PD Ch2

“So, what are you going to do in the future?”

At my senior’s question, I opened my mouth as if asking for the last lifeline.

“…If you need translation, please give me some work.”

“…”

Senior Hwang, who had asked so casually, paused mid-sip of his coffee. He looked puzzled. Though we hadn’t known each other long, Senior Hwang knew my personality to some extent. I was awkward with requests. Like those who aren’t good at asking for favors, I was fundamentally the type with excessive pride.

I was ashamed. Asking for work out of the blue. The hand gripping the mug tightened, knuckles protruding. Senior Hwang seemed unsure what expression to make. I hadn’t come to trouble him. I awkwardly swept back my hair. After a moment of thought, he stood up and abruptly handed me a book.

“Talk of the devil. Take this.”

I looked back and forth between Senior Hwang and the book he was offering, my face questioning.

“There’s this children’s book that blew up in the States recently, right? We bought the rights. We’re planning a massive advertising campaign, from broadcasting to printing, subways to streets, so give it a read. We were looking for a translator anyway.”

It was a sudden proposal I hadn’t expected at all. I shook my head.

“No, I haven’t done anything this big yet.”

“I didn’t say I was going to entrust it to you.”

“…”

“It’s not the main translation, it’s a sub-project. And we’re a small company here, so I can’t pay much. But I’ll try my best.”

“…”

“Why, are you too moved?”

I couldn’t bring myself to speak. I gripped the innocent mug as if it would break. I looked down at the brown liquid swaying with each clench of my hand, and finally opened my mouth.

“Forget the money, instead…”

“Instead? Instead, what? Huh? What?”

The impatient Senior Hwang leaned forward, pressing me.

“I need a place to live.”

“What?”

He frowned slightly, tilting his head as if he hadn’t heard me properly.

“A house.”

“Are you asking for an apartment right now? Look at this guy’s nerve.”

“Not an apartment, just a house. I’m not asking for it, I’m asking to borrow it.”

“Where are you staying now? And where’s your mother?”

“A friend’s house is empty, so I’m staying there for a bit. My mother is… elsewhere.”

“Suddenly asking me to find you a house, what’s that supposed to mean? You came to Korea without finding a place to live? Is there something wrong?”

Senior Hwang, finally realizing the seriousness of the situation, asked with a darkened face. I couldn’t answer his questions, nor could I handle them. I put the half-drunk coffee on the table and stood up. I also left the children’s book Senior Hwang had given me on the table.

“I’ll be going.”

“I need to know what’s going on to find you a house or sell one. What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? A guy who claims it’s nothing comes looking for me first thing in the morning with a face like he’s about to die, asking me to find him a house?”

“Give the translation to someone else. I don’t think I can do it.”

“What’s wrong with you? You need to tell me what’s going on so I can help.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Yoon Junghyun.”

“…I’m sorry. I’ll be going.”

As I turned, Senior Hwang slammed his mug on the desk and stood up. The bang sounded like a threat to stay put. I stopped, my hand on the doorknob.

“Take the book.”

“…”

“I’ll look for a place for you, and if I can’t find one, you can come to my house. I have a spare room.”

Senior Hwang had been married for only about a year. Even if there were more rooms in his apartment, I didn’t want to go in. Only after thinking about that did I realize.

Hwang Minho and I had met briefly while studying in the United States and shared a few drinks on the weekends. We weren’t actually close enough to be having this kind of conversation. It felt like my mind had gone haywire.

“…”

“Take the book.”

I turned around and picked up the book I had placed on the table with the mug. Senior Hwang’s frighteningly hardened expression finally loosened a little. But he was still serious. I bowed my head and tried to open the door silently. Senior Hwang urgently grabbed me.

“We haven’t seen each other in years, and you’re just going to leave like that? You don’t have plans for dinner, do you? It’s been a while, let’s have a drink.”

It was a metaphorical expression of his determination to find out what was going on. I didn’t dislike the intention of getting me drunk and making me spill the beans in that atmosphere. He was a kind person. The problem was that there were things I couldn’t tell even him. I refused without looking at him.

“I have plans.”

“…”

“I really do.”

He and I both knew that I didn’t have any plans, but I added it euphemistically. He sighed.

“Alright. I’ll let you go for now, but not next time. If you came to rely on me, then put on a thick face and rely on me until the end. I’m capable enough.”

I turned my head to look at him. He had the eyes of an older brother looking at his youngest sibling who had been put out by the water.

“It’s not like that. I’ll be going.”

“Call me.”

“Yes.”

I took the book and left Senior Hwang’s company. I wasn’t in my right mind, wondering what I was thinking when I made the appointment with him, what I was thinking when I went to his company. Half out of it, I walked to the subway station. The sharp, cutting wind had subsided a little. I couldn’t feel the cold at all. My thoughts weren’t going the way I wanted them to.

∞ ∞ ∞

Even though I was wearing a thick military jacket, the sharp wind hit my cheeks and roughly penetrated my side. I crossed my arms against the penetrating cold. I pushed my hands into my side to try to retain some warmth.

There was a time when I couldn’t afford to live with my mother, so I came here alone to attend middle school in Korea. The unrenovated Gimpo Airport was very old even in my young memory. My maternal grandfather and grandmother were standing in the arrival hall with a large sign with my name on it. People I had seen once when I was a child, whom I didn’t even remember, and whom I had only seen in pictures since then, people I had only awkwardly exchanged greetings with over the phone. As a young child, I ran and hugged them as soon as I found them in the arrival hall lobby, people I could only consider as the first people I knew. It was the first time I felt a sense of relief in Korea, where I was surrounded by people who spoke a familiar language and had familiar faces, after being alone in a strange place with fear and isolation. Seoul had always remained that way for me. The only people I knew that I found in a strange airport. But not now. It was unfamiliar. Terribly unfamiliar.

Today was Friday evening. The eve of the weekend was the same all over the world. It was a time when traffic was congested everywhere. The subway was crowded with people leaving work. I stared blankly at the route map, wondering where to go and which train to take. Then, the name of one place caught my eye.

“…”

I got on the subway that was arriving just then. I was giving off the gaze of a tourist looking around the subway as if traveling in a foreign country. There were hardly any people reading newspapers or books on the subway. Most of them were holding cell phones, slightly larger than their palms. Some people within my sight seemed to be watching the same TV program. The shoulders of those wearing earphones shook intermittently at the same time, and I could hear chuckling sounds.

Was it because it was Friday? There was no sharp tension or weariness of having to live another day on people’s faces. Everything was languid. Unlike those whose tension and rigidity had eased, I leaned against the opposite exit as if being chased by someone. I twisted my head to avoid the smell of other people’s bodies.

After a few stops, I got off and transferred to another subway line. It took exactly an hour after getting on the subway to find the way to Tracks in Itaewon, asking for directions.

Tracks, which was sometimes used as a performance venue, was on the third basement floor of a seven-story building. It was the first place I had ever looked for after hearing that there were gay clubs in Korea. I had only seen it in pictures and texts, but it felt strange to stand in front of it in person. I stepped down the spiraling stairs, opened the glass door, and went inside.

It was a little after eight o’clock, so there weren’t many customers. There were salarymen with women at one table, and most of the tables were empty. It wasn’t a place to dance and have fun. It was a little different from what I had expected, but I didn’t want to repeat the journey I had wandered for an hour to get here, so I had no other choice.

I wanted to forget everything, or rather, I wanted to evaporate my consciousness in the heat and madness where I couldn’t think of anything. My original purpose in coming here was to mix in with a dissolute crowd, shake my body, and let myself go. Things were going differently than planned, but I couldn’t make a different choice after coming all the way here. I walked inside, where the soft jazz melody and the low notes of the contrabass pleasantly wrapped around my body.

I sat on a stool and ordered a beer. I took off my jacket and put it down next to me, and drank the beer. When it was past ten o’clock, past eleven o’clock, and past twelve o’clock, people like me would fill this place one by one, waiting for someone to stick close to them and talk to them, making their pupils shine.

Before I knew it, four bottles of beer were placed in front of me. Three of them were empty. I rolled up my sleeves and checked the watch on my wrist. The hall was filling up faster than I thought. The population density had increased even before ten o’clock. Surprisingly, the proportion of women was high. It was a place where having a good gender ratio was of no help. There was a bit of a pathetic aspect to a city dweller with no one to meet burying themselves in the crowd and sipping alcohol alone, but I was able to escape the pressure of reality that was tightening around me. But I knew best that the effect would only last an hour or two at most.

What my mother always chose to forget reality was alcohol. I watched the fact that its effect was too short from the closest distance. So she drank again when the effect was about to disappear. She was always drunk. A reality that she and I couldn’t bear without being drunk was our lives. And I always vowed to myself, watching my mother, that I would not live that way.

I had to get up before I got drunk. I put the bottled beer to my mouth and drank it, thinking of finishing the beer I was drinking now and getting up. I couldn’t taste anything, as if I was forcibly stuffing the leftovers into my already full stomach. I looked around the hall and made eye contact with someone. It was a gaze that had been watching me for a long time, waiting for our eyes to meet. I stared at him and nonchalantly turned my gaze away.

At first, I thought it was my stepfather playing a lewd prank. It was the day I invited him, the grateful man who had liquidated my mother’s debt without any conditions, to dinner. A public shower room where hot water flowed for five minutes if you put in fifty cents, a smelly bathroom where teenagers secretly sneaked in and were madly engrossed in sex, a trailer village where poor people gathered on unmanaged grass.

My mother, who was ashamed of living in the Caravan Park rather than enjoying a vacation, was in a frenzy, putting up and taking down curtains to somehow make the space, which was already bustling even if only one person moved busily, look wider. But, contrary to my mother’s concerns, he didn’t seem too surprised that people could live in a cramped cabin.

My mother emptied about three bottles of expensive Bordeaux wine, and I was also quite drunk from the alcohol the man offered. I was ashamed of my mother’s appearance as she drank to the point of not being able to control her body. Before her drinking got worse, I forcibly took her, who was saying she didn’t want to, to the bedroom and laid her down, and then I supported the man, whose face was also flushed with drunkenness, to take him to his car.

I thought the man’s action of putting his lips to my earlobe and sucking it slightly was a mistake. I thought he might be playing a prank because he knew my tendencies. It was because my mother had been talking loosely about me at the narrow dinner table, where it was difficult for even three people to sit, holding a half-torn rib in one hand and stirring it constantly.