Beauty Looks Down on Me Read online

  The woman came up behind me. “Did I drive last night?”

  “My cousin did. Not many places to drink around here. So I guess you guys know each other? I heard you telling him you’d have breakfast at his restaurant.”

  I told her I didn’t have any appetite at all.

  6

  IT WAS ALMOST noon when the woman and I pulled up at the dock. It was so completely deserted, it was hard to imagine a more desolate place. When we checked the ferry schedule, we found out it only made two trips a day. Having sensed the presence of people, an old woman thrust her head out the door of the corner store. “Not many people want to take the ferry anymore since the road for cars has been completed,” she said brusquely, and clutched the door as if she was about to slam it shut.

  “You can get there by car? I thought it was an island.”

  “An island? It’s just a long way to travel on a mountain trail, so people used to get there by crossing the river.”

  “How long will it take to drive to the temple?”

  The old woman stared straight at me.

  “There’s no temple. There’s only the site of the temple.”

  “Was it torn down?”

  “There was no temple there in the first place. No, maybe I heard one used to be there, until a few hundred years ago.”

  “But I saw the name of the temple printed on the map. I even saw a sign.”

  “Just because you see the name of the temple doesn’t mean the temple is going to be there. Maybe the map forgot to indicate that it’s just the ruins. And maps can be wrong. Mapmakers are only human.”

  “I guess I didn’t think of that.”

  The old woman asked me whether I still wanted to buy a ticket. When I told her no, the door to the store swung closed behind her.

  After getting in the car again, I told the woman we should head back. It occurred to me that my memory of sneaking into the temple’s main hall in the dead of night, of lying on a wooden floor cold enough to send shivers through my bones, might have been of a different temple. Now it seemed I’d gone into the main hall by myself, and if that were the case, maybe the entire memory was wrong. But the woman said she wouldn’t miss out on seeing the river after coming this far and stubbornly got out of the car. She brushed past me and led the way, once again like some amiable guide. Her steps were astonishingly quick. Both the ribbon tying her long, wavy hair and her flared skirt seemed to fly in the wind as I followed behind her reluctantly. Before I knew it she was already entering the path down through the pine groves along the river. The yellow dust that had followed us there was blurring everything. I saw the woman climb atop a tall, jutting rock and straddle it.

  “I don’t think I did any experiments on how to become lighter.” I told her while trying to catch my breath. “It’s just what I happened to be thinking when they pushed me into the river. I wished my body could become light. I wished that I could float up into the sky.”

  The boarders had all hated me and tortured me routinely with their mean-spirited pranks. The older of the two medical students never exchanged a word with me. Just once he came looking for me in my room and asked me whether his younger brother had really been sleeping or if he’d been playing cards, and I was incapable of lying. The hwatu rounds broke up after that. But card games aside, the whiny law student continued to borrow money from me. He knew I wouldn’t play dumb and say I didn’t have any money to lend him. He also knew that if he told me later he didn’t have the money to pay me back, I wouldn’t have the courage to call him out and say, “You’re lying to me, aren’t you?” It was the same case with the handsome engineering student. When he brought a girl home and wanted to hide her in my room, I couldn’t make up some excuse to get out of it. And while I did see J and his friends from time to time, going down an alley late at night carrying a soju bottle and some glue wrapped in a plastic bag, I wasn’t spying. It was merely a scene that anyone standing by the window would have naturally encountered.

  When the English student who was good with a guitar learned that I liked Jim Morrison, he taped the word “DOORS” to my door.

  “What does it mean?” I asked him.

  “Isn’t it just like you to call a door a door?”

  But I knew very well about the line from an English poem posted over his desk: “There are things known, and things unknown: in between are the doors” (William Blake).

  Red ribbon in her wavy hair, her dress wide and frilled, the woman watched the river and swung her legs like a child left alone on the tall rock. She kept crossing and re-crossing her short legs dangling in midair. It suddenly occurred to me that I might have hurt S. I might have hurt this woman too. I might have hurt my family—maybe the whole world. What had I done wrong?

  “Are you crying?”

  “Because of all the yellow dust. I might get an eye infection.”

  “Liar!”

  The woman threw her head back and cackled gleefully.

  “I fell into the water while carrying someone else’s ID. I dried myself off at the minbak house near the temple.”

  “They’re all lies.”

  That’s when it happened. The woman’s body, along with her laughter, floated up into the air. I grabbed the hem of her skirt and at that moment I felt my own body floating up with her. In a whirl of reddish yellow dust, I could see the river off in the distance, and all the passengers crowding the boat, the man in a black coat, and the image of K in his younger days with his hands stuffed in his pockets, looking down the river with a hesitant expression, puffs of white breath coming from his mouth. So this is how it’s done, I muttered to myself. I have finally completed my research on how to make my body lighter.

  7

  IT WAS S’s birthday. I took her to Ruby Tuesday’s.

  “Really? Ruby Tuesday’s of all places? I’m too old to sit here and blow out candles with a tiara on my head.”

  S was full of complaints, but it was the only restaurant near the dorm that served Western-style food. Here and there, children were being rowdy. A server appeared dressed like a girl from the Alps. After greeting us with a curtsy, she asked us if we wanted the non-smoking section. “Yes, and can you seat us in a quiet area?” S said in a voice full of restraint, after shooting daggers with her eyes at the rowdy children.

  “This is the only quiet spot at the moment. Is this okay?” The server had guided us toward a booth by a window, way off in the corner of the restaurant. How could such a quiet table still be available? Relieved, I slid into the booth first, sitting on the inside with my back to the wall. The space between the table and the bench was too tight, so I pushed the table away from me a little. Then S tried to seat herself across from me. But the opening was too narrow so that her body wouldn’t fit between the table and the bench. S peevishly shoved the table back in my direction and tried to squeeze herself in. Needless to say, the table was practically touching my chest, and S’s angry face wasn’t far away. We ended up leaving our seats in the reverse order we’d taken them, and were guided to a table right next to the rowdy children, our mood now even worse.

  “What’s the point of having a booth where customers can’t even sit down?”

  The server gave S a ready response. “Something wrong with the design, I guess. But some customers occasionally do sit there.”

  S and I barely exchanged a word over our steak and beer. We’d been seeing each other for ten years by then, so it wasn’t like there was much left to talk about. Secretly, we knew that the moment we opened our mouths, we might blurt out that the whole thing had gotten tedious or that we should just break up. That day, we drank late into the night. Most of the customers had left by then, so for the first time, the atmosphere was quiet, just like S had wanted. I saw a man being guided to the cramped booth where S and I had tried to sit. He was carrying a large instrument case, and there were streaks of gray in his hair. He looked tired. The waitress guiding the man was so short she might have been a dwarf. I didn’t think it was such a strange
sight, since this was a family restaurant known for hosting special events. After pouring some coffee for the man, the short waitress took a seat across from him and they started talking. The booth fit them perfectly. The man lowered his eyes and drank his coffee without a word. The woman laughed occasionally while looking off into space with googly eyes, talking to herself in an animated way. From where we were seated, she looked like a mime. Every time the woman moved, the instrument case leaning against the wall blocked some of the lighting, casting a broad shadow across her face. Soon, the man rose from his seat, and pushed the table aside to sit next to the waitress. As soon as he sat down, he leaned his head on the dwarf woman’s shoulder. I stared blankly at the sight of this man, who was now sobbing.

  S suddenly called out in a low voice. “That sign was on our left a while ago, but now it’s on our right. I’m positive. I’m positive it was over there!”

  Slowly I brought the beer mug to my lips and slurped up the foam as I spoke. “It’s a revolving restaurant. It turns a few degrees every second, and once every hour it returns to the same position.”

  “What? You should have told me so from the start!” There were tears in S’s eyes. “Everything you do is like this. I know you want to tell me it’s not your fault that the place is a revolving restaurant. You always go by the principle that you’re never wrong, so in the end, nobody’s to blame. Right?”

  S’s voice must have been a bit loud because the musician and the dwarf woman seated across from us turned to look at us. That’s when I knew that the woman’s eyes had met mine. Under her flared skirt, her short, neatly tucked legs were dangling in midair. And that’s when I felt a part of me split from myself, float up, and drift toward the musician. The me who had crossed over to sit beside the dwarf woman began sobbing, my face buried in her shoulder. “I’m sorry, I kept on muttering. I’m sorry. I’m a useless bastard. I’m sorry.” It didn’t seem like my tears would stop any time soon.

  Translated by Jae Won Chung

  WEATHER AND LIFE

  B’s Daydream

  B THOUGHT THAT she’d astonish the world someday. She didn’t know what it would be exactly; only that one day, something would suddenly happen. If her present state was all there was, her life was too tedious.

  Perhaps she’d inherit a vast estate from some distant relative whose face she hadn’t even seen, like Little Lord Fauntleroy. She frequently lost herself in daydreams. What if she happened to discover some ancient treasure, hundreds of years old, buried in the corner of the yard? Or if she were to help a scruffy vagabond child on his way, only to find out that he was hiding his real identity and was in fact the son of the president, tired of his magnificent surroundings, off in search of a true friend. And if the person in need of help wasn’t a boy but an adult, he could be a movie director in search of a young actress who, though on the surface quite ordinary in appearance, possessed a unique, hidden charm.

  B’s imagination was her only friend on the tiresome trips home from school. One day, she stopped and stood for a long time in front of a poster advertising the performance of a world-renowned Korean soprano. It wasn’t because such a high-level classical performance was a rare occurrence in the small town she lived in. Instead, she was thinking that the magnificent, beautiful female singer might have insisted on volunteering for a provincial tour in order to find her real daughter. B imagined herself following her real mother on tour around the world.

  No one knew when or how such instantly life-changing events might occur. B was especially friendly toward strangers. Moreover, she had a tendency to accept common, trivial, everyday matters as signs of something more significant.

  To anyone else, it was ordinary to see a row of neatly-placed shoes in disarray, or have a neon sign light up in front of one’s eyes, or hear church bells suddenly ring while walking down the street. But every time such a thing happened to B, she’d carefully look around, her attention focused. When she walked, she’d often glance behind as if someone was following her; all anyone would have to do is tap her on the shoulder, and she’d jump with fright. Graffiti was another thing that attracted her interest. It was just random scribbling to a normal person’s eyes, but to B it could be a message from beyond sent to her alone.

  B’s imagination expanded the limits of her four-dimensional world. She’d always considered it necessary to exercise caution on one’s path, particularly at forks in the road. Choosing which direction to follow can, after all, completely change one’s life. Consequently, the moment she set foot in one direction, she’d close her eyes tightly in acceptance of the future consequences of her choice. But at some point she’d begun to think that there was an abundance of invisible boundary lines throughout the world. To unintentionally cross these lines meant to be sucked into a black hole and thrown into another dimension. People were unable to perceive them; clearly all those who’d gone missing had crossed those boundaries and had gone into another dimension. Even in B’s neighborhood, there was a gentleman of whom nothing had been heard in years. No one knew that he’d at some place and time stumbled upon one of those boundaries. Since normal people wouldn’t even realize it if it happened to them, B considered life to be a dangerous, and at the same time dramatic, thing. Naturally she was different than other people.

  It was a day when class was held outside, on the mountain behind the school. In search of a place to eat her packed lunch by herself, B stopped on a small trail. A huge log was blocking the way. A tree trunk had snapped in a typhoon the previous season and lay where it had fallen. To B, however, the log blocking the path looked like a border dividing the present world from a different, unknown world. At last, she’d come upon a boundary. She could clearly sense the flow of a mysterious, concentrated energy in the area, dizzying like a whirlpool. She felt a momentary chill run down her spine. She thought that the moment she stepped over the log, she might be entering a completely different world; there seemed to be unknowable beings enveloping her, watching over her decision with bated breath.

  Unable to overcome her tension and dizziness, B suddenly collapsed to the ground. Her classmates sent word to the teacher in charge who came and helped her up, and thus B was able, just barely, to return to the normal world. She was scolded for walking away from the grounds of her beloved school, the “School of Love.”

  From that day forward, B began to think that she might have been born with a rare disease, regardless of the fact that her mother, when she heard what had happened, thought it was just a mild case of anemia and nothing to worry about. It was once difficult for her to understand why she’d been born into such mediocrity. But perhaps, since she was an exceptional individual, provision had been made for her to be raised as a normal person for her own protection. Her mind was supplied with one particular fancy, that through her rare disease she became aware of herself as one born of nobility. Ah, with life being full of so many codes, it’s a wonder how many riddles we have to solve along the way.

  Moving

  B CONSIDERED HERSELF a duck who would one day leave for her real parents and become the crowned swan that she was born to be, just like in The Ugly Duckling. She wasn’t too concerned about what was going on with her family. In fact, she’d always thought that the members of her household didn’t care much about her. A family should have a special, anxious attachment to each other, like in Little Women. B’s idea of a family was hiding presents deep in the backs of drawers, or looking down tenderly at sleeping faces, or standing at the window for a long, long time to watch one’s child walk to school. Parents should always immediately stop whatever they’re doing to lend an ear to their children’s troubles; one need only look at Hansel and Gretel to see that big brothers should accompany and watch over their little sisters, wherever they happen to go. In that sense, there wasn’t a single person in her family who acted like family. On top of that, in terms of an inability to recognize her uniqueness, her teacher and classmates were no different. B thought that she received unfair treatment from her fam
ily. The intimacy she shared with them was in fact normal, but it was difficult for B to accept wholeheartedly.

  Since last winter, some change had taken place at B’s home. With her parents quarrelling more frequently, her father had been away since January. They said he’d gone on a long-term business trip. And one day in February, her mother said that she was moving the family to a big city so that her second-oldest brother could go on to high school. With no word from B’s oldest brother, as usual, her mother had no choice but to do the packing for the move by herself. She gathered all of the things up and put them outside: her husband’s prized collection of books, his bicycle, his clothes and shoes; and the guitar, the record player, the set of dumbbells, the motorcycle posters on the walls, and other stuff scattered around her oldest son’s room. But they didn’t take any of it with them. They moved with little more than half of their household goods.

  B’s mother had the most trouble deciding whether to keep or to throw out the complete collection of World’s Classics for Boys and Girls that stood in numerical order in the bookcase in B’s room. She thought that at B’s age, they were too childish for her, and that spending too much time reading storybooks would make her indifferent to study and more prone to indulge in wild fantasies. With B now about to enter middle school, there was no reason to take along a bunch of storybooks for children. Nevertheless, probably thinking that it would be wasteful to throw them away, she filled two boxes with them in the end and loaded them onto the moving truck.

  Sitting with her mother in the truck’s passenger seat, B arrived in a city she was seeing for the first time in her life. The place where they unloaded their things was an old neighborhood atop a hill on the outskirts of the city. The house had only two rooms; the wardrobe went in first, into the main room, and then B’s second-oldest brother’s desk was put in the room opposite. After the moving truck left, her brother, who’d taken the bus alone, stepped in through the gate late in the afternoon. He grumbled that he’d thought he was going to die trying to find the place and was seemingly displeased with both the house and the fact that they’d moved. For some reason he seemed to be severely angry with his mother, too. He trampled on B’s neatly lined up shoes, stomped violently on the wooden floor, and if that wasn’t enough, he mercilessly kicked apart the boxes of World’s Classics for Boys and Girls that were lying off to the side of the narrow room. B resolved that when she transformed her life into something more splendid, she’d summon her brother just so that the look of surprise on his face would be the very first thing she’d see.