“Put your bag over your shoulder first.”
I stood and stared at him.
“Aren’t you getting on?” He glanced back at me.
“I can walk,” I said.
“On those feet?”
“I can walk.”
“Stubborn.”
He scooted backward to try to nudge me onto his back, but I kept moving back as well.
“I said I can walk. See!”
I started walking out of the alley. The cuts on the bottoms of my feet all began to hurt at once, and the pain made my knees wobble. My pants came unstuck from the wound in my knee; the stanched blood started running down my leg and seeping through the fabric. When he saw how unstable I was, he stepped in front of me and offered me his back again.
“Just get on, Jung Yoon!”
As he bent over, his torn shirt opened up in the back. I could see the clear outline of his spine. It reminded me of a mountain ravine. I had a sudden desire to run my hand down it. He looked like he could lift me up and gallop around the city with me on his back.
“Okay, but only until we find a shoe store,” I said.
“Understood. Until we find a shoe store.”
I climbed onto his back with my bag slung over my shoulder, just as he had instructed. He stepped onto the sidewalk and headed for the main street. I was conscious of my breasts and stomach pressed against him, but he didn’t seem to notice. He moved forward without the slightest waver. I wrapped my arms around his neck. The position was awkward at first, but I soon felt comfortable. I could see my bare feet swinging next to his thighs. It reminded me of how my mother used to carry me on her back that way when I was very young. It occurred to me that the smell I had always thought of as her scent was just the smell of sweat. I used to fall asleep with my nose pressed against her strong, warm back. Myungsuh’s torn shirt pressed against my stomach. I resisted the urge to rest my cheek against his shoulder and turned to look at the empty lot. The ownerless shoes, bags, shirts, and other belongings were scattered under the streetlights. I felt like I was the only one to survive that chaos. I felt bad for the ones who did not—ones I could not even see—and my heart grew heavy for them. Though we had agreed that he would only carry me to the nearest shoe store, neither he nor I knew where to find one. After a while, he added, “If we find a shoe store.”
“And if we don’t?” I asked.
“Don’t worry. I’ll carry you all the way home.”
The buses had stopped running because of the demonstration, so we had no choice but to walk. When we reached the spot where he first found me, he paused and asked where I lived.
“Dongsung-dong.”
“You live in Dongsung-dong?”
“Yes.”
“We might have bumped into each other.”
“Do you live there?”
“No, but Miru used to.”
Yoon Miru.
The sound of her name was like a black curtain being drawn over my heart, like when the day goes dark and a sudden rainstorm beats down.
“Where is Yoon Miru now?”
He didn’t answer.
“Where is she?”
I kept asking him where she was, as if I were her unni, her older sister. He paused to catch his breath, but instead of answering me, he repositioned his hands to better support my weight.
“We should take the underpass, right?”
He seemed to be avoiding talking about her.
“We can’t,” I said. “The gates are closed.”
We waited at a crosswalk. Though there were no cars, the traffic lights changed in order.
“Where is she?”
“She just got back from the island.”
“The island?”
Just as he started to explain, a group of protesters whooshed out of a dark alley and streamed onto the main road. For a moment, we were caught in the middle. Some of them bumped into us. We received a few hard stares, too. I wanted him to set me down, but he only held me tighter. The protesters streamed by so quickly that I could not tell whether they were slamming into us or we were slamming into them.
He started walking again. Finding a shoe store was like finding a spring blossom in the dead of winter. Most of the stores on the first floors of the buildings had their metal security gates rolled down or the glass doors locked with the lights out so no one could see in. A menu board in front of a restaurant had been knocked over. I was glad to see a faint light streaming out of a car showroom. Whenever I walked downtown in the middle of the day and saw the crowds of pedestrians, I wondered what they were doing out instead of being at work somewhere, but now I realized that they were the life force of this city. Without people, the city felt dead. The excitement that had engulfed us when we were being overrun by protesters faded, and we were left with a sad silence. As Myungsuh walked forward, I could smell the sharp scent of tear gas on the air. The sporadic shouts of protesters and the roar of riot police reached my ears. My spine stiffened at the sound of the water cannon.
We passed a locked-up newsstand.
“What can any of us do in this day and age?” he mumbled. He sounded like Professor Yoon. “What do you want to do with your life, Jung Yoon?”
I thought of the copies of We Are Breathing in my bag.
“Sometimes I wish we could start off old and get younger as we go,” he said.
“What would happen then?” I asked.
“I guess we would both look old right now,” he said.
I couldn’t imagine either of us looking old.
“I wish someone would promise me that nothing is meaningless,” he said. “I wish there were promises worth believing in. That after we’ve been hunted and lonely and anxious and living in fear, there is something else. Considering the way we are living right now, if we were young at the end of our lives instead, then maybe our dreams could come true.”
We passed a bus stop. There were no buses anywhere.
“Don’t you think?” He was looking in vain for me to agree with him.
“That means we would die looking our youngest and spend this part of our lives looking our oldest. Is that what you want?” I asked.
He stopped in front of a closed jewelry store. Though I couldn’t see him, I could imagine the look on his face.
“I didn’t think about that,” he said.
I had never thought about what it would be like if I could live my life in reverse. I mumbled to myself, not intending for him or anyone else to hear me, “How does everyone stand it?” Dahn’s and Miru’s faces came to mind.
“They can’t stand it,” he said, “and that’s why they form barricades, throw paving bricks, and run away only to get caught and arrested. What they can’t stand is the fact that nothing ever gets better. Nothing has changed since last year. It’s as if time has stopped.”
“What do you hope will happen?” I asked.
“I just want something to change. Nothing ever changes no matter how hard we fight, so we become lethargic. Sometimes I find myself wishing that someone would steal all the books, just take them all, every last one, even from the libraries. I wish the schools would close so that no one could go, not even if they wanted to. Everything is the same. It only feels like time is passing, and only the characters change. We are torn apart and chased around. We fight back and get chased some more … We all stare at the walls and complain of loneliness. All we have to do is turn around, but instead we keep our faces to the walls. It’s depressing to think that this will never change. Things were no different last spring, either.”
I listened without saying anything.
“If I hadn’t met you,” he said, “I might not be able to tell the difference between this day last year and today.”
Then he mumbled under his breath, “So … let’s remember this day forever.” I wanted to see his face. I wanted to see what he looked like when he said those words, because the lethargy that he was feeling was mine, too. Maybe we had exaggerated the meaning of our chance encoun
ter that day in an attempt to dispel that lethargy. I took my arm from around his neck and ran my hand over his cheek. Then, one by one, I felt his forehead, his nose, the groove under his nose, his lips, his chin, his ears. Then his eyebrows. He let me touch him.
When I ran my fingers over his eyes, he stopped walking. It must have been hard for him to keep moving forward.
“Yoon.” He had never called me by just my first name before. “I never thought I would see you out in the streets. They were fighting dirty today—both the demonstrators and the riot cops. I got separated from my group and was starting to get scared when suddenly there you were. I couldn’t stop rubbing my eyes in disbelief. Why did you come out today?” He sounded heavyhearted.
“I didn’t want to go home early. I was trying to take the longest route home, and then this happened to me.”
I thought of the typewriter sitting on my desk in my empty room. The clacking of the keys echoed in my ears. There are times when I am grateful for the fact of not being asked why. He did not ask why I didn’t want to go home. I wouldn’t have known how to answer if he had. He took a deep breath and exhaled. I felt his chest rise and fall. I pulled my hand away from his face and rubbed the corners of my stinging eyes. Each time he breathed, my chest and stomach clenched. That tightness also came with the piquant joy of seeing the ocean for the first time, of rising at the crack of dawn in winter and discovering the courtyard white with snow, of scraping a fingernail in disbelief over a grapevine where green tendrils flush with spring curl out of a dried-up and lifeless plant, of looking down at the pink fingernails of a young child. Like seeing white cumulous clouds in a summer sky, or peeling back the skin on a sweet peach and taking a bite, or walking along a forest path and absentmindedly picking up a pinecone to discover the inside packed with white pine nuts.
I hugged him tighter. The scent of his body was right under my nose. It was mixed with the smell of tear gas.
“Do you demonstrate every day?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer.
“Is that why you haven’t been to class?”
“Every morning, I open my eyes and I ask myself: Should I go to school, or should I go demonstrate? I can’t sit still in class, but it’s the same when I’m out in the streets. I feel like something is pushing me to join the demonstrations, but I often wind up getting separated from the others, like today. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, blow my nose, and throw the tissue at the trashcan. If it makes it into the can, I go to school, and if it doesn’t, I take to the streets. Other times, I stay in my room and wait for someone to come find me.”
“I see.”
“Sometimes I go to school just because you’re there.”
I loosened my grip.
“But I didn’t go today because I knew you’d be there …”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought, if I saw you, I might grab you and tell you everything.”
I wondered what he meant by that.
“But instead, there you were in the street. I was so surprised.”
“You didn’t look surprised.”
“You immediately started crying, standing there in your bare feet, so how could you tell whether I was surprised or not?”
I liked the way he smelled. His smell made me not want to ask where Miru was. If I got to know her better, would I get to know him, too? It bothered me that he didn’t want to talk about her. I had a feeling that if he did, I would have to get off his back and walk home alone on bare wounded feet through this tumultuous, chaotic city. I was suddenly frightened by my overpowering curiosity toward Miru. Would the things I learned bring Myungsuh and me closer, or push us further apart? I used to think that sharing secrets always brought people closer. So I revealed secrets I did not want known in order to feel closer to someone. Oh, the loss I felt when I found out the secrets that I had held dear, that were so difficult to say out loud, that I had kept to myself, were being spread around the next day as if they were nothing! I think that was the moment I realized that pouring your heart out to someone might not bring you closer but in fact make you poorer instead. I even thought maybe growing close to someone was better achieved by empathizing in silence.
The city looked as tangled as a spider’s web: the buildings with their countless windows, streetlamps standing in rows, narrow alleyways, and signs so jumbled that you could not tell which shops they belonged to. The streets had been closed to traffic, but the lights kept changing like clockwork. Though there was no one to look up at them, the large billboards filled the air with their glittering colors. I glanced down an alleyway, the darkness too thick to see where it ended. Myungsuh crossed a small intersection, brushed past an empty phone booth, walked beneath an overpass, and crossed another intersection. Though he was headed toward my place, we were like people with nowhere to go.
We must have walked for over twenty minutes in silence.
“Let’s stop there,” I said, pointing at a flower shop.
The door sat wide open. All of the other shops had their security shutters rolled down or their doors only half open, as if they had given up on doing business. The fistful of soil from my mother’s grave was still sitting in a clay pot outside my apartment. I glanced at it each time I left. I had bought the pot with the idea of planting something in it, but I couldn’t decide what; meanwhile, the soil was drying out.
“Why here?” he asked.
“I have a flowerpot at home. I want to plant something in it.”
I pointed at something green sitting on the doorsill of the flower shop. I had been looking for an excuse to get down, and that was all I found. It looked ornamental, but I did not know what it was called.
“It looks like palm leaves,” Myungsuh said.
Despite its small size, it was indeed a palm plant.
“Let me down,” I said.
He set me down in front of the flower shop. There was only a handful of soil in the flowerpot at home. I would need to buy more. The shop was barely bigger than a closet. If you weren’t paying attention, you might not even notice it was there. Inside, an older woman in glasses was sitting on a stool and gazing out. She stood up when she saw us. I caught the faint scent of mackerel being grilled. There must have been a fish restaurant close by. The smell made my stomach growl.
When I poked my head into the store, the woman came out. I asked her the name of the plant, and she said it was a table palm. Inside the shop, there were more flowers withering than blooming. The balsam and hyacinth had lost their petals, and even the leaves were wilting.
“Are you young folks heading back from a demonstration?” the woman asked.
We weren’t sure what to say. The furrow in her brow deepened.
“When will this country ever stop rioting?” She sighed. “I can’t open my shop. It’s closed most of the time, and there’s so much tear gas in the air that all the flowers have wilted. Look at this. I was raising two birds in this cage, but they died yesterday. And look at my face. Even at this age, I have acne that won’t go away. It’s from breathing tear gas every day.”
Her voice was raspy.
“Take whatever you want,” she said. “Everything is so wilted that it would be wrong to take your money.”
Sullenly, she picked up the table palm that I had asked about and put it in a bag.
“When you get home, transfer the plant to another container and water it. I’m sorry we couldn’t leave you a world where no one has to riot … I’m so sorry.”
Myungsuh had been staring blankly at my feet when the woman surprised us with her apology, but he suddenly dashed across the street to a phone booth.
“This is going to sound as ridiculous as telling you that a cat hatched an egg … You kids may be in the right, but if you keep this up, the rest of us will have to protest as well. We’ll have to protest all the protesting.”
She smiled bitterly.
“You kids aren’t doing anything wrong, but we can’t live this way.”
I
didn’t know what to say.
“We have to make a living, too.”
She was talking to me as if we were related. I didn’t know how to respond to her. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I kept bowing my head. I hoped Myungsuh would hurry back. The longer she talked, the more anxiously I gazed at where he stood inside the phone booth across the street.
“We failed this time around, but you have to leave a better world to the next generation.”
The woman locked the door to her shop, the melancholy look never once leaving her face. Then both she and the flowers vanished, making me wonder if I had imagined everything. All that was left of her shop was the cold metal roll-down gate. My knees gave way, and I sat on the ground and watched as he finished the call and ran back to me.
He sat down at my side.
“Miru’s coming,” he said.
Miru.
“I asked her to bring you some shoes,” he said.
“That must have been a surprise.”
“What size are you?”
“235.”
“Same as Miru.”
He seemed to know everything about her.
“Where is she coming from?” I asked.
“Myeongnyun-dong.”
We were in Anguk-dong. Since the buses had stopped, Miru would have to walk the whole way. That afternoon, when I planned my long route home through downtown, I had assumed it would take me two hours. I had even thought about taking a three-hour walking route instead. But several hours had passed since I left the campus, part of which I spent being carried on his back from City Hall, and I had only just reached Anguk-dong.
“Did Miru move there from Dongsung-dong?” I asked.
“We lived together in Dongsung-dong.”
“What?”
“We lived in a house that Miru’s parents got for her and Mirae—her older sister,” he said.
“Miru has an older sister?”
He started to nod and then stopped and fumbled with the plastic bag. He grabbed my hand and put it on his knee. I could feel the dirt on his jeans.
“To be honest, I don’t want you and Miru to become friends. But you two are always asking about each other.”
Miru asked about me?