I'll Be Right There (34 page)

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

E
ven 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.

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

A
fter 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.

D
id he feel the same way I did?

S
ometimes 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
.”

T
he 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.

S
o 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.

W
ould 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?

E
tched 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.

T
he 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
.

However, in this novel, I do not specifically reveal the era or elucidate Korea’s political situation at the time. This was a deliberate decision on my part as a writer, because I believe that what happens to the characters in
I’ll Be Right There
is in no way limited to South Korea. Everything that happens in this novel could happen in any country and in any generation. I believe that no matter how rough the world becomes, there will always be teachers and students learning from each other, and even when savage and violent powers obstruct our freedoms, there will always be earnest and heartfelt first loves and friendships being born. While writing, I was focused on and absorbed in giving expression to those moments. I believe those are the moments that define our lives. We may be the protagonists of tragedy, but we are also the heroes of our most beautiful and thrilling experiences.