I'll Be Right There (8 page)

I had that dream again. I think I hear someone calling me, so I open the door and look out. But all I see are layers of darkness. I take a single step into the dark and stand there. When I told Miru about the dream, she squeezed my hand tight. Told me not to follow the voice. Said if I have that dream again, I should keep the door shut and not go out, as if I could control the dream however I wanted
.

“You won’t go out there, right?” she asked. She looked so serious that she made me think I had dreamt something really remarkable
.

“Only if you promise to stop looking for him,” I said
.

Miru gave me a hard look. I felt bad. Like I was letting her sister Mirae down. I apologized to her after a while
.

“Please don’t act like my parents,” she said. “I’ll never ask you to help me look for him again, so leave me alone.”

I listened and didn’t say a word. Miru cleared her throat and continued
.

“If I don’t find out what happened to the man my sister was looking for, I won’t be able to live with myself.”

A while back, before the semester started, Miru was reading one of the professor’s books. It was a collection of essays that had come out six years ago. Miru suddenly asked me if he was a bachelor. I said that if by bachelor she meant someone who lives alone, then yes. She said she thought she knew why he lived alone. It was strange to see her talk that way about someone she had never met. The book she was reading, which was his only published work aside from two books of poetry published when he was younger, consisted of reveries on poetry, with no mention of his private life. He had not published anything else since that book, including any poetry collections. The only way to read his more recent work was to dig through old magazines in the library. Until Miru brought it up, I had never given any thought to the fact that he wasn’t married, even though it was obvious he was a bachelor. I asked her how she knew
.

“I think he’s seen something,” she said, and muttered under her breath, “It must haunt him.”

I asked her why she said that
.

“Look,” she said. “What do you suppose this picture is doing here?”

She showed me the page. There was no mention of the artist, but I knew at once who it was
.

“Arnold …

I stumbled on the pronunciation of his last name, so Miru finished for me
.

“Arnold Böcklin.”

She seemed to be turning something over in her head. Then she said she wanted to sit in on his class. I wondered aloud why someone who had stopped going to her own school would want to go to someone else’s, but then I thought maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Maybe the professor’s class would help her turn her life around. Whenever I told her she should start acting like a normal college student again, she would retort, “You’re one to talk!” She was becoming more like her sister every day. She said she would do whatever it took to find the man who had disappeared, the one her sister had failed to find. But how are you supposed to find someone who’s dead? I didn’t know what to say to her
.

|||

I saw Jung Yoon in class today. I thought that was her first name, but I guess it’s just Yoon, and Jung is her family name. Turns out she was taking a break from school. She looks like she’s lost weight. But then again, even when she was a new student, she never seemed happy or excited. I wonder what’s bothering her. I could tell she didn’t recognize me. One time, I walked behind her all the way to school. She was deep in thought, and the feeling coming off her was very strange. She stopped in front of the school. Just stood there without going in. I stopped, too, and waited to see what she would do. How often had I watched her from a distance? I had also watched her once as she was sitting by herself at school reading Emily Dickinson. She stood in front of the gate with her head down, scuffed the ground a few times, and then turned and walked away. She was gone in an instant
.

|||

That day, I didn’t see her on campus at all. I found out later that she had applied for a leave of absence. She always kept her distance from others. Come to think of it, I’d never properly spoken to her except for one time when she was a new student. During that first semester, all of the students in our department had gone to Ilyeong on an overnight retreat. Out of all of those students, she was the only one who caught my eye. I still remember the way she looked: black hair falling to her shoulders, black vest over a white shirt, snow-white sneakers, stubbornly closed mouth. While everyone else sat in a circle next to the river and sang, she stared into the glowing flames and refused to sing along. The next morning, I woke up hungover on the floor of the guesthouse next to the others who had passed out drunk and got up and headed outside. The nausea was overwhelming. While I was dry heaving on all fours on the riverbank, I glimpsed her through the haze rising off the river. At first, I thought she had just dipped her face in the water. Her face was wet. When she noticed me watching her, she jumped and hid her face. I realized that she had been crying. Her eyes were puffy, like she had been weeping without restraint. She put her head down and walked away, but I followed her. She stopped next to the pile of wood leftover from the night before. The thick fog had settled over the charred remains of the campfire. She squatted next to the ashes. I sat beside her. She rested her arms on her knees and buried her face in them. I did the same. She lifted her head and rested it on her forearms. I did the same
.

“Why are you copying me?” she asked
.

“To make you laugh!”

She laughed weakly, as if to be polite
.

“Do you know me?” she asked
.

“Not yet.”

“If you don’t know me, then how can you make me laugh?”

She kept using the formal register with me, despite my attempts to get close to her
.

“But I just did,” I said
.

She peered at me through the fog. Her eyes were still swollen. She must have seen me throwing up, because she took an aspirin out of her pocket, handed it to me, stood up, and disappeared into the mist
.

—Brown Notebook 2

CHAPTER 3

We Are Breathing

I
made the right decision to learn about the city by walking around it. Walking made me think more and focus on the world around me. Moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other, reminded me of reading a book. I came across wooded paths and narrow market alleyways where people who were strangers to me shared conversations, asked one another for help, and called out to one another. I took in both people and scenery.

After I found a way to get to school without having to go through the large traffic tunnel, I enjoyed walking to school as well. I had walked toward the school one day only to find myself back in front of the tunnel again. I looked around, wondering what to do, when I saw a staircase to the right of the tunnel. At the top of the stairs, a narrow, winding path led uphill over the tunnel and through old tile-roofed buildings. The school was only a couple of minutes away by bus, but if I took the path that led over the tunnel, it would be a good twenty minutes on foot. As I walked farther, I came across more staircases.

It felt like a different city up there. A tall, redbrick smokestack had BATHHOUSE painted on it in huge white letters. A house that sold clay jars of all sizes sat with its front gate open, and I even came across a sign for the Social Science Library. A crepe-myrtle tree like the one by my mother’s grave was growing in an empty lot. But it must have been quite old, because the base of the trunk was incomparably thicker and the branches spread much wider than my mother’s tree. At one point, the path became so narrow that I had to step to the side when two giggling girls wearing backpacks passed me in the opposite direction. People up there lived life at a slower pace and did not concern themselves with those who lived below the tunnel. I peeked over a shoulder-high wall to see slices of daikon radish drying on a round straw tray. Bright red chili peppers hung from vines planted in even rows in a blue plastic container. There was even the occasional flowerpot planted with premature chrysanthemums sitting in front of someone’s house. In one alleyway, I came upon a long wooden deck placed between two of the houses upon which elderly women were kneading dough and julienning what looked like pumpkin. When I walked by, they stopped what they were doing and stared at me like I was another species. The first time I went through there, I walked very slowly so I could take it all in. But I soon grew so familiar with the place that I could get from one end to the other in ten minutes. Later still, even when I was not on that road, the road was with me. When it rained, I found myself wondering whether the straw tray had been taken inside. I even enjoyed the small pleasure of exchanging greetings with the girls who passed
me on the street. I lowered my head when I saw a man mixing concrete. He had taken off his shirt and was dripping with sweat, and the tan lines from his undershirt made me aware of the difficulty of his labor. I discovered that if I took just a five-minute detour on the way from school back to my apartment, I could pass a street lined with used-book stores. I had to take an underpass and detour around a baseball stadium to get there, but it was worth it. I would stroll past the towering stacks of used books and pause to peruse the titles at the very bottom. When I got to know that street, the feeling of being a runaway, which I had had ever since I started walking around the city, finally started to soften.

During the nearly three weeks that I spent exploring the different paths to school, I did not see Miru once. I didn’t see Myungsuh, either, except in Professor Yoon’s class. Whenever I walked into the classroom, the first thing I did was check to see if he was there. He was always sitting by himself in the back, where he had sat next to Miru on the first day of class. Always in the same seat. I would glance back again at the end of class, but he was usually gone by then. Sometimes while walking, I got so distracted by my feelings toward him and Miru that I lost all track of where I was.

I didn’t understand why I couldn’t get Miru off of my mind. She haunted me. And when I was not in Professor Yoon’s class, I wandered around the school wondering where Myungsuh might be. I didn’t have anything to say to him, but I looked for him all the same. After a while, I couldn’t tell whether the person I was really curious about was him or Miru.

Then one day, Professor Yoon distributed copies of the course reader that I had typed up. Myungsuh was not in class that day. Professor Yoon set the stack on the podium so everyone could grab a copy on the way out. I stared at the black letters of the manuscript that I had typed, then took two more copies and put them in my bag. I was thinking of Myungsuh and Miru. When Professor Yoon announced to the class that I was the one who had typed the manuscript, I unconsciously glanced back at Myungsuh’s seat. I hadn’t seen him when I first got there, but he might have come in after me. His seat was still empty. I was disappointed that he wasn’t there to hear Professor Yoon tell everyone that I had done the typing. Though that was all I had done, I felt proud to see the printed and bound copies. On the cover of the finished book was the title,
We Are Breathing
. It was in Professor Yoon’s handwriting.

Do not write a single sentence that abets violence.

That was the first sentence of
We Are Breathing
.

The first time I pulled the manuscript out of the envelope and read that sentence, I felt my spine straighten. I typed the sentence over and over, once for every year of my age, changing the paper as I went. I became so absorbed in typing that I felt like I was no longer the same person who had brought the manuscript home. Reviews of poems and stories personally selected by Professor Yoon filled the sheets of paper. I started to understand what he meant when he said he was sorry to put me up to it but that maybe it would help me
as I studied. The notes tucked between the pages appeared to be an appendix. Post-it notes and arrows indicated where he wanted memos and other brief texts to be added to the manuscript. There were even poems copied down in Professor Yoon’s handwriting that I felt I should look up on my own.

The next day I went to a shop that loaned out typewriters. I had seen the shop on my way to the bookstore on Jongno Street. The shortest rental period was one month. I rented a typewriter and lugged it home on the bus. After that, I found myself eager to get home from school every day so I could get back to typing. I could not take the extra ten minutes to walk through the neighborhood above the tunnel or the extra five minutes to visit the street with the used-book stores, so I would find myself on the bus instead.

When I first started typing, I was so loath to leave even a single typo that if I mistyped a letter, I started over with a new piece of paper. But after a while, I started correcting my typos with correction fluid instead. As I typed one page after another, I became more familiar with Professor Yoon’s handwriting. At first, I racked my brain trying to decipher some of the letters, marking those pages for later if I could not figure them out. I went to the school library to compare his copies against the original texts. I could have checked with him directly, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to give him the completed manuscript without having to ask any questions.

Whenever my shoulders ached at night from all the typing, I rested my arms on the windowsill and looked at the world outside. I gazed down at the light pouring out of the thick cluster of apartment buildings at the base of Naksan
Mountain. My cousin had found the rooftop apartment for me because it was close to where she lived. I traced the buildings with my eyes and tried to guess which of those countless lights was my cousin’s apartment. Then I looked up at the sky. It was studded with stars. I tried to spell out the words
do not write a single sentence that supports violence
in the stars. I also looked at Namsan Tower off in the distance. Though it didn’t look like much in the daytime, at night it blazed with light and marked its position. It reassured me to know there was something that stayed in one place and did not change, even if it was just a tower. I forgot about it during the day but found myself unconsciously staring at it at night. On overcast nights, when clouds obscured the tower, I poked my head out more often and waited for the clouds to lift. I decided I had to go up there someday. I surprised myself by picturing going up there with Myungsuh or Miru. After what felt like endless typing, I reached the final page. It contained a list of twenty books that Professor Yoon wanted us to read before graduation.