Diary of a Murderer

by Young-Ha Kim

  Yunseok hopped from job to job, working night security details at construction sites and as a general night guard. He got less than five hours of sleep, but he never complained. As if he were performing a religious ritual, he dutifully distributed flyers each morning and on weekends took their old car across the country. And Mira, Mira thoroughly searched the neighborhood surrounding that supermarket. Every year, Yunseok’s friend who ran a photography studio photoshopped a new rendering of Seongmin, one year older than the last. The photoshopped picture had an overly polished, finished look that ended up resembling a funeral portrait. Mira would stare attentively at the children in playgrounds. Seeing her loitering, mothers would call the police, and the police always responded, though the flyers cleared up any misunderstanding. But inevitably, Mira was once nearly charged with child abduction. That day she became convinced that one of the children in the playground was actually Seongmin. She pretended to ask him his name and address, then suddenly embraced him.

  A passing yogurt vendor intervened and demanded, “What are you doing?” The vendor called over the apartment building’s security guard, and soon the child’s mother rushed out to the playground. They released Mira only after Yunseok got on his knees and begged for forgiveness, and promised that they would never see his wife again.

  A year after that, Mira returned to that very building, climbed onto the playground slide, and began floating paper airplanes made out of the flyers. She had originally despised anyone who folded the flyer, since it creased her son’s face. She had even fought with commuters who crumpled the flyer and threw it away. So Yunseok found her making paper airplanes out of the flyers difficult to believe.

  A friend had introduced Mira to Yunseok the same year he’d gotten full-time employment. His first impression was that she was shy and introverted. Mira was raised by her aunt, and as soon as she finished high school, she started working at the bookstore. Looking back, Yunseok saw that something hadn’t been right. She was overly sensitive to what others said, or became terrified for no reason. She’d say that the other employees ostracized her, and she was convinced that they insulted her every chance they got. That’s unlikely, he said, trying to persuade her, but she remained unconvinced. Mira was his first real girlfriend, and he’d trusted that her ways were typical of a woman’s ups and downs.

  * * *

  Two women visited Yunseok, one a police officer and the other a social worker. He peered to see who was behind them, but they were alone; at first he assumed they were evangelizers. He led them into the living-room-cum-kitchen, filled with flyers he’d left in teetering stacks. When their son returned home, he wanted to show him: Look, this is how your parents lived.

  He said, “Where is my son? Did something happen?”

  “Please don’t worry. He’s in the car.”

  “Why didn’t you come in together?”

  The police officer picked up a flyer. “I’m very aware of how desperately you’ve searched for your son.”

  Yunseok handed her several flyers with different designs. The social worker inspected them.

  “Occasionally, a family will abandon their child, then report him missing. They couldn’t afford to raise . . .”

  Yunseok had seen such coverage on the news. One woman had abandoned her child and reported him missing in order to remarry, but several years later the child was found through the national genetic database and returned. Only then, the woman confessed and begged for forgiveness. He knew that many were disguised as missing child cases; he now understood why the police station had insisted on escorting Seongmin from Deagu.

  He said, “We weren’t so bad off then, to abandon our child.” He mentioned the name of the motor company he had worked for. “I was a full-time employee, and Seongmin’s mom also had a job at the time.”

  The social worker said, “I didn’t mean it that way. If there’s been a misunderstanding, I apologize.” She added, “Before you meet your son, there is something you should know.”

  “Is something wrong with him?”

  “It could be a problem, or not. It’s that . . . you should know how your son’s lived all these years.”

  Had Seongmin’s kidnapper chained him to a dog collar in a basement?

  Yunseok said, “I’m not sure what it is, but we can gradually figure it out. What’s there to worry about when his parents are standing right here. Let me see my son first.”

  The social worker glanced discreetly around the house.

  “Is his mother here? The paperwork shows that he has a mother.”

  “That’s . . . Something came up, but she’ll be back very soon.”

  Yunseok took in the doubtful look exchanged between the two women: Their son returns after an eleven-year absence and the mother isn’t around?

  “Has there been a change in family status or something similar?”

  “No, I’m still very much married to Seongmin’s birth mother. We put everything into searching for him. She’s just out for—”

  The impatient police officer cut him off. “Seongmin was kidnapped—let me make that clear. Abducted.”

  “Of course,” Yunseok said. “The shopping cart didn’t roll away on its own.”

  But at the time, the police hadn’t ruled out the possibility that the kid had clambered out of the cart on his own, then gotten lost in the busy weekend shopping crowd. The kidnapper hadn’t demanded a ransom, which supported their speculation.

  “Yes, that’s right. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Seongmin had no idea that he was kidnapped.”

  Yunseok had considered that possibility. Seongmin was three in the Korean counting system, and not yet two in the international counting system, so it made sense.

  He asked, “What kind of guy was this kidnapper?”

  “It’s not a man. She was a woman in her mid-fifties. At the time of the incident, she was in her early forties.”

  He’d also never imagined the kidnapper was a woman.

  “How did you catch her?”

  “She wasn’t caught—she committed suicide. Jonghyeok found her first and called the emergency number.”

  “Jonghyeok?”

  “Ah, Jonghyeok is Seongmin. When we arrived on the scene we learned she had taken a large dose of antidepressants. The preliminary postmortem report also confirmed suicide. More importantly, we discovered a suicide note. It said she was sorry that she had taken someone else’s child but hadn’t done a good job raising him. She wanted the boy returned to his family. She’d written down the time and place of the abduction, and they matched the records for your case.”

  The officer showed Yunseok a photocopy of the note. When he read the line about asking the boy’s parents to forgive her, he felt suffocated. Ask only for what makes sense to ask for.

  The social worker said soothingly, “Anyway, Seongmin grew up believing that she was his real mother.”

  Suddenly Yunseok’s chin trembled as if his body had gone chilly. He breathed deeply and tried to calm down.

  The police officer said, “Your son is in shock. After all, he saw the person he believes is his mother after she killed herself. That alone requires years of therapy, but to make things worse, he learned that he was kidnapped and is now in a state of panic. I kept him with me for a few days, to help stabilize him, but all this is difficult to accept for a kid. I hope you understand how he must be feeling, given that he’s experienced great shock and now has to adapt to a new environment.”

  “Why is my home ‘new’ when we’re his actual parents, the ones who gave him life? There’s no need to worry. He’s returned to his real family, so he’ll soon recover.”

  “For your environment to dramatically change—that isn’t easy, even for a grown-up. I do have one request. Please don’t push Seongmin about the past, for now. It’s wise to accept him as he is.”

  As soon as the police officer pulled out her business card, the social worker followed suit. Yunseok learned that the social wor
ker was actually responsible for his district. It was clear that the officer had come up early from Daegu, conferred with the social worker on the handing over of Seongmin, and asked her to please watch out for him.

  The front door flew open just as the two women were leaving. They stepped back, surprised by Mira, who ran in whistling, her wrist braceleted with dozens of filthy elastic hair bands. Yunseok leapt forward and grabbed Mira, and Mira, who despised being restrained, screeched like a trapped animal and kicked wildly at him.

  “Let me go, let me go, you pig, you filthy son of a bitch. I said let me go!”

  Yunseok just managed to calm her, then pushed her into the room.

  He smoothed down his rumpled hair and said, “That woman is Seongmin’s mother. It was such a shock for her . . .”

  As if caught in a dust storm, the two women pursed their lips and squinted toward Mira, then looked at each other. When the officer made her decision and nodded, the social worker said, “We’ll bring your son in, then.”

  Yunseok felt numb. For so long he had lived for this moment alone, so why did he feel this way? He felt no excitement, no emotion. Those two women, his wife slowly going mad, this situation, all of it seemed surreal. Didn’t all this surreal evidence mean that the child they would soon bring in was fake? Shouldn’t parents instinctively know these things? Was it actually possible for Seongmin to return to them without any signs?

  The two women returned, nearly pushing in a boy with dark fuzz under his nose. The boy stopped at the entrance and didn’t want to go inside. He looked nothing like the son whom Yunseok had grieved for. He looked nothing like his parents, and shared no resemblance with the face on the flyers they’d handed out for so long. The boy in the flyers had chubby cheeks, earnest eyes, and resembled a TV child actor; the boy in front of Yunseok had long, slanted eyes and a belly. He looked like a fierce, bad-tempered kid. If Yunseok were to run into him on the street, he wouldn’t recognize him. Still, he ran out and took the boy’s hand.

  “Are you Seongmin? Don’t you recognize your dad? It’s me, your father.”

  Seongmin averted his gaze as if he were suppressing his feelings. He kept looking back at the officer. She gently urged him forward and whispered, “Jonghyeok, it’s your father. Go on.”

  The boy took off his basketball shoes and came in with an enormous suitcase. Yunseok signed several forms handed to him without reading them. The officer glanced back several times as she left. One look, and he could tell that the boy had been crying. As soon as the visitors left, Yunseok shut the door behind them and hastily grabbed Seongmin’s hand. Still uncomfortable, the boy immediately withdrew it. When Mira emerged and stared suspiciously at them, Yunseok brought Seongmin closer to her, still harboring a last hope that his return would bring back her sanity.

  “Seongmin, it’s your mom. Do you recognize her?”

  He gazed downward, looking perplexed. His eyes darted around as if he’d just been kidnapped. Mira glanced at him, then looked away indifferently. She collapsed to the floor, turned on the television, and sat so close to it that her nose nearly touched the screen. The boy kept sneaking looks at the house. The worn wallpaper stained and spotted with mold. Damp lingerie hanging on a laundry line that cut across the room.

  “We didn’t always live here. You know, we used to live in a decent apartment. You don’t remember? You were already a real talker by then. It was south-facing, with good light.”

  Yunseok took out the oldest flyer from the closet. “This is you. Do you remember?”

  Seongmin looked at his image and mumbled, “Excuse me, but . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “Where is the bathroom?”

  The boy had a strong regional accent, which made him seem even more of a stranger. Yunseok slid open the plastic door; he noticed the boy frown as he entered the narrow, moldy bathroom. Yunseok flushed with embarrassment. He had gotten used to putting life on hold. He had delayed wallpapering the house and doing repairs, even neglected his annual health checkups, until they found Seongmin. Problems piled up. He never had enough time or money; printing costs for flyers and gas prices inevitably rose, never fell.

  He waited for Seongmin. He had so much he wanted to share with his son, but he didn’t know where to start. He was ready to stay up day and night answering Seongmin’s questions, if he would just ask. But Seongmin wasn’t interested. Yunseok’s stomach throbbed with pain. He’d had intestinal problems for over six months. He couldn’t remember when he’d had a good shit. His poop was watery and thin, and half the time he was either constipated or had diarrhea. Sometimes there was blood in his stool. His work colleagues said that stress does that to you, that stress irritates your stomach. Yunseok had gotten used to saying, “This isn’t a life worth living.”

  When the boy didn’t emerge for over thirty minutes, Yunseok got a bad feeling. He called, “Hey, Seongmin.”

  There was no response.

  “Seongmin, what are you doing in there?”

  Still nothing. Had he run away? Yunseok knew it was impossible, since the bathroom had no windows, but he couldn’t help himself. When he shoved open the sliding door, Seongmin was sitting on the toilet, crying with his pants pulled down. As soon as Yunseok went in, he whirled away from him. Yunseok shut the door, but he still heard the murmur of “Mom, Mom” in his ear.

  He knew that Seongmin wasn’t asking for his birth mother, who was watching cartoons on television. Just then, Seongmin’s pleas went from muffled sobs to wailing: “Mom, Mom, Mom!” Yunseok plugged his ears with his fingers.

  He went to give his wife a back rub. She giggled and said, “That tickles,” and fell to the floor. “Come on, just stay still for a minute,” he said, but she was unbearably ticklish. In her attempt to escape, her elbow smashed into his chin. It was so painful he almost cried. Sprawled hangman-style on the floor, Yunseok stared at the scattered bundles of flyers. He took a flyer and looked blankly at the face of the boy he had searched for everywhere for over a decade. The boy in the flyer felt far more familiar to him than the one in the bathroom. There had definitely been a mistake, because a stranger had shown up.

  He was reminded of the movie Back to the Future, which he’d watched long ago. In it, the main character returns to the past and meets his future mother. In Yunseok’s case, it was the opposite situation. Eleven years ago, he was flung abruptly from the past, alone, into the future. In the future he meets his insane wife and his son who believes that Yunseok isn’t his father. Neither recognizes Yunseok. He viewed the house again through Seongmin’s eyes. Even to Yunseok it was unfamiliar and bizarre: the wallpaper streaks looked like burns, the dusty strips of cellophane everywhere seemed to just barely connect one worn object to the next. What is my mission in this strange future? What on earth do I have to do? His duty for over ten years had been clear: to find his missing child. The mission was so clear, so precise, that everyone made way for him.

  They had sacrificed their apartment and good jobs, and stopped having sex. The child was the black hole of their life that swallowed everything up. They continued living this way until one day it became normal for them. Even after working all night long, he would feel energetic when, early in the morning, he took his flyers to a subway entrance. He knew the free-newspaper distributor well enough to greet him with a light joke. Factory colleagues who knew his story sometimes relieved him of the more difficult work. For over ten years he had been “the missing child Seongmin’s father,” but that ended overnight.

  If it was true that he hadn’t experienced anything like happiness for a single moment, it was also true that he had become used to his misery. What do I need to do tomorrow? He had not once seriously considered this. It was always, If I find Seongmin, if I find Seongmin; he had never imagined what would happen afterward. If only they found Seongmin, he had believed that even Mira’s schizophrenia would disappear.

  He somehow endured the unendurable, but what truly felt unbearable was this very moment. He once read an art
icle about a marathon runner who had accidentally taken a shortcut and reached the finish line first, but was stripped of his medal. Whose fault was it when the ending was different from what you’d hoped for? Yunseok thought about this as he listened to the boy’s sniffling through the door. When, and why, had everything gone so badly? Was it his wife’s fault for wanting to go to the supermarket? Was it his fault for carelessly letting go of the shopping cart? Or his wife’s fault for buying cleansing cream? They had resented and blamed each other. Their fights crossed into dangerous territory by blindly probing one another’s weaknesses, their subconscious, deepest selves.

  “You didn’t want children in the first place,” Yunseok said to Mira, who had once considered aborting.

  Mira screamed, “That’s why I’m being punished instead!”

  Yunseok criticized Mira in turn, saying, “You’re the one who hadn’t wanted a baby. What was so important about your work—didn’t you say that we should take our time having children?”

  After the first few cruel years had passed, years of resignation and cynicism followed. Only the flyer kept them going as a couple. It became their unifying religion and their ritual. The printers they visited monthly became their church, and the flyers were the gospels that helped them forget their earthly struggles and would guide them to heaven. Every day, Mira’s condition worsened.

  Seongmin hardly spoke. He took a video game console out of his suitcase and played it all day, filling the house with its electronic screeching. Then he sat in one corner of the room, propped up his knees, and buried his face in them for a long time. He spoke only to answer questions, and sometimes retreated to the bathroom to cry. He ate almost nothing prepared for him. At least he ate the instant noodles they bought for him.