“She asked if it was okay to send him to our grandmother’s house if she found him. It was the first time since we were kids that we had ever talked about that house. I pressed the key into the palm of her hand. Yoon, I had no idea why he disappeared, but I genuinely hoped he would find sanctuary at our grandmother’s house. If he had to go into hiding, then I wanted him to hide there. I didn’t know if he was a good person or a bad person or what he had done. But my sister looked so exhausted because of him that I hoped he was somewhere she could reach him. I never thought I could feel that way toward a person I’d never met. I followed my sister to the front door and asked her to call me every day at the same time. She said she would call at midnight. At first, she kept her promise. I would ask her if everything was okay, and she would answer brightly that it was. But her voice would trail off when I started asking more questions. Her calls became infrequent, from once every three days to once every five days, and then the phone stopped ringing altogether. Every now and then she would show up in person, looking terrible, and sleep like the dead until she got her energy back. Then she would grab some cash and leave again. Sometimes she would pet Emily, a vacant look in her eyes, as if she’d only come to see the cat. The days that she came home to sleep off her fatigue seemed to be the days that she got really bad news about her missing boyfriend. After she had stumbled home and slept it off, she would suddenly start talking about him. She told me that the day he was supposed to come over for dinner, some men came looking for him. Judging by the time, it must have been right before he would have left for our place. ‘Who were they, and why did he go with them instead of coming over here?’ She kept asking me questions I could not answer. She looked worse and worse each time she came home. ‘Someone saw him get in a cab with those men, but then he jumped out and ran away. What happened in the cab that made him run away?’ She would mumble to herself. One day, she told me his real name was Minho. I assumed she had met his family. I think she and his older brother were looking for him together. She seemed hopeful and said his brother might be able to find him, and that his brother looked just like him. ‘He calls him Minho.’ She kept mumbling his name to herself. Another time, she came home and said someone had seen him escaping into the woods in front of a police checkpoint, but she looked disappointed and said that it turned out it wasn’t him. Then she said, ‘No, no, that’s good. What would he be doing hiding in the woods?’ I could only tell where she had been by the things she blurted out. Someone told her they saw his body floating under a bridge in the Cheongna Reservoir, but when she went to Cheongna, there was no one there, let alone anyone she could ask. Another day, she mumbled, ‘Miru, why would he have gotten on that train?’ She would come home, say things I didn’t understand, sleep like the dead, and leave again. Each time, I got another unfulfilled promise that she would call me once a day. It was ridiculous how powerless I was. Even though it made her grimace, the only thing I could say to her was, ‘If you don’t promise to call me every day, then I won’t let you leave!’ What I learned from her searches was that countless numbers of people had gone missing—not just her boyfriend. While she searched for him, I started to notice how many people there were wandering around in search of loved ones, friends, coworkers, and sons who had abruptly vanished. How could something like that happen?”
Miru stopped talking for a moment. I sensed that she was torn between needing to continue and knowing she should stop. She looked tortured by the words she could not swallow, as if there were a giant thorn in her throat. I placed my hand on top of hers.
“If it’s too much,” I said, “you can stop. We can finish the story later.”
“No, I want to talk about it. But only if you’re okay.”
The telephone rang again. Miru continued.
“I got a phone call from my sister early one morning. She said she was back and needed a bath. She asked me to meet her at the bathhouse. I thought she meant she was back for good. I packed a change of clothes for her. Underwear, a toothbrush, a towel … and this skirt.”
She pushed my hand away and pointed to the floral skirt she was still wearing.
“It was your sister’s?”
“Yes. She always wore it around the house.
“I packed up her shower basket and went to that public bath where you and I went last time. She was already inside. We bathed together like we used to when we were kids. We scrubbed each other’s backs and rinsed each other off. My sister’s face, which had looked so anxious ever since her boyfriend disappeared, looked peaceful that day. I thought maybe she had found him. She offered to wash my hair for me. She used to do that sometimes when we were younger. I loved it when she would wash my hair. She squeezed shampoo into the palm of her hand and gently scrubbed my scalp with her fingers. She washed away the suds and rinsed my hair over and over until the water ran clear. Then she combed my hair straight, rolled it up into curls, and pinned them in place. She stroked the back of my neck and asked me how school was. My eyes stung with tears. I thought the fact that she was asking me about school meant that she had come back to her senses. We stayed in the bathhouse for a long time. When we went back into the locker room, our toes were swollen and wrinkled from the water. My sister dried me off with a towel. She even took her time drying my hair. Then she put lotion on my back. She dressed herself in the clothes I had brought for her, but when she saw the skirt, she said she would wear it at home. I thought her jeans were too dirty to wear again, but I didn’t think much of it. We came out of the bathhouse, and she retrieved her bag from the counter. It was a big backpack that I had never seen before, the kind you use to go camping in the woods or trekking cross-country. It looked heavy, so I suggested that she take it off so we could carry it together. She said it wasn’t as heavy as it looked. She suggested we get something to eat even though it wasn’t lunchtime, so I figured she was hungry and followed her without a word. She led me to a new sushi restaurant on the main street that I had been wanting to go to. She didn’t like sushi. I had mentioned that it looked good, but we had never gone. We ordered a combination plate and some udon noodles. To my surprise, she seemed to enjoy the food, even though she kept saying, ‘I’ve never had this before.’ Her forehead was sweating, and she didn’t leave a single piece of sushi uneaten. After we were done, she took a wrinkled manila envelope out of her backpack and asked me to hold on to it. I asked if she was coming home, and she said she had to return the backpack. She told me to go home first and said she would join me later. She sounded like she meant it. On the way out of the restaurant, she told me to hurry home. I said, ‘Promise you’ll come back?’ She nodded. As she walked away from me, I said once more, ‘Promise?’ She said yes. Then she told me to hurry up and go home. I said I would wait until she got into a cab, but she told me to leave and gave me a little push. There was nothing I could do, so I turned to go. But then she called me back and gave me a hug. She smelled like the soap we had shared in the bathhouse. ‘Miru, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ She said it twice. I told her, ‘It’s okay, as long as you come home.’ She let go of me and told me to hurry off again. I said, ‘See you soon, Unni,’ and started walking toward home. When I glanced back, she was standing there watching me. Then she quickly turned and left. I don’t know what it was, but something didn’t seem right. I sensed that I shouldn’t let her get away. I ran after her. I saw her cross the street, carrying that heavy backpack, and flag down a taxi. I hurried across as well and jumped into another cab. I pointed out the cab she was in and asked the driver to follow her.”
The phone rang again. This time, Miru stopped talking and listened to it ring. Who on earth could be calling her so persistently at this hour?
“Can you stand to hear a little more, Yoon?”
“Keep going.”
“You might regret it. Ever having known me, that is.”
“It’s okay. Talk.”
Miru took my hand in her own scarred ones.
“If it’s hard to listen to it, tell me to stop. Just sa
y, that’s enough. Understand?”
“… Yes.”
“My sister’s taxi was heading toward her boyfriend’s college. When we got close to the school, the traffic was all backed up. The cars weren’t moving. My sister got out of the cab, so I got out, too. The street leading to the school was packed with people. I think they were holding a rally to protest his disappearance. I saw a banner waving in the wind with his name and face on it. She stopped and looked up at his picture. I thought she was going to the rally, so I decided to head back home. I was still carrying our shower baskets, after all. But my sister crossed the street instead of joining the group of people. She stopped in front of a ten-story building and stared up at the roof. I stared up at it, too, wondering if she had spotted something up there, but I couldn’t tell what she was looking at. What is she doing? I thought, and continued to follow her. She looked all around the building with that huge backpack on her back. Suddenly, she disappeared from view. I hurried over with the baskets in my hands to the front of the building where she had vanished and searched everywhere for her. It was strange. There were no cafés or restaurants inside. It was just a phone company building. Over where I thought she might have disappeared was a stairwell. I climbed up. Second floor, third floor, fourth floor, and then finally the ninth and tenth floors. After that was the roof. I wondered why on earth my sister would be on the roof of a phone company building for no reason, and I started to turn back. But just then, through a crack in the door that led to the roof, I caught a glimpse of her. She was standing at the edge of the roof and looking down at the street where the demonstrators and riot police were standing off against each other. She looked so desperate. Up until that moment, I still had no idea what she was planning to do. How could I have known that she was planning something so extreme and so horrible? She looked down at the people below and then set her backpack down. She opened it and looked inside for a while, as if steeling herself. Even when she took a white plastic jug out of the bag, I stood there staring, clueless as to what she was doing. She pulled the stopper out of the jug and struggled to lift it overhead; she doused herself from head to toe with the contents of the jug. What is she doing? I wondered, and swung the door open. And then the smell hit me. No, I thought. I knew at once. It was the smell of gasoline. I ran toward her and tried to shout. But no sound came out. My tongue had lost all feeling and was floundering in my mouth like it had forgotten how to speak. When I finally managed to squeak out the words, Unni, Unni, she turned to look at me. Her face was white with fear. The tops of our heads were blazing in the hot sun. All of the noise and shouting in the street below seemed to stop all at once; everything went silent. It was like we were in a vacuum, just the two of us. ‘Miru, don’t come any closer. Get out of here. Go home.’ She pleaded with me to leave. But she never raised her voice. ‘Go on. Get out of here. Miru, please go.’ I covered my ears with my hands and screamed, ‘Are you insane? Please don’t do this! He’s not worth it …’ The seconds ticked by like eternity. We stood there on the roof, staring at each other, begging, Please. Don’t. Then it seemed she couldn’t wait any longer. She bent over and rummaged through the backpack, gasoline dripping off her, and pulled something out. I ran forward and grabbed the backpack, but she pushed me. I fell backward. She tried to flick the lighter, but her hands were too slippery. Then she took out a matchbook and struck a match. I screamed and jumped up. When that tiny flame from the match leapt onto her skin, I grabbed her hands. The flames seared my palms. It felt like thousands, tens of thousands, of flaming hot needles pierced my hands all at once. I saw the blaze catch the hem of her shirt and instantly swallow her face and hair. All I could do was panic. All I remember is black smoke, the sounds of the crowd below who had finally noticed us, anguished screams … Finally, my sister shook off my hands … Her body went over the railing and I saw her float in midair for a moment. Her arms were stretched out toward the sky. I fell to my knees as though hammered down. I couldn’t move. I thought I heard a thunderclap and saw lightning coming from the sky, but it was a hallucination. The sky was so blue that day. People rushed onto the roof, and I was taken to the hospital.”
Yoon, who suddenly became far less talkative after spending the night at Miru’s place, asked me, “Where were you when Miru’s sister died?” We had just finished eating some noodle soup that I made in Yoon’s kitchen and were standing on the roof, gazing out at Namsan Tower shining in the distance. Yoon had asked me to make the soup when we were walking back to her place from school. It was something I made for her from time to time. The table palm on Yoon’s desk was growing. Yoon sat at the pullout table in the kitchen with her chin in her hand and watched as I filled a pot with water and placed it on the stove. Cooking for her reminded me of living with Miru and her sister, Mirae. But when I served the finished soup, Yoon barely touched it. She kept transferring noodles from her bowl to mine. “You said you wanted noodles?” I asked. In a dead voice, she said, “Not anymore.” I ate almost all of her noodles along with my own. She waited until we were outside on the roof and looking down at the lights of the city to ask me where I was when Miru’s sister died. My heart sank. For some stupid reason, I blurted out, “So now you know?” She said, “I didn’t realize Miru’s sister was that Yoon Mirae.” I couldn’t bring myself to ask whether she also knew that the scars on Miru’s hands came from grabbing her sister. But Yoon seemed to guess what I was thinking, because she brought it up before I could. Neither of us spoke for a moment. I felt a lump in my throat and reached out for Yoon’s hand, but she pulled it away. That was the moment I realized I’d been secretly hoping the two of them would never become friends. The city lights flickered over Yoon’s face. She said, “How could something like that happen?” Her face hardened. It looked as if Miru’s pain had transferred to her. “How could that happen?” I had asked myself the same thing countless times. Mirae’s boyfriend, who disappeared the night we were all supposed to have dinner together, is probably already dead. Inside the envelope that Mirae handed to Miru were detailed notes of everything she had learned while searching for him. She must have figured out that he was never coming back. Maybe she did what she did because she had finally faced the truth. She said that on the night he was supposed to join us for dinner he was seen boarding a train with some strange men who had come looking for him at the school. After her sister died, Miru took up the search for her sister’s boyfriend, and I joined her. That was how I found out that there were so many people who had gone missing. Some of the disappeared were later found dead in crashed cars, or with their skulls cracked open from accidental falls, or with their stomachs swollen with water in reservoirs where they had no business being. Yoon said she didn’t know what to say or do for Miru. “Hearing about it was painful enough,” she said, “so how can she …” Yoon didn’t say another word until I left. After midnight, I left her place and was walking down the hill when she called out to me and came running. When I turned, she threw herself into my arms and told me not to go. I could feel her chest rising and falling against mine. Her tears were wetting the neck of my shirt. We stood in that dark alley as if rooted in place.
|||
Miru asked me if we could all move in together.
“Like we did before. But this time with Yoon?” she asked.
After their sleepover, they were no longer Yoon Miru and Jung Yoon to each other but just Miru and Yoon. Miru’s face had brightened, while Yoon’s had turned dark. I asked Miru if that was really what she wanted. She said yes.
“Did Yoon agree to this?” I asked.
She said she was waiting for her answer.
“In the same house as before?” I asked again.
She nodded.
“If you promise to stop looking for him,” I told her, “I’ll move back in with you.”
She mumbled something under her breath. I was afraid of what she might say next.
“Yoon said she would help me look,” she said finally.
She refused to look me in the
eye. I felt like she was asking me if I had already forgotten about Mirae? The whole time she and I had been looking for him, I figured he was already dead. Miru must have, too. How could she not have felt what I was feeling? Her sister had poured gasoline over herself and set herself on fire in order to send a message to everyone about her boyfriend’s suspicious disappearance and unexplained death. Just thinking about it made my whole body ache. Like I was the one on fire. If this is how I feel, and I wasn’t even there, then how much worse was it for Miru, who watched her sister burn to death right before her eyes?
Mirae must burn at the center of Miru’s mind all the time. I felt so angry and resentful toward Mirae. Was there no other way to get her message out? Though I sympathized with what she must have felt, she shouldn’t have done it. I asked Miru if she wanted Yoon to suffer like us.
“What do you mean, ‘like us’?” she said.
I raised my voice at her.
“Look at us! Do you think we’re normal? Look at you. You’re throwing your life away!”
My words weren’t just aimed at her but also at myself. After her sister died, Miru and I let everything fall apart. What would have happened to us if it weren’t for Yoon? The thought of life without her makes me feel like I’m trapped inside a cave.
|||
With each passing day, Mirae’s pain is becoming my own. She must have learned about the deaths of others who had disappeared, too, while searching in vain for her disappeared boyfriend, just as Miru and I did in our own search. Why did he get on that train with those strange men, when he was supposed to be eating dinner with us? When he had planned a retreat with the other leaders of his organization? Someone said his body had been found on an island. But it turned out it wasn’t him. Mirae probably went to that island, too. She must have known it wasn’t him, but maybe she couldn’t erase the image of the person’s body drifting in the ocean—the one who had slipped and cracked his skull. The bodies of the disappeared that had been found in reservoirs were discovered to have plankton in their lungs, kidneys, and spleens. And in their hearts and livers, as well.