fir. I pictured the crepe-myrtle beside my mother’s grave. The long branches extended well past her grave, and when the bright red blossoms were in bloom, you could see where she was buried even from a great distance.
In the end, Professor Yoon was buried in the mountains near his cottage where he had spent his final days. Everyone had a different opinion, but that was the chosen spot. We buried him beneath a pine that was more than two hundred years old. It might have been one of the same pines that Myungsuh and I had cleared of snow until we both collapsed from exhaustion. Back then, it had been too dark to see anything, but when I looked around in the daylight, I saw that the woods overlooked a river that led to the sea. In the back, flanking the site like a folding screen, was a lush stand of Korean pine and Japanese cornel. The urn that held Professor Yoon’s ashes was set in the earth beneath the tree; we took turns scattering handfuls of soil on top. When it was my turn, the moment my hand closed around the cold earth, all of my words deserted me, leaving only one: Goodbye. After the funeral, we sat in a bar until dawn, drinking aimlessly, and started to piece together the words Professor Yoon had left on our palms. We argued late into the night about which parts should come first and which should come later; one person fell asleep right there in the bar with his face pressed against the table. When we put Professor Yoon’s last words in order, they spelled out: My Christophers, thank you for being a part of my life. Do not grieve for me. All things must come to an end—youth, pain, passion, emptiness, war, violence. Do the flowers not bloom and fade? Just as I came into being, so must I pass out of existence. Look up to the sky. That’s where the stars are. They are always shining there, whether we are gazing up at them, and whether we forget, and long after we die. May each one of you become one of those shining stars.
When I finished telling the story of Saint Christopher, one of the students raised her hand. Since the time I had been given was short, I had not planned on taking any questions and was getting ready to step down from the podium. But I put my glasses back on and nodded at the student who had her hand up.
“Thank you for sharing the story. So, does that mean that we are Saint Christopher? Or are we the child he carries?”
Long ago, Professor Yoon had asked us the same question. Whenever I find myself in one of those moments where the past seems to be repeating itself in the present, I stop thinking of time as moving in a straight line. Seated next to the girl who asked the question was my cousin’s daughter, Yuseon. While the three of us were having lunch on Sunday, Yuseon had paused in the middle of picking up a perilla leaf with her chopsticks and said, “There was an announcement at school that you’re going to be the guest speaker at chapel. Is that true?” My cousin said, “If they announced it, then of course it’s true!” Yuseon, who was the spitting image of my cousin, cocked her head to one side. I could tell she didn’t believe that her aunt—the one who went to the public bath with her, the one who always missed her dental appointments because she hated going and would get phone calls from the nurse, the one who was always quick to grab the last piece of fruit left on the plate when they ate together—was the one invited to speak at chapel. Yuseon said, “That’s strange. They usually only invite famous people …” Then she added, “I hate going to chapel. I usually skip it. Is it okay if I don’t go?” So I had assumed she wouldn’t be there. When I saw her sitting there, looking so bright-eyed next to the girl who’d asked me that question, I felt a little awkward. To her, I was just an aunt who combed her hair for her or swapped clothing. The girl who slipped and slid over the linoleum in her haste to help me trim Emily’s claws looked so grown-up seated amongst the other college students. Judging by the way they smiled at each other, I assumed that she and the
girl who’d asked the question were friends.
I stood up straighter and prepared to give my answer.
The day Myungsuh, Professor Yoon, and I had gone into the mountains to dislodge snow from the trees, it snowed again sometime in the night. Myungsuh and I left the village the next morning to find that the trees in the mountains were once again covered in snow. On the bus back to the city, Myungsuh said he would move in with me. When I got home, I moved my things around to make room for him. But he never showed. He even stopped calling in the middle of the night from wherever he had collapsed while wandering around the city. When I got tired of waiting for him to call and went to the magazine company where he worked part-time, he came running out to meet me. He showed none of the foot-dragging of someone who did not call and did not keep his promises. The company where he worked was in the first ten-story building to go up in Gangnam, the new district south of the Han River. Nowadays, ten stories doesn’t seem like much, but back then, it was the tallest building around. Nearby was a royal burial ground covered in pine trees; I called him from a phone booth at the entrance. He appeared so quickly that it was hard to tell whether I had hung up the phone and come out of the booth first or he had come out of the building and shouted to me from across the distance first. He threw his arms around me before there was a chance for things to get awkward. We walked around the royal burial grounds three times. I didn’t bring it up, but he promised again to move in. He said he would bring his things over in three days. But three days went by, and he never showed. Four times he said he would move in, only to break his promise. Each time, I went back to his office building, and he ran out and hugged me just like before. The hugs lasted longer and longer. On the night of his final broken promise, he came to my place. That time, he did not hug me. He just stared silently down at his feet. Together, we gazed out at Namsan Tower shining as always in the distance. I think I asked him what he was afraid of. I was surprised by his answer.
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