I'll Be Right There (13 page)

Myungsuh placed another perilla leaf on Miru’s rice. She looked down at it quietly and said my name. I looked at her. Her dark eyes locked on mine.

“Can I have more rice?” she asked.

“More? Really?” Myungsuh sounded shocked.

We each had another bowl of rice and another bowl of soup. When we ran out of side dishes, Myungsuh took the
containers out of the refrigerator again and heaped more food onto the serving dishes. He kept glancing at Miru as she ate.

S
tuffed, we left the messy table as it was and collapsed on the floor. The cat tiptoed languidly between us and leapt up onto my desk. She tucked her front paws together, arched her back, and huddled over to look down at us. She looked like a pile of fresh snow that had fallen only on that one spot. My cousin had told me that cats were independent and kept their distance from people. But Miru’s cat did not seem to mind when Myungsuh held her or when she was placed in my arms. Cats were also supposed to be sensitive and react to even the slightest touch, but Miru’s cat seemed to be unperturbed by anything. She had an elegant way of lifting her feet and arching her neck. Without quite realizing it, all three of us were staring at the cat.

“She’s deaf,” Miru said.

I looked at her in surprise.

“She can’t hear anything.”

“Really?”

“That’s why she’s so quiet.”

Finally, I understood why the cat barely moved and made so little noise.

“They say ninety percent of that breed are deaf.”

“What kind is it?” I asked.

“Turkish Angora.”

It was hard to believe that those lovely little ears could not hear a thing. I had thought,
What a regal cat, too noble to be hanging out with someone like me, who sits in the street with no shoes on
. When Miru told me it was deaf, I started to warm up to it. If I were sitting closer, I might have even reached out to stroke its ears.

“How did you figure out it was deaf?” I asked.

“She didn’t seem to recognize her name, no matter how much my sister and I called to her. At first we thought all cats were like that. But then we realized that no cat could sleep that deeply. We would see her sleeping under a chair when we left in the morning, but when we came home at night, she would still be asleep in the same spot. She slept anywhere and everywhere. As a kitten, she slept under cushions and inside plastic bags. When she got a little older, she slept on top of the bookshelf and behind curtains … She would sleep inside boxes … She would sleep and sleep. She was more like a lump of sleep than a cat …”

When Miru said that, I pictured an animal called sleep.

“When she finally started sleeping less, she started staring at everything that moved.”

“Like what?”

“Leaves shaking in the wind, bells dangling in the air, drops of rain sliding down the window, a ball of yarn rolling around, broken laces, glass beads, that sort of thing … She would stare at them. When they moved this way, she turned her head this way, and when they moved that way, she turned her head that way.”

“I see.”

“One time, she was sitting in the window with her back to us. When we went to take a look, the first snow of the year was falling. The cat was watching the snowflakes dance in the
wind. All day long, she moved her head in time with those whirling snowflakes. We took turns calling her name, but she never turned to look at us. That was when my sister realized something was wrong. The cat was deaf. I hadn’t even considered that possibility, but when I started watching her more carefully, I realized she wasn’t reacting to sound but to the air—the vibration of a door opening, the drumming of footsteps. I snuck up behind the cat once when it was gazing out the window and clapped my hands right next to its ears. But she just kept looking out the window. We took her to a dog hospital and had her examined. Sure enough, she really was deaf.”

“Why did you take a cat to a dog hospital?”

“We couldn’t find any veterinarians that treated cats.”

“What do you call her?” I had finally gotten around to asking the cat’s name.

Myungsuh answered before Miru could.

“Emily Dickinson,” he said.

“What?” I was shocked.

“Emily Dickinson,” Miru said. “My sister picked the name.”

Dahn’s face flashed through my mind. She named the cat Emily Dickinson? I got up and went to the desk and took out the very first book I had ever bought in this city—the collection of her poems. I pointed at the picture of Emily Dickinson on the cover and looked at Miru as if to say,
You mean this Emily?
Miru nodded. It seemed Emily had been with us even before we met. We were connected to each other through her, even though we hadn’t grown up together. Dahn had read her
poems and then given them to me; meanwhile, Miru’s sister was naming the cat after her.

“Ms. Dickinson probably wouldn’t be too happy about it, would she?” Miru said.

“What do you mean?”

“That we named a deaf cat after her.”

I hadn’t considered that. I looked at the cat and called out, “Emily Dickinson!”

“Just call her Emily. That’s what my sister did.”

It was just the three of us, but Miru brought up her sister so often—my sister did this, my sister said that—it felt like there were four of us in that room. Myungsuh opened the book of poems and read one out loud.

I stepped from plank to plank

So slow and cautiously;

The stars about my head I felt
,

About my feet the sea
.

I knew not but the next

Would be my final inch,—

This gave me that precarious gait

Some call experience
.

When he got to “About my feet the sea,” Miru joined in. It seemed they had read poetry out loud together before. Their voices harmonized. As I listened, I remembered Professor Yoon’s book and opened my bag. I took out the copies of
We Are Breathing
and gave one to each of them. I felt like the purpose of my long, unexpected pilgrimage across the city had been to deliver these books. I let out a sigh as if I had completed some arduous task. While Myungsuh and Miru opened their copies, I looked at the cat on top of the desk, the cat that could not hear a single sound in this world, and called out, “Emily—.”

When the lecture ended, I slipped out of the classroom before Yoon could turn and see me. She sat in the very front. I was staring so hard at her all through class that I didn’t even hear the professor’s voice, but I couldn’t stop myself from dashing out of there as soon as class was over. Then I saw her in the middle of a deserted street that had just been stormed by protesters. I thought I was seeing things. She was standing among the tall buildings downtown with her back to me, her hair disheveled, nothing in her hands, barefoot. I called out her name, and she turned to face me. It was her. I remembered the first time I saw her, in the early morning fog next to the river in Ilyeong. It was hard to believe they were the same: that face dripping with tears like she had just washed it in the river and this lone pair of eyes floating in the middle of a city swept by demonstrations. But that’s what it’s like to live in this city—these things happen all the time, like it’s nothing
.

|||

I read about the Genovese murder in the book I stole. It took place on March 13, 1964, before I was born. A woman named Catherine “Kitty” Genovese had finished a night shift and was returning to her New York apartment at three-fifteen in the morning when she ran into a suspicious-looking man who attacked her with a knife. Thirty-eight of her neighbors heard or saw her dying, but no one came to her aid. When Genovese yelled for help, the lights all went on in the apartment building, but no one opened their door or came down the stairs. One person yelled from their window, “Let that girl alone!” and the assailant ran away. Bleeding profusely, Genovese collapsed on the sidewalk. Nobody came outside to help her. The lights in the apartments went out, and the street grew quiet. The attacker, who had been hurrying back to his car, returned and stabbed Genovese again. She screamed again, and the lights went back on. The attacker ran away again. While Genovese struggled to crawl into the building, the lights went off. The attacker, who had only been hiding, came out once more and finished what he started. Genovese died after being stabbed in three attacks over thirty minutes. Each time she called for help, the lights went on and the attack stopped; when the lights went off again, the attack resumed. It was documented that thirty-eight people watched through their windows as Genovese was stabbed to death. Is this what it means to be human? I felt like putting the book back where I’d found it
.

|||

Miru laughs more now because of Yoon. They’re like sisters. Since Yoon gave us our copies of We Are Breathing, Miru has been carrying it in her bag everywhere she goes. The three of us sit together in the professor’s class. Sometimes we stop by his office afterward. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Miru pay attention in class. He even calls her name when he gets to the end of the attendance sheet
.

Some of the people in class turn and look at her when he does this. Yoon looks, too, and smiles. Sometimes, in the middle of class, the professor will walk over to us and pat Miru on the back. I wonder if he and Yoon realize—aside from me, they are the only two people that Miru allows to see her scars
.

|||

I met Yoon today, and we walked along the old fortress wall that used to encircle the city. She walks everywhere, even to school. It’s hard to picture her not walking. I’ve been following her and making my own new discoveries. As we walked along the wall, I told her about the Genovese murder. She listened intently
.

“She probably would have survived if only one person heard her screams, rather than thirty-eight,” she said
.

“You think so?” I asked
.

“That’s what psychologists say,” she said, and explained. “They say that’s how people’s minds work. If one person witnesses someone in danger, they won’t hesitate to help. But if there is a group of witnesses, each person will unconsciously wait and do nothing.”

I asked her if that was because they all shifted the responsibility to one another, but she said it was not a transfer but a diffusion of responsibility
.

“According to psychologists,” she said, “the more witnesses there are, the smaller the sense of individual responsibility.”

I asked if she was studying psychology, and she said it was one of her electives. Then her face turned gloomy
.

“But can human beings really be explained through psychology and psychoanalysis?”

I stared at her. I don’t think she was expecting an answer, because she grabbed my hand and mumbled to herself:

“How frightened she must have been each time the lights went out … Her terror was probably worse than the pain of being stabbed to death.”

—Brown Notebook 4

CHAPTER 5

City Walls

I
used to take walks alone, but Myungsuh and Miru started joining me.

We would walk side-by-side until the road narrowed, and then we would fall into single file—Myungsuh in the lead, Miru in the middle, and me in the back. When the narrow road ended, we walked side-by-side again. Walking with them was different from walking alone. I thought I would not be able to see the city in detail the way I did when I was alone, since being a threesome meant we would be paying more attention to one another, but because there were three of us, there seemed to be more to see. If one of us pointed at something and said “Look at that,” we would all come together and look as one. I saw things I would have missed on my own. Miru mostly pointed at things in the sky: dark clouds, white clouds, a blazing sunset, the crescent moon hanging primly in the night sky, a halo around the moon at midnight, birds traversing the dark. I started paying more attention to the clouds at night thanks to her. I even looked for constellations like I did when
I was little—first locating the Big Dipper and then using it to find Cassiopeia and Andromeda. Myungsuh mostly pointed out people: ruddy-faced manual laborers working hard to make ends meet; a middle-aged woman diligently turning hairtail fish as they roasted to a golden brown over a brazier set at the entrance to the market street; a grandmother with her back bent forward at a ninety-degree angle, walking so slowly that each step seemed to take a full minute as she carried vegetables to market; red-cheeked children, who looked as if they were growing taller as they played, charging after a bouncing ball; a drunken man perched precariously on an overpass with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.