Just
like everyone who makes a living by stealth, Sun has abided by a few
codes of practice. Her all-black work clothes have been the first and
foremost, and her contoured crust of makeup, the second. This second
code is something she picked up years into her job, when her generic
blank-canvas face proved to make a more reliable montage than an
artificially put together one with memorable, sharp angles. And these
two codes are exactly for this kind of moment of emergency when the
owners of her target house walk in on her, in the middle of an
unfinished job.
As
footsteps approach, Sun leans into the built-in closet, pulling the
door silently closed with only a sliver of light remaining. She makes
out a woman’s voice that adds a lilt of nervous giggle to the
ineligible conversation led in a man’s baritone. The conversation
veers away from the back room she’s hiding in. Before sneaking out
of the closet, Sun slips a screwdriver in the pocket of one of the
wool coats. Familiar noises ensue from the master bedroom: moans,
rustling, and those soft sounds of skin in contact. She tiptoes past
the bedroom, across the thankfully tiled floor, and out the front
door, which she leaves slightly ajar, not to risk exit noise. The
clueless couple will blame it on their forgetfulness, as people do.
Outside,
raindrops have grown to the size of rice grains. Even if someone
right this second witnesses, and later testifies to her leaving the
house, Sun’s fully made-up face, faithful to the current vogue down
to the oblong lip smudge, wouldn’t be traced back to her. Not in
this capital city of South Korea, where a sixth of its entire
population lives. The witness would be describing thousands, or even
millions of women in the city who wear the same face, some more
deftly contrived, some less so. It’s easy to disappear into the
backdrop of a society that so avidly endorses uniformity. Lucky for
someone like her.
Sun
wonders, walking off, how many of the stories about a swift shadow on
the periphery of one’s vision, misplaced keys, and source less
noises around the house, with doors and windows mysteriously
unlocked, actually involved people like her. Probably plenty. And Sun
is hardly the only one, after all, who has been feeding off of one of
the world’s oldest desires: to bring your enemies to their knees,
at all costs.
*
Sun
took her first job when she was fourteen. On the cusp of an Indian
summer. Lunch break. When one of the girls from her class walked up
to her, Sun was sitting atop the school’s only monkey bar gym, her
legs dangling through its rusty rungs. The girl fidgeted and stalled,
in that familiar way kids did with Sun. Eyes averting as if from
roadkill. The mouth muscle tugged awkwardly, tense around the words
it forms. Sun could sense the girl’s discomfort, maybe even dread,
but also a need much stronger than all that—Sun could feel it out
the same way a lighter flame sways to a wick nearby. Some girls could
play the flute like chopsticks. Some could take a quick scan and name
the brand of any article of clothing a celebrity flaunts on screen. A
few even mastered the art of BB guns. Sun couldn’t do any of that,
but could do this. Like a nine-block floppy cube in hand, pieces of
causal relationships clicked effortlessly into place when Sun put her
mind to it. But more importantly, she could pretend it was a gift
more special than it was. As if her intuition needn’t be backed up
by hours and hours of eavesdropping and social climate monitoring.
And she stayed deadpan when this girl Yuri came to her with a plan to
sabotage her classmate.
Four
years before that summer, Sun’s mother had found Sun hiding behind
the partition in her meeting room after an appointment with a VIP.
Less than an hour after kicking Sun out on the spur of the moment,
her mother let her back in. And she said: “Alright, maybe watching
me work will do you more good than watching that useless TV all day
long.”
Only
ten at the time, Sun hardly understood what took place in her
mother’s meeting room. The room was dimly lit and smoggy with
incense at all times. But Sun took a liking to the crudely drawn
peonies on her mother’s partition, much bigger than the cranes with
bulging eyes that looked as if they were going to throw up on the
flowers anytime. Each meeting went pretty much the same. Most guests
entered the room with unease. Her mother sat sternly with her back to
the birds and flowers that were completely out of proportion but none
of the guests took note of. Meanwhile, Sun would listen for the
growing hint of what had brought each guest there in the first place,
just to ask questions and put up with her mother’s military voice:
angry, sad, confused, sad, sad…. So many came with so much sadness
to vent. And so much pent-up emotion that had nothing to do with her
first put Sun on edge, then at peace. Through the cracks that loose
partition hinges allowed, Sun watched beringed women whine and growl
about their children and husbands. Men with hollow cheeks cursed at
the scoundrels who had it easy. Young women, who often visited in
twos or threes, bombarded her mother with questions about the future
of their romance. A few guests wept through the thirty minutes they
paid for and left with her mother’s advice to go to the doctor.
Sometimes her mother furiously jangled a knob of bells at the guest.
Sometimes she threw grains of salt. Sometimes she printed out a
boojeok
in red ink, slapped it into the hand of the guest, and explained what
the paper talisman would do.
Sun
doesn't remember exactly how she found out her mother was not a
typical shaman, either. It’s probably the questionable normalcy of
her life outside the meeting room that tipped Sun off. Or maybe just
the fact that had she been a real shaman, her mother would have
already found her long-estranged father. Sun’s mother did not
travel to secluded places for prayers like other shamans, and the
most superstitious thing she’d ever done outside work was to hang
in her bedroom a sunflower painting, an amulet for wealth according
to feng
shui.
Or it was perhaps all the explaining. She’d say to Sun, “I’m an
unlicensed psychiatrist.” Or, “The room’s a confessional for
those with unusual religions.”
When
Sun grew older and mustered enough courage to ask if it wasn’t
lying, her mother only stared at her with a hint of pity and
answered, “Every job requires some form of lying, honey. And I’m
the one doing them a favor. That’s called a white lie.”
That
must be true, Sun then thought. Guests spilled their beans in her
mother’s room voluntarily and quite happily in exchange for her
attentive silence, scolding, and empty promises. And they paid for
the talking, because they believed, or wanted to believe, her mother.
That’s how Sun learned the economy of belief. It was to her
advantage that the teachers aware of her family background, believed
her to be a sensitive, straight-A student who needed their unbiased
protection. But it was also in her favor that the kids believed her
to be a witch of some kind to not mess with. The gap between those
two beliefs didn’t need filling. It was, in fact, all the better
if no one heeded that gap at all.
So,
that summer day, Sun took on her first job and did not so much as
flinch when Yuri wanted her to plant a fat wallet in Buyong’s bag.
Yuri offered her a newfangled Nintendo Switch in return. So Sun
didn’t ask herself whether or not she was mostly motivated by the
knowledge that Buyong’s mother had married Yuri’s father, and not
even a year after his unpleasant divorce from Yuri’s mother at
that, which had been the gossip of town for some time. So, right on
the spot, Sun chose to explain to herself that although she might
have thought to become a prosecutor with a family who could put her
through a decade of higher education, she could at least bring
justice to this world where she was a father short, just as was Yuri,
while Buyong so unfairly was not. The way she saw it, Buyong
practically rubbed it in their faces all the time with her
unapologetic presence. So Sun decided to set it right for once and
all. So she slid the incriminating evidence into her classmate’s
backpack without a twinge. So she kept her face straight when the
teacher told the entire class to empty every single bag. Sun watched
Buyong cry and apologize in front of the class for a crime she hadn’t
committed, and saw nothing but justice delivered. Buyong’s shame
was well-deserved. And Sun ignored the faint echo of her conscience:
“Was it?” So that’s how Sun named what she’d done “white
wrong,” which she didn’t know at the time she’d be doing for a
living, and that’s how she could sleep at night, and still can,
sixteen years later, not a problem.
*
A
few bus stops from the target house, Sun flicks out her disposable
flip phone. Rainwater sloshes in the folds of the convenience store’s
awning as she types in the only number she’s memorized ever since
her mother died.
“Another
job well done,” answers the man Sun’s come to call Don. While Don
is short for his full name, Youngdon, Sun’s always associated the
name with the Korean word money,
and Don himself has insisted on thinking of it as the Spanish title.
As a sketchy private detective and loan shark, he is mighty worthy of
the name.
“When
are you coming for the paycheck?” asks Don, casually disregarding
the civility of small talk that has never been part of their
conversation. Words roll off Sun’s tongue: “I’ll bring that
green bean bread you like.” She quickly hangs up, and as quickly
leaves the shelter of the awning. Several high school girls exit the
door to the convenience store just as Sun stalks off into the
thinning rain. Their pastel umbrellas plop open like gunshots.
Don
lives in a nondescript officetel he converted into an office, with a
loft area the size of a refrigerator. Those with money rarely sought
out means of revenge from a criminal underdog like Don, but instead
went to a soundproof office disguised as a legitimate business and
nestled in one of the glass-armored high-rises. Those who do come to
Don for help were at times unable to cover all the expenses, which
happens more often than either of them would like. But Don always
finds a way to get them covered. Sun’s simply assumed that details
of his knowhow might be better left unsaid, for her sake as much as
his. Information can be of value, that much she knows. After all,
Sun’s met quite a few clients who were desperate to retrieve their
personal and professional information being traded on the black
market. But information, for someone like Sun, could be a
double-edged sword. So she’s never questioned Don when told to
steal seemingly unimportant trinkets and documents during her job.
Sun
takes the stairs as always, a bag of fluffy egg breads swaying from
her hand. Just as she rounds the corner on the third floor, she spots
a long-haired woman standing in front of Don’s unit. Sun steals an
appraising peek before hiding herself. Although softened by distance
and lack of proper lighting, the woman’s face has the expressive
fleshliness of youth, hard to miss. By principle, Sun doesn’t meet
any client in person, which makes her job simpler than it would have
been otherwise. Usually, Sun only follows some of them to verify
their identity or observes from a distance for confidentiality
reasons. Now, this particular woman seems too dressed up, too young
to be visiting a person like Don in the middle of the day. Almost as
young as when Sun first met Don.
The
woman’s fingers hover over the doorbell. With her matte black boots
running right up into the avalanche of her white furry dress, she
looks like a nervous heron. Nervous, just like most of the young
women who come in need of Don’s help with their boy’s problems,
from their gambling or drinking habits to abuse of all kinds. The
woman pokes a finger at the doorbell, sounding a faint ding. She
squints down the empty hallway in Sun’s direction. Not
nervous,
Sun decides. More like, expectant.
The
elevator swishes up past their floor, but the woman doesn’t seem
aware. A spray of sunlight sweeps over her face like seafoam for a
second as the city outside realigns itself in ways neither of them is
there to witness. The woman doesn’t look particularly afraid to be
seen. All spruced up. A fragile swinger bag shouldered like a bow.
She is, in fact, made up and put together in that pointedly
attractive way women do when they’re thinking of their presence as
a token of some kind. As if her visit is not for business. As if
someone behind the door is going to be taken pleasantly by surprise.
The door finally inches ajar when the woman brings her fist to its
unflinching heft and taps ever so lightly.
“Yeobo!
What are you doing here?”
An
arm shoots out to grab the woman and pulls her indoors. Sun makes
note of the door thudding closed, and strolls her way upstairs to the
rooftop. Soon her phone buzzes with a text from Don. After a swift
reply, Sun leans against the railing and starts eating the bread
right out of its rustling plastic package. She finishes the first one
in a few greedy mouthfuls, and works thoughtfully on the second. By
the time the woman exits the officetel complex, a bull’s eye in the
streams of rare, darkly clad passengers, the drizzle has transitioned
to heavy clouds to overcast sky, and Sun’s on the third and last
bread. Sun always likes to have that in store. A third wheel, a
maybe, a no-worries-I’ve-got-your-back. She stuffs her mouth with
the rest of the bread, and tosses the plastic bag over the railing.
As if to fall in step with her thinking, she darts down the flights
of stairs.
Hiding
takes effort. Consistent, daily effort. Hiding starts from having no
other choice but. Hiding means there’s something to find out,
something of value, or something, just maybe, that can bring harm to
those who didn’t think to sniff around soon enough or those who had
the temerity to do so at all. Especially if it’s hiding your spouse
from your decade-long partner in crime.
Sun
pushes her body against the weight of the glass door, forcing herself
out. The woman is still in sight, slow in her heeled boots. The black
plastic bag Sun threw from the rooftop, far from hitting the ground,
floats overhead like a moment of eclipse. Sun tucks her hair in the
safety of her hood and follows the woman.
*
When
Sun first met Don, she was a college dropout working as a barista who
skipped the stiletto teeter phase straight to the no-nonsense bob.
Her mother had just died, and while some assumed Sun’s leave of
absence was temporary, Sun knew she’d never go back for the
trivialities of college life. All the drinking made one wonder about
the idea of nationwide alcoholism. The group projects for which only
half the group made any accountable effort. The constant gossip. The
passive-aggressiveness paraded as coolness, the partisan cliques, the
obligatorily progressive yet mindlessly spewed ideals that didn’t
make their way into anyone’s real life. The all too repetitive
dates. But above all else, the student loans it would have taken for
Sun just to pretend to enjoy any of it at all. She could see herself,
at the end of it all, draining the last years of her twenties at some
desk job that required a wardrobe of monochrome button-ups and pencil
skirts, waist-deep in debt. At best. So she swerved. And she set her
eyes on another task she deemed her top priority. Maybe even the
mission of a lifetime. She set out to find her father.
Sitting
across from Sun, Don didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d warm
up to a twenty- something looking for her birth father. Back then,
his office was located in an even more derelict part of the city, in
one of the decade-long projects. Bubble wraps tightly hugged his one
bedroom’s yellowed wallpapers from top to bottom in lieu of
soundproof panels. On his acrylic desk was only a notepad and a box
of Monami ballpoint pens, the cheapest you could get without risking
constant ink leakage.
After
a few crooks and clueless paralegals who were of no help whatsoever,
Sun had her doubts about Don. And of course, Sun sized up the man in
front of her, as she had those amateurs. Don’s black rubber
slippers, she was sure, were designed for the outdoors. The soft,
blue hint of stubborn beard across his shaved jaw. His square
fingertips and mercilessly clipped fingernails. His obvious lack of
interest in lightening the mood or addressing the odd conditions of
his office slash home, from the bubble wraps to the tarp over what
Sun thought was a kitchen counter. His face felt like an artifact, a
form of blankness tautened by the occupational alertness of someone
on the windy side of the law, and the boredom of having been there
for quite some time. Just as she was beginning to wonder if she’d
find a body in the bathroom, Don took a pen from the box. He said:
“Here’s how this is going to work.”
Raised
by a con artist, Sun never trusted anyone who was quick to show
gestures of empathy or overvalued flexibility and a silver tongue.
Don was the very opposite: a grumpy-looking listener who didn’t
believe in inside jokes or pep talk, who spoke in bullet points and
cut you mid-sentence, stickler for rules and protocols, often to a
fault. During their first meet-up, Don laid out his plan to get her
the intel she wanted, how long it would take, plans B and C, and what
was expected of her as his client. He was everything Sun wasn’t
particularly fond of. But he also ticked off all the boxes.
Two
months later, Sun would find herself climbing up into Don’s office
and pocketing a flimsy folder that contained information on her
father. She gave it an angry read before throwing it out on her way
home: serving time for petty theft. Three timers already. Sun didn’t
understand what she was trying to achieve by finding her father, but
it definitely wasn’t to orient herself in her family tree full of
mediocre felons. She might have felt more entitled to a
father-daughter reunion had he turned out happier, or had he been a
worse kind of criminal, even. But the file only reassured her that
the information she was going to pay for was far from worth it.
She
did end up paying for the information, a week or so later. At work,
too busy making sure the latte had an acceptably frothy top, Sun
missed the whole prelude to the quieted commotion at the register,
until she finally made out Don’s voice. It was a small local cafe
crowded with huge milk crates lying on their sides to pass for
tables, most of them half-filled with second-hand paperbacks but
without a single pair of matching chairs. The part-timer, a college
student who just came back from his military service, slightly raised
his voice when he felt Sun’s eyes fixed on his back, probably
mistaking her shock for irritation at his incompetence: “Sir, I
asked you multiple times. How are you going to pay?”
Sun
met Don’s eyes square on, no room for misunderstanding. If he
managed to find her just with her ordinary face and a fake ID, there
was no point trying to evade him now. There would be a plan B, plan
C, and so on in his ques, to get her to pay her dues. And of course,
Don recognized the resigned acknowledgment on her face. He flashed a
rare maybe-I-don’t-entirely-despise-you smirk, and told the
part-timer.
“This
one is on that barista.”
In
order to pay him back, Sun started out as a follower. She stalked
people to their scenes of adultery, gambling, prostitution, and even
illegal cockfights and drug-induced, sexually charged cult
gatherings. When she paid him back in full, she continued to work for
Don, and gradually for bigger, riskier projects. She became ears in
strangers’ walls. She became a variable in the foolproof schemes of
the fools who believe in perfect crimes. She became a criminal
herself.
While
Don considered his business just an out of the box venture, Sun took
a different stance. The way she saw it, all she did was rearrange
elements of a specific circumstance, so anyone willing could
manipulate the next sequence of events. She offered a twist to the
plot of someone’s life. A few strokes of her own in an otherwise
impeccable imitation painting. Even the best of the experts wouldn’t
notice her touch, so slyly applied. It wasn’t exactly harm that Sun
was trying to cause, each time she slipped evidence of infidelity,
corruption, and illegal activity in a stranger’s life, without much
of a twinge. Just like anyone born into life’s iron fist made of
predetermined details, Sun was a big skeptic of the idea of free
will, and from her standpoint, there was no better way to mess with
fate.
*
The
woman has an inconsistent, rickety gait, unlike most gallop-prone
Koreans who hate to waste a second more than necessary on
transportation. Sun’s followed enough people by now to be able to
accurately predict the route of the her quarry, but this woman
doesn’t seem to fit the mold. Detours, window-shopping, sniffing at
flowers, and peeping in the dog park, this woman does it all. As if
to make sure anyone can catch up, but will have to keep her eyes on
the woman to do that. In the meantime, Sun had to break one of her
rules—no beverage or food on the job—and buy a cup of rice punch
from a food cart to quench her thirst. A couple hours past lunchtime,
and with the weather clearing up, streets are now looking much less
abandoned, slowly but alarmingly enough.
The
woman makes a slow way around the bend of a street where a shanty
town unfurls, full of narrow alleyways and slate-roofed houses, known
among Koreans as dahl-dong-neh,
meaning moon village, because its residents go to and return from
work at dark hours of moonlight instead of sunlight. Sun frowns.
Nothing about the woman screams vinyl flooring and a mold-infested
half-basement rental. Not one thing the woman has on her, bait shop
chic. Under normal circumstances, Sun would have put a stop to her
task of the day and found a better time to observe the woman from a
safe distance. But this is no ordinary woman. Dropping this chase
right now might mean never being able to pick up where she left off.
Sun decidedly makes a beeline for the bend.
Next
thing she knows, Sun’s face-to-face with the woman. Her
thickly-lashed eyes bore into Sun’s own. Sun attempts to slip past
the woman, pretending to be an innocent passerby. But the woman grabs
Sun by the arm.
“Don’t
you want to know the story behind that screwdriver?”
Sun
barely stops herself from flinching. She places her hand over the
woman’s and begins to pull away: “I’m afraid you’re
mistaken.”
The
moment she says it, Sun knows she’s made a rookie mistake, caught
off guard. Utter confusion should have been her reaction, not a
defensive verbal push. The woman is now breathing down Sun’s neck,
quite literally, and Sun can scrutinize the woman’s face from the
taut fullness of her skin to the seams of slightly more visible pores
along the T zone. And the face shakes Sun up. The woman is a slightly
more glittered version of the face that Sun puts on for work, to
become unrecognizable. But this familiar face, this time, sends a
chill down her spine. The woman doesn’t show any sign of letting
Sun go. Instead, she urges: “Do you have any idea what my husband
has on you?”
Safety
measures are no news in her line of work. And of course, Sun herself
kept plenty of things on Don just in case, from evidence of his dirty
work for a minor politician to tax evasion the IRS will be happy to
lunge on him for. And Sun expects no less from Don, for one thing.
But the woman’s taunting tone gets on Sun’s nerves in ways she
doesn’t like, not in the least.
Later,
Sun will wonder what really made her listen to the woman. In those
boots, the woman has little chance to keep up if Sun’s decided to
run. It’s probably the sheer amount of evidence that Sun is under
no real threat with the woman. Or that look of habitual aggression of
a young woman who’s sick of people jumping to conclusions about
her, the very kind of conclusions Sun angles for when she puts on her
work face: desperate to fit in, eager to please, nothing of note,
going with the flow, in other words, safe. Safe to say average. Safe
to pay no attention when you see her exit a house without locking the
front door. Safe to shake her off when she shoots you a warning. Or
it’s just the desperation of the woman’s rant, maybe. But for
whatever reason, Sun listens. More than anything, she listens to her
own gut.
And
the woman talks.
*
Jung
didn’t hear Sun’s expert footsteps across his titled floor, or
the front door unlocking with a slight tut. After performing
twenty-one surgeries just in the last two days, he felt as if moving
underwater near the end of sex. When the woman slid out of bed to get
some water, his eyelids had grown heavy already. Two more years, he’d
been telling himself, and then he would up and leave to open his own
office, although he’d have to take out loans or marry some daughter
of a rich man who wants a doctor in the family, as some of his
friends did. But at least he’d no longer have to rely on reheated
delivery foods or factory-produced lunchboxes for most of his meals
between surgeries and appointments, or turn a blind eye to the
presence of ghost doctors casually referred to as some necessary evil
in the world of plastic surgeons. Unhappy patients had yet to sue the
hospital in an enraged flock, but maybe that was in the works. Two
more years, or sooner, he told himself yet again. It was no position
to be in for long. Miserable one, really. He’d considered himself
generally, albeit self-pityingly, a good man.
He
dutifully recycled. Didn’t curse or throw fists while driving. He
held the door for women he went out with, and picked up the check on
the first, second, and third date. He even once volunteered his whole
summer as part of the UNICEF program during college and liked to say
it’s the highlight of his resume. His friends from med school
called him “a good guy,” with the kind of thoughtlessness that
made the phrase feel like it was coined for the likes of him. But
being a good man hadn’t rewarded him much, he recently started
thinking. Bringing a woman home on a rare off day also felt no longer
so much desire as his fear of further missing out in life somehow.
Still, he labored out a rough “Thank you” when the woman brought
him a glass of water.
When
the woman broke up with him, efficiently doing up her bra, and even
before he finished the glass of water, Jung didn’t think much of
it. As she put her white furry dress back on, and laced up her black
boots, he didn’t try to change her mind, but also didn’t ask if
he’d done anything wrong. He was tired and wanted more than
anything in the world to go to bed. He fell asleep not long after the
woman let herself out. It had been raining. She had her umbrella
ready.
The
woman was soon walking off in swift, exacting strides, without once
looking back, a blood-stained screwdriver in her pocket.
*
When
Sun lets the woman talk, she rants with a pained alacrity as if
someone’s whipping words out of her. She’s a daughter of one of
the many implicated, she claims, innocents. “Sure, you took out
many real jerks too,” the woman stresses jerks
in a childish way, and Sun wonders how young she was when her dad was
implicated. The woman’s fingernails claw into Sun’s arm when she
says, “But my dad wasn’t one of them.” The woman has been
accruing evidence against Don and messing with their operations for a
while, when she found out the police were at his heels and Don was
suspecting Sun instead of her. “He’s going to pin it all on you
and take off with me,” the woman says, “I cannot let that
happen.” Without warning, she lets go of Sun’s arm. And the woman
produces the screwdriver that Sun planted in a wool coat earlier that
day and was supposed to implicate a plastic surgeon. Sun finally
says, “That guy made a woman blind.”
The
woman gives Sun a funny look that seems to say, “Gonna tell me
either of us cares about right or wrong?”
A
boy walking a mutt without a leash steals sideways glances at the
women, and they turn away to walk up the steep staircase that climbs
and rounds until the shanty town looks like a ball of yarn in its
tight grip. The eroded staircase has more stones missing than not,
and dust has bled without much effort into the untrusting exterior
walls that conceal each house right up to the eaves. Sun’s black
spandex pants soon take on a tint of dark rust, just from strolling
through. Sun feels as if she’s going to choke on the willful air
that clutches at everything and anything passing through. The damn
mud. The residues of yellow dust all the way from China. The
perpetual smog. It’s
a small wonder, really,
Sun thinks, how
much air can carry.
Despite the dust, the woman keeps talking, without much of a cough.
But
at a closer look, the woman’s white dress betrays the stress of the
heavy-duty dust they worked up their way there, now uncleanly beige
in patches.
The
woman’s still holding the screwdriver, its sharp end clutched in
her fist, when Sun finally cuts her short.
“That
thing at least proves part of your story.”
*
It
was spring, thick with yellow dust. The man was gaunt, his gray jail
suit loose around his body, and not in a handsome way. Sun introduced
herself as a graduate student studying some interdisciplinary
criminology, or at least that’s how Don arranged things. It had
been a year since she started working for him, and this, he’d said,
could be an extra bonus if she wanted. She brought along a new
notepad whose first few pages she tore out on her way there, and a
blue pen she was clicking restlessly as the man rambled. He seemed
mildly pleased with the presence of a willing, though obviously
half-absent, audience. Sun took the man in one surveying gaze right
before she sat, just the way she’d down a glass of beer, and had
been rarely eyeing him since. He had on what she could only describe
as an impersonal smile. Before coming over, she had wandered the
delicacies section at the Shilla department store and thought to
purchase a box of seaweed rice crackers set among excessively wrapped
boxes of edibles that she knew, not from experience, people buy for
important clients or older family members they rarely visit, and she
just might have too, had she not been informed in time that edibles
couldn’t be sent in.
This
was the first day Sun would remember for a long time that she
combatively put on her work face. It was more of a war face that day
Sun would also realize. It was also this face, an amateurish faux
skin of gaudy colors, leery even, that might have given the man the
wrong idea. He bent forward and hushed, “Now, look.”
Sun
froze, and searched the man’s face for a hint of recognition. The
man said, “Are you one of the, you know, girls?”
It
took her a second to process what the man was saying. He frowned at
her blank face, and tutted lightly, mistaking her dumbfounded silence
for a mute yes. “You see, I’m dead broke.”
Sun
leaned into the frame of her plastic chair that wobbled at her
shifting weight. The man continued, “If you’ve got a problem,
believe me, it’s not mine.”
For
a moment, Sun didn’t know whether to cackle viciously in this man’s
face, or to actually start weeping, as most B-rated films she managed
to watch seem to instruct women to do under a circumstance like this.
She just scratched at the bridge of her nose. Tension ebbed all at
once, leaving her body now slouchy. One hand propping up her chin,
she looked down at the empty notepad. Oh,
dear father,
she could have just written, instead of wasting her time coming all
this way. But she did. She stared at the man who was oblivious to the
irony of her presence in this room and felt like a piece of evidence
yet to be discovered. So Sun asked, full of malice, savoring the joke
alone: “Not yours? Why do you think so?”
The
man said, so perfectly, “Oh, I know so.”
*
Sun
waits in the dark, as she has so many times before. Just as she
waited for the perfect timing to get her job done. Just as she waited
as a little girl behind her mother’s partition for each guest to
finish talking, and to leave, so she’d get to drag her mother out
of that dark, musk-filled room. Sun watches a sedan appear as two
blinding eyes of light from the house. The woman and Don. According
to what the woman said, at least. Everything checks out so far. Their
two-story stucco house is nestled against the backdrop of a low
mountain. It’s the kind of house that helps her gauge the owner’s
moderate wealth; wealth from the sleek exteriors, but not excess of
it from how isolated it is; nothing but a bleak landscape of
factories in the vicinity, and a single dirt road leading to a
distant web of busy highways then to the even more distant heart of
the city where everything is at hand.
Sun
makes sure the sedan’s headlights disappear down the road before
she approaches the house. Once inside, she cautiously directs her
flashlight around, lighting up the walls on all sides. A row of
framed photos runs along the hallway. The woman and Don, captured and
framed in various outfits, in various seasons and places, but with
similar camera-shy smiles on their faces. In most of them, they’ve
struck up the exaggerated poses of self-conscious intimacy as a
relatively new couple does in public. Then Sun brings herself closer
to the photos.
Sun
hardly understands the stages of any romantic entanglement that lasts
longer than days or weeks, let alone a marriage. She has no way to
discern signs of authenticity in the handful of pictures in front of
her. So she can in no way wonder, just based on them, if the woman
too has already gone through those stages, watched her target husband
become a rugged, simpler caricature of his former self, simpler as
the number of his concerns exponentially shrank, and nonetheless
found a way to put down her roots, however temporarily, however
precariously. Sun doesn’t wonder if the woman has eventually come
to feel that visceral kind of loyalty, not romantic or sexual
necessarily, but physical nonetheless, for the man standing beside,
behind, or around her in those pictures. It’s a concept way too
foreign to Sun.
What
Sun does understand is a need to set the world on fire, if that’s
the only way to set it right. Even if it’s her very own world.
*
When
Sun left the meeting with her father prematurely, Don was waiting
outside. Now
what,
she wondered. Instead of cutting to the chase as always, he gave her
the eye. (What did he say? Sun no longer remembers.) But Sun shrugged
it off, and started to cackle with full force, as would an at first
glance mean yet essentially troubled teenager who finds everything
absolutely and crucially hilarious, especially matters regarding
herself. When he tried again, Sun had to raise her hands as if in
surrender.
“No,”
she shook her head, suddenly and badly missing her college life.
“Save it.”
*
At
first, Sun doesn’t notice something’s off. She’s hunched over
the safe, her skin thick with sweat under layers of makeup. A
flashlight clenched between her teeth, she squints at the lock. Her
stiff fingers work mechanically until, finally, the safe clicks open.
Sun grabs the fat envelope inside, and after a quick consideration,
also rakes the stacks of bills into her duffel bag. There’s no way
Don won’t realize she’s been here, his shelter violated exactly
the way he taught her, and cash is the only savior for anyone on the
run. She entertains the possibility of a micro pet cam, or a
separately saved digital copy of what’s in the envelope, yet again.
But soon, she’s back on her feet and making her way out. She leaves
the safe and the door to the master bedroom open, feeling not an
ounce of strength left in her, with nothing more she can do to
rectify the mess she’s leaving behind. Don once said
to keep anything important where we lay our head at night.
There’s no place that feels safer, no matter how untrue. Of course,
Sun thought then, if there were, we’d be sleeping there instead.
Then
Sun hears the siren.
*
Sun’s
not too far up in the mountain when the siren has closed in on the
house. The duffel bag hangs near her calf, now a deadweight as she
scrambles uphill. Trees offer no good covers, most of them bare as
they are in this season. But the dirt road is by no means a better
escape route, Sun has decided. She sniffs out something in the air.
But she brushes it off as the smell of the city’s outskirts, a
combination of warehouses, factories, compost, and stretches of
half-burned arid land, and keeps climbing, head lowered and
breathless from the run. It’s not until Sun is halfway up the
mountain, more of a hill that feels bigger once she’s climbing it,
that she senses the heat. Up ahead, a knee-high fence of flame
flutters. Sun watches a shot of flame waver like an accusing finger
and shrink back in. The fire takes dry branches with cracks, by
overwhelming force, and Sun is rooted to the ground for a split
second before looking around in awe. The heat sweeps over her like a
gust of dusty wind, and she’s monetarily out of breath. Sun
realizes the siren could have been from a report of this mountain
fire, which could have been unrelated to her break-in.
But
as the fire makes its slow descent towards her, Sun realizes someone
must have set it close by, stoked it, perfectly timed, in order for
the fire to come in such a deliberate flow of movements, to find her
here, right now. Then it occurs to Sun. The fire will take up the
small mountain in no time. It proceeds towards the only other thing
left to consume, Don’s house. The firefighters, notified well in
advance, have arrived and will enter the house in search of its
residents. They’ll find the suspicious state the house has been
left in, the safe open, its contents emptied. The evidence of Sun’s
break-in she didn’t bother to cover up. Don gets called in as
practically the only resident living on the perimeter of that
mountain, the cause of the fire verified by then unlikely to be
accidental. The police will seize the opportunity, if what the woman
said had any truth in it. Don gets questioned, his house probably
searched inside and out, with the excuse of insurance policy in the
light of this not-so-natural natural disaster that befell the owner
of the house. Sun sees Don sitting across from a tired-looking member
of law enforcement. He asks for a lawyer and waits for the woman, who
fails to show up. And she will never show up.
Then
Sun sees the woman, not too long ago, waiting in front of Don’s
unit, in that white furry dress of hers, and sees her face clearly
this time, not unlike her own, on which a look of something far from
anything she would have ever guessed, hovers.
*
The
woman was waiting. Expecting. A person on her tail, or another on the
other side of the door. Or both. There was little difference between
the two of them, after all. More than anything, the woman had been
waiting for this moment. So it was without effort that she put on a
smile when the door opened, with a silent spectator surely watching
it all, and when her husband thoughtlessly invited, almost forced
her, in.
*
Sun
doesn’t waste any more seconds. Her light-headed body finds itself
moving two heavy arms, first to sling the duffel bag off her shoulder
and rummage through it, then to fling stacks of bills into the fire
creeping up on her. Some of the stacks come undone mid-air. Thin
bundles thud to the ground and single bills flap away in all
directions. Soon, it’s impossible to tell the bills from the fallen
leaves taken up in flames.
Sun’s
face burns with all the effort, and her knees almost buckle as she
lifts the duffel bag again. Then finally, her tired, now slightly
trembling hand finds the envelope, and manages to tear it open. The
heat is right upon her, and the envelope slips from her sweaty hands
and flops onto the carpet of pine leaves underneath. Sun doesn’t
register the spilled content at once, but slowly, scattered
photographs come into focus, a few curt sentences scribbled on the
back of each. 2
hidden kids with an ex in Chungcheong province,
a
fake license fabricated by Mr. T, father on a death row, they
read.
Photographs,
not of Sun, but of different men and women. A series of violent
coughs overtakes her, and Sun bends over, shaking. When she
straightens back up, she’s still shaking. Some of the people in the
photographs Sun recognizes as past clients, and the scribbles take
her all the way—through the mist of years of work that has become a
routine—back, and what the woman said roaming the shanty town also
comes back running through her head.
What
if I say, sometimes, it’s way easier to make money off
blackmailing, or let me put it this way, presenting a possibility of
something bad that can happen to you, or of revealing some dark deeds
you were ready to pay for, than actually doing anything at all?
Sun
throws the duffel bag into the fire, and starts coughing. The only
thing that’s left of what she took from Don’s house is the
photographs that seem to twitch with the blaze reflected off their
glossy surfaces. The women in some of the photographs look as if they
could be, very well might be, Sun or the woman, but Sun doesn’t
flip them over, and leaves every last one of them there, lying on the
forest floor, the unstoppable fire zeroing in on them. Everything
hisses around her, in sync. But Sun doesn’t feel hissed at, not
quite yet, as she turns from the border of fire and walks towards the
source of the siren and growing light, towards a moment of
inexplicable calm.
Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆 李 朴) is the author of the poetry collection, Present Tense Complex, winner of Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera 2021), and a forthcoming poetry chapbook, Still Life, winner of Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She received fiction prizes from Indiana Review and Writer’s Digest and her recent fiction appears in the Iowa Review, J Journal, and Notre Dame Review. You can find more about her at: https://suphil-lee-park.com/
