I'll Be Right There

by Kyung-Sook Shin

  “If we live together, we’ll just hurt each other. It’ll turn ugly.”

  I understood what he meant by hurting each other, but I didn’t know what he meant by ugly. I thought maybe I’d misheard him and asked him to repeat what he had said.

  “If we start this way, you’ll never get anywhere and you’ll never accomplish anything, because of me.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I’ll isolate you from others. You’ll be like an island, cut off from everyone else. I’ll end up making it so that people can only know you through me. I’ll want you to not have any other relationships, and I’ll try so hard to keep you by my side that it will turn us both ugly.”

  “Then why did you agree to move in?”

  “Because I want to live with you, too.”

  I shivered in the cold and glared at the lights of the tower. Back then I did not understand, and did not want to understand, what he was saying to me.

  Whenever I refer to a certain time as long ago, I feel like I am walking somewhere. Maybe those things that we realize only after so much time has passed that we can describe them as long ago are what we are made of.

  On that night long ago, the boy I thought I had known better than anyone else seemed like a complete stranger. It was as if he was gone and I stood alone. I bit my lip and realized that I could no longer fathom his heart. Having thought that he was all I needed, I felt pathetic. He said my name, but I didn’t answer. He reached out his hand, but I didn’t take it. Was he trying to tell me that being with me had turned ugly? A crack ran through my heart, and a thin sheet of ice formed over it.

  He turned me around as I glared at the tower and tried to say something to me, but I would not hear it. I left him on the cold, windy rooftop and went inside. Which of us was in the right? I could hear him calling my name and knocking on the door, but I did my best to ignore him. I sat at my desk and resisted the urge to go back outside. The book of poems that we had found in the bookstore where we took refuge from the riot police during a demonstration was lying facedown on my desk. I turned it over and flipped through the pages in defiance of the sound of his knocking. Line by line, I read the poems that I had already memorized after countless readings. I read them out loud to drown out the sound of his voice. I have no idea when he finally left. I fell asleep with my head on the desk, the book of poems on the floor.

  And him?

  When I opened the door and stepped outside, the roof was covered in snow.

  He’s gone, I thought.

  When I realized he was gone, my knees nearly buckled. I looked around for any trace of him and found his footprints overlapping one another in front of the door. He must have paced back and forth there as it continued to snow. I placed my feet inside his crushed footprints and followed the tracks.

  They led across the roof and down the stairs. At the entrance to the building, his footprints overlapped again, the snow tamped down until it was hard and gleaming, as if he had been pacing back and forth a long time. The footprints continued down the hill below. They led me in the direction of Miru’s old house. Near the house, his footprints crisscrossed again and turned back. Maybe he had stood there lost in thought, or had stared up at the house that was now occupied by other people. I stood in his prints and looked up at the house in the morning light, and then I, too, turned back. I’d thought that if I followed his tracks long enough, I would be able to find him, but they became impossible to follow. They were the only prints at first, but as the morning progressed, other people left their tracks as well, until finally a garbage truck passed by, covering them all with tire marks. I stared for a long time at the spot where the truck had erased his footprints, and then I headed back home. There, I threw some things in a bag and took the train to my father’s house in the country. I spent the rest of the winter at my father’s side.

  But it was not yet over between us.

  On a day when the snow, which had been falling for over a week straight, was piled as high as a grown man, Myungsuh showed up at my father’s house. He had walked all the way from the city. His toes were frostbitten, and his cheeks were blistered. “Why did you do that?” I asked. He took my scolding without a word. “You’ll go to this length, but you won’t move in with me?” He didn’t answer. He stayed in my father’s house with us for three days. He went into the mountains to clear the snow from the pine trees just as we had at Professor Yoon’s house, played games of janggi with my father, and even followed him to my mother’s grave. When he left, I bought him a train ticket and saw him off at the station for fear that he would try to walk back to the city. Myungsuh, who had not said a word the whole time we were sitting in the waiting room, called out my name at the turnstile where his ticket was being checked. I looked over at him, and he said that after I returned to the city, we should finish what we had started at Namsan Tower. I asked what he meant, and he mumbled, hugging strangers …

  One day, after winter passed and spring had come, I saw him standing in front of Myeongdong Cathedral. He was holding a sign that said “Free Hugs.” I didn’t think he would go so far as to make a sign. We had arranged to meet each other there, but I couldn’t bring myself to approach him. Our plan was to first hug a hundred strangers and then reconsider what we would do with our lives. We had agreed to start at Myeongdong Cathedral. I had gone there countless times in search of him. I waited and watched him from a distance. To this day, I cannot explain why I hung back instead of hurrying to join him. What should I call the peculiar resistance that spread through me when I first saw the “Free Hugs” sign? People cast sidelong glances at him and his sign as they walked by. Some even stopped and stared. Not only did he not hug anyone, he looked as if he himself felt awkward, like he didn’t quite know what to do with himself. A foreigner walking past went up to him and gave him a hug. When the person squeezed him, his arms hung awkwardly at his sides. He stood in that spot for three or four hours. No one else approached him, nor did he approach anyone. But he didn’t look like he was waiting for me. When I saw him drop his sign, as if in defeat, I left.

  How eagerly I used to wish for someone to tell me I would someday be able to painlessly accept everything that had happened to us.

  Even after he visited me at my father’s house, we didn’t break up. We kept making promises and planning to see each other, right up until eight years ago. As if we couldn’t not make promises. So many promises that we never kept and didn’t remember. Promises idly made on top of promises unkept.

  Putting off our breaking up by promising to see each other again.

  After Myungsuh had found out what happened to Miru, he resumed his habit of telephoning in the middle of night with no idea of where he was or how he got there, so I got calls from him every night. I think the first thing I asked him each time was Where are you? Just once, he had stated the name of a town known for growing apples. I headed to the intercity bus terminal and waited for the first bus of the day so I could hurry to where he was. There, we rented bicycles and rode along a narrow path beside an apple orchard. Stuck our hands out to pluck apples wet with morning dew. Crunched into those fresh apples and laughed. That day, nothing bothered us, as if we would always be moving forward together. But it didn’t last. Before long, he was back to being unable to say where he was calling from. I would go out in search of him. Sometimes I found him, and sometimes I didn’t. Once, when I had barely managed to find him, I made him laugh by telling him that anyone who calls at four in the morning must be a North Korean spy. Then one night, the call came not from him but from a stranger. The man on the phone said that Myungsuh had climbed over his wall and fallen asleep in the yard. He said Myungsuh didn’t look dangerous, so he had shaken him awake and asked him questions until he was able to get a phone number out of him. That was how he got my number, he said. But if I didn’t go and get him right away, he would have to call the police. I asked where he lived. It was Miru’s old house. I ran through the dawn air to get Myungsuh. When he saw me, he
called me Miru. Though I can’t remember, I’m sure there have been times when I looked at him and called him Dahn, too. Was that maybe the night we stopped making any more promises to each other? When we stopped saying, I’ll be right there?

  A few days ago, I went to visit my father in the nursing home. In the bus on the way to the train station, the person sitting next to me had a newspaper open to a picture of Myungsuh. It was an article about one of his photo exhibits. Since I couldn’t take my eyes off the newspaper, the person handed it to me when he got off the bus. I opened it up and murmured, “Emily, these are great photos,” as if she were sitting right next to me. The title of the exhibit was Embracing Youth. The photos were of young people hugging each other in countries all over the world, including pedestrians on Arbat Street in Moscow. The article said that he had spent three months on the road to take a thousand photos of young people hugging each other. He must have left right after Professor Yoon’s funeral. In response to the reporter’s question, “Why, of all things, photos of young people hugging?” he had said, “Sometimes I’m troubled by self-destructive urges, but seeing young people hug each other helps me to overcome them.” He added that of all the people in the world, the people of Moscow were the least inclined to smile, but even they couldn’t help but grin when they saw young people hugging each other on Arbat Street. He added that he himself had hugged a hundred young people he didn’t know on that very street.

  Did he feel the same way I did?

  Sometimes I feel like I am falling apart, like I am bombarded. I push away the fear and sluggishly make my way to my desk and write, in order to fight off the mysterious anxiety that paralyzes my senses. I stared at his photo, at him saying that he had hugged a hundred young strangers, and I felt so sad that I had to turn away and gaze out instead at the noonday city flashing past the bus window. Staring back at me were the ghosts of us from days past, trudging through the city with our loneliness and our dreams of someday.

  That day, at chapel, another student raised her hand. She asked, “Looking back on your twenties, what would you most want to say to those of us who are going through our twenties now?” I made eye contact briefly with Yuseon, who was seated amongst the other students, as I looked over at the student who had asked the question. She must have been shy because her voice trembled. Without even having to think about it, I said, “I hope you all have someone who always makes you want to say, Let’s remember this day forever.” The students oohed and aahed, and then laughed at each other’s reaction. I laughed with them. “Also …” They’d thought I was done but they quieted down again. “I hope you will never hesitate to say, I’ll be right there.”

  The day after the veterinarian told me that Emily, who was now so old she could barely move, had inoperable stomach cancer, I was woken in the middle of the night by the faint sound of a ringing telephone. The faint ringing seemed to grow louder, as if drilling straight into my eardrums. I reached out and brought the receiver to my ear, and an unfamiliar voice asked if Jungmin was there. I said no, but the young man suddenly burst into tears and pleaded with me to please put Jungmin on the phone. I set the receiver down without hanging it up. After a while, I picked it up again, and the boy was still crying. He didn’t seem to care whether I was listening or not. He just needed time to cry into the telephone. Once he stopped crying, he would feel a little better about the situation with Jungmin. Emily got up from where she had been curled up in a ball on the nightstand, slowly climbed onto my stomach, and stretched out. By now, even grooming was difficult for her. When I asked the veterinarian if there was any chance Emily could make it through surgery, she said that Emily had lived a surprisingly long life already and did I need to put her through that? I took Emily home instead. I stroked the scruff of her neck until I heard the phone beep—either the boy had stopped crying or the call got disconnected—and I placed it back in its cradle. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I worked at my desk for a while before opening the bottommost drawer. I took out envelopes, printouts, a dictionary of Chinese characters, until I reached the box at the very bottom that contained Myungsuh’s journal. I had sealed it inside that box as I was coming to terms with his absence. I opened the box and took out his journal.

  So much I wish I’d done differently. Bursts of guilt—If only!—that haunt me at every turn. Suddenly understanding those old feelings in unexpected, unrelated situations. Things that will remain incomprehensible or unanswered regardless of what lies ahead of me.

  Would the day ever come when I could tell him that I’d finally gone to Basel, to Peru? That I had stood before Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead in the Kunstmuseum Basel and whispered Miru’s name, then looked around wildly because I thought I heard her say, Yes?

  Etched in the earth in the Nazca desert plain at the foot of the Andes mountains, invisible at human eye level, are inscrutable geometric figures that can be seen only from the sky. You have to be at least three hundred meters in the air to see them in their entirety. They say the images were left there by the Nazca people fifteen hundred years ago. Because they had no domesticated animals, the people who made the glyphs did all of the work with their bare hands. The figures include hundreds of long lines formed by removing bits of gravel to expose the lighter sand beneath: giant birds whose wings are so large that, if they were given life and took to flight, the shadows might cover much of the plain; strange and beautiful creatures that I do not recognize. They are engraved in the plain like codes scratched out by someone’s fingers. How did the Nazca leave these enormous glyphs before anything had been invented that could lift them into the air and enable them to look down? It is believed that the fifteen-hundred-year-old images were able to last this long because, despite being at a latitude where you would expect to find lush tropical growth, the area is very dry. It had not rained in the last ten thousand years. I couldn’t fathom that length of time. The word “dry” seemed like an understatement for a place that had not seen rain in ten thousand years. My travel companions and I viewed the glyphs from a helicopter. Zigzags, stars, plants, and grids of inestimable size, circles, triangles, squares, trapezoids—the glyphs went on and on without end. They did not just cover the vast and desolate Nazca plain but stretched farther away, across islands, past deep ravines and streams, around the curves of the Andes. Hundreds upon hundreds of connected lines. There was an enormous triangle with its top lopped off and a bird that looked as if it was flying south. Then one in particular caught my eye: a fifty-meter-long spider etched in the sand.

  Would I have ever guessed back then that I would one day gaze down at a fifteen-hundred-year-old spider drawn in the desert? At the spider glyph in the Nazca plain of the Andes mountains, where I had arrived after flying for eight hours, changing planes in Los Angeles, and flying for another twenty or so hours, Dahn returned to me, as real as anything. Dahn—who had once taken me all the way to my mother’s grave despite his fear of spiders. At that moment, a corner of my heart that had been lightless and cold as ice suddenly cracked, and a single ray of light from a morning star rushed in and shined on it. It felt warm. Quietly, so no one could hear, I whispered his name. Dahn’s face floated over the fifteen-hundred-year-old spider engraved in the desert floor. I murmured to myself, Don’t be afraid. And I’ll never forget you. It was then that I finally realized I was not made up only of myself. Everything I saw and everything I felt was also part Dahn. And part Miru. And partly their unfinished time that I was living.

  The morning light stretched across my desk while I flipped through page after page of his journal. Emily summoned up the strength to jump onto the desk and curled up next to me as I was reading. Don’t worry, Emily … I mumbled, unsure of what I was telling her not to worry about, and scratched her behind the ears. She gazed at me for a moment and then sprawled out like a puddle on top of the desk. Myungsuh’s journal had sat sealed and unopened for almost as long as we had been apart. Everything in it seemed new. Despite having read it so many times that I thought I had the pages
memorized, I felt like I was reading it for the first time. I turned over the final page and slipped the brown notebook out of its black dust cover. The last time I had done this, when I had sealed his journal almost eight years ago, was still fresh in my memory. Into the cover, I slipped the letters Dahn had sent me, my belated replies that I’d had nowhere to send, and the slim book of poems by Francis Jammes that Myungsuh and I once read together in a bookstore while a demonstration raged in the streets outside. They didn’t fit. I took the book out, unfolded the letters, and started slipping them between the pages instead, but after a moment, I just sat there, feeling at a loss. Where was Miru’s diary now, the one I had shelved in Professor Yoon’s office with the books by writers who had died before the age of thirty-three? Who was reading the book of poems by Emily Dickinson that Dahn had snuck onto the base? For all I knew, they were nowhere to be found. I flipped Myungsuh’s journal over to slip it back into the dust cover, and paused. There was something written on the very back. I sat up straighter as I read it: I want to grow old with Jung Yoon. It was Myungsuh’s handwriting. Had this been written here all this time? These words had been sealed away for the last eight years? I set the journal down and sat unmoving as the morning sunlight finished its trek across my desk. Emily quietly opened her eyes and looked at me. Eyes still blue despite her old age. “Don’t worry, Emily …” I murmured as I filled my fountain pen and answered the sentence it had taken me eight years to find:

  I’ll be right there.

  Author’s Note

  I’ll Be Right There is a story of young people living in tragic times. It is also the story of people who find themselves separated, despite their love for each other, because they carry wounds that are too deep to overcome, and who struggle to come back together. Their story takes place in the 1980s and early 1990s in South Korea, which is also when I was going through my twenties and early thirties. The long dictatorship of the Park Chung-hee regime had collapsed, and what took its place was not freedom but a new dictatorship headed by Chun Doo-hwan. At the time, South Korean youth, including university students, were protesting in the streets and being fired upon with tear gas nearly daily in their quest for democracy and freedom. That period of unrest lasted about a decade. Young people would rally against the government one day only to disappear mysteriously the next, while others committed self-immolation in the streets in protest. And young men who had led demonstrations later died suspicious deaths in the military during their compulsory service. If it were not for the sacrifices of these young people who fought and struggled for change, South Korea would not be what it is today. It is this history that forms the setting of I’ll Be Right There.