Korean Literature Now

Authors
Translators

PROFILESon Bo Mi

Son Bo Mi debuted in 2009 when she received the Twenty-First Century journal’s New Writer’s Award but launched a full-fledged literary career only in 2011 when she won the Dong-a Ilbo’s New Writer’s Contest. She has authored the novels Dear Ralph Lauren and Little Village, the novella The God of Coincidence, and the short story collections Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, Elegant Nights and Cats, and Manhattan Fireflies. Her works in English include The Hot Air Balloon (Asia Publishers, 2014).

FICTION

The Substitute Teacher Vol. 65 Autumn 2024

On sunny afternoons, when the child woke from his nap, Ms. P would take him by the hand and head outside. The neighborhood, which was filled with luxury condos, had a nice playground in the middle of the complex, but Ms. P always walked to the nearby park just beyond. As she neared the park, holding the hand of this boy, this five-year-old with a bowl haircut and big monolid eyes, she felt again the pure joy these moments gave her. In the center of the park, there was an open area with a manicured lawn where children could run and play. Ms. P spread out her mat on the edge of the grass and sat down with the boy. Nearby, young women had also brought their children to the park and were chatting in small groups or watching their children play. Ms. P exchanged polite nods with them but kept to herself. When the boy asked, “Can I go play?” she smiled and nodded. Once he dashed off, she took a book from her small canvas bag and began to read. Sometimes she would stop reading to watch the boy. The children played well together. Occasionally, when he tried to take another child’s toy or overpower a younger one, Ms. P would fold down the corner of the page and go to him. She would place her hand gently on his shoulder and say in a firm but soft voice, “You’re not being a good boy.” The young women watched as Ms. P reprimanded the child. At this point, it might be good to mention the boy’s mother. According to her, she had “been tricked into marriage” by her husband, but that was just a playful complaint. From the moment she realized she had an eye for art, she had hoped to work in France. She had actually gone to Paris during high school and studied art history at a college there. However, weary from years of living abroad, she returned to Korea as soon as she finished graduate school. She hadn’t planned to remain in Korea permanently. Her intention was to stay with her parents for about six months to recuperate and then leave again. Yet, somehow, nine months later, she found herself walking down the aisle in a wedding dress. “The friends I studied with ended up in New York, Amsterdam, or London. I had this crazy idea that I’d go back to Paris one day, even after I got married,” she once told her colleagues. “You have no idea how good he is to me. He adores me.” But the climax of her story was this: “Two lines showed up on the pregnancy test. I was so shocked!” Every time she got to this part, she’d almost burst into tears. “I love my little boy. I’d never trade him for anything now. He’s absolutely priceless to me. But was it hard raising him? No, no, it was pure joy.” Indeed, she stayed home for three whole years to take care of him. When she announced she was getting married, her mother had felt a sense of betrayal and declared she wouldn’t help with the child-rearing. Her mother kept her word. Anyone who heard the boy’s mother tell this story always marveled at her appearance, as there was no sign she had given birth or raised a child. Her thick, glossy hair had attractive curls that fell over her shoulders, her skin had a vibrant glow, and her limbs were long and slender. Around the beginning of spring that year, she secured a job at an art gallery—even though it was just an internship—and hired a nanny, Ms. P, to take over caring for the boy. Sometimes, those listening asked about the nanny. After thinking for a moment, she would say, “Oh, her? Hmm . . . she’s a good person.” If Ms. P had known that someone would ask the boy’s mother about her, she would have wanted her to answer this way: “Oh, the nanny? She used to be a substitute teacher.” Of course, it would be possible to leave out the word “substitute,” but that somehow felt dishonest. Ms. P had taught history—sometimes social studies, sometimes geography—for twenty long years, and she loved her job. In her younger days, there must have been a time when she’d longed to become a full-time teacher. Thankfully, there were many schools that needed substitute teachers, and until last year, Ms. P was able to move from school to school, teaching history—sometimes social studies, sometimes geography—to middle and high school students. However, after filling in for a female teacher on maternity leave last spring, no schools had shown any interest in hiring her. When she was finally forced to accept that she would never stand in front of a classroom as a substitute teacher again, Ms. P didn’t feel particularly upset. She wasn’t the type to blame others. And whenever someone begged on the subway, she never turned them away. When she first arrived at the apartment for the nanny interview, the boy’s father said, “I heard you used to be a teacher.” He had passed the bar exam a few years ago and now worked on the legal team of a well-known company. For some reason, he felt a mix of sympathy, pity, and even a little guilt that Ms. P was sitting in his living room, applying to be his child’s nanny. However, she simply said, “There are substitute teachers younger and more capable than me. How could I stay on? That would be shameless of me.” Ms. P thought of the students she had taught, those who’d listened attentively, nodding along while looking into her eyes. As these memories floated through her mind, she glanced around the room—the lilies in the vase on the coffee table, the geometric patterns on the curtains covering the balcony window, and the glass cabinet in the kitchen filled with decorative tea sets. She also took in the family—the handsome, polite young father, the lovely, elegant young mother, and the cute, intelligent-looking child. Perhaps at that moment, Ms. P thought of her own home with its modest wallpaper, synthetic fiber curtains, and narrow bed. She imagined herself eating alone, getting dressed alone, and sleeping alone. But these thoughts lasted only a moment, so brief she hardly registered them. Instead, her mind quickly filled with thoughts of her desk—a huge mahogany desk. It was actually a dining table, but Ms. P used it as a desk. It didn’t matter. It was the most expensive and beautiful thing she owned. Beautiful. Ms. P repeated the word in her mind. Then she straightened her back. “That’s just the way the world works,” she said, fiddling with the metal button on her tweed jacket, the best piece of clothing she owned. Ms. P’s job was relatively simple. Around two in the afternoon, on her way to work, she would stop by the daycare to pick up the boy and bring him home, staying with him until one of the parents returned. The parents didn’t like leaving their child with someone else after dark and made sure at least one of them had dinner with him every evening. Frankly speaking, Ms. P contributed nothing to the dinner table. The weekend helper made all the side dishes, and the mother (sometimes the father) cooked after work. So, Ms. P watched the child until the father (or mother) set the table, but she never joined them for dinner, and she didn’t particularly mind. On her first day picking up the boy from daycare, he insisted on staying until his mother came for him and ended up crying. This happened several times. Each time, Ms. P gave a nonchalant sigh and said, “All right, let’s do that.” She had twenty years of experience. Eventually, the boy would hold Ms. P’s hand and head home. While the child took a nap, Ms. P took out a book from her small canvas bag, along with some food she had packed. She didn’t help herself to even an apple from the refrigerator. When Ms. P was hired, the first thing the boy’s mother had done was to show her the tea box with its assortment of teas, the medicine cabinet, and the fridge filled with fruit. “Please, consider this your home,” she had said. But Ms. P never turned on the TV or radio, used the phone, or even touched a bottle of pills. Apart from the child’s room, the living room, and the kitchen, she didn’t look around the apartment or handle any of the books on the shelves in the study. After their stroll in the park, the boy usually played with his toys, but sometimes asked Ms. P to read him a book. When she read aloud, he would repeat after her in a small voice. Watching him, Ms. P recalled a song she’d once heard: The seagulls stir the heart because while sinners sin, the children run and play. Because the children run and play. Why did that song come to mind? She turned to look out the window. From the apartment, she saw the bridge that crossed the Han River, the rows of apartment complexes beyond that, and a giant Ferris wheel spinning in the distance. Sunlight sparkled on the river’s surface, and the spring breeze made the water ripple, like hundreds of pages were turning. Suddenly, Ms. P’s heart sank, and she was filled with fear. She turned back to look at the cute, intelligent little boy who was repeating after her. She patted his head affectionately. One day, the boy came holding a large sketchbook and crayons. “Do you know how to draw?” “Of course,” Ms. P said with a gentle smile, taking the sketchbook and crayons from him. “Can you draw a ball?” “A ball?” She drew a large circle with a black crayon. “But that’s not a ball.” Ms. P felt a little confused. “Yes, it is.” “Soccer balls don’t look like that,” he said, shaking his head. What did a soccer ball look like? How were you supposed to draw a basketball? And what about a baseball? At the boy’s insistence, she turned the page and drew another large circle with the black crayon, but she couldn’t figure out how or where to draw the lines. She tried to focus on all the different balls floating in her mind. That night, on her way home, Ms. P stopped by a store and spent a long time looking at soccer balls, basketballs, baseballs, golf balls, rugby balls, and beach balls. At home, she copied each kind into a small notebook and practiced drawing them over and over again. The next day, she studied different types of flowers, then different colors, and then different cars. One day, she even bought a book on raising children around the boy’s age and started reading it. Sitting at her large desk, which was actually a dining table, in the corner of her small room, she felt overwhelming happiness as she organized these things. When was the last time she’d felt this way? But soon she realized that such thoughts were blasphemous. She reminded herself to be thankful for each day. However, after a moment, she compromised a little and thought, “I’ve never been this happy.” When spring ended and summer began, everything was a mess. It rained almost every day, and the air was muggy. Ms. P didn’t wear her tweed jacket anymore. Instead, she wore a light cotton blouse with sleeves that came just above her wrists. One day, while it was pouring outside, the child struggled to put on his rain boots at the daycare entrance and said, “My mommy is home today.” It was true. The day before, his parents had a big fight. They had been discussing their summer vacation. For months, they had planned to go to Rome with the boy, but now the father said he couldn’t go because of work. He added angrily that he didn’t see the point of taking such a young child to Rome. The mother thought he was being unfair and insulting toward her, so she went into the boy’s room where he lay sleeping, gathered him up in her arms, and burst into tears. Ms. P knew their fight was none of her business and that she shouldn’t interfere, but what about the boy? What would happen to him? What if their fight affected him negatively? Would he be able to forget his mother holding him while sobbing? What if this memory became buried deep in his heart? Was there any guarantee it wouldn’t resurface somehow later in life? Ms. P thought of the delinquents she had taught. Where were they now? The ones who’d smoked, used foul language, and shouted. Their raspy voices. The thought made her heart sink, and the recklessness of the boy’s parents angered her. But when she arrived at the apartment and saw the mother lying in bed, in her pajamas with her luxuriant hair disheveled, Ms. P’s heart softened a little. She went to her and asked if there was anything she could do. The mother shook her head and spoke in a choked voice. “I’m so embarrassed.” Ms. P shook her head. “Since I started working, we haven’t had any proper time together. I know it must be hard for him too, but still. . .” Ms. P patted the mother’s shoulder and went to the kitchen to bring her some warm milk. “Drink this and get some sleep. You’ll feel better afterward.” Watching the mother blow on the hot milk like a child, Ms. P felt a complicated emotion that was hard to describe and struggled to suppress it. She said, “Sorry, but I need to say this. It’s not good to fight in front of children.” It didn’t take the mother long to think about Ms. P’s words. That very night, when her husband gave her a bouquet of roses to make her feel better, she told him while in his arms, “She had the nerve to give me advice.” “What did she say?” “She said it’s not good to fight in front of children.” “It’s probably because she’s never had kids. To her, everything’s theoretical. But not everything goes according to theory.” The mother fell into thought. Why do some women grow old without marrying or having children? But she soon stopped thinking about it because her life was too far removed from such a reality, and her imagination couldn’t grasp it. “Did she say if she has any family?” “On her first day, she mentioned her brother and his wife run an auto repair shop out in the country. Don’t you remember?” “Oh, I remember now.” “She paid for her brother’s college education and even helped with his wedding expenses.” That was true. Ms. P had supported her brother through college, and she had given him a significant portion of her savings when he got married and started his auto repair shop. However, she had not seen or spoken to him and his wife for several years. Even though she didn’t know these details, the woman said, “When you think about it, she’s had such a sad life.” But about a month later, when she had to make an awkward request to Ms. P, she had already forgotten this conversation with her husband. The boy’s mother worked at an art museum that was getting ready to hold a fall exhibition called “Contemporary Art of Eastern Europe.” Nearly everything related to the exhibition was proceeding cautiously and slowly, as if walking on thin ice. Just when they thought they were on solid ground, a problem arose. A Romanian artist announced he no longer wanted to send his work to the exhibition. To make matters worse, several other Eastern European artists wished to withdraw as well. The boy’s mother and other staff had to stay at the museum until late at night to speak with the artists in Romania, Poland, and the Czech Republic, where the time zones were significantly different. The mother had no choice but to call Ms. P and explain the situation. As Ms. P was about to hang up, she made a joke without thinking, “Eastern Europe can be difficult.” After hanging up, Ms. P recalled a student from her days as a substitute teacher who always got confused as to whether Portugal was in Eastern Europe or not, and she laughed. She believed she knew more about Eastern Europe than the boy’s mother. That evening, Ms. P took out the soybean sprouts and eggs from the fridge and taught the boy how to trim the sprouts. She had recently read that handling plants and vegetables was good for a child’s development. The boy sang, sloppily trimming the bean sprouts, while she mixed the eggs, chopped the scallions and carrots, and made an omelet. Afterward, she cleaned up his mess and made bean sprout soup. Other side dishes were already prepared. A short while later, Ms. P and the child sat at the table and had dinner. It was the first time she had eaten there. She patiently waited until the boy finished feeding himself. After dinner, she washed the dishes and bathed the child. When it was time for him to go to sleep, she sat next to the bed and read him a story. “When you wake up tomorrow, Mommy and Daddy will be here,” she said. “I know,” the boy said, nodding. Ms. P pulled the blanket up to his neck. “What a good boy you are.” Long after he fell asleep, his parents still didn’t come home. Ms. P sat on the living room sofa where she usually sat when the child napped. But tonight, she felt uneasy. She wanted to wake the child. At the same time, she felt like an intruder in an empty house, doing something very wrong. In the end, Ms. P turned on all the lights in the apartment—the living room, kitchen, and even the empty rooms—before she sat back down on the sofa. She was afraid. Why? That night, Ms. P went home, lay down on her small bed, and then suddenly sat up. She knelt by the window and prayed. After that, the couple often failed to follow their rule of coming home before sunset to be with the child. On nights when they returned late, Ms. P would have dinner with the boy, help him brush his teeth, and inspect his mouth. She would change him into pajamas, tuck him into bed, and read him a story. She cared for him more diligently than ever. The couple offered to pay Ms. P extra for overtime, but she refused. “There’s no need for that.” Those weren’t empty words. “This is my job.” Or she said, “Don’t worry about it.” A few days later, after putting the boy to bed, Ms. P went to the kitchen. She hesitated, but then opened the cabinet. She recalled what the boy’s mother had said on her first day: “Please, consider this your home.” Ms. P took out her favorite teacup, the one with a delicate little bird painted on it. She put it back, then took it out again. She poured hot water into it, got a purple tea bag from the tea box, unwrapped it, and placed it in the cup. After a while, she removed the tea bag, threw it in the trash, and walked into the living room. She carefully placed the teacup on the coffee table and this time turned off all the lights in the apartment—the living room, kitchen, and empty rooms—leaving only the decorative lamp on in the living room. She sat on the sofa, pulled out the book she had brought, and began to read. Please, consider this your home. For the first time, Ms. P felt she truly understood what the boy’s mother had meant. Several days later, Ms. P opened the door to the study and went inside. She hesitated a little before taking a book from the shelf. She no longer needed to bring along a book in her small bag. There were plenty of books to read in that home. How would one describe that fall? Six years later, a group of well-dressed women were having lunch and chatting in a restaurant with a small porch. They had just begun to open up, sharing their struggles and bonding with each other. They talked about their children’s falling grades, big losses in stock investments, the promotions their husbands didn’t get, and bad real estate deals. Of course, they planned to enroll their children in more classes at their cram schools, make other investments to recoup their losses, and buy new cufflinks to raise their husbands’ spirits. The boy’s mother showed signs of aging, but she looked more elegant and beautiful because of it. She wondered why they had to talk about such things on a day when sunlight bathed the streets and the leaves rustled in vibrant colors. Yet, as she listened, that fall suddenly came to mind. Actually, it wasn’t a sudden recollection. The first time she recalled that period was three years ago in the summer. Since then, that fall had often crossed her mind, whether she wanted it to or not. Many things happened that season, as if they had all been orchestrated. She’d been busy preparing for the “Contemporary Art of Eastern Europe” exhibition, their weekend helper had quit unexpectedly to care for her grandchild, and her husband’s legal team at work was in crisis due to the deaths of several factory workers. Most shocking of all, her mother-in-law was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Her husband’s only sister lived abroad, so they had to take in her mother-in-law. Her husband said they had “missed the window” to intervene, which led to several arguments between them. But did they ever have a chance to intervene? She’d never mentioned her mother-in-law’s diagnosis to anyone. She vaguely knew Alzheimer’s could be hereditary and worried that it wasn’t just her mother-in-law’s illness but a foreboding mark on the genes of her husband, who held a fairly high position for his age, and her son, who was now over eleven and enjoyed being alone. Her thoughts naturally turned to Ms. P, who had cared for her family and mother-in-law. Perhaps she had always wanted to think about Ms. P. Her memories spiraled back to the night when she had wondered about the lives of “those kinds of women” while in her husband’s arms. She believed that autumn was the most difficult time of her life. But that was naïve of her. Every time an unforeseen hardship invaded her life, she felt cursed, but in this case, who was cursing whom? Now it was her turn to speak. She didn’t want to say anything but also didn’t want to seem odd or boastful. “A few years ago, my mother-in-law came to live with us because she was ill. You see, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.” She was shocked to hear herself say “Alzheimer’s” out loud for the first time. But she quickly realized the other women were more shocked. They had never wanted to hear such things. Yet they recovered quickly. “Oh my, taking care of a sick mother-in-law isn’t easy.” “At the time, I was working as a curator at an art gallery.” “She studied art history in France,” added another woman, who knew her well. Someone sighed in admiration. “Do you speak French well?” “Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça va, merci beaucoup,” she said playfully. The women laughed heartily, drawing the attention of others in the restaurant. “Taking care of my family and my mother-in-law on top of my job was really tough.” “Oh my, I can’t even imagine. You’re amazing.” “Our nanny helped a lot with our son. I don’t know what we would have done without her,” she said humbly, quickly adding, “But no matter how much help you get, you know how hard it is.” No one asked how her mother-in-law was doing now, and she was relieved. Her mother-in-law had passed away last year. She cleared her throat. “But now, it’s all over.” If Ms. P ever had the chance to talk about that period, what would she have said? She might have said, “That family had only me. They were so grateful. You couldn’t find a couple with such grace and elegance. They never forgot a kindness.” However, Ms. P would probably never have the opportunity to share that story, because no one is interested in her past. Even after many years, Ms. P could still remember the day she first met the elderly woman with Alzheimer’s—a patient wearing a navy cashmere cardigan, pearl necklace, and pearl ring. One morning, much later, when Ms. P was about the same age as the old woman had been, she was washing her face when she looked in the bathroom mirror and became lost in thought. It was then that she decided to erase the old woman from her memory. But this was far into the future. That fall, however, Ms. P was simply amazed that a nearly seventy-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s could look so neat and elegant. Ms. P arrived early every morning to help the couple get to work. She did the shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and took care of the boy and the elderly woman. Sometimes, she took them for walks or to the hospital. After the couple left for work, Ms. P picked the elderly woman’s outfit—a different one each day—along with a necklace, clip-on earrings, and a ring, until one day the woman hit Ms. P in the face while wearing the ring, and it was never taken out of the jewelry box again. Sometimes the elderly woman got angry at Ms. P, saying she’d chosen the wrong clothes and accessories, but soon forgot she’d even gotten angry. “My mother is so lucky to have you. I don’t know what we would have done without you. Thank you so much. We didn’t know what to do…” the father often said. The young couple, floundering with fear and sadness, gradually found their balance again with Ms. P’s help. By the weekend, Ms. P was exhausted. Her back ached, and her shoulders throbbed so much every time she lifted her arms that she needed to apply pain relief patches. Luckily, the child liked the smell of the patches. Just by seeing the mess in the apartment on Monday, Ms. P could tell what kind of weekend the family had. She couldn’t bear the thought of the young couple struggling without her. So, one Saturday afternoon, when the father called, sounding completely defeated and anguished, Ms. P felt a deep sense of relief. When she arrived, the father looked half-crazed, and the mother—Ms. P was shocked by her appearance—had a puffy face, messy hair held back by a headband, and was still in her nightgown. The boy sat on the couch in his pajamas, clutching an encyclopedia, looking as if he hadn’t even washed his face. The old woman was locked in her room. “We had no choice,” the father said, his voice full of shame, guilt, and sorrow. The elderly woman burst into tears upon seeing Ms. P, saying she wanted to go home. “But Mother, this is your home!” the father said. Ms. P told the father to clean the living room while she bathed the elderly woman and the boy. She told the mother to wash her face, brush her hair, and get changed. The mother came back shortly after, dressed in a knit shirt and slacks, and asked Ms. P what she should do next. Ms. P told her to air out the elderly woman’s room and put the bed covers in the wash. She did as she was told. Ms. P first bathed the child, dressed him, and sent him to his mother. Then she helped the elderly woman bathe, took out a green sweater and skirt from the closet, and dressed her—later on, the father would recall how his mother had looked like a Christmas tree that day—not forgetting her pearl necklace and earrings. After a day filled with intense emotions, the elderly woman ate a large helping of the meal Ms. P prepared and went to bed early. That night, Ms. P had dinner with the boy and his parents for the first time. The couple felt as though they’d just been rescued from a disaster. As Ms. P watched those poor kids—the young couple who’d been so distressed just moments before but now sat neatly and elegantly eating their meal—she recalled that song again: The seagulls stir the heart because while sinners sin, the children run and play. Because the children run and play. Because the children run and play. Because the children run and play. . . “I’m so sorry. We didn’t even think to call a doctor. We just thought of you,” the father said for the fifth time, looking at Ms. P. “No, no, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it,” Ms. P said, helping the boy eat. The boy sat next to her, practically hanging onto her shoulder. Normally, she would have insisted the child eat on his own, even if it took a long time, but that day she spooned the food into his mouth. “My mother doesn’t recognize me. She doesn’t recognize her daughter-in-law or even her grandson,” the father said. “She’ll get better soon,” Ms. P reassured him. “What if she doesn’t? What will we do then?” the mother asked. Ms. P didn’t know the answer. She couldn’t possibly know. Yet, she felt she had to give the young mother some kind of response. “She’s very ill,” she said. “She’s ill,” the boy repeated after her. “It was awful. We didn’t know what to do. Mother was doing well, wasn’t she? She was perfectly fine until yesterday,” the father said, rambling. “My wife and I are so busy these days. Just look at the boy. Of course, you’re taking great care of him, but what I’m trying to say is. . . I don’t know. . . everything’s a mess. Did you hear, Ms. P? People who worked at our company factory died. But we have so many documents to review and draw up, so what I’m trying to say is. . .” “Honey, you don’t have to explain anymore,” the mother said, trying to comfort her husband. But the father kept talking. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m just so scared. What happened to Mother? I mean, I know she’s sick, but what are we supposed to do. . . I couldn’t think of anything except to call you. I . . . we . . .” The father started to cry. The boy, seeing his father cry, began to cry too, and soon the mother joined in. But Ms. P wasn’t flustered at all. It was as if she had expected this moment, or felt it was her duty to resolve the situation, and she calmly comforted each one of them. “I’m sorry. We didn’t know what to do. . . everything’s falling apart. . .” the mother said, sobbing. “You poor things, don’t say any more. Nothing bad is going to happen.” Ms. P looked after them until they stopped crying. After they finally finished their meal, she cleaned the table and did the dishes. She took out the teacups painted with a delicate bird and heated three cups of milk, making one cup of tea for herself. They all sat together at the coffee table and drank. Ms. P stayed at the apartment until the family went to bed. For the next two months, Ms. P went to their home every single day without fail. The couple tried to hire a professional caregiver, but Ms. P insisted it wasn’t necessary. “I can manage everything on my own,” she said. One Friday night near the end of fall, as Ms. P was leaving, the mother said, “You don’t need to come in this weekend. Please get some rest. You’ve been working so hard lately.” “No, it’s all right. Who’ll take care of Grandmother if I’m not here?” “Don’t worry about it. You need your rest, too,” the mother said, taking Ms. P’s hand for a moment before letting go. Later, Ms. P found out that the elderly woman had been sent to a nursing home, one of the best and most expensive, according to the research done by the boy’s maternal grandmother. “We’ll be visiting her every weekend,” the mother said, as if justifying their decision. And indeed, unless something special came up, the family visited her every Sunday until she passed away. Ms. P felt a little hurt that they hadn’t asked her opinion about sending the elderly woman to the nursing home, and she had a question for them, but ultimately, she couldn’t ask it. Later, much later, Ms. P felt thankful she hadn’t asked. With the mother-in-law gone, Ms. P finally had her weekends to herself. It’s not bad. It’s good, everything is fine. It’ll be okay. Nothing bad will happen. Ms. P muttered these things to herself, almost as if she were praying, as she applied pain relief patches to her shoulders and back. There were still many tasks Ms. P did for the family. She did the shopping and cooking, ate dinner with the boy, and read books by the light of a small lamp while sipping tea after he went to bed. They couldn’t go to the park anymore since the weather had turned cold, but reading to the child or playing indoors wasn’t bad. Soon after, the “Contemporary Art of Eastern Europe” exhibition at the museum where the mother worked ended successfully. Actually, “successful” was an understatement. The exhibition was a huge hit. Articles about it appeared in local newspapers and women’s magazines. There were even pictures of the mother, smiling confidently at the camera. The father’s work issues were also resolved without the company having to take any action. Just as Ms. P had said, nothing bad happened. Though not as often as before, the couple now managed to have dinner with the boy more often than not. As Christmas approached, the couple decided to make up for the summer vacation they had missed and flew to a small island in Southeast Asia with their boy for a few days. For the first time in a while, Ms. P also had a long break. She planned to go on a trip as well, but ended up going nowhere. On the last day of her vacation, she stopped by a bookstore, bought a stack of books for the child, and then sat alone in a downtown café, sipping tea and watching the snow drift past the window. It snowed a lot that winter. The café was filled with a mix of post-Christmas fatigue, lingering excitement, and vague anticipation for the new year. Across from Ms. P sat a couple in their early forties, having tea and sharing a fruit tart with a girl who seemed to be their daughter. The girl checked her phone every now and then, but also laughed, complained, or talked at length to her parents. Ms. P watched them for a while. How long did she watch them? Suddenly, the girl looked up, and their eyes met. Ms. P quickly gathered her things and left the café. It wasn’t because she’d been caught staring, but because she wanted to call her younger brother all of a sudden. Having left her cell phone at home, she had to look for a payphone. She walked over five blocks, and her socks became soaked and the ends of her hair froze from the snow, but she finally found a payphone. At last, when winter ended, Ms. P resumed her walks. She asked the boy if he was happy, and he said he was, holding her hand tightly. In the park, Ms. P still didn’t talk to the other young women. As always, she read her book, watched the child, and taught him what was appropriate and what was not. The family hired a new helper for weekend housework, giving the mother more free time, so Ms. P no longer needed to cook or clean. Sometimes, though, she still prepared snacks until the boy’s parents returned. They ate together a few times in the winter, but when spring began, they didn’t have a chance to share another meal. Occasionally, she stayed late when both parents were delayed, but that was rare. Ms. P wasn’t disappointed. She believed her life had entered a new phase of stability. The couple also felt their lives had entered a new phase. The father sometimes went golfing with his superiors on Saturdays, an invitation that wasn’t open to just anyone. The mother’s dedication during the “Contemporary Art of Eastern Europe” exhibition earned her high praise. The family dined out often and visited the nursing home on Sundays. The father believed his mother’s condition was improving, and it actually was. One day, when the mother punched in the door code and entered the apartment, she was struck by a strange feeling. Why does Ms. P always leave only the small lamp on? Why does she keep the apartment so dark? She watched as Ms. P greeted her, folded the corner of the page, and put the book back on the shelf. Why doesn’t Ms. P use a bookmark? It was hard to believe that she had seen this scene many times before. After Ms. P left, she looked at the teacup left in the sink—the teacup with a delicate little bird painted on it. The set was from England and her favorite. She had inquired at the department store several times, waiting two months for it. It had been worth the wait. That night, she told her husband they should enroll their child in full-day daycare. Ms. P’s job as a nanny ended. A few months later, the father got promoted, and the mother became a permanent staff member at the museum. Everything was perfect, and nothing was wrong. Truly, nothing bad had happened. The night she was let go, Ms. P lay in bed, recalling the night view from their apartment. She had enjoyed the pleasant autumn breeze while watching the bridge and its lights across the dark river, the procession of car lights, and the giant Ferris wheel in the distance. She had wondered: What would happen if all those lights went out? If that ever happened, she’d believed she would know exactly where to run. Had she been wrong? She thought about the wrong choices, the misguided thoughts, the futile hopes, the resignation, and the losses that marked her life. It had always been that way. She had always thought it was courage, only to realize later it wasn’t. So what was it then? There were times she wanted to cling to something. She felt that life—her life—was a series of struggles and prayers. A prayer not to pray anymore. Please help me not to make another foolish decision. She had wished desperately that she would stop praying. Back when she was young, she should have continued studying for the exam to become a full-time teacher. She thought of her parents, her incompetent parents who had depended utterly on her, yet whom she had loved dearly. And her younger brother’s family. They had a child, too, but she had never seen him. She had been happy once, too. There had been times when she had loved and been loved. Times she thought would never end. In the end, there was no one by her side, but that wasn’t a life she chose—just as anyone wouldn’t. Yet she believed that someday, a small event would resolve all the wrongs. The young couple told her that they were moving abroad and wouldn’t need her anymore. Ms. P knew it was a lie. But what did it matter if it was a lie? For them, nothing bad would ever happen. That adorable boy would grow up well, loved by his parents. How smart and wonderful he would become! Maybe one day, he would become a dashing teenager and talk about her. The young, elegant, cultured couple might have once been her students in history—maybe social studies or geography. But Ms. P knew that was a stretch. Still, she hoped the children she had taught were growing up somewhere, elegant and in good health, living in tall, clean towers, driving nice cars, speaking with refinement, and holding important roles in society. That’s life, she thought. It’s going to be all right. Someday, all the wrongs will be made right, like one pull on a string that would untangle the knot. Ms. P thought of these things as she closed her eyes. Falling asleep was always easier than she expected. Translated by Janet Hong
Martian Child Vol.60 Summer 2023

I was the only survivor of the twelve lab animals sent to Mars. We were launched into the future, frozen at -270° C in liquid helium. While my shipmates changed course for the afterlife as they dreamt, I continued to faithfully send my healthy vital signs back to Earth. My duty was hibernating inside this pulseless, frozen body. And as I crossed the solar system, Mars metamorphized into red bugs, red clothes, red clouds, as it danced about in my subconscious. I was a bowl made of ice; only my dreams remained animated. Multiple centuries passed like a long nap. I was discovered lying down—by only myself. I could feel the slow pulse of a planet that was matching my heartbeat. How long had I been like this? When had the spaceship arrived? Was I alive? Or was this the afterlife and not Mars? As questions filled my head, my brain commanded me to close my eyes and open them again. But nothing changed. I probably wasn’t hallucinating. I squeezed my eyelids once more then peeled them apart. Centuries of time screamed out between my eyelids. I made eye contact with the spaceship’s black pupil. I could still remember the shrinking image of Earth outside the circular observation window. Memories crossed the vast expanse of time, docking with me in the present. Soggy feed and fresh fruit. Sweet meat dripping with juice. We were the pride and jewel of our research center. I was given the royal treatment leading up to the day of the launch, like a sacrificial lamb being fattened up for the gods. We were clones, the result of years of experiments that killed countless lab animals in the name of science. We were humanity’s dream. And humanity was our dream. My language, my intelligence, my thought patterns, my longing for home—everything about me seemed “human.” But were these things, was my longing for home, the result of natural processes? Or was it only something that had been transplanted inside me like a chip? I was born in a lab; I did not know what kind of organism I truly was. I received tests and training all the way until the day of the launch. I never got to properly say goodbye to Earth. All I remembered of my last days on that blue planet were but a few snapshot images: people waving their hands at me; powerful vibrations at launch; the pressure on my chest and ears; the heat of the engine, which was so intense that we thought the ship had caught fire; cables floating in space. Men drenched in conceit. Houston. Countdown. Ants slowly circling the observation window. If everything went according to plan, this wouldn’t be Earth. If everything went according to plan, this would be somewhere on Mars. If everything truly went according to plan, this would be the future. After all, the clock was set to five hundred years in the future. I turned, and a harness constricted my body. I forgot they had tied me up to protect me from the impacts of takeoff and landing. My instincts kicked in. I had been trained on how to free fall, how to move in zero gravity, how to take care of my excrement in space, how to find the button and release my harness. Button. Where was that button? Before I could even finish this thought, my fingers found what they were looking for. Just because I was awake didn’t mean I was completely on. I had released my harness, but I didn’t have the courage to get up. My body wouldn’t be as awake as my mind was. Something might have been damaged in the process of being frozen and thawed; it was possible my nerves might never come back to life. The low gravity could have weakened the valves of my heart, and my vision might not be as good as it used to be. I needed to move slowly and carefully, like a fish just thawed in early spring. I inspected each body part one at a time. After all, I was the only one who could conduct this process. Right arm. Check. Left arm. Check. Two legs and two knees. Check. My sense of vision, hearing, and touch were coming back to me. It was now time for me to lift my body and get out of this capsule. And yet, despite knowing what I had to do, I just continued to stare up at the ceiling of the spaceship. Bark. Bark, bark, bark, bark. Bark, bark. Bark. I could hear a dog. The barking lasted too long to be a hallucination. The dog was barking clearly and in rhythm. It also sounded like only one dog. Was there an open hatch on the ship somewhere? I realized I couldn’t lay here any longer; I had to get up and check the ship. When I stood up, my vision went dark from the sudden drop in blood pressure. But I was an expert in surviving in the dark. I breathed in and visualized the pain spreading throughout my body. As soon as I pictured the synapses and neurons reviving, the black cloud began to lift. When I opened my eyes, there was a Siberian husky in front of me wagging its tail. Laika. The dog casually opened its mouth and spoke. It talked in a foreign language that I didn’t understand. When I didn’t respond, it barked once, then switched to English. “Welcome. My name is Laika.” Her English had a thick Russian accent. “How—” I pointed to the closed hatch behind Laika but was unable to continue speaking. I couldn’t tell which was more surprising: that a dog was talking to me, or that it had opened and closed the hatch on its own. “You want to know how I got in here?” Laika asked, reading my mind. “There’s not a door in the entire universe I can’t open.” Later, I learned Laika could pass through walls. And not just walls. She could pass through entire planets and stars. Not even gravity affected her. Laika was dead. When I asked her what happened, she said it was a long story. But she did tell me about the moment she was reborn and what happened after that. “When the spaceship blew up, my body disintegrated and fell to Earth like a spritz of consecrated holy water. I’ve been wandering the cosmos ever since. But damn. Once I was dead, I realized there was no god, no heaven, nowhere for me to go.” Something about Laika seemed familiar. An image appearing on a monitor. I knew Laika. She was one of us, the first lab animal sent to space. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched her into space with the Sputnik 2, making her the first living creature to leave Earth. “I was born three centuries after that,” I said. “That makes me your successor.” “Where are you from?” “I was made in the US. I launched from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.” “I’ve seen many Americans before. I think it was when I passed the wrecked spaceship around Venus. I saw an old, white-haired astronaut at the window. He was licking the walls like a crazy person. When I asked why he was doing that, he said it was because he was afraid of the moon. This to me seemed ridiculous for someone floating in space to say. He said that he’d heard people would go crazy if they went to the moon. And then just as he arrived on the moon, POP! The engineer exploded, but the machine he was operating was perfectly fine!” “What a fascinating story.” “Right?” Silence fell between us for a moment. It was the talkative dog who broke the silence. “These all seem related. A crazy astronaut, a test animal that wanders the cosmic afterlife in death, and a frozen mammal resurrected in the future.” I realized the last one was referring to me. I crouched down, looked Laika in the eye. “Tell me, Laika. Am I a machine?” “No.” “Then do I look like a human?” “Well, you talk like a human. You walk on two legs. But you’re not one hundred percent Homo sapiens.” “Am I dead? I mean, you’re dead, not to be rude. So does the fact that we’re talking like this mean I’m dead, too?” “I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.” “Where are we? Is this space? The afterlife?” Laika stared into my confused eyes. If she were human, she would have shaken her head. But instead, she did the equivalent in dog mannerisms by turning in place twice. “It seems like by asking where we are you’re asking who we are.” Laika elongated her body as if she were stretching. She preoccupied herself to give me time to dwell on the profound nature of what she had just said. It took a while, but eventually I came to realize that Laika was similar to a theater actor in many ways. She was a dog with a strong ego. In fact, she seemed high on her own ego sometimes. Perhaps it was because she had wandered alone through space for such a long time, just like me. I didn’t know how to react to what she said, as though I’d just heard a bad joke. “Do you want to see my pet fleas?” Laika said, suddenly changing the subject. Laika showed her back to me. At first, I didn’t see them, but Laika directed me to each of her pets one by one—on the back of her neck, on her right front leg, three fingers left from the center of her back, and on top of her tail. The fleas were able to jump and stay in the air for a long time, probably because the gravity on Mars was less than on Earth. Each of the four fleas had been given the name of a former astronaut: Collins, Irwin, Schweickart, and Aldrin. “You used to be a pet yourself,” I said to Laika. “And now look at you. Raising your own pets.” “Do you know what the two conditions of a good lab animal are?” Laika put the fleas back in her fur, where they started sucking on her blood. “They need to be intelligent and healthy, and they can’t have a master. I ran away from home to wander the streets of Moscow. I considered myself lucky when I was taken into the lab and fed until my belly burst. But the next thing I knew, a million wires were hooked up to my body and I was being sent into space. Damn, it was just like that David Bowie song, ‘Space Oddity!’ You know rock and roll, don’t you?” Laika started humming as she crinkled her eyes. I didn’t know rock and roll; I didn’t know what this had to do with raising fleas; and who the hell was David Bowie? And yet I nodded anyway. It was weird; I was accepting everything without any resistance, as though I were in a dream. A ghost with fleas for pets? Where did she get the fleas anyway? Had they been on Laika when she disintegrated in the atmosphere? Did they turn into cosmic particles and re-form into fleas so that they could suck on her nonexistent blood? “We don’t know where here is. We believe we’re on Mars, but we don’t know which dimension this Mars belongs to. Don’t think about it too much.” Laika stared lazily at the dancing fleas. * It was now Laika’s turn to ask questions. She wanted to know the latest news from Earth. Unfortunately, the latest news I had was several centuries old, but that was more than enough to shock her. Laika hadn’t known that the lab where she’d come from was gone, and that all the scientists who’d launched her into space were dead. In fact, all the animal rights activists of the world who used to protest unethical experiments on animals had also died off. And Laika’s friend, Albina, who had been chosen alongside her but eventually failed the last test, had also died. And so had the Soviet Union. “The Soviet Union is gone?” Laika looked like an exile who’d just learned she was the last of her kind. She’d been homesick. The astronauts of the Cold War era had waged a proxy war, and as a result, Laika had been sent to space. Laika at one time had been a symbol of Soviet triumph. “There were even stamps with my face on them—” Laika looked dispirited—which was ironic because she was nothing but spirit. To lighten the mood, I asked Laika how she got all the way to Mars from the moon. “It was easy once I died. I just walked here on four legs. The moon was crawling with astronauts, both alive and dead. There was no peace or quiet. When I first arrived on Mars, it was a perfect hideaway, not one footprint on its surface. And then it occurred to me that I might be in purgatory, stuck somewhere between heaven and hell.” “Purgatory? What’s that?” “Don’t tell me you haven’t read Dante.” Laika stuck out her long tongue and clicked it in a disapproving manner. This Siberian husky, whose head barely reached my kneecap, was unbelievably smart and snarky. And the way she liked to show off her mental acuity by acting surprised by other people’s ignorance was an act of great arrogance. “Well, you’re the strangest animal I’ve ever seen,” Laika said. “You may not be human, but you’re just as dumb. Oh, excuse me.” But the look on Laika’s face hardly looked sorry. Laika’s facial expressions were as plentiful as her vocabulary, and I was getting sick of it. “But how can you stand this stench?” Laika suddenly became serious as she started sniffing the air. She then began growling in the direction of the capsules with eleven corpses. “You need to have consideration for my canine nature. My sense of smell is thousands of times better than yours, and the smell of rotting corpses is pure torture. Plus it’s disrespectful to leave your fallen comrades like that, you know. If we’re going to be together, we’ll need to make this place more hygienic.” I didn’t know when she and I had become “we” or when “we” had agreed to live together, but I just nodded. This was something I would realize with time, but Laika was good at giving orders, and I was comfortable with taking them. We got to work. But by “we got to work,” I meant Laika wagged her tail and barked while I did what she told me to do. Because she only had four legs and had come to Mars first, and because I had two arms and still didn’t know what was going on, I had no choice but to do as she said. I opened the capsules to find eleven clones that looked just like me, each at a different stage of decomposition. It seemed like there had been a critical failure with the capsules’ temperature regulation system. It wasn’t an easy sight for me to look at. On display were eleven different variations of death all in my image. The corpses that were only skeletons were easier to deal with. I shuddered when I touched the corpses that were oozing with bodily fluids. But I forged ahead and cleaned every inch of the spaceship’s interior, which was the size of a medium-sized Starbucks. And as I did this, I was also organizing the last few centuries. As I busily moved my body about the ship, my old senses finally returned to me. Outside the window, the orange sky was starting to darken. I opened the hatch to bury the bodies before the sun set. That was the first time I’d stepped foot on the surface of Mars. The scenery wasn’t much different from the wastelands of Earth. Jagged rocks, silhouettes of boulders on the horizon, and an apricot-colored sky without a speck of cloud. Was this really Mars? Without any clouds, the sky was like an expressionless face—the face of someone whose mind I could not read. I picked up my shovel and started digging. The Martian sand, which was finer than Earth’s, remained suspended in the air for a moment before slowly falling back down to the ground. I dumped all the bodies into the same wide, shallow hole, and covered it back up with dirt. I then cut a large piece of cloth from the airbags that had deployed during landing and covered the grave. I picked up four heavy rocks, which looked like pieces of olivine, and placed them at the corners of the tarp. And with that, the burial was finished. In the end, these eleven clones, my shipmates, had travelled all this way just to be buried on the surface of an alien planet. Floating in the Martian sky were two lifeless satellites: Phobos and Deimos. When I returned to the spaceship, Laika was sleeping under the cockpit chair. I went into my capsule and lay down. It was still a good bed. When sleep mode was turned on, a soft sheet filled with air would wrap around my body. But this device had another use that its inventor hadn’t intended: it would comfort me when I yearned for human contact. When the air tubes connected to the sheet pressed down on my body, it felt like some invisible person was hugging me. Out in the bleak expanses of space, could there be anything more useful than this? I wanted to let Laika experience this feeling, too, but because she was so proud, she hated anyone’s hands touching her. * It was about ten days after arriving on Mars that I was first able to hug Laika. That was also the day I met Deimos, so there was extra reason for celebration. That day, we’d traveled farther than ever from the ship to see “Eden.” “It has the most beautiful sand ripples on Mars. The name Eden was my idea. When you see it, you’ll know why.” Laika marched ahead as she proudly wagged her plump behind. I’d never walked so long through the desert, but I followed her without complaint, even though I was out of breath. After walking for the better part of a day, we began to see structures in the landscape reminiscent of clam shells. On low hills, geometric patterns were carved into the sand, as though they’d been etched by a master sculptor. And scattered throughout the sand were shimmering stones of gold, blue, and black. “It’s breathtaking!” I picked up some orange-red sand with my hand, and the fine, dry grains slid between my webbed fingers. Laika looked at my hand and clicked her tongue in pity. “What were they thinking, giving you webbed hands and sending you to a planet with no water?” As Laika said this, I noticed a strong wind blowing in the distance. But soon, I realized it wasn’t just a strong wind, and it wasn’t that far off in the distance. “Sandstorm!” No sooner had Laika shouted this than the storm reached us. I held onto Laika out of fear, huddling close to the ground and waiting for the storm to pass. Perhaps because of Mars’s thin atmosphere, the sandstorm looked more powerful than it actually was. A thick layer of sand covered us, but other than that, we were unscathed. When the storm finally passed, Laika, who was still in my arms, said to me in an irritated tone of voice, “Get permission next time before you put your hands on me.” As Laika freed herself from my embrace, she paused. “Oh my.” “What’s wrong? “You’re pregnant. And you’re a female! Humans are so cruel. How could they send a mother into space with her unborn child.” My mind went blank. And then forgotten memories started flashing through my consciousness. A lab. White lights converging into a single point. People in gowns staring down at me from inside the light. Dr. Lichnowsky. A syringe in his hand. As terror and unease seized me, the movie-like images started to blur, as though masked by a dense fog. I tried to close the door to my memories, but I’d already remembered most of what had happened. I’d been inseminated without ever having mated with anyone. “What kind of experiments did they do to you back on Earth?” More images. Graphs and monitors. Nurse Cecilia, who cried as she tied me down. The painful shot into my ovaries. The insemination took more than a few torturous attempts before they succeeded. But that was the last thing I remembered. Laika saw that I was unable to speak. She nodded her head in a knowing manner. “They erased your memories.” Laika really did know everything. She also knew how to comfort me. “But it might’ve been for the best,” she said with a bitter slant to her mouth. “Just look at me. I remember everything. There’s not a single moment I’ve forgotten. Wandering the streets of Moscow; being taken in by a family only to be chased out of the house again; my real name and the metal cage in the corner of the lab; barking at them to let me go; the researcher who called me a dumb animal too stupid to talk (I mean, have you seen a more eloquent dog?); the cramped cockpit with all that heavy equipment; the terror when the fire engulfed my spaceship and me. I was burned alive! Just five hours after liftoff, I was turned into space dust. I’d rather be a blank slate than have to remember all those terrible things. Erasing your memories was the humane thing to do.” Laika growled as she relived the horrors of her life. Even as I listened to her resentment, I instinctively grabbed at my stomach. I didn’t feel anything inside me. Was I really pregnant? It felt so strange. I didn’t know whether I was human or animal, and yet I had somehow become a mother. “I was once a girl, too,” Laika said bitterly. “I bet my descendants are still living on Earth.” As we made our way back to the spaceship in silence, each lost in our own thoughts, I stopped when I noticed a strange object. The sandstorm had uncovered something buried in the ground. It was an inconspicuous hunk of metal, something I wouldn’t have noticed had I not almost tripped over it. At first, it looked like a washing machine. As I bent over to look at it, Laika lowered her voice and told me to quickly dig it up. I didn’t have any tools, so it took a while to get it out of the sand, but when I finally managed to pull it out, what we discovered was a robot, about half my height and twice as wide as my shoulders. It must have been made of ultra-light material because it was almost weightless for its size. The edges were dented, and its tracks had fallen off the sprockets. The robot had no power. I said I thought it was beyond salvaging, but Laika pointed to the rear of the robot. “Hey human—or whatever you are—you have two hands, you know. Do you see that shiny board on the back? Wipe it off.” The place Laika was pointing to was a solar panel covered in a thick layer of dust. Laika was like a first-generation immigrant to Mars, and I was fresh off the boat. But I had no problem with following the orders of a dog. I didn’t have a strong sense of self as a human, and Laika didn’t have a strong sense of self as a dog. I liked her ordering me around and giving me things to do. And when I used my hands, I felt like I’d finally had respite from the thoughts threatening to make my head explode. I took off one of my gloves and used it as a rag to wipe off the dust on the robot. * The robot was only about half my weight, so it wasn’t surprising that it had been flipped over by the wind. After we dusted it off, we brought it onto the ship and set it up next to a sunny window. We soon forgot about it, like one forgets about a flowerpot of dead plants. One day, as we were in the spaceship listening to Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 at full volume, the robot’s lights came on. Technically, the only thing that had changed was the electricity flowing through its circuits. But somehow it felt like the robot was overflowing with life now, as though the electricity had transformed it from an inanimate heap of metal to a living, breathing organism. “Belated greetings.” The robot’s polite voice had an electronic buzz to it. Not only were its vocabulary and intonation human-like, but it also had a light at its front that mimicked a human face. The face didn’t have a mouth, but it did have a pair of neon eyes, which expanded and contracted to express emotion. I bent my knees slightly and gazed into what would have been its eyes. “I am Deimos, named after one of the moons of Mars.” “Does that mean there’s a Phobos?” Laika asked without any preamble. The robot’s eyes became long and thin and turned to the color of tungsten. After a slight pause, Deimos said Phobos had fallen into a ravine, and it had been a long time since Deimos had heard its twin’s signal. The twins Deimos and Phobos were pioneers, laboratories, and photographers all at the same time, and they’d explored every inch of the red planet. As an eternal duo, one would come to the rescue whenever the other was in trouble. Upon completing their mission, they’d lived five times longer than their expected lifespan, and over that time, they’d become close to one another and very intelligent. They explored canyons, traveled to Elysium Planitia and Valles Marineris, and searched for traces of water, sending back all manner of pictures to Earth, even ones of their own tracks. After sending the pictures, they’d collect sounds from space and play them back to listen together. Deimos said they were so happy when they got a signal from other ships. The twins held a vague fondness for the blue planet they’d sent images to. They knew the word “fondness,” and they knew the phrase “to long for.” To them, it meant sending data endlessly in one direction. The scientists who received these images would save them to a folder to be used to develop helmets, gloves, and boots that humans could wear on Mars one day. The photographs would increase, and there were plans to create a mock Mars environment somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico. Humankind would prepare to go to Mars there. They would put on boots, practice walking, and get their bodies used to Martian gravity, using tools and equipment designed from the data that Phobos and Deimos sent. The twin robots would talk tirelessly amongst themselves about the mock Mars environment, like two people who’d bought a house on a distant planet. They’d even made retirement plans to live there as monuments to their mission once they returned to Earth. They would be worshipped, and they would live out their lives in a cozy model home they designed and built. And— “Don’t tell me, you’ll be put on stamps?” Laika said, cutting Deimos off. Laika’s mocking tone shattered Deimos’s daydream. “I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but that won’t happen. Most humans die before they live to be one hundred. You really think they have the patience to carry out a migration to Mars that could take several centuries? Dreamers always make up a first generation of human explorers. They get on boats, chase dreams of freedom, sail to distant lands in search of gold. When they settle down in their new home, their sons inherit the land. Their people prosper from the bountiful soil. Their sons, and their sons’ sons, grow fat and weak from the successes of their forebearers. Success to humans is like reduced gravity. You might get taller under one-fifth Earth’s gravity, but your bones become weak. In the end, they stop exploring. They lay waste to the world they inherited and begin to wage wars. And in the blink of an eye, everything turns into a desert wasteland like Mars. Tell me, Deimos, what do you think your role in this story is? You were born from the ambitions of the first generation, and are busily sending messages to the second generation. By the time the third generation comes around, you’ll be all but forgotten. I bet the funds for the mission to Mars have already been reappropriated for war. All your messages are probably collecting dust on a hard drive somewhere. No one’s listening anymore. “The truth of the matter is that we need to escape from these pointless duties. Let’s not waste energy setting up high-powered antennas. Our effort would be better spent cleaning up the surface of Mars. Let’s stop wandering the desert and just stay here.” “But it’s in my nature to wander,” Deimos said in a tiny voice. It looked overwhelmed by the length of Laika’s argument. “You talk just like a human! Nature. Wander. Words like that don’t apply to robots. If you want to go out there and continue ‘wandering’ through a sea of rocks, be my guest. But this one’s pregnant. Speaking of which, do you have any medical supplies?” “I have a bio-protocol designed for any biological organisms I might discover. The protocol’s name is Doctor.” “Great. Show us this Doctor of yours.” Laika nudged me forward. I didn’t know what to do. Deimos extended its hose-like arm and pulled me toward itself with a clamp. “I just need one drop.” I felt a small prick as Deimos drew my blood. I could hear a fan whirring inside the robot. “Twelve weeks and healthy. It looks like you’re due seven months from now.” “Just great! How’s a baby supposed to grow up in a lifeless desert?” “Try not to go to the lower regions of Mars. There are high levels of radiation there. The radiation is so high, in fact, that it was melting the subterranean ice and sending vapor into the air.” “Vapor? Ice? Does that mean there’s water on Mars?” “By my calculations, there is about a sixty-seven percent chance of there being water.” Confronted with this shocking news, the Siberian husky shook her body and fell silent. A chance. A chance of there being water. And sixty-seven percent, at that. After regaining her composure, she began giving orders like someone in charge. “Deimos, this is vital information. If there’s water here, that means this planet can eventually become like Earth. And there’s nothing good about that. But that can wait for later. I’m a ghost and you’re a machine, so it doesn’t affect us; the same can’t be said for this one. She needs to eat and drink. And soon we’ll have a baby. Goodness, this is giving me a headache. Anyway, while I’m away, you need to look after this one. You’ll become a good nanny because you don’t complain and you act fast. By the way, is there anything else you can do?” I felt uncertain as I watched this large dog analyze information and make decisions so suddenly. Once she learned I was pregnant, Laika took extra care of me, as though I were now her daughter. I had been born without a mother, so when I thought about the love Laika was showing me, I wondered if Laika was a gift sent to me from heaven. Of course, the scientists who’d made me wouldn’t agree with such theological thinking. As soon as I learned I was twelve weeks pregnant, I noticed my body starting to change. I vacillated between states of extreme fatigue and severe insomnia, and I spent more and more time lying in my capsule. And when I looked at my slowly ballooning stomach, it felt like I was observing a waxing moon. Had I not known I was pregnant, I would have just thought my body was adjusting to the Martian environment. My friends took naps several times a day in the hammock hung under the spaceship. When the baby moved inside my stomach, joyful vibrations filled my body with warm concentric circles. As the waves exited my body, a smile formed on my lips. That smile created a new map on my face. But this only lasted for a short while before tears rolled down my cheeks. When I observed my rapidly swinging emotions, I was unable to tell if they were the results of experiments or just something all pregnant mothers experienced. Deimos said my condition was due to hormonal changes. When the morning sickness started, Laika complained that my sense of smell had become even more sensitive than hers, but Deimos explained that it was just vertigo and had nothing to do with my sense of smell. I couldn’t hear the rest of their conversation because I was clinging to the toilet bowl and throwing up. “Lue’s estrogen levels are thirty times higher. It’s to be expected.” “I’d accept that if she were just a normal human. But she’s evolved. She shouldn’t have to suffer from morning sickness like this.” Was I really an evolved form of female primate? Were these strong emotions really just the result of hormones? Regardless of their origin, my emotions were real and true to me. As a mysterious being sent to a mysterious world, this was the only thing I could tell myself with certainty. These emotions were real. And this truth belonged to me and me alone. One day, Deimos let me hear the fetus’s heartbeat. There was nothing that Deimos’s arm couldn’t do. Half-immortal, it was programmed to work for eternity. Right now, it was doing everything in its power to take care of us, and now it was letting me hear my baby’s heartbeat. The sound was like a small spaceship racing toward us at close to the speed of light. “I’ve never heard a sound so loud,” Laika said as though she were a poet. Over time, Laika and Deimos finished digging the well for water and once every four days went down to put ten liters of water in the tank. Deimos’s tests determined the water to be safe, but Laika wasn’t ready to let me drink it. She always worried about me. In fact, she was so concerned for my and the baby’s health that she took her pet fleas from her body and stored them in a container, even though I wasn’t due for many more months. “I can’t get rid of you guys, but you need to stay here for now. You might not be good for the mother and baby. I’ll let you drink my blood occasionally, so don’t be sad. We must prepare for the baby!” The desolate landscapes ceased to look as hostile because of the daily love and care that Laika and Deimos showed me. * I was taking a nap under the canopy. I was drifting in and out of consciousness as several dreams flashed across my mind. I could hear two voices, both in my dreams and outside them. In the dream, I see a cloud. It’s shaped like a fluffy feather, not like the clouds that form in the Martian atmosphere. As I stare up at the blooming cloud, I can hear my friends talking. “There are three ships.” “I know. But how many people do you think that is?” “A lot.” “Are they landing?” The cloud changes into the shape of a spaceship, and outside the observation window astronauts with pacemakers prepare to land. The images in my dream continue to change based on the conversation. Laika asks most of the questions, and Deimos answers. “Are they human?” “Yes. Humans. One, two, three, four. . . About seventy of them in a line.” Humans are coming to destroy the planet. Seventy humans split between three ships land on Mars. Humans are terrifying when alive. I remember steel bars. What will happen when they discover me, a lab animal? Will they kill me and dispose of my baby? Is that why they have come all this way? How can I stop this future from happening? How much time will it take for humans to get here? Something is pounding inside my body, either my racing heart or the baby’s kicking. “What about the well?” Long tire tracks appear in the sand. They morph into the shape of a whip, and then change again into Deimos’s robotic arm. And then I am open. Deimos cuts the umbilical cord. “I will cauterize it to prevent infection.” But in a daze from the birthing, I feel no pain. We’re at the coast. A glacier falls, letting out a loud sound like a gunshot. The glacier, which has grown for the last several centuries, falls into the water, and the baby exits my body. The newborn is covered in its own bright-red blood. Laika leaps with joy and licks the baby. “A child has been born unto us!” “What do you mean?” “The most glorious and succinct sound? Haven’t you read Hannah Arendt?” Patronizing Laika. We go down to the sea. We wash the baby in the water where the glacier has fallen. When the baby touches the cold water, it begins to cry and buries itself in my breast. I look at the thin, translucent, sail-like webs between the baby’s small fingers, then suddenly jump into the water. I put the baby on my stomach and wash away the blood. Fish dance. The newborn baby swims like a fish. I know this is all a dream, but not wanting to wake up, I squeeze my eyelids tighter. “What if they discover the well?” A low voice that comes from reality. I wanted to return to the dream, just one more time. To a world with no humans. White wrinkles appear on the sea. The wrinkles move toward me, and I float over their white ripples. “Waves.” “What?” “Sea wrinkles—they’re called waves, dummy.” Suddenly, Laika is continuing my dialogue. This is my dream in another place. A me from a different place is dreaming. The dreams of two people overlap. “If this were really Mars, you’d be jumping around like a kangaroo. And your eyesight would be deteriorating. And how could you survive -62° C? This place only looks like Mars. Even if something bad happens, it’s not real.” Another Laika is telling me this. Another universe, another Laika—a planet where several dimensions superimpose, where time and space bend, where the line between dreams and the afterlife blurs. I am moments away from being split in two; I have no choice but to wake up as I am pushed out of the dream. When I woke up, Laika and Deimos were still by my side. “I had a dream. A dream about giving birth.” When I told them about my dream, Deimos explained that it could take more than a millennium for an ocean to form on Mars. Did that mean I had seen the future? “What about the spaceships? There were seventy humans on three spaceships that landed on Mars.” “You must still be half-asleep. Don’t worry. We’re the only ones here right now.” Hearing this, I let out a sigh of relief; it felt like I was being embraced by my capsule’s air tubes. I picked up a rock of beautiful azure, placed it in my palm, and stared into it. Off in the distance, I could hear something that sounded like a plastic bag being dragged through the air by the wind. I could see the faint silhouette of a small volcano beyond the spaceship. This scenery—my nest comprised of familiar things and friends—relaxed me. Once this happened, I wanted to say something to my baby, I wanted to say something loving, words of mine generated by you. “You’re the only one I care about in this universe. My child. Every star in the cosmos is a mother, and we aren’t cold.” The baby will be born. I am here with your two aunties, so there is nothing to worry about. When I repeat this to myself and rub my large stomach, Deimos asks me if that means it’s a female robot. Laika perks one ear up as if to wink at me. My stomach wiggles in response. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert
Downpour Vol. 49 Autumn 2020

Her husband worked as a salesperson at an electronics store when one day, while wandering through the empty aisles, he suddenly fell. Because he was always clowning around and rather enjoyed the spotlight, his co-workers assumed he was pulling one of his pranks again. For this reason, there was a brief delay in getting him to the hospital for proper treatment—though the delay couldn’t have been more than a minute or two—a detail she found so upsetting that she burst into tears. Fortunately, he was diagnosed with nothing more than a minor concussion, and the doctor said he should be fine after a few additional tests and a week’s rest at the hospital. Her husband looked unusually relaxed during his stay. In fact, he went so far as to say he’d never felt better. She was a receptionist at a small trading company, and each day after work she headed straight to the hospital to make sure he had all that he needed. Several days later, her husband wished to be discharged, and on the evening of the fifth day, she brought him home. As she watched him leave for work the next morning, cheerfully cracking jokes as he’d always done, she sensed certain emotions come alive again. After leaving work early that day to prepare a special dinner, she looked back on their married life and sank into regret. Even so, she couldn’t help feeling a glimmer of hope that things would be different from now on. They had some money saved up. Maybe her husband could enroll at a community college. With a college degree, he would be able to find a better job than what he had now. Maybe they could have a child. She wanted a boy . . . All evening she was in high spirits, but from time to time, a sense of foreboding would hit her without warning. Still, she thought nothing of it. That’s why she didn’t see (or chose not to see) the many signs—he knocked over the decorative scented candle several times at least, he neglected to use his chopsticks, he dropped his spoon, and his cup slipped from his hand more than twice—each detail an essential element to the construction of our story. From that day on, she felt simultaneously happy and anxious, and couldn’t shake the sensation that she was floating in space. It wasn’t until four days later in the morning, when her husband said tearfully, “Honey, I can’t see anything,” that she finally returned to solid ground. When they went back to the hospital, one doctor started by saying, “No abnormalities could be detected in the eyes,” and delivered the rest of the diagnosis in cold, precise language, while another doctor opted for a more figurative expression: “If we just flick on the correct switch, I’m sure his sight will return.” Both statements filled the couple with hope, and it was this hope that spurred them on to undergo three surgeries in the next two years. In order to come up with the money for the final surgery, they had no choice but to move to a smaller, shabbier apartment, as well as take on debt. The day her husband received his third—and final—surgery, she sat tensely in the waiting room, looking as if she were expecting an important guest. She wiped her nose repeatedly with the sleeve of her worn sweater and began to leaf through the magazines strewn about the room, as if the very act of reading would somehow hide her pilling sweater. But unfortunately, almost nothing she read interested her, and in one magazine, not even a single word was able to hold her attention. Her mental state may have been to blame, or possibly the fact that the selection of magazines in the waiting room—they were about golf or tennis, or had to do with classical music, ballet, or lifestyle—was too sophisticated for her crude taste, but such judgments would be unfair. The truth was, the magazines were old. The director of the hospital believed buying magazines was a waste of money, and so had cancelled all his subscriptions years earlier. The only one there that she found somewhat interesting was a blues music magazine called Blue Shoe. (First published in the US in the 1990s, Blue Shoe ran for a total of eight issues in Korea from 1994 to 1995 until it was cancelled due to insufficient revenue. What she read was the Summer 1995 issue.) She had no idea that blues was a genre of music, and had believed it to be nothing more than a seductive, sultry dance, but for years to come, she would remember the song lyrics she read in the magazine that day. Please don’t leave me here. Won’t you help me fight gravity and rise up? I’m not that kind of woman. Soon after, a resident let her know the surgery was finished and asked her to come with him to receive a full report from the surgeon. She shoved the magazine she’d been reading into her bag, and slowly followed the resident down the narrow corridor. ⁎ They made their way through the heavy rain and arrived at Gourmet Restaurant. They hadn’t cancelled their reservation; they had run a little late, that’s all. The couple liked to dine there on the last Tuesday of every month. “It’s really pouring out there!” said Mister Jang, the restaurant owner, as he passed them each a towel. “I heard a typhoon’s headed this way.” Soon after, he brought over a bowl of olives and a bottle of wine. The couple was in the middle of discussing the same topic yet again—whether they should bring their son home from junior boarding school—but they stopped talking as soon as Mister Jang approached their table. Mister Jang was in his late forties and a bachelor, or so they presumed. His regulars had been the ones who’d given him the nickname “Mister Jang.” “I take it that your child lives far away?” he said in a friendly but polite manner as he poured the wine. “We’ve never mentioned it before?” said the wife. “Our son is at a private boarding school—one of the best middle schools in the country. They only accept students with the top scores. He’s in his second year.” “You must miss him.” “Oh, yes. Very much. He’ll be coming home this summer break.” Everyone thought they made a very nice couple. The man was in his early forties, and though he had a tired appearance and didn’t look exactly young for his age, he had a trustworthy face with clean-cut features. His wife was five years younger, and while she wasn’t a typical beauty, her face called to mind a bookcase made of a rich dark-colored wood and filled with books, brass hinges polished to a high shine, and perhaps a small, but elegant tea table. Mister Jang’s intuition and years of experience told him at once the meaning behind her words “this summer break,” but he was shrewd enough to refrain from probing any further. Long after the restaurant closed for the night, the couple was still engrossed in conversation. This sort of thing happened often. The man gestured angrily once in a while, and the woman wrung her napkin with both hands. After sending the staff home, Mister Jang went to the couple’s table to refill their water glasses. Only then did they realize there were no other customers in the restaurant. “We didn’t realize it was so late! Sorry about that. We’ll be off soon.” “No, that’s quite all right. Can I get you anything else?” Mister Jang smiled as he waited for them to respond. “We’re the only ones here,” the man said. “Why don’t you have a drink with us?” “I’m afraid I’ll have to pass on the drink,” Mister Jang said at last. “But since business hours are over, I’ll join you for a bit, if you don’t mind.” He took a seat at their table. “I was up last night, watching a show by myself,” the woman said. “You see, he was out late drinking with his fellow professors.” Then lowering her voice, as if spilling an important secret, she added, “He recently received tenure.” The man let out an embarrassed laugh. “A famous actress was on the show—now what was her name? She starred in that movie recently . . . you know, the one where a thief breaks into the post office to steal the mail. Honey, do you remember it?” Her husband shrugged. “Anyhow, she’s divorced and has a son who has trouble focusing. He has ADHD. And he’s only eight years old.” “So many kids have the same issue these days,” the man said. “Does it worry you to hear stories like that?” Mister Jang asked. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Well, don’t you wonder what you’d do if that were your child?” “Hmm, not really. Our son has never caused us any trouble. He does well in school. You could say he’s a model son, actually,” the man said, looking toward his wife. However, the wife ignored his words and turned toward Mister Jang, saying in tongue-in-cheek fashion, “Shouldn’t you marry first before you start worrying about those things?” “I guess I’m just a worrier,” Mister Jang said. The woman laughed. “Oh, you’ll be fine. You’re a clever man. If you get married and have a baby, I’m sure your baby will be clever, too.” “And how do you know if I’m clever or not?” he asked a little sarcastically. “I can tell just by looking at someone. I learned a bit of physiognomy back when I was in college. Believe it or not, the reason I married this man was because he had a good face.” The man laughed. Mister Jang laughed along. “Well, the actress talked about how her son grew extremely close to the old woman who lived alone next door. He’d go play there almost every day, even when the actress was home, and wouldn’t come back for hours. The actress obviously didn’t have time to get to know the neighbor—I mean, you can imagine how busy she gets. They barely talked, but just from what she saw or heard, it seems she didn’t have a good impression of the old woman. She probably thought it was strange that her boy was spending all his time next door. So do you know what she did? She asked the old woman to stop seeing her son. Now don’t you think that was going a bit too far?” Mister Jang nodded. But her husband asked, “You mean the actress said all that on the show?” “That’s right,” she said flippantly, as if the question annoyed her. Soon after, the couple stood up to pay the bill. The rain had stopped at some point and the late summer breeze that smelled of rain drifted in through the open door. Mister Jang thought the couple’s faces looked drawn and angry and somewhat sad. For a long time, he stood watching after them as they walked toward their car. ⁎ After her husband lost his sight, she played the role of the good wife without a single complaint. When she returned from work, she put dinner on the cramped table, and when dinner was finished, she painstakingly calculated their expenses. She wanted to pay off their debt quickly, but it was impossible with what little she made, even with all of her husband’s severance pay. While she wrestled with the calculator, he read a Braille book or listened to the radio. He enjoyed one program in particular where multiple guests came on to read funny anecdotes sent in by listeners. He asked her to add Braille stickers to the computer keyboard, and while she was at work, he typed up his own funny stories. When she returned from work, he asked her to print them out and mail them to the radio station. She never read his stories—not even one—and though she sent about half to the station, she lost the other half. In any case, not once did any of her husband’s stories make it on air. One day, tired of listening to the same station all the time, he started fiddling with the dial when he happened to catch the words of a public relations representative from their district. “We wish to cultivate an appreciation for arts and culture among our residents, so as part of this plan, we will be offering unparalleled classes at affordable tuition fees.” The district rolled out its most ambitious programming yet, holding courses with titles like “The History of the Library,” “Italian Cuisine,” and “Flaubert and Dickens” taught by experts on the subjects, who received generous remuneration for their services. The district’s efforts became publicized in local news as “Humanities for Citizens” or “A High-Quality Cultural Tour for Residents,” and received widespread praise. He told his wife about these classes, and suggested that she attend one once a week. In the end, the class she chose was “American Popular Music.” It was a subject she was somewhat knowledgeable about, since she had a good impression of the United States and enjoyed listening to the radio, especially after her husband lost his sight. Every Wednesday evening, she put on the only coat she owned and pushed her way through the chilly wind to the district office building, located two bus stops from her home. She loved the evening walk to her class, the smell of the lecture hall, her perfectly square desk, and the professor who always came dressed in an expensive cashmere coat. He had attended college and graduate school in America, and fittingly, he possessed extensive knowledge of not only American popular music, but also American film, fiction, poetry, and drama. She took copious notes, cramming her notebook with text, and when she returned home, she told her husband all that she had learned. With his eyes closed, he sat in his chair and listened. She always wondered why he felt the need to close his eyes when he couldn’t see a thing, but she never asked. About three months into the class, the district chief suddenly summoned the department heads and over a long meeting, made the decision to cancel all classes. One Wednesday evening, the professor of “American Popular Music” informed his students that his class would no longer be running and that “Everyday Yoga” would take its place the following week at the same time. He was kind enough to add that those who were interested should take the course, but if not, they should request a refund. There wasn’t a hint of disappointment or regret on his face. In fact, he looked relieved, as if a weight had come off his shoulders. After class, the woman sat alone in the empty classroom. She felt as if she’d been abandoned, even humiliated. About twenty minutes later, she put on her coat and walked slowly out of the building. She always walked through the parking lot and back gate since she got home much faster this way, but when she stepped out of the building that day, the professor of “American Popular Music” was standing in the middle of the parking lot. Dressed in his camel cashmere coat, he was talking on the phone, shaking his clenched fist in the air, as if the person on the other end of the line were standing in front of him. He was so agitated he dropped the car keys he’d been holding, and though he picked them up right away, he would shake his fist, drop his keys, and be forced to stop every few steps. She watched him repeat this comical routine several times. She waited until he finished his phone call to approach him. “Hello,” she said. It took him a while to place her. “I’m in your ‘American Popular Music’ class. I have to say, I respect you so much, Professor.” She was anxious that he might not recognize her, so when he said at last, “Ah, of course, hello there,” she felt enormously relieved. ⁎ Inside the car on their way home, they argued again about their son. As soon as they pulled into the parking lot of their apartment building, his wife slammed the driver’s side door shut and went up to their suite. He stayed in the car, staring blankly at the silhouettes created by the row of shrubs by the entrance, at the puddles gleaming in the streetlight, and at the end of the wet sidewalk, until his gaze fell on the fire lane. A few years ago, there had been a fire in their apartment. When he’d rushed home after receiving the news, he’d found several fire trucks in the fire lane preparing to leave. “Are you the father?” someone asked. His son, then twelve years old, stood clasping the hand of their elderly next-door neighbor, looking unhurt. At the time, the old woman had been living alone; her husband had passed away from a heart attack several years earlier and all her children had married and moved out. Whenever the couple needed last-minute child care, they left their child with this neighbor, but on the day of the fire, his wife should have been home. “Thank God it wasn’t a big fire,” said the old woman, as if she were making an excuse. His son’s room was the most damaged by the fire. To be exact, apart from his room, the rest of the apartment was fine. “The fire started in your son’s room,” the firefighter had said. The boy’s photo albums, clothes, journals, awards, and report cards all disappeared. “He kept saying he wanted to go home, said he wasn’t a little kid anymore, so I just gave him some dinner and sent him home, but who knew something like this would happen?” the old woman said. “Where did your mom go?” he asked his son, but the boy merely shook his head from side to side, staring at the ground with his lips pressed tightly together. Twelve years old. For the first time, the man realized the boy was growing up. He couldn’t bring himself to embrace the boy or hold his hand. The old woman said with a smile, “He’s very mature for his age.” The year before, she had passed away from lung cancer. After she’d received the diagnosis, she hadn’t lasted a month. Now her youngest son and his wife lived in her apartment, but the two families barely talked. After the incident, he and his wife—no, their entire family—spoke not a word about the fire. He tried, however, to spend more time with his family. A few months later, the boy said he wished to transfer to a prestigious junior boarding school just outside the city. The tuition was high and only top students were accepted into the school. Because his family had lived in the US until he was seven years old, the boy’s English was better than his peers’. The couple fully supported their son’s desire to transfer schools. If he were admitted, he could go on to the senior high school endowed by the same foundation, and if that were to happen, he was pretty much guaranteed a spot at one of the elite universities in the country. Their son passed the middle school entrance exam, and the couple became the envy of everyone they knew. But when did it all start to go wrong? His wife started believing it had been a mistake to send their child away, insisting at every chance that they bring him home and transfer him to a middle school nearby. Then he would calm her down by saying that keeping their son at the boarding school was the best thing they could do for “his future,” and somehow manage to persuade her. But at times, they would argue fiercely. Each time they fought, she would get up and leave, slamming the door behind her. If they fought in the living room, she would disappear into the bedroom and slam the door shut, and if they fought in one room, she’d go into another room and slam the door shut, and if they happened to be fighting inside the car, she’d slam the car door shut and go up to their apartment. He believed that her closing the door this way meant she saw the situation in an entirely different light. In other words, she wasn’t merely expressing her anger; there was a deeper significance to her action. Even so, in the end he always opened the door, making it so that they—that is, he and his wife—stayed trapped inside together. He went up to their apartment and found his wife sitting vacantly at her vanity table in the bedroom, still dressed in her outside clothes. When he saw her, a scene from a certain American book came to mind. It was about a man, who, at the end of failure, has the realization that his greatest treasure in life is his wife. A strange emotion came over him, but it didn’t take long for him to grasp that what he was feeling was desire. “What’s wrong?” “He was here. He left his laundry behind.” At some point, their son, if he needed to drop by the apartment, would come home only when he knew his parents would be out. They didn’t know how to interpret his actions. The couple remained silent for some time and then his wife started to dial a number. “Who are you calling?” he asked, but he knew exactly who. There had been several incidents like this. Six months ago, she had barged into his office at the university and insisted that they go get the boy. She said she had already let his school know. It was always like this. But not once did they actually succeed in bringing their child home. He gazed at her back, as she held the phone up to her ear. “No, don’t. The more we act like this, the more he’ll end up hating us.” But she ignored him, and put down the receiver soon after, saying, “It’s strange. He’s not picking up. We should leave right now.” She then added, “You’re coming, aren’t you?” ⁎ All they did that day was stand beside the parking lot steps and have some coffee from the machine. She showed him her lecture notes and he nodded appreciatively several times. All at once, she recited the lyrics she had read in the magazine on the day her husband had received his final surgery. “Please don’t leave me here. Won’t you help me fight gravity and rise up? I’m not that kind of woman.” She talked about Blue Shoe, and asked if he recognized the song. The professor gazed into the bottom of his paper cup and asked if the article had mentioned the song title. She couldn’t remember. “Sorry, I don’t have a good memory. But there wasn’t any other explanation about the singer or the song. It mentioned only the title and a part of the lyrics. But I forget what the song was called.” She felt her face grow warm, and for that reason, she grew upset. The professor said the words didn’t ring a bell at the moment, but that the title might come to him sometime later. He asked if she still had the copy of Blue Shoe, and she nodded, saying she could even give it to him if he liked. And then once more, she said earnestly, “Your class was incredibly valuable. I’ve learned so much.” When it was time to go, she tore out the last page of her notebook and wrote down her phone number. “If you happen to find out about the song, would you mind giving me a call?” That night, she read her class notes to her husband, and told him how she’d had coffee from the dispenser with the professor. “He’s such a smart man. Truly. More than we can possibly imagine.” However, she didn’t mention that the class was cancelled. When the following Wednesday came and her husband asked why she wasn’t leaving for class, she said she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to rest. They ate supper and listened to the radio together. She then helped him type up a funny story he wanted to send to the radio station. The following Wednesday came, and she remained at home once more, and again the following Wednesday, and again the Wednesday after that. Still she didn’t reveal that the class had been cancelled, and her husband no longer probed her. One evening during dinner, she asked him, “Do you remember how I look?” He tried to recall her face. Once in a while, she would gaze at her reflection in the mirror. Though she was only thirty-three years old, her hair was already going white in places, her cheeks sagged, and her skin was rough. She sometimes even woke in the middle of the night. She would look around at their cramped, dingy room, the kitchen sink that reeked of food, the bathroom where cockroaches scurried about, and finally at her husband’s sleeping face. Her husband, who didn’t do much except stay at home, had gained a lot of weight, particularly in his belly and back. She often thought about herself on the day of his final surgery, how she’d sat in the waiting room, and though she didn’t know the reason why, she felt a slight pain in her chest. Toward the end of winter, she received a call that her husband had been in a car accident and was in the hospital. He sometimes went out by himself with a cane. When she arrived at the emergency room, he lay in the hospital bed with his left leg in a cast and his eyes closed like a corpse. She felt her pulse begin to quicken. Her husband’s injuries were minor, and he fully recovered two weeks later. But for a long time after that, she vividly recalled the way her heart had pitched in her chest. After the accident, he stopped venturing out alone, and always stayed indoors typing, but he no longer asked her to send his stories to the radio station. Whenever she heard the sound of typing, she sensed something inside her shatter, and she couldn’t help but feel as if she were being punished. On the last Wednesday of March, she received a call. As soon as she heard his voice, she knew who it was. It was the professor of “American Popular Music.” He said he’d been away on a trip, and he’d called because he’d suddenly thought of her. “I know this might be crossing the line, but I was wondering if I could see that issue of Blue Shoe?” She turned her place upside down, but wasn’t able to find the magazine. Still, she went to see him. They met at a shabby coffee shop near the district building. She told him she would bring the magazine next time. And so, she began to go out every Wednesday evening once more. She told her husband she’d decided to attend the class again. In a way, what she told him was the absolute truth. The next time she and the professor met, they had coffee at a café far from the district office. He told her about music, film, fiction, poetry, and drama, and she diligently took notes. She even told him about her husband. When she told him that her husband was blind, the professor told her about famous blind musicians. That night, she read out her notes to her husband as she had always done, asking him at the very end, “Can you understand everything I’m saying?” ⁎ The rain started again, heavier this time. The sound of the rain hitting the car was deafening. The wipers moved incessantly, but the scene outside the windshield kept blurring. Because of the late hour and all the rain, the perimeter highway was deserted, which filled him suddenly with fear. His wife had been driving with her mouth tightly shut the entire time. He felt that what she was doing was madness, but he didn’t dare say anything. All he knew was that they needed to go home. “He’s not going to come with us,” he said. “How can you be so sure?” she said. “Did you forget what happened last time? How he called us and told us to stop humiliating him?” “We have to bring him home, even if we have to drag him all the way back.” “Let’s turn around. It’s raining too hard. We might get into an accident. It won’t be too late if we go in the morning.” “No, we have to get him tonight.” He gazed at her profile. She looked extremely angry, but she also looked unbearably sad. The thought crossed his mind that perhaps he’d been wrong about the desire he’d felt for her earlier, and that what he’d actually felt was the urge to hit her. He realized a certain emotion was trying to push its way through and drag him to some far-off place. “He’s not coming back. We need to give it time.” She pulled over to the side of the highway at once. “Give it time? What do you mean?” she said, her voice shaking. He didn’t know what he’d meant either. “Turn on the hazard lights,” he said finally, and closed his mouth. If they wanted to talk about their child, they needed to go back to the night of the fire. He needed to ask her where she had gone that night, why she hadn’t been home with the boy. But he didn’t ask. If she had been home, there wouldn’t have been a fire, and in that case, their son would have never left them, but even if there had been a fire, their son wouldn’t have had to fend for himself. These words threatened to spill from his throat. But he wouldn’t ever bring up any of this with her. He had no desire to blame his wife. The rain was coming down harder. Lightening tore across the sky, followed by a distant crash of thunder. All of a sudden, the thought that their child may have been the one who’d started the fire flashed across his mind, but it was an awful thought, a thought he needed to immediately discard. She had her face buried in the steering wheel. He reached over to turn on the hazard lights, but she stopped him without lifting her face from the steering wheel. “This is dangerous. The rain’s coming down hard. Please, let’s head back.” “I don’t care.” “Honey, please. We might get into a big accident. We might even die.” “Why didn’t you ever ask me where I was on the night of the fire?” she asked, lifting her face from the steering wheel. It was dark inside the car, but the light from passing cars created bizarre patterns and then disappeared. He felt numbed by the noise of the rain pummeling the windows. “It was for you. For your sake,” he said. “For my sake? How?” He hesitated, not knowing how to respond. “To protect me from your cheating?” she asked. “What?” He looked at her. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “What are you talking about?” “On the night of the fire, do you know where I was?” “Where were you? If only you’d been home that night, our son would have never left. For the last three years, I’ve tried so hard not to say this to you. So what are you saying now?” In the darkness, her face crumpled, and she said nothing for a moment. It seemed her eyes were filling with tears. “What are you saying? Are you saying it’s my fault our son is treating us this way?” “You left him on his own that night.” “Then what about you? Didn’t you leave him behind? Didn’t you leave me behind, too?” “What are you talking about?” “I followed you that night.” She glared at the wipers that were struggling to sweep the rain away and said once more, “I followed you.” She turned off the wipers, and swiped at her tears with one hand. He couldn’t see a thing. Everything was water. “God, I never wanted to bring this up,” she said. He didn’t know what to say. “You went to her house that night,” she said, choking back her sobs. “I parked in front of the house and was trying to decide if I should go in or not. Then about two hours later, I saw you come out—with her.” ⁎ It was her husband who had suggested inviting the professor to their home for dinner. “I’d like to listen to that intelligent professor myself.” She had no desire to show the professor her impoverished, miserable life. But unfortunately, her husband took the matter into his own hands, taking care of every last detail. He called the professor himself, and was insistent, yet polite, until his invitation was accepted. Knowing her husband was intending to be cruel, she wanted desperately to cancel the dinner, but in the end gave in. She cleaned, sprayed insecticide in every corner of the house, and threw out the food waste. While she did these things, her husband didn’t bother to help, but merely listened to funny anecdotes on the radio, and typed something on the keyboard. She put a few potted geraniums she’d bought from a flower shop on the shelf. She managed to find the copy of Blue Shoe at the back of the shelf, but she crammed it back in the shelf. As she was preparing dinner, she recalled how she had cooked a special meal for her husband the day he was discharged from the hospital, but the sound of his typing put an end to the memory. That evening, the professor came to their home. Years later, when his wife pressured him to talk about that night, the first thing he recalled was the smell. An unpleasant, peculiar smell. Before they ate, they sat around the cramped table and listened to the few CDs that the professor had brought as gifts. They were the albums of blind musicians, like Stevie Wonder, Diane Schuur, and Ray Charles. “Honey, all these musicians are blind,” she said to her husband, but he said nothing. The last song they listened to was called “Defying Gravity.” It wasn’t by a blind musician, but from the musical Wicked. The professor was kind enough to translate the lyrics for them. “The words are lovely,” he said. I’m through accepting limits ’Cause someone says they’re so Something I cannot change But till I try I’ll never know I’d sooner buy defying gravity Kiss me goodbye, I’m defying gravity And you can’t pull me down! “Aren’t these lyrics very similar to the ones you mentioned before?” the professor asked. While they listened to the music, her husband kept his eyes shut. “Honey, what are you doing?” she asked. “I’m listening. Isn’t that what we’re doing—listening to the music?” They played “Defying Gravity” once more, and she brought the meal she’d prepared to the table. She noticed that the professor was staring at her husband throughout the whole dinner, but she said nothing. “Please don’t stare at me like that,” her husband said abruptly. Before she could say anything, he continued, “Professor, tell me this—how are you so smart? How is it that you know everything? Please, you must tell me.” He set his spoon down on the table, locked his fingers together, and then rested his chin on his clasped hands. It was certain he couldn’t see a thing, but he acted as if he could indeed see. As she watched her husband, she recalled how, after the car accident, he had lain with his eyes closed like a corpse, and she felt the emotions from the hospital that day come alive again. “I’m not a smart man,” the professor said. “There are many more people who are smarter than I am.” “I suppose. Just like how I keep sending stories to the radio station, but there are so many stories that are funnier than mine.” “What kind of stories did you send in?” “Funny stories, of course.” “Do you think I could hear one?” The woman, seated beside her husband, shook her head from side to side. “If you’d like.” Her husband started to tell his funny stories, but none of the three people sitting around the small table laughed. Soon after, the professor received a phone call and left. She walked him out and watched him drive away in his car. Watching his taillights disappear into the night, she thought about what the past three years had meant to her. When she went back inside the house, her husband was listening to “Defying Gravity” while typing on the keyboard. She turned off the music. “How is it that he knows so much about everything?” she asked. “Apparently, his wife is also very educated. They have a son, and he’s very smart.” She added, “Honey, if we have a baby, do you think our baby could be as smart? Do you think it’s possible? I don’t think so. You know why? Because we’re stupid.” It was then that she realized the reason for her husband’s blindness, the reason they couldn’t afford to have a baby, the reason for their entire unhappiness—it was all due to their stupidity. It was simply a part of them, and it would continue to be a part of them for the rest of their lives. But her husband couldn’t care less what she said, and kept tapping away at the keyboard. ⁎ He thought back to that night. While they were eating, the blind man’s hands had struck him as remarkable, but the wife seemed to accept her husband’s behavior as perfectly natural. In fact, it was hard to believe he was blind. “Why didn’t you just ask me where I was going? Do you mean you left our son at home every Wednesday evening to follow me?” “I guess it’s all my fault then.” “Let’s go back. We need to go home.” But they stayed on the side of the highway, without turning on the hazard lights or wipers. The rain kept pouring down. “Honey, it’s madness to stay like this. We could even die.” “I don’t care.” “It isn’t what you think. The woman told me about a song I’d never heard before, that’s all. Plus, she mentioned Blue Shoe. You know how rare that magazine is. I wanted to see it for myself, and I wanted to know what song she was talking about. That’s the only reason I saw her. I’m telling you, it isn’t what you think.” His wife said nothing. “When I went inside the house, I noticed a bad smell—a strange, bad smell. I just wanted to come home. That’s what it was like for me. I swear it isn’t what you think. A sad, miserable couple lives there, that’s all.” “I know. She has a blind husband.” “How do you know that?” “Did you sleep with her?” She bit her lip. He observed in the darkness her forehead, the sharp line of her nose, and slender neck. “You must have seen her. She’s an ugly, poor woman. She doesn’t suit me at all.” Her eyes glinted in the darkness. At last she opened her mouth. “How can you say that?” She collapsed onto the steering wheel again. He thought about the downpour, the distant thunder, and their motionless car. Because their car was occupying a very small space in this world, it seemed they could very well disappear. “That was the last time I saw her. In the middle of dinner, I received the call that there had been a fire in our apartment, so I rushed home. I swear that was it.” “You didn’t call her again?” his wife asked, without lifting her face from the steering wheel. “That’s right.” That, however, was a lie. He’d called the woman a few days later, but she hadn’t picked up. And then he’d gone to her house a few months after that, except he hadn’t been able to ring the doorbell. “Fine, let’s go get him. Let’s go get him right this minute.” All he wanted was to get away, to flee, to go back to the beginning. But his wife didn’t start the car. He thought maybe now was the time he needed to hit her. “He isn’t coming back,” she said. “We both know it. We’ve lost him forever.” Their car stayed this way for a long time, hidden temporarily from the world. ⁎ After the couple left, Mister Jang began to clear the table. First, he took the dirty dessert plates, wine glasses, and forks and spoons to the kitchen and put them in the sink. Next, he removed the tablecloth and spread a fresh one over the table, spraying some water on the linen to smooth out the wrinkles. Napkins folded into triangles were set at each place, and the chairs were pushed in. After flicking off all the lights in the dining room, he headed back into the kitchen to wash the dishes. When he finished, he turned off the rest of the kitchen lights except the halogen lamp and made himself an instant coffee. He dragged a patio chair over to the sink and sat down. The rain was pouring down; lightning flashed and thunder crashed. Mister Jang thought about the world’s unhappiness—so much unhappiness, which had nothing to do with him. He thought about those swept away by torrential waters or wounded by broken signs and trees, those who lost homes and cars from flooding. He thought about all the crimes happening somewhere in the world at that very moment, about parents who lost their children and children who lost their parents, about people lonely and dying from sickness, about women giving birth to children they did not want. And he thought about all those caught in the downpour, stopped by sorrow and rage. Mister Jang took a sip of his coffee and was deeply grateful for the peaceful life he had.

Index

Authors

FICTION