I'll Be Right There (22 page)

It made me a little nervous, too
.

—Brown Notebook 7

CHAPTER 8

A Single Small Boat

Y
oon
.

I thought I was not going to write to anyone on the outside until I got out of the army. But here I am writing to you, so I guess it was a pointless resolution. On a blank piece of paper, I wrote your full name, “Jung Yoon,” then just your first name, “Yoon,” and then back and forth between the two ten more times. Just now I wrote “Yoon” again, put a period after it, and sat and stared at your name for a long time. Why did I resist writing letters? I feel less like a soldier at war and more like a man at battle with his desire to write. My sister wrote to say that you asked for my address. I’ve been waiting every day since then to get a letter from you. Not a response sent to a letter I wrote, but a letter sent first by you
.

We call everyone outside the military “civilians.” In other words, you are a civilian, and I am a soldier. You’ll probably laugh when I tell you that I decided not to write to anyone on the outside because I want to live as a true soldier. But as long as I’m in the service, that’s all I want to do. This place is my escape. I want to forget about the soft “me” that lived out there in society and become strong and armed through discipline and training. I went to see you before coming to the army because I was determined not to write to you or even to see your face until I was done. But my will is weak
.

Took me nearly a year to realize that my feelings for you are not something I can control. I fear I might ask you in this letter to come visit me. But if by chance I do write those words, you must not come. I even forbade my family members to visit me. I don’t want to see any civilians in this place. I mean it. I threatened my mom and my older sister that I would go AWOL if they tried to come with me on my first day or if they tried to visit me when I took my first leave. I said that in exchange I would do well at target practice and earn a reward leave, and then I would visit them myself. But I didn’t get to keep that promise. Some other guy got the award, so he shared the rice cakes he got from his mother with the rest of us. I bet you’re thinking, They send you on vacation if you’re a good shot? You’d probably laugh and tell me to stop joking. But Yoon, I’ve found myself here. As it turns out, I am an excellent marksman
.

Yoon
.

Once again, I write your name and stare at it for a long time. I often think about the friends of yours that I met when I visited you. It made me quite happy to see that you have friends like that by your side. I also never thought I would get to meet Professor Yoon, whom I knew only from books. You all looked so beautiful. He seemed strict, but warm at the same time. I envy you for having him as a professor. Maybe the reason I ran away to the army was that I didn’t have friends like yours where I was. I felt I’d become part of a “we” when I was with you all. The hours we spent walking with your friends along the fortress wall were like a dream. I wait for no one, Yoon, but I do wish I could relive the night we all spent camping overnight in a tent pitched fearlessly—and illegally!—next to the fortress wall. That memory will stay with me until I leave the army. Also, sleeping in that house and eating dinner with you and Miru and Myungsuh—that memory will stay with me for the rest of my life. Whose guitar was that? Those songs we sang together. To think that I spent several days living with people I’d just met. Why was that house sitting empty? I remember the look in Myungsuh’s and Miru’s eyes when they saw that we had pulled all of the weeds in the yard the next morning. Sometimes I wonder if any of all that happened was real. Even though I’ve only been to the house once, I am certain I will be able to find my way back without ever getting lost. So that must mean it wasn’t a dream. I was so glad I could spend that time with you. I can’t believe I am only telling you this now
.

I wonder if Miru still writes down everything she eats. I teased her that if she keeps hunching over when she walks, she’ll be a hunchback by the time she’s old. Does she still walk like that? One night, when we were staying at the house, I woke up and went to get some water. Miru’s diary was sitting on the table, so I stole a peek. I’ve never seen a diary like that before. I’ve never met anyone who takes such pains to write down every single thing they eat. That night, as I flipped through those entries listing everything she had eaten every single day, a strange feeling came over me. After a while, those simple lists started to sound like poems. Like she was shouting, I am what I eat and what I have eaten … Every once in a while, there was an entry where she went on a binge. It pained me each time I came across one of those. I also read the parts between her food entries where the three of you wrote stories together. It gave me a glimpse into how the three of you spent your time together. Miru came into the kitchen and caught me reading her diary. She took it in stride, while I was the one surprised. She even asked me indifferently which of you I thought was the better writer? But I wasn’t thinking about the quality of the writing when I was reading it. What I was marveling over was the fact that three different sets of handwriting could harmonize so nicely. Does it sound strange to say that I found something comforting about those jumbled stories? I told her I wanted to add illustrations in the margins, but she asked me to do it later, when we all meet again someday. Sometimes I think about that promise she and I made to each other. That day will come. Someday, I mean. Someday, when we meet again, I’ll illustrate the stories the three of you wrote
.

Yoon
.

How could I have ever imagined that you would show up in the waiting area at the training center, holding a book of poems by Emily Dickinson? When you called out to me from afar, I thought I was seeing things. And you didn’t come alone but also brought Myungsuh and Miru and even Emily the cat. There you were, right before my eyes, when I’d been so exhausted and depressed about stopping my mom and sister from visiting. I used to hate the idea of someone watching me walk away. I even hated sticking my hand out of a car window or door and waving. I waited to get my hair cut until I was on my way to the first day of training, so you were the first ones to see me with a buzz cut. Embarrassing. I keep picturing Myungsuh’s face when I asked why you’d come and he said, “It was my idea!” The face of a
hyeong,
a man’s older brother
.

Thank you, too, for bringing Emily and giving me a chance to hold her. I felt bad because I avoided her each time she came near me when we were staying in that house. I’d never held a cat before. It felt warm. So warm that I can still recall that heat. If I’d known cats were that warm and soft, I would have held her the whole time I was there. I regret that. And then there was you. You insisting I take the book of poems anyway, after I said I wasn’t allowed to have it inside the compound. You telling me to sneak it in somehow. Don’t be surprised. That book is right here on my lap. I’ve been using it as a smooth surface on which to write this letter. After I leave the army, I’ll tell you how I was able to hold on to it all this time. My army discharge gift to you
.

Yoon
.

It feels like so long ago that I gave you this book. You told me that a guy you went to school with, the one nicknamed Pedal, took the book I gave you and vanished, but somehow you found a new copy. These Dickinson poems that have found their way back to me are my patron saint in here. Whenever the cravings for homemade kimchi get too strong, or when I come across a spider, I recite this poem from memory:

That Love is all there is
,

Is all we know of Love;

It is enough, the freight should be

Proportioned to the groove
.

I repeat “it is enough” to myself two or three times. That’s the line where I can feel my arachnophobia subside. Starting tomorrow, we’re doing night drills for three weeks. I hope I don’t fall out of rank
.

Take care
.

From GI Dahn to Civilian Yoon

D
ahn sent me the first letter a year after he joined the military and was selected for the special forces. It was more than five pages long. He didn’t mention anywhere in it that he was in a special forces unit. I unfolded the letter and put it on my desk.
From GI Dahn to Civilian Yoon
 … I stared at those words for a long time. It pained me to realize that I had never written him back. I filled a fountain pen with ink, took out a new notebook, and wrote his name at the top of the page.

Dahn
.

Dahn as a baby, Dahn as a child, Dahn as a seventeen-year-old, eighteen-year-old, nineteen-year-old, then a college student, then a soldier. Right after he joined the army, I didn’t hear from him for some time. I called his sister to get his address, and she told me he had been assigned to a special unit. She said they had nonstop drills every day, and that sometimes he had to survive in the mountains for half a week with only a canteen and a bayonet.
You know how on Armed Forces Day
, she said,
the soldiers parachute in formation? His unit is one of those
. But why Dahn? She told me he had the right physique for the special forces. But they must do aptitude testing as well? I pestered his sister with questions, but it made no difference. I wrote his name in my notebook again. I could
not picture Dahn parachuting out of an airplane. How did he survive on his own for days in the mountains? In the space between the words
civilian
and
soldier
rested the sense of distance that prevented me from picturing him doing a road march or maritime training. I imagined his unit must spend so much time in the mountains that, after being discharged from active duty, the mere mention of mountains would make them turn their heads in disgust. To think that was where he was. Dahn the arachnophobe in the special forces having to survive for days on his own in the wild? Even after I had his address, I kept starting letters and abandoning them because I could not begin to imagine what he was going through. Then his letter arrived first.

Dahn
.

I got your letter. I hope the night drills went okay
.

Unsure of what to write next, I closed my notebook. How many times during those three weeks of hard training did Dahn have to recite Dickinson to himself so he could face down a spider? I started to put Dahn’s letter back in the drawer but paused and stared for a moment at the other letters stacked inside. I took them all out and placed them on top of the desk. They included lettercards and even ordinary postcards. I could not believe I had never written back to him, despite the many times he had written me. A scrap of paper mixed in with the letters caught my eye, and I pulled it out.

Start reading again
.

Write down new words and their definitions
.

Memorize one poem a week
.

Do not go to Mom’s grave before the Chuseok holiday
.

Walk around the city for at least two hours every day
.

The first time Myungsuh and Miru came over, I made them wait outside while I went in and pulled that piece of paper off the wall. It must have gotten mixed in with Dahn’s letters. I flattened it out and stacked the letters on top of it.

T
he image of Dahn at the waiting area flickered before my eyes. We had arrived at the training center two hours early and were waiting for him. Since we hadn’t arranged to meet, we thought there might be too many people and that we might not get to see him. There were only a few others at first, but it soon grew into a crowd. Most were friends of the new recruits. If we had not been standing in front of a military training center, it would have looked like we were waiting for a concert to begin. Myungsuh spotted Dahn before I could. While I was staring way off into the distance, he tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to him. He even called out to Dahn before I did. Dahn was shocked to see us. It was so strange to see him with a buzz cut that I could not stop staring. His scalp, and even the underside of his chin, looked blue from where it had been closely shaved. He stared at me for a moment and then took the cat from Miru. I guess saying goodbye makes us reach out for those we would ordinarily
ignore. Maybe we care about them more, too, when it is time to part. He cradled the cat in his arms and looked around at us. He had stayed away from Emily when the four of us were staying in the old house, but now it felt like she’d been his from the start.

Dahn did not put her down the whole time. Not even when we went to a coffee shop, which took forever for us to find, and not even when I handed him the book of poems and told him to sneak it on base somehow. Finally, just before returning to the training center, he handed Emily back to Miru. Then he walked away without once looking back. I caught myself chanting the words,
Turn around!
Myungsuh mumbled, “That’s cold.” I ran. Dahn was walking straight ahead in the crowd of blue-skinned heads when I caught up to him.

“I’ll write to you,” I told him. “I’ll come visit you, too.”

Dahn told me not to worry about it and smiled. Later, sitting in the bathroom at a rest stop on the way back to the city, I pictured Dahn disappearing into the crowd without looking back and had to close my eyes from the pain. Then, back on the bus, I thought about that time very long ago when a night train chugged past right in front of us, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut even tighter.