I'll Be Right There Page 2

  “I call this my Brown Notebook. I use it to jot down my thoughts. I want you to have it.”

  He put his hand around my wrist and pulled me toward him; I let him put his arms around me. He pulled my hand down to his crotch and said, “You can have this, too.” He sounded so serious that I couldn’t help but laugh. With one hand on his notebook and the other on his crotch, I felt a strange sadness wash over me, and I whispered in his ear, “Can we go somewhere farther away?” But I knew there was nowhere else.

  Who can foresee the days that are yet to come?

  The future rushes in and all we can do is take our memories and move forward with them. Memory keeps only what it wants. Images from memories are sprinkled throughout our lives, but that does not mean we must believe that our own or other people’s memories are of things that really happened. When someone stubbornly insists that they saw something with their own eyes, I take it as a statement mixed with wishful thinking. As what they want to believe. Yet as imperfect as memories are, whenever I am faced with one, I cannot help getting lost in thought. Especially when that memory reminds me of what it felt like to be always out of place and always a step behind. Why was it so hard for me to open my eyes every morning, why was I so afraid to form a relationship with anyone, and why was I nevertheless able to break down my walls and find him?

  In my first year of college, I used to stare at the front gate of the university every morning and debate whether or not to go inside. Often, I would turn around and walk back down the hill I had just climbed. Even now, I cannot say what was wrong with me. For three months, during the end of my nineteenth year and the start of my twentieth, I kept the window of the small room in the apartment where I lived with my older newlywed cousin covered with black construction paper. It was only a single sheet, but it turned the room as dark as night. In that darkness, I left the light on and passed the time reading. There was no reason for it. I just had nothing else to do and nothing I wanted to do. I read an entire sixty-volume literature anthology, in order, each volume of which contained over twenty short stories printed in letters smaller than sesame seeds. When I finished, I looked out the window to discover it was March. When I think about it now, it seems so long ago. To think that in the happy home of two newlyweds there was a room that was kept as black as night! When I came out of that room, it was to attend the matriculation ceremony at the university, which was the freest place I had ever experienced in this city. Now Professor Yoon is in the hospital, Myungsuh is out there living a life that has nothing to do with me, and there is another whom I will never see again. But had I not met them where and when I did, how could I have made it through those days?

  I watched the snowflakes grow heavier and collected my thoughts. I reminded myself that the only reason he had called after eight years was to tell me Professor Yoon was dying. I muttered to myself not to lose sight of that. First and foremost, I needed to get to the hospital. We are always crossing and recrossing each other’s paths whether we realize it or not. Long-forgotten memories kept cropping up and surprising me, like pulling on the stalk of a potato plant after the rain and seeing endless clusters of potatoes pop out of the soil. Even if I never thought of him or heard from him again, the fact that we had connected with each other, however briefly, still made me sad.

  He broke the silence. I held the receiver, unable to say a word as he told me about Professor Yoon. Then he asked, “Can I come over?”

  At this hour?

  I thought it was over between us, but he asked it so casually: Can I come over? How long had it been since I last heard those words? Back when we were together, he used to say those words to me all the time over the phone. Can I come over? He would even call from phone booths to say, I’m on my way. Whether rainy, windy, cloudy, or clear, each day passed with those words ringing between us. Back then, he and I were always waiting for each other. It was never too late at night for him to come see me, and there were no limits to when I could see him. We would tell each other to come over any time, day or night. We each get one life that is our own. We each in our own way struggle to get ahead, love, grieve, and lose our loved ones to death. There are no exceptions for anyone—not for me, not for the man who had called me, and not for Professor Yoon. Just one chance. That’s all. If youth were something we could do over, I would not be standing here today, answering my phone and listening to his voice for the first time in eight years.

  I hesitated a moment and then said, “No, I’ll figure it out.”

  He sighed and hung up.

  My last words to him left me feeling lonely. They were my words, yet they sounded strange to me. I should have told him I would meet him at the hospital. It was a harsh thing to say. He had said the same words to me once, many years ago. By then, we were past the point of always knowing where the other one was and what we were doing. I had asked him what he was planning to do about something, and he snapped, “I’ll figure it out.” It seems that whether we are aware of it or not, memory carries a dagger in its breast. I had not been dwelling on his words all that time, and more than enough time had passed for me to forget about it completely, but in an instant, my subconscious retrieved his words and turned them on him. I was not the type to rebuff a friend like that. And if someone I had been feeling close to were to speak to me that way, I would likely start keeping my distance. His words had been roaming around inside me all that time, like lost puzzle pieces, before finding their way back.

  I returned to my desk and spent the morning slumped in my chair. After the difficult memories finally subsided, I was left with a cool breeze.

  Was it August? Or September? We were filling a basket with crab apples from the tree that grew in Professor Yoon’s yard when a cool breeze blew over us and we laughed. The tiny tree was barely tall enough to peek over the wall, but it was heavy with crab apples. Professor Yoon watched from the living room window as we filled the basket. I have forgotten why my college friends and I had gotten together to pick crab apples, but we must have been happy and at peace then, considering the way our laughter gushed forth.

  “Will these days ever come again?”

  My friend had meant it in an offhand way, but the comment cut deep.

  “Not the same days,” someone said sadly.

  We gathered up the laughter that had poured forth so easily a moment before and, to avoid one another’s eyes, looked at Professor Yoon gazing out the window at us, each of us lost in our private thoughts. Maybe we had already foreseen the future. After we finished picking the fruit, we returned to the living room and sat in a circle. Professor Yoon had fallen asleep with a book on his knee. Someone set the book down carefully on the table. Curious to see what he had been reading, I picked it up. It was The World of Silence. It looked old: the pages were yellowed and folded back. With my hand on top of the book, I stared at Professor Yoon’s socks hanging loosely on his too-thin feet.

  Though I knew I should go to the hospital, I could not bring myself to leave my chair. I felt like I was floating, and I kept dozing off. By the time I was able to sit up straight and examine my desk, it was already noon. Books I was in the middle of reading were scattered about, and a memo pad lay facedown beneath some papers I had been editing. Two pencils sat askew in a pencil case I had bought at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. I stared at the dove carrying a leaf in its beak engraved on the side of the case and then began to straighten up my desk. I closed the poetry books that were sitting open and put my scattered pens and pencils back in the case. I crumpled up the discarded papers covered in underlines and tossed them in the trash, removed the paperweights from the thick books that I had shoved aside in the middle of reading and gathered them off to one side, and returned the books to their shelves.

  For some reason, straightening up my desk always reminds me of death. Once, I had tidied up and was heading out of the room when I glanced back at my clean desk. Suddenly frightened, I went back and messed it up again. Growing old does not make us any better at lo
ving one another or understanding the meaning of life or death. Nor does knowledge come with the passage of time. Compared with when I was young, I am worse now at loving another person, and news of someone’s unexpected death shocks and upsets me each time. Nevertheless, I hope that when I die, I will be writing or reading a book at my desk late one snowy night and I will simply put my head down and close my eyes forever. I want that to be the last image of me on this earth. I brushed away the traces of death that clung to my fingertips each time I put a book on its shelf and finished tidying up. To get ready to go to the hospital, I lathered my hands with soap and washed my face, changed into clean clothes, and checked the mirror. On my way out the door, I paused involuntarily and glanced back at my desk.

  As if it had been waiting for me, the telephone rang again.

  CHAPTER 1

  Parting

  When I turned twenty, I returned to the city and made five promises to myself:

  Start reading again.

  Write down new words and their definitions.

  Memorize one poem a week.

  Do not go to Mom’s grave before the Chuseok holiday.

  Walk around the city for at least two hours every day.

  My mother passed away before the end of my first semester of college.

  The first thing she did after she found out she was sick was to send me to live with my older female cousin in the city. I was in middle school at the time. For my mother, sending me away was her way of loving me. She said I was too young to be tied down to a sick mother and that I had too much to live for. Everybody has to say goodbye eventually, she told me, so you may as well start practicing. I cannot say she was right. I think that if we all have to say goodbye eventually then the best we can do is try to stay together as long as we possibly can. But it’s not that one of us was right and the other was wrong. We just saw things differently.

  Up until her illness took a turn for the worse, I used to get her medication for her at a big hospital in the city, where she had once been admitted. Every Wednesday, I ordered her prescription at the pharmacy, sat in the waiting room, and waited for the number written on the piece of paper I was given to appear on the electronic display. When my number popped up with a ding, I pushed the slip of paper through the window. After a brief wait, a basket with a week’s worth of my mother’s medication was pushed back to me. I repeated this trip to the pharmacy every Wednesday to purchase my mother’s pills and mail them to her. Each time I called to tell her they were in the mail, she said, “That’s my daughter!” Always in the same unchanging voice. Good work, daughter! Thank you, daughter!

  Four days before she died, she sent me a package. It contained a ring she always wore and some perilla leaf kimchi.

  “Perilla leaf kimchi is your favorite.” She sounded cheerful over the phone. “I’ve looked forward to leaving that ring to you!”

  I didn’t know she would die so soon.

  Whenever I thought about the fact that she had packed perilla leaf kimchi for me and then took off her ring, wrapped it in paper, and sent it to me before dying, I rubbed my eyes hard, as if to dig them out. There was no more medicine for me to pick up on Wednesdays, yet every Wednesday morning I could be found sitting in the waiting room of that hospital. It was my Wednesday routine. I no longer had a number to wait for, but each time the pager dinged, I looked up and watched the display change. After a while, I would tell myself it was time to get to class, and I would leave the waiting room. But before I knew it, I would find myself heading toward the train station instead and boarding a train. Some mornings, I even made it to the steep road that led up to the school only to turn around and head for the station. There, I would buy a ticket for the first train out.

  There were always empty seats on the train in the middle of the day. I could sit wherever I wanted regardless of the seat number printed on my ticket. Some days, I was the only person in the entire train car. I would stare out the window until the conductor announced that the train had arrived at the station in the small town where I was born. Along the way, when the river appeared, I turned my head and stared until I could not see the water anymore, and when distant mountains suddenly slid into view, I leaned back in my seat. Once, a flock of birds appeared from out of nowhere and flew across a field. I watched them until the train went into a tunnel, and then I shut my eyes tight even though there was nothing to see anyway. I was always famished by the time the train stopped. I would slurp down a bowl of noodles in a shop in front of the station, and only then would I realize where I was and murmur to myself, Mama, I’m back.

  My mother’s death was not the only reason I decided to take a break from school. I was studying at a university for the arts. The campus had a freewheeling atmosphere that was characteristic of art schools. Some people fit right in, while others were left out. I was in the latter group. I doubt anyone there even knew what my voice sounded like. The male students were more interested in protesting or drinking than in going to class, and the female students were busy preening or being dramatically depressed. It was the kind of place where, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, you could burst into Hamlet’s or Ophelia’s lines and nobody thought anything of it. There, it was considered a performance and a mark of individuality to sing incessantly or to sit in one spot and stare at someone without blinking. Even if you weren’t trying to spot someone doing something unusual, someone would catch your eye nonetheless. With my ordinary looks, I felt as if I was always alone. Everything they said sounded to me like a foreign language from some far-off land. But that was not the only reason I decided to take a leave of absence. Back then, I would have been the odd one out no matter where I was.

  One day, one of my male classmates disappeared. He was a friendly guy whom everyone called Pedal, because he had this powerful walk that made him look like he was pedaling his legs. The day he stopped coming to school, he came running up to me where I was seated on a bench. He told me his younger brother was in town and that he had to send money home with him right away. He talked me into giving him all of the cash I had on me. He even took a book of poems from me—a collection by Emily Dickinson that Dahn, my childhood friend, had given me when I left home. Later, I found out that Pedal had borrowed money, as well as a fountain pen, books, and notebooks, from more than ten other girls that same day and then disappeared without a trace. Too late, it was discovered that he was not even a registered student. But while my classmates were exploding with rage, saying it was unbelievable that he had been taking classes with them for several months and that they needed to do something about it, I left to apply for a leave of absence.

  The night Dahn had given me that book of poems, he showed up at our front gate and called out my name. Dahn and I snuck through the darkened alleys of our hometown, where hundreds of thousands of our footprints were stamped in the dirt, and walked to an open field on the edge of town. We sat next to each other beside the railroad tracks. A night train chugged and rattled past us. The light coming from each of the cars was luminous. If not for the chugging of the engine, it could have been just glowing windows racing through the dark.

  “We have to go to college.” Dahn sounded like he was making a pledge.

  I was too surprised to respond.

  “I’m going to be an artist,” he said.

  I felt like I was going to burst. The night breeze blew toward us over the field and seemed to carry our hopes with it, departing before us into some distant time. When Dahn and I parted ways that night, he handed me a paperback book of poetry. He said that he had just finished reading it and so was giving it to me. It was too dark for me to make out the title.

  “They say that when she died, she left over seventeen hundred poems stashed in a drawer,” he said. “Her first collection was published four years after her death.”

  “Who?”

  “Emily Dickinson.”

  “E-mi-ly Di-ckin-son.” Even after sounding out the syllables, I still did not recognize the name. Dahn had always known
from a young age what he wanted to do; he thought deeply about things and conducted himself differently from our peers. He read different books, owned different things, and had a different way of speaking.

  “She seemed to see things that were not of this world,” he said.

  “Not of this world?”

  “Things we can’t see. Like death … and so on.”

  It was the first time I had heard someone my age talk about death or things that were not of this world. That was probably why Dahn always seemed like he was a few years older than he really was. When I got home and flipped to the first page of the book, the first thing I saw was Dahn’s handwriting.

  I began to tread softly … Poor people shouldn’t be disturbed when they’re deep in thought.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

  I liked Dahn’s handwriting. It looked scribbled, but the style was so energetic that it reminded me of the hoofbeats of a galloping horse. I stared at the quote and realized it was goodbye. I put the book in the bottom of my bag.

  Because I could not stop for Death,

  He kindly stopped for me;

  The carriage held but just ourselves

  And Immortality.

  When I read Dickinson’s poetry, I pictured my mother’s face. I wanted to savor the poems, so I read them slowly, going over each one five times. When I finished the book, I took my first subway ride to a large bookstore on Jongno Street, clinging to the strap the whole way to keep from swaying. The first book I spent money on in this city was The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. With no clue as to what it was about, I selected it because it was the title Dahn had written in the book. On the subway ride back, I opened to the first page.

  Here, then, is where people come to live.

  As I stared vacantly at the first sentence, a single tear fell from my eye, a tear that had refused to come even when I left home. Was I, too, one of those who had come to live? This city was not kind to me. It had tall buildings and many houses and countless people, but no one to greet me gladly or take my hand. Too many wide and narrow streets made me lose my way frequently. And I had no intention of getting to know the people of this city. I grew accustomed to not greeting people when I met them and behaved like a young exile.