I'll Be Right There (32 page)

The dog went out to the courtyard and sat in the snow beneath the window. The professor opened the window and stuck out his hand to stroke the dog’s neck. His touch was gentle. Then he sat up straight, as if something had occurred to him, and he said, “Get up. Let’s go into the mountains.”

Dusk was falling. Why the mountains at this late hour? Yoon gave me a look. She seemed to be wondering the same thing. The professor grabbed some long poles that were propped up next to the front gate and handed us each one. He took one for himself as well and led the way. As we walked out the front gate carrying poles, we looked both ridiculous and resolute. The small village was completely blanketed. A few of the houses sat empty. On the way out of the village and into the mountains, we saw no sign of anyone else out and about. Our legs sank deep into the snow as we followed the professor. The professor stopped in a part of the woods filled with old pines. I had never seen anything like it. The snow-covered trees stood in the darkness like people gazing down at us. It was so beautiful that I felt like kneeling before it. The professor brushed the snow off a branch that was touching the ground. Yoon stood below an old tree that measured more than two arm spans around and tipped her head back to look up
.

“Help me dislodge the snow,” Professor Yoon said. “Since spending the winter here, I’ve learned that if it snows again when the trees are already covered, the branches can’t bear the weight and will snap right off. Let’s work together to clear the branches before it snows again.”

Some of the branches were already broken. He raised his pole and used it to lift a branch. Though he barely nudged it, the snow poured down; flakes fell on our heads. Yoon and I followed suit and raised our poles into the branches to knock the snow loose. We moved hesitantly at first but soon became absorbed in the task. Though it was after dark, the snow reflected enough light for us to see. Each time we cleared one of the younger pines, the flexible branches snapped upward. Some of them knocked the snow off higher branches when they sprang up like that. Despite the cold, sweat broke out on my forehead and slid down the sides of my face. The professor collected the broken branches that were buried in the snow. One by one, I made my way forward until I lost sight of Yoon. When I looked back, she was hard at work shaking the branches, oblivious to me as well. The professor worked behind us for a while but then stopped and watched us in the dark. My whole body was wet with sweat. I had no idea how long we had been at it. The trees that had bowed under the weight of the snow rose up into the night sky. Even though she was out of breath, Yoon kept moving to the next tree. The mountains filled with the sound of our labor. I paused to look up. The stars glimmered in the frozen night sky. How long had it been since I lifted my eyes to look at the stars? It must have been past midnight. I didn’t see the professor. I looked around but did not see him. Worried, I stopped and ran downhill. My spine was slick with sweat. The professor was sitting beneath an old pine cleared of snow. I asked him if he was okay. He smiled faintly. I sat beside him and listened to Yoon breathing hard as she shook the snow-laden branches. The sound of her pole knocking against the trees echoed through the mountains. I started to call out to her, but the professor stopped me
.

“Leave her be,” he said. “She’ll stop when she’s ready.”

—Brown Notebook 10

Epilogue

I’ll Be Right There

What is the furthest I shall reach

in life, and who can tell me? Whether

I’ll still be a wanderer of the storm

and living as a wave in the pool,

and whether even I’ll still be the pale,

spring-cold, spring-wind-trembling birch?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from
The Book of Hours

“I
would like to tell you about a man named Christopher.”

I pushed my glasses up and looked around the classroom. Their bright eyes were all fixed on me. I had been invited to speak at a women’s university as part of the chapel service. I took my glasses off and set them on the table. Their bright eyes blurred. The students in the back row were reduced to silhouettes. I could tell they were wondering who this Christopher was, just as we all had back when Professor Yoon told us the story. I looked at their puzzled faces and smiled to myself. I can tell I am getting old whenever young
people strike me as endearing. But getting old isn’t a bad thing. Getting old means that the subtle envy I feel for those passing through youth, and the waves of loss that wash over me when I see the way they seem to glow, will abate and leave only the hope that they will make their way forward freely, unimpeded by anything.

“Have any of you heard of Saint Christopher?”

I picked my glasses up from the table and put them back on. Their sparkling eyes once again poured into my own.

W
hen 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
.

M
ore 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
.