Our Happy Time (14 page)

I
typed in the words
capital punishment
and hit Enter. Countless documents and articles popped up. The first result said,
Capital punishment is the highest penalty as it deprives a criminal of life and permanently removes them from society.
Next to the computer was Yunsu’s letter. It read:

I pictured him writing the letter one word at a time with his hands cuffed. Then I pictured the little boy with the scarred hands. As I moved the cursor over the words
highest penalty,
I kept thinking about how Yunsu cried when he told us the story of Orestes.

If someone asked me if would rather die or see her again, I would prefer to go to the gallows. If there is a God, then he has given me the worst punishment of all. Death
doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not afraid of dying. I never was, not even when I was a little kid.
I kept thinking about what Yunsu had said, and how he had told us at our very first meeting that he feared mornings the most.

I opened another link:
Origins of the Death Penalty.
According to one amusing article, England used to be crawling with pickpockets, so they were executed in public to discourage the practice. People gathered like clouds to watch these executions, and other pickpockets made a fortune off of them. There was another article that said 164 of the 167 death row prisoners incarcerated at Bristol Prison in England until 1886 were executed in public. The United States, as well, held public executions up until the end of the 1930s. Of the world powers, the United States produced the highest number of death row inmates after China.

I went to the kitchen to top off my coffee and looked out the window for a moment. Just as Yunsu had described in his letter, the hills behind the apartment building where I lived were tinged with yellow.

The letter continued:

It looked like the shaky handwriting of an adolescent boy trying to impress a female teacher that he has a crush on. I could tell I was getting sentimental about the fact that he was a man facing death. I shook my head. This was not a good sign. My heart felt like it was bubbling over, like it was filled with soda water. Over the last few days, whenever I was driving somewhere, I kept catching myself thinking about him. I stared blankly out the window. Since he had gone to the trouble of writing me a letter in handcuffs, I had no choice but to write back. But I had no idea what to write. I couldn’t exactly say,
So, you were suicidal? What a coincidence. So was I.

While I was standing at my kitchen window sipping coffee, I saw something strange happening in the park behind the apartment complex. There was a circle of
teenagers
, around twenty of them, a little too big to be
middle-school
students, but a little too small to be in high school. Curious as to what they were doing, I took a closer look and saw that they had another teenager surrounded and were beating him up. Even from the fifteenth floor, I could see that his face was covered in blood. An eerie feeling came over me, and my heart started to race. When one of the kids was done punching him, another would step forward and start punching him again. I remembered that I had seen
other kids gang up like that and fight in the park from time to time. I think I had also seen fliers posted in the elevator stating that the neighborhood association had passed a resolution and asked the police to increase security in the park behind the complex. In the past, I would have been indifferent to something like that, but not anymore. I felt scared, as if I were witnessing a murder. I picked up the phone and dialed 112 for the police. My family had had to dial 119 for medical emergencies several times because of me, but it was the first time in my entire life that I had ever dialed 112. I heard a voice on the other end.

“Hello? Hello, I’m calling from, um, Gangnam-gu in Seoul—”

“Yes, Seoryeon Apartments?” The operator cut in as I was stammering, trying to figure out what to say. I thought to myself,
Wow, Korea’s emergency services are really advanced.

“Yes, hello, uh, there are some teenagers beating up another kid on the hill behind building Number 109. He looks like he’s bleeding.”

I took the phone to the window in the kitchen and looked out again. The kid was on the ground.

“He’s fallen! Please come quickly!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The operator hung up. I looked at the clock. It was 3:48 pm.

I felt a little bad about the mean things I had said about Korea after returning from abroad. Once, while arguing with a man I had lived with in Paris, I had screamed at him in the street. Not five minutes went by before a police officer came over and grabbed him by the arm. I was shocked, as was the man I’d been arguing with.

The officer asked me,
Mademoiselle, is this man
bothering
you? Shall I take him down to the station?

Oh, no,
we said.
We were just joking around.

That’s how I remember our fight ending. Someone had looked out their window and reported it, and the officer got the call and was dispatched. The swiftness of it shocked us, and we said,
Let’s not tell anyone we’re Korean,
and went back into the café for a drink.

Feeling anxious, I stood and watched out the window. Several minutes had passed since the kid had fallen, but he still wasn’t getting up. I thought,
What if he dies?
Several of the kids picked him up and started helping him out of the park. Since the fight was over, the police would not be much use even if they did show up. But then two of the kids grabbed another kid by the arms and led him into the circle. It looked like they were dragging a condemned criminal to an execution ground. Another kid stepped forward and began beating him. I checked the road and the path right in front of the apartment building, but the police were not yet on their way. I couldn’t even hear any sirens. When I checked the clock, it was past four. I dialed 112 again.

“Hello? I called a moment ago. The kid who was bleeding is gone, and now they’re beating up another kid. Why aren’t you here yet?”

“Yes, thank you, we’re on the way.”

They hung up again. This time, the kid who was getting beat up looked like he was putting up some resistance. Several kids surrounded him and, all at once, they started beating him at the same time. He flopped to the ground, and they started kicking him. Like a flock of vultures surrounding a dying animal, the kids would not get off him. I looked at the clock. It was 4:15 pm. The police still had not arrived. My heart would not stop racing, and I felt like I might throw up. It was as though the child’s despair was being transmitted directly to me. The police showed no sign of arriving. I paced around the room, and then out
of some sort of stubborn pride I dialed the number again.

“I’m the person who called a while ago. Why aren’t you here yet? A kid is getting beat up. They have him surrounded and are kicking him. He’s already on the ground, and they’re kicking him! This is the second kid.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The operator hung up again. I went back to the kitchen window. Two kids had picked up the boy who was on the ground and were holding him up by the arms while another kid did a flying kick into the exhausted boy’s stomach, like something straight out of the movies. My entire body reacted to the boy’s pain. My teeth started chattering, and I felt like I was being tortured. The police did not come; my telephone rang instead.

“Hello?”

“Hello.”

“Did you report a crime in progress? This is the police.”

South Korea’s emergency hotline system is indeed amazing,
I thought stupidly.
They even know the phone numbers of the people who call in crimes.

“Why aren’t you here yet? If you’d gotten here sooner, you could have stopped the first kid from getting beaten up. Now they’ve moved on to a second kid! A bunch of them are ganging up on one kid. You have to stop them. Please hurry.”

“Listen, we’re on our way to a three-car collision at the Gangnam intersection. So we’re going to be a little late. We’ll be there as soon as we can, so please stop calling.”

The police officer sounded like a friendly car repairman. He was explaining his tardiness and asking for my
understanding
. Meanwhile, the kid was nearly unconscious. I looked at the clock. It was 4:20 pm. I calmed myself down by saying, “Viva la Korea.” After a while, I heard a siren. I waited with my fists clenched for the police to hurry up
and punish those bad kids. Several of the kids left the park to stand guard. The strong circle they had formed started to come apart. They, too, had heard the siren. The phone rang again.

“This is the police. The park is empty.”

“Where are you?”

“The park at Seoryeon Apartments.”

“Do you mean you’re in the little park inside the complex?”

I hurried to the front window. The apartment complex had a fountain and a small marble-paved park.

Out front, a police car was parked with its siren wailing. In the toddler playground with its swings and slide, women pushing baby strollers were crowding around and staring at the police car.

“Officer, what kind of madman would be beating someone up in a children’s playground in an apartment complex where there are guards on duty? I didn’t mean that park. I said the hill behind building Number 109!”

“Lady, why are you yelling at me?” the officer said. “I got it now.”

After a moment, the phone rang again. It was the officer.

“Are cars allowed on that hill? I don’t see a road.”

Before, he had sounded like a car repairman, but now he sounded like an unfriendly removals man. I suppressed the emotions that were welling up inside of me and responded like a friendly operator.

“Park behind building Number 109 and walk up the hill. Please hurry!”

I went back to the kitchen window. At least the police had showed up. They were here now, and no more children would be hurt. A group of kids were standing in formation, like they were discussing something, and then several of them took the blood-covered boy with them and took off on
a path through the woods. Their timing was like something out of a script. The police were slowly making their way toward them. They looked like they were out for a walk. Since I was up on the top floor, it felt strange to be looking down on them from the sky, like I was a god or something. The phone rang again.

“Lady, we checked out the area. But no one seems to be hurt.”

“What? So?”

I could longer keep my voice calm.

“I asked, and the kids said they were having a
middle-school
reunion. I ordered the kid who was beat up to step forward, but no one did. If none of them were beat up, then none of them could have been beating up anyone either.”

I exploded with rage. I could not think of how to respond to him.

“You asked the kid who was beat up to step forward? Did you also ask the one who was doing the beating to step forward? I guess I made a mistake. It was wrong of me to expect anything from the police in this country. It’s already been over thirty minutes since I placed the call. That’s enough time for two or three people to die!”

I slammed the phone down hard. I wondered if I would have let them off the hook that easily if it were my son or little brother getting beat up. The phone rang again. The officer seemed to be calling back. I felt like the young Rastignac mumbling at the top of the hill in the final scene of Balzac’s
Le Père Goriot,
except instead of saying to the city of Paris, “Henceforth there is war between us,” I was saying it to the police.

“Hello?”

“This is the police. Lady, what are you so mad about? We didn’t do anything wrong. I’m going to speak now, so listen up. We weren’t late because we wanted to be. A
handicapped guy fell into Yangjae Stream today. We were late because we had to go fish him out and take him back home. And the kids here said they were just playing. That’s what they told me. I don’t know what kind of world you think this is, but what were you expecting? For me to torture a confession out of them?”

He made it sound like I was the unreasonable one. It seemed as if he was pleading with me, saying that I didn’t understand his job, that there was so much to do and so few people to do it, and that he worked and worked but there was never any end. I felt like muttering,
We got a real comedian here,
but my anger rose.

“Do the police usually get permission from citizens before torturing confessions out of people?” I said. “Is that what you’ve done so far? If I asked you to now, would you do it?”

“You know we can’t.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help but laugh.