I'll Be Right There Read online

  The cousin I lived with in the city served as my legal guardian until I finished high school. She got married around the time that I started college. At that point, it made sense for me to move out, but I had nowhere else to go. Even though my mother had sent me away, she did not want me to be alone. I stayed with my cousin in order to reassure my mother, who was still fighting her illness. But once she passed on, it became harder for me to stay there. My cousin’s husband was an airline pilot, which meant he was often gone on long flights to places like Paris and London, but he was not gone all the time, and I did not want to intrude. I would have preferred to stay with my mother, even if only for a short time before starting college, but she refused to let me. By then, she did not have a single strand of hair left.

  The next line in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, “I’d have thought it more a place to die in,” was ringing in my head when I applied for a leave of absence, the first semester not yet over. I had no friends, so there was no one for me to say goodbye to before returning to my parents’ house in the countryside. When I moved out of my cousin’s apartment, she gave me a look of regret and asked if I really had to go.

  “Sorry,” I said. It was not the right way to answer her question.

  “Sorry? What are you sorry for?”

  “Everything.”

  I meant it. I felt especially sorry toward my cousin. Sorry for not smiling more, sorry for taping black paper over a window in a newlywed’s house, sorry for not being nicer, and sorry for forcing her to look after me because I had lost my mother. I had noticed the sympathy that flashed in her eyes whenever she looked at me. After all, we had lived together for over four years. She urged me to stay, telling me to think it over once more. I told her I had already made my decision. She asked me again if I would change my mind. I shook my head. With a sad look on her face, she gave me a long hug.

  “Come back anytime, if things get tough.”

  From my cousin’s body came the fresh scent of a newlywed woman. She smelled like strawberries, leaves, a peach. The moment I caught that sweet scent, I knew I had made the right decision. Though the space I had taken up was only one small room, it was still a newlywed’s home. To think that I had taped over the windows of that room and forced them to mind how they laughed or smiled around me. To think that, even then, my cousin had never once frowned at me. Once, her husband asked me, “Isn’t the room too dark?” I told him it was fine, and he never brought it up again.

  My year at home was dull and boring. Dahn had also left for college and was living in another city, and my father’s daily routine never varied, whether I was there or not. Seasons changed: new buds appeared, typhoons passed through, persimmons swelled, heavy snow fell. In the space of a year, my father’s back grew more stooped, and he turned into an old man. He had grown accustomed to taking care of himself during my mother’s long illness, so things were no harder for him than they were before she was gone. Nevertheless, he grew old quickly. My aging father grew even more taciturn. I wondered sometimes if my presence in the house made him uncomfortable. I would go to bed late and struggle to wake up the next day; meanwhile, the first thing he did every morning was visit my mother’s grave. He laid fresh sod over it and even dug up her favorite crepe-myrtle tree that grew in the courtyard and replanted it close to her grave. I accompanied him a few times but otherwise avoided going with him. As I walked behind my father on the way to her headstone, he looked like a house that was caving in. So instead, I timed my visits for midday or when the sun was setting. That way, there was no chance I would run into him.

  My mother had not been afraid of dying. Rather, apologetic.

  It rained continuously for several days and then stopped. When it did, two things happened.

  My father returned from town, took off his shirt, and tossed it up on the porch, and then, dressed only in a sleeveless undershirt, he grabbed a shovel and went back out the front gate. A pack of cigarettes had fallen out of the shirt he had tossed. I grabbed the cigarettes and found a lighter and went to the back of the house. The backyard was overgrown with pumpkin and taro leaves. I squatted down and looked at the green taro leaves that had unfurled after the rain. Then I took a cigarette from the pack, put it in my mouth, flicked the lighter, and raised it to the cigarette. I kept looking nervously in one direction, worried someone might catch me, but my father suddenly appeared from behind me. There was no time to mask what I was doing. My father’s eyes met mine just as the flame touched the cigarette. He stopped in his tracks and eyed me for a moment, and then he turned around and walked away without saying a word. I prepared to be scolded harshly. I even thought that if we argued, it might take away the silence and solitude that had drawn a heavy curtain between father and daughter. But to my surprise, he did not say a word at the dinner table. I thought maybe it was painful for him to see me lighting a cigarette and he had chosen to pretend he saw nothing instead. A strange anger rose up inside me. I wanted him to scold me. That way, I could smoke without feeling guilty. I started to clear the table, but he suddenly asked if I wanted to dye my nails.

  “Dye my nails?”

  “I don’t know if you remember but once, when you were little, I dyed your fingernails with balsam flowers.”

  Did he? I looked down at my hands where they held the dinner tray.

  “When you unwrapped the orange dye from your fingers in the morning, you screamed, ‘My nails are bleeding!’ You ran to the well and stuck your hands in the cold water. You were so little …”

  On summer nights when my mother was sick, my father crushed up balsam petals, put them on her fingernails, wrapped them in plastic, and bound them with thread. She had asked him to do it for her. He said he wondered if the balsam was the reason the anesthesia did not take well during her surgery. After clearing the dinner table, I watched as he placed the crushed balsam flowers on my fingernails, and I asked weakly, “Dad, does dyeing your nails with this really stop anesthesia from working?” He murmured, “I’m not sure.”

  I thought, I’m sorry, Mama. I won’t smoke again, Mama.

  That night, I tied string around my fingertips and went with Dahn to the field on the edge of town. Dahn was home for a visit from the southern city where he was attending college. We walked over the railroad ties in the dark. Since moving south for college, Dahn had become taciturn, like my father, and his brow seemed permanently furrowed. His chin was unshaven and he refused to smile, as if he had made up his mind to not be nice to anyone. Not even me.

  “Dahn,” I said, and turned him around by one shoulder in the dark. We were separated by endless rows of black railroad ties. “Would you like to see my mother’s grave?”

  I didn’t think he would agree so readily. He nodded right away and said he would stop by his house first to get his headlamp.

  “Headlamp?”

  “I use it for night hikes or anytime I go out walking late at night.”

  “Do you mean the thing miners use?”

  “That’s an actual helmet. Mine is smaller. I have trouble sleeping so I use it in the dorm to sketch by. If I leave the lamp on, my roommate can’t sleep. I keep the headlamp in my bag and use it outside, as well.”

  Did he really just say he wears a headlamp in the middle of the night to sketch by?

  This Dahn who talked about sketching by the light of a headlamp because he could not sleep seemed like a stranger to me. We left the train tracks and walked to his house in silence. Our shadows crisscrossed each other on the wall. Dahn snuck into his house and came back with his headlamp. He tried to put it on my head.

  “No, you wear it,” I said. “Walk ahead of me.”

  Dahn put the lantern on. When the light flicked on over his forehead, he looked like a different person. We cut through a field and headed toward the mountain where my mother was buried.

  “You handled it well,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your mother.”

  Feeling a sudden pang in my chest, I hooked one of
my fingers, still bound with cotton thread, around Dahn’s pinky.

  After Mom died, I stopped reading books.

  My cousin called and tried to get me to go to church, but I did not want to listen to anyone. I did nothing the whole year. On days when the rain came streaming down or when I felt like a potato pulled from its vine, I would go downtown and slip into the theater that showed double features, slump down in my seat, and return straight home afterward. I kept my mother’s ring, the one with the pearl shaped like a tear, in my pocket at all times. In the middle of napping, I would wake with a start and hurriedly shove my hand into my pocket, searching for the ring. I would relax once my finger grazed the pearl, but it also made me feel sorry for the way I’d treated my mother. Once, after she had become sick, we got into an argument and I raised my voice at her. I was so bitter and angry with her that I imagined I was dead and pictured her looking inconsolable with grief. The ring reminded me of that. I could never take that moment back. I felt sad and hated myself for having wished her pain. But I could not bring myself to wear it. Doing so seemed like admitting that she was dead, and I was afraid of that.

  When we reached the foot of the mountain, Dahn hung back.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Spiders.”

  To get to the grave, we had to take a mountain path, and along that dark path, spiders would be building webs in the air, waiting with bated breath underfoot, or crawling on rocks.

  “You’re afraid of spiders?”

  The light from Dahn’s headlamp bobbed up and down in the dark.

  “They scare me more than riot police.”

  I giggled involuntarily. A grown man afraid of spiders.

  “Don’t laugh. You make light of them now but you’ll be sorry. Didn’t you hear about the giant bird-eating spider that attacked a village in Australia?”

  “No.”

  I had honestly never heard of it. But ever since learning about the baby spiders that feed on their mother’s body as they grow, I had been unable to like spiders. It was both fascinating and strange to hear the names that came out of Dahn’s mouth: wolf spider, tarantula, crab spider, brown recluse … Sydney funnel-web spider.

  “The strongest are the funnel-webs.”

  Once he started talking about spiders, he would not stop. He told me that spiders had descended from trilobites, which lived in the Cambrian period of the Paleozoic era, and that spiders had lived underground a long time ago but came aboveground from the Mesozoic era to the Cenozoic. He added that the number of species had increased exponentially during that time, and now it was difficult to comprehend just how many there were. Do fear and love share the same root? I wondered if he was really scared of them. He knew everything there was to know about spiders, the way you take a deep interest in something because you love it so much.

  “When did you start being afraid of spiders?” I asked.

  “A long time ago.”

  “But how come I never knew?”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “Why not? Was it a big secret?”

  “You don’t love me … That’s why you didn’t know.”

  I stared at him as he walked ahead of me in the dark despite his dread of coming across a spider. Each word—you don’t love me—hit me like raindrops falling from the eaves.

  “Did something bad happen to make you afraid of spiders?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Then what is it? Why spiders, of all things?”

  “Why do you have to add ‘of all things’ after ‘spiders’? Would it be any different if I said I was afraid of owls or squirrels?”

  Talking about spiders seemed to have put Dahn on edge. But he had a point.

  “You should just stare at a spider, head on, with your eyes wide open … Maybe you’ll overcome your fear.”

  “I tried that. Someone told me it was all in my head and that I should go see this spider museum way down in Namyangju. Confront some giant spiders and face them down. But the sight of the taxidermied ones alone made me itch all the way down to the skin under my toenails. I felt like my blood was running backward and my whole body was swelling up like one big blister.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “It really is.”

  I unhooked my finger from Dahn’s and looked at him straight on. He stood still, like a man waiting to be sentenced. I opened my arms and wrapped them around him.

  “Don’t be afraid.” Those words were meant for me, too. “We’ll be okay, we’ll be fine.”

  The light from Dahn’s headlamp, which had been sweeping the ground for spiders, shone on my face.

  “Can I kiss you?” he asked.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Dahn’s lips hesitantly brushed my cheek, my forehead. After a moment, he brought his lips to mine. They were warm and sweet.

  “I never thought you would be my first kiss,” Dahn said.

  I couldn’t help but let out a small laugh. As if I could have known either that he would be my first kiss and that it would turn out to be so unexciting. Against the night sky, the mountain’s spine looked like a ferocious animal. Its dark silhouette, like a large black beast lying on its stomach with its mouth open, was growing more distinct. As we got closer to the mountain, I started to feel afraid. I suggested turning back. But though he shook with fear of the spiders that he would never have known were there if not for the headlamp, he was adamant that we go the rest of the way to my mother’s grave. Nocturnal birds took flight, moving from tree to tree, as if spooked by the sound of us arguing about whether to turn back or press on. We continued toward the grave. Dahn was so busy shining the light on the path and in the air, checking for spiders, that he had trouble keeping his footing. He kept moving forward, though, even while describing how his knees would go weak at the mere sight of a spider, and how seeing one in the daylight, even from a distance, could give him cold sores. I thought if he was that afraid, he could just avoid looking at them. Why the compulsion to hunt them down with his headlamp? What if he actually saw one? Maybe searching for them with his own eyes was his way of coping with his fear. So that’s the kind of person you are, I thought. I had learned something new about Dahn. At long last, Dahn guided me through the dark to my mother’s grave, fighting off the fearsome spiders along the way.

  “We’re here.”

  As soon as we reached the grave, Dahn let out a deep sigh. It was the joyful sigh of one who had conquered his fear.

  “Let’s bow,” he said.

  “At this time of night?”

  “Isn’t that why we came?”

  “No,” I said.

  I told him not to, but Dahn bowed anyway, the headlamp still in place. When he was done, he shone the light on the crepe-myrtle tree and murmured, “So this is where he moved it.” He went over to the tree, took out a cigarette, and lit it; meanwhile, the thread tied around my finger came undone. The crushed balsam paste fell in front of the grave with a plop. Dahn’s cigarette flickered in the dark. He must have been rubbing his face with it between his fingers, because the ember danced around like a firefly. In front of my mother’s grave, I grabbed a fistful of soil, squeezed it together in my hand like a ball of rice, and put it in my pocket. The soil was probably touching my mother’s ring. Swayed by a sense of emptiness that made me want to grasp on to something, I looked over at Dahn where he was fidgeting beneath the crepe-myrtle, the lantern on his head and cigarette in his mouth, unable to set his feet anywhere comfortably for fear there might be a spider beneath the tree as well, and I nearly asked him, Do you love me? If I had, Dahn and I might have drifted apart irreversibly. I swallowed my words and stared at my mother’s grave. Then and there, I decided it was time to return to the city.

  “Students are protesting every day at my university,” Dahn said.

  I balled up more soil from my mother’s grave and put it in my pocket.

  “I beat up one of my friends,” he said.

  “You did?”
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br />   “It was someone I met my freshman year. He loved to eat. No matter what he ate, even if it was nothing special, he could make it look like it was the best thing he’d ever tasted. Made you hungry, too, just to see it. We threw him a going-away party because he said he was joining the army, but he wound up in the riot guard instead. He was sent back to our university to put down a demonstration. What luck, right? He gets sent to his own school, of all places … Whenever I walked past the riot guard, he would be standing there, drenched with sweat in the blazing sun. A few times, I saw him sitting on the ground next to the police bus, the kind with barbed wire over the windows, stuffing spoiled-looking rice into his mouth. Each time, I thought about how he used to eat so well, and I felt something surge up inside of me. Then one day, he and his buddies were chasing some students, and he fell behind. It was just he and I. I don’t know why I did it. When I saw him fall out of rank, I went after him. He spun around and recognized me. Neither of us smiled. We grappled—I don’t know who took the first swing—and just started pummeling each other, torso and limbs, blindly … He tried to run back to his group, but I stayed right on him, kept him from going anywhere, and beat the hell out of him again.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “Don’t know. Felt like I was going crazy. Couldn’t stand it.”

  “Stand what?”

  “Myself … us … my situation … I mean, our situation.”

  I listened quietly.

  “Just because I attacked him doesn’t mean I was the only one swinging. I took a beating as well. He punched me in the head, gave me a black eye, everything. He tried to shake me off, but I wouldn’t let him get away. I chased him, and then he chased me, and then I chased him again. It was all a blur. All that was left was the urge to destroy. Each time he tried to get away, I chased after him only to get more beat up, but I would not stop. When I finally came to, I was lying in my dorm room. Someone must have carried me there.”