I'll Be Right There (2 page)

What are you doing with your life?

When I was twenty, each time I asked myself that, I left the university and walked for hours around the city, eyes streaming from the sting of tear gas in the air. Has nothing changed since then? Even now, whenever I picture his eyes, I have to get out of my house and walk—I pick any road and follow it to the end. Neither society nor I have changed for the better; we have only become more imperfect in different ways. When the bridge over the river that cuts through the city collapsed and a bus carrying girls to school plunged into the river, when I saw an airplane crash into a tall Wall Street building one morning, when I sat in front of the television on the first day of the new year and watched for hours in disbelief as flames engulfed Sungnyemun Gate, I asked myself the same question:
What are you doing with your life?
I drove in circles
around what was left of the burned city gate in the middle of the night until I felt like returning home again. Now as then, whenever I feel like giving up, I walk around the city. Through the depression and loneliness, the same thought arises:
If only he were here
.

Which of us was the first to let go?

At some point, I realized I would have to live without him. I was nervous and afraid, but the time had come for me to go it alone. Even afterward, images of him clung and would not let go. Like that night we spent in some seaside village on a remote island. How were we able to walk all night like that? And while getting caught in cloudbursts. We took a ferry from Incheon so far out into the sea, and yet I’ve completely forgotten the name of the village. We hadn’t planned on going there. We just jumped on Subway Line 1 at Seoul Station for some reason. The fact that it was Line 1 doesn’t hold any meaning; I am only assuming that was how we got there because I remember passing Bucheon Station. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt, which means it was probably midsummer. The subway train was so packed that it was hard to stand up straight. I was tired, and it must have been one of those days when I was not in the mood to talk. Each time the train stopped, a crowd of people surged in, filling the car with the smell of sweat. As he stood there swaying, brow furrowed, I said, “Let’s go somewhere far away.” Or maybe it was his idea. We got off the subway at Incheon and took a bus to the ferry terminal. We did not care where the ferry went as long as it was as far as possible from the harbor. The ferry carried us across the sea. As we stood at the side of the boat and took in the breeze, whatever it
was that had me feeling so worn down did not seem to matter anymore. We stared at the sea. I had never gone that far from the coast before. Since he had grown up in a beach town, the experience was probably different for him than it was for me. It was not easy to get to the island. The ferry ride took two hours, and when we reached the island, the tide had come in, making it impossible to go all the way to shore. Someone brought a small motorboat out to us from the village dock. After everyone boarded, we headed for the island. I saw children fishing way out in the water. I frowned, worried they might be swept away at any moment, but someone told me they were standing on an embankment and were not actually in the water. They said I would be able to see it once the tide was out. The boat let us off on another submerged embankment. I hiked up my skirt, and he rolled his pants up to his thighs, and together we waded along the embankment to the island.

That day, we walked as far around the island as we could. It must have been the rainy season, because more people were sitting on the beach than swimming in the water, and the farther we got from the dock, the fewer people we ran into. We could smell salt on the air, and a line of trees next to the beach shook violently in the wind. We stood on the beach and put our arms around each other as the sun slipped into the sea. In the blink of an eye, the crimson disk disappeared below the horizon. Afterward, he turned moody. Though he had kept trying to cheer me up while I was feeling down, now he was the one not saying a word. I grew quiet. As we walked along the beach together in silence, we came upon a dead seagull carried in on the tide.

“A bird!” I murmured.

He started digging a hole in the sand to bury it.

“What’s the point?” I asked. “The tide will just wash it out.”

“All the same!”

When I think of the way he said that, I cannot help but smile. That phrase always used to remind me of him. Whatever the situation, he would say, “All the same, it’s better that way!” He took a notebook out of his bag, tore a sheet of paper from it, and wrote,
Rise again, dear bird
. Then he rolled the piece of paper around a stick and planted it in front of the bird’s grave.

Did we eat anything that night? I don’t remember eating, nor do I remember being hungry. That night, we walked until the whole island was dark, as if we were trying to find out where the water ended. That was probably the first time I watched the sea grow black as darkness fell. The black water climbed over and over itself until it reached our feet and retreated.

“Jung Yoon!” Whenever he called me by my full name, it meant he had something on his mind.

“What is it?”

“Let’s remember this day forever.”

That’s it? Unimpressed, I mumbled under my breath that if you wanted to remember something, you ought to have a memento. I heard a rustling sound in the dark. He slipped his journal out of his bag and into my hand.

“I call this my Brown Notebook. I use it to jot down my thoughts. I want you to have it.”

He put his hand around my wrist and pulled me toward
him; I let him put his arms around me. He pulled my hand down to his crotch and said, “You can have this, too.” He sounded so serious that I couldn’t help but laugh. With one hand on his notebook and the other on his crotch, I felt a strange sadness wash over me, and I whispered in his ear, “Can we go somewhere farther away?” But I knew there was nowhere else.

Who can foresee the days that are yet to come?

The future rushes in and all we can do is take our memories and move forward with them. Memory keeps only what it wants. Images from memories are sprinkled throughout our lives, but that does not mean we must believe that our own or other people’s memories are of things that really happened. When someone stubbornly insists that they saw something with their own eyes, I take it as a statement mixed with wishful thinking. As what they want to believe. Yet as imperfect as memories are, whenever I am faced with one, I cannot help getting lost in thought. Especially when that memory reminds me of what it felt like to be always out of place and always a step behind. Why was it so hard for me to open my eyes every morning, why was I so afraid to form a relationship with anyone, and why was I nevertheless able to break down my walls and find him?

In my first year of college, I used to stare at the front gate of the university every morning and debate whether or not to go inside. Often, I would turn around and walk back down the hill I had just climbed. Even now, I cannot say what was wrong with me. For three months, during the end of my nineteenth year and the start of my twentieth, I kept the window
of the small room in the apartment where I lived with my older newlywed cousin covered with black construction paper. It was only a single sheet, but it turned the room as dark as night. In that darkness, I left the light on and passed the time reading. There was no reason for it. I just had nothing else to do and nothing I wanted to do. I read an entire sixty-volume literature anthology, in order, each volume of which contained over twenty short stories printed in letters smaller than sesame seeds. When I finished, I looked out the window to discover it was March. When I think about it now, it seems so long ago. To think that in the happy home of two newlyweds there was a room that was kept as black as night! When I came out of that room, it was to attend the matriculation ceremony at the university, which was the freest place I had ever experienced in this city. Now Professor Yoon is in the hospital, Myungsuh is out there living a life that has nothing to do with me, and there is another whom I will never see again. But had I not met them where and when I did, how could I have made it through those days?

I
watched the snowflakes grow heavier and collected my thoughts. I reminded myself that the only reason he had called after eight years was to tell me Professor Yoon was dying. I muttered to myself not to lose sight of that. First and foremost, I needed to get to the hospital. We are always crossing and recrossing each other’s paths whether we realize it or not. Long-forgotten memories kept cropping up and surprising me, like pulling on the stalk of a potato plant after the rain and seeing endless clusters of potatoes pop out of
the soil. Even if I never thought of him or heard from him again, the fact that we had connected with each other, however briefly, still made me sad.

He broke the silence. I held the receiver, unable to say a word as he told me about Professor Yoon. Then he asked, “Can I come over?”

At this hour?

I thought it was over between us, but he asked it so casually:
Can I come over?
How long had it been since I last heard those words? Back when we were together, he used to say those words to me all the time over the phone.
Can I come over?
He would even call from phone booths to say,
I’m on my way
. Whether rainy, windy, cloudy, or clear, each day passed with those words ringing between us. Back then, he and I were always waiting for each other. It was never too late at night for him to come see me, and there were no limits to when I could see him. We would tell each other to come over any time, day or night. We each get one life that is our own. We each in our own way struggle to get ahead, love, grieve, and lose our loved ones to death. There are no exceptions for anyone—not for me, not for the man who had called me, and not for Professor Yoon. Just one chance. That’s all. If youth were something we could do over, I would not be standing here today, answering my phone and listening to his voice for the first time in eight years.

I hesitated a moment and then said, “No, I’ll figure it out.”

He sighed and hung up.

My last words to him left me feeling lonely. They were my words, yet they sounded strange to me. I should have told him I would meet him at the hospital. It was a harsh thing to
say. He had said the same words to me once, many years ago. By then, we were past the point of always knowing where the other one was and what we were doing. I had asked him what he was planning to do about something, and he snapped, “I’ll figure it out.” It seems that whether we are aware of it or not, memory carries a dagger in its breast. I had not been dwelling on his words all that time, and more than enough time had passed for me to forget about it completely, but in an instant, my subconscious retrieved his words and turned them on him. I was not the type to rebuff a friend like that. And if someone I had been feeling close to were to speak to me that way, I would likely start keeping my distance. His words had been roaming around inside me all that time, like lost puzzle pieces, before finding their way back.

I returned to my desk and spent the morning slumped in my chair. After the difficult memories finally subsided, I was left with a cool breeze.

Was it August? Or September? We were filling a basket with crab apples from the tree that grew in Professor Yoon’s yard when a cool breeze blew over us and we laughed. The tiny tree was barely tall enough to peek over the wall, but it was heavy with crab apples. Professor Yoon watched from the living room window as we filled the basket. I have forgotten why my college friends and I had gotten together to pick crab apples, but we must have been happy and at peace then, considering the way our laughter gushed forth.

“Will these days ever come again?”

My friend had meant it in an offhand way, but the comment cut deep.

“Not the same days,” someone said sadly.

We gathered up the laughter that had poured forth so easily a moment before and, to avoid one another’s eyes, looked at Professor Yoon gazing out the window at us, each of us lost in our private thoughts. Maybe we had already foreseen the future. After we finished picking the fruit, we returned to the living room and sat in a circle. Professor Yoon had fallen asleep with a book on his knee. Someone set the book down carefully on the table. Curious to see what he had been reading, I picked it up. It was
The World of Silence
. It looked old: the pages were yellowed and folded back. With my hand on top of the book, I stared at Professor Yoon’s socks hanging loosely on his too-thin feet.

T
hough I knew I should go to the hospital, I could not bring myself to leave my chair. I felt like I was floating, and I kept dozing off. By the time I was able to sit up straight and examine my desk, it was already noon. Books I was in the middle of reading were scattered about, and a memo pad lay facedown beneath some papers I had been editing. Two pencils sat askew in a pencil case I had bought at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. I stared at the dove carrying a leaf in its beak engraved on the side of the case and then began to straighten up my desk. I closed the poetry books that were sitting open and put my scattered pens and pencils back in the case. I crumpled up the discarded papers covered in underlines and tossed them in the trash, removed the paperweights from the thick books that I had shoved aside in the middle of reading and gathered them off to one side, and returned the books to their shelves.

For some reason, straightening up my desk always reminds me of death. Once, I had tidied up and was heading out of the room when I glanced back at my clean desk. Suddenly frightened, I went back and messed it up again. Growing old does not make us any better at loving one another or understanding the meaning of life or death. Nor does knowledge come with the passage of time. Compared with when I was young, I am worse now at loving another person, and news of someone’s unexpected death shocks and upsets me each time. Nevertheless, I hope that when I die, I will be writing or reading a book at my desk late one snowy night and I will simply put my head down and close my eyes forever. I want that to be the last image of me on this earth. I brushed away the traces of death that clung to my fingertips each time I put a book on its shelf and finished tidying up. To get ready to go to the hospital, I lathered my hands with soap and washed my face, changed into clean clothes, and checked the mirror. On my way out the door, I paused involuntarily and glanced back at my desk.