Your Republic Is Calling You (7 page)

The corners of his mouth lift a little. "No, it's fine. Other people's stories are always funny."

A short silence ensues.

"The speed limit is fifty miles per hour here," she warns, pointing to a sign. A silver camera reveals itself with a flash, the sunlight refracting off its surface. Chol-su slides his foot over to the brake.

K
I-YONG PARKS HIS
car in the lot in front of his office. He looks into his car one last time as he shuts the door. The thought that he may never drive it again flits through his head. He glances around and takes the stairs to his office. Song-gon, who was watching Japanese porn with his earphones on, hurriedly closes his browser window.

"Hello, sir, you're back already?"

"What do you mean 'already'?"

Song-gon glances at the clock. "Oh, I lost track of time."

"Did you find out about the screens?"

"They're supposed to call me back."

"I'm sorry to ask you this, Song-gon, but can you go buy me a keyboard? Something's wrong with mine. Some keys work and some don't. I forgot to pick one up on my way in."

"Sure, I know how frustrating it is even if one key doesn't work. Is it urgent? It's going to take a little time."

"That's fine. Why don't you take your lunch break while you're out?"

"Okay."

Ki-yong takes out a few ten-thousand-won bills from his wallet and hands them to Song-gon, who heads out. As soon as Song-gon leaves, Ki-yong opens Song-gon's desk drawer
and rummages through messy files, a rainbow of Post-its, earphones, a stapler, a stack of business cards, wires, a promotional paperweight, and packing tape. He studies everything carefully but nothing arouses his suspicions. Ki-yong replaces the items in the reverse order he took them out and goes to his own desk. His monitor is blinking slowly like the eyes of a cow, lulled into energy-saving mode. When Ki-yong taps on some keys, the computer comes alive, awaiting orders. He clicks on the e-mail that indicated Order 4 and follows each step, collecting strange metaphors. Finally, he reaches the end: "March 16th, 0300 hours. Rendezvous at 3674828."

Ki-yong looks at his watch. He has less than twenty-four hours. He takes out a map and finds the coordinates. Taean Peninsula on the west coast. He digs his fingernails into his temple. An agent of Ki-yong's stature can easily go back through China, so why was this dangerous course chosen? Two possibilities pop into his head. Either his identity has been leaked and the South's intelligence agency has barred his leaving the country, or it's a test of Ki-yong's loyalty. Either way, it's a problem.

Ki-yong opens the body of the computer with a Phillips screwdriver. Big balls of dust roll around inside. He carefully removes the hard drive. He takes it to the bathroom, places it in the sink, and turns on the tap. Sinking to the bottom, the hard drive emits a few errant air bubbles. Only bubbles, despite all the hours they spent together—it feels as if he were watching a part of his brain being sliced out. When the bubbling stops, he picks up the hard drive, shakes the water out, and brings it back to the office. Now it would be safe to throw it away in a trash can in a subway station bathroom. Ki-yong reassembles the computer. He then takes out his desk drawers, one by one. Business cards, pens, paper clips,
a stapler, and glue sticks fall on the rubber pad protecting his desk. He sifts through the stack of business cards; some names he remembers, others he doesn't. They would soon be whispering about that movie importer who suddenly disappeared. He puts the cards back in the drawer so that anyone looking through it could find them easily, and sweeps the rest of the items back in his desk.

He walks up to the bookshelves. Like a man about to go on his summer vacation, he deliberately runs his hand over the spine of each book. Which books should he take? Will he have time to read? And if he follows Order 4 and goes back, could he even read these books? Probably not. He will have to go from an existence surrounded by books to one made up of walls. He selects Simon Singh's
Fermat's Enigma.
Since it is a mathematics book, neither the South nor the North would have an issue with it. He picks out the poetry volume necessary to crack codes in case he gets another order. He hesitates, then puts in his bag Oloikov's
Death of a Soldier,
a novel he has always meant to read.

Ki-yong also grabs his iPod, on which he has more than two thousand songs. How many songs will he be able to listen to in the future? It has taken so long to collect this many. At first, when he got to the South, he listened to cassettes. He was intimidated by the walls of CDs and tapes stacked in music stores without space for even a toothpick between them. He couldn't believe that all these different kinds of music could coexist in the world. He had grown up in a country of marching songs. His countrymen didn't enjoy music in private, but sang in unison to tunes blared from speakers in the streets. The first electronic gadget he bought when he got here was a Sony Walkman. He listened to the South's pop stars, especially Cho Yong-pil and Lee Mun-se, and the Beatles. The Beatles in particular shook his soul to its core.
He listened to "Hey Jude" or "Michelle" alone in his room through the headphones of his Walkman, savoring the forbidden. These songs opened a door to a new kind of happiness, one he'd never experienced in Pyongyang. Later, when he found a more permanent place to live, the first thing he did was set up a small stereo system and a CD player. As time passed and sound quality and fidelity improved, his tastes gravitated toward classical and jazz. And then, before he realized it, the era of the CD had passed and everyone listened to music in the form of audio files. He was diligent about ripping a CD, converting it to MP3s, and storing them in his iPod, but these days he never surrendered himself to music quite as passionately as he did during his first few years in the South.

It isn't only Ki-yong who changed. The world around him has transformed as well. He came south before personal computers became widely available—he learned how to use one alongside South Koreans. He learned FORTRAN and BASIC, and entered the world of word processing through programs like Posokgul. And he transitioned from the world of MS-DOS to Windows, from the Bulletin Board System to the Internet. He actually adapted quicker to this new world than the average forty-year-old South Korean. As a transplant in South Korean society, his whole mission was to adapt. He didn't have the confidence or the courage to resist or reject change. That was a privilege of only the natives.

He unfastens his watch. He takes out a Sunnto scuba diving watch from the drawer and swaps it with the watch he was wearing, which was a part of his wife's dowry. Plated with 14k gold, it's unfashionable now. Unfashionable—it feels foreign to judge aesthetics so fluidly. In his former world, judging beauty and ugliness according to individual standards was one of the most dangerous adventures one
could undertake. Ki-yong's eyes, heart, and hard drive have been completely rewired to become a product of this current world, like a refurbished cyborg. As if someone drugged him, rendered him unconscious, and switched everything out. His old hard drive was thrown into a pool of water and bubbled to its demise.

He was born in 1963 in Pyongyang. But when he came south, he was given the name and identity of Kim Ki-yong, a man born in 1967. The real Kim Ki-yong, an orphan, was born in Seoul. When he was seventeen years old, he left the orphanage and disappeared, and his identity records were expunged. What happened to Kim Ki-yong, the man who lent him this shell? Sometimes he dreamed that the real Ki-yong came back. A man with an erased face stood at the head of his bed. Even though he never said anything, he could tell that this was the real Ki-yong.

In the spring of 1985, he went to a government office in Yongsan and renewed Kim Ki-yong's expired identity card, got fingerprinted, and received a brand-new card, assuming the identity of a man he'd never met. The North Korean mole stationed at the office was a dejected middle-aged man, not the young man impassioned with revolutionary fervor Ki-yong had expected. After the conclusion of their official business, they drank coffee in the hallway. The man addressed him in a nonchalant tone, "So you made it. I thought they had forgotten about me." He didn't seem all that pleased with Ki-yong appearing out of the blue. His tone was curt and rude.

"What do you mean 'forgot'?"

"It's been a while since a customer came by." The man glanced at Ki-yong. He stubbed out his cigarette in the sand on top of the trash can. "I've been meaning to go up but haven't had the chance."

"Do you still have someone over there?"

"Yeah."

"Who?"

"My mother lives near Sunan district in Pyongyang and my uncle is probably in Chongjin."

"I hope you'll be able to visit one day."

The man hawked and spat into the ash can. "If I go now, after all of this, will I be able to live happily? Is that possible?"

"What?"

The man's mouth twisted and he smiled as if to say, What does a kid like you know? He sighed. "Nothing. Good luck." He crushed the paper cup in his hand and tossed it in the trash can, then headed back into the office. He looked like a man who had seen all of his dreams and hopes sputter and managed only to survive, powered by the few drops of cynicism left in the bottom of his fuel can. Ennui dripped down his pant legs with his every step.

For Ki-yong, who had just graduated from the Operations Class of Kim Jong Il University of Political and Military Science, commonly called Liaison Office 130, the man's defeatist attitude was surprising. How could he live in enemy territory without being alert? How could he let go of his animosity toward the South, where the great enemy Chun Doo Hwan massacred thousands of people in Kwangju in broad daylight? Later, he realized the South specialized in lifelessness and defeatism. Indiscriminate weariness was prevalent. Ki-yong knew what ennui was, but this was the first time he personally observed it. At home, it was an abstract idea batted about when criticizing capitalism. Of course, there was ennui back home, too. But in a socialist society it was closer to boredom. And it was really a matter of inadequate motivation; a bit of stimulation could change the feeling of
boredom. But the prototypical capitalist ennui Ki-yong encountered for the first time in the South was heavy and voluminous. Like poisonous gas, it suffocated and suppressed life. Mere exposure to it prompted the growth of fear. Sometimes you encountered people who inspired in you an immediate primal caution, something that made you say, I don't want to live like that. That civil servant in the office had this effect on Ki-yong. He represented depression, emptiness, cynicism. Unattractive and dressed shabbily, the man triggered a feeling of discomfort in Ki-yong even though they spent only a few minutes together.

Ki-yong ended up seeing him again years later, in a completely different situation. It was the summer of 1999. A man wearing a red cape stood on a small wooden box in Chongnyangni station, screaming. The cape was embroidered with a black cross with a gold border, which made it look like a college cheerleading uniform from far away. Sweat trickled down his face and black flies buzzed around his head. Ki-yong stood in place, staring at him for a long time. The man had changed immensely. He was thinner and his eyes were glowing. In a reverberating voice, he boomed that the end of the world was near. How did the spy steeped in ennui become an eschatologist? Had he really become one? Frozen in the square, which was crisscrossed by prostitutes, cops, college students, and laborers, Ki-yong gawked at the former spy turned religious fanatic. But the man didn't recognize him. When Ki-yong approached him, he was handed a pamphlet describing the end of the world. It was crudely laid out, studded with excerpts from the book of Revelation.

Ki-yong asked, "Don't you recognize me?"

The man glared at him. Without answering, he turned away to preach to another person. Ki-yong tugged at his
arm. He looked back at Ki-yong, annoyed, and tossed back, "What? You think I'm crazy?"

"No, I met you once in Tongbu Ichon-dong."

The man's face tightened slightly. "What's the use? None of it matters. Read the pamphlet. We will soon be beamed up. That day will come soon."

Feeling a little abandoned, Ki-yong started to leave the square. The man got off his box and trotted after Ki-yong. "I do know who you are."

Ki-yong stopped.

"But it doesn't matter. I discovered the secret of the universe. Before, I was just frustrated with life. But I knew, as soon as I received the Holy Spirit, that everything about this life was useless. I was fooled. Look at the faces around you. See any happy faces? They're all kicking and struggling and living each day like pigs. Why? Because they don't know why the world exists. That's why they keep walking on aimlessly. If they knew why, they wouldn't have to wander. You just have to walk the path pointed out by our Lord."

His harangue wasn't coming to an end anytime soon. Ki-yong interjected, "So you're saying that before this year is over, people will be beamed up to the sky from their cars and their empty vehicles will fall off the overpasses and the people left behind will want to be dead, howling in pain?"

"They'll regret being born as a human."

"How do you know that before you even experience it?"

The man pointed at his ear, small and ugly like an unshapely gourd. "Do you only believe in things you see? I heard with this ear here. The Lord told me. Listen hard. Our Lord speaks only to those who listen." He climbed back on his box and cleared his throat.

The end of that year was not met with bodies being lifted to heaven. The New Year began with thirty-three citizens
ringing the bell in the Bosin Pavilion, just like every previous year. Despite the millennium bug, planes didn't plummet to the ground and trains didn't derail. Nuclear power plants didn't break down and satellites didn't malfunction or accidentally launch nuclear missiles. Ki-yong thought of the red-cloaked man when he saw on the news that an assembly of 166 churches was to take place, for the devout to pray as the world ended. What happened to the man betrayed both by the revolution and Armageddon? And to all the people who congregated in the 166 churches? Why didn't they take their own lives when it became clear that the world was not coming to an end? Could Armageddon be held at bay that easily? But soon, everyone quickly forgot the large signs saying
PERFECT PREPARATION FOR Y2K
that hung on tall buildings in Kwanghwamun. Nobody thought twice about the millions of people around the world who barricaded themselves at home with generators and basic necessities. Of course, some people reaped profit from fear. One trillion won was spent in South Korea alone; even more was spent in the United States and in Europe.