Diary of a Murderer Read online

  Once Seojin learned that the man’s life was based on such simple patterns, he decided to target his early-morning walk. He wanted to turn up without warning and ask him, “Why the hell did you kill Ina?” But one morning after Seojin actually began trailing him, he wondered if it made any difference whether or not he asked his question and planted fear and guilt in the man. He also feared that the man would threaten or attack him in order to cover up his sins. While Seojin followed the man, feeling conflicted, someone burst out from behind a dawn redwood tree and tackled Ina’s husband.

  “You fucking murderer!”

  Seojin quickly recognized him: the loan shark who’d attacked him from behind the spindle trees. The man climbed on top of Ina’s husband and pummeled his face with his bare fists. He beat the husband so badly that it looked as if he might kill him. Within seconds the man’s face was a bloody mess. The loan shark’s tears as he beat him shocked Seojin, and even more shocking, he repeatedly wailed, “Ina, Ina! Please forgive me. Inaaa!”

  The gathering crowd was too alarmed by the loan shark’s strength to intervene. Only a passing maintenance worker pried him off the husband. Pinned to the ground by the shoulder, the loan shark pointed at the husband and screamed, “The guy’s a murderer! The fucker’s killed someone!”

  Seojin cautiously left the scene, went to his office, tackled his duties, and ate lunch alone. He’d scheduled afternoon hospital visits, including a stop at the only university hospital in the suburbs. As he passed its emergency center, he wondered if this was where Ina’s husband was admitted. He might have suffered serious brain damage after the golf club and then the loan shark. Seojin entered the ER and asked if a patient with brain damage had been admitted that morning. Thanks to a nurse he was friendly with, he easily tracked down the husband’s room. The patient looked either asleep or in a coma, and an older woman, probably his mother, sat at his side.

  Seojin lied, introducing himself as a work colleague. He asked, “How is he doing?”

  She said, “The doctors say that once the intercranial pressure drops, they’ll have to operate on him, but the pressure might not drop. He could also be paralyzed, or he could be lying like this forever . . .”

  She began to cry. “How did this disaster happen to us?”

  “Have they caught the man? Do they know why the man attacked?”

  The woman’s eyes filled with rage, whose target was probably not the attacker, but her dead daughter-in-law. But she wouldn’t reveal that to a stranger.

  She continued, “I mean, they said it was an unprovoked attack, but who’s ever heard of an unprovoked attack? The bastard should be executed in public.” She sighed. “It’s his fate. Nothing’s going to bring my son back.”

  When her cell phone rang, she got up to take the call.

  Seojin stood over the man and silently looked down at his face. Ina would have made her decision that night. After agonizing, she had chosen Seojin over the loan shark. If she had trusted the loan shark instead, she would still be alive and her husband’s life would have ended then. The loan shark would have disposed of the body without a trace and would now be living with Ina. Seojin wondered whether he would have suffered more with Ina dead and gone or alive and the loan shark’s lover. It might have been tougher if she were with the loan shark. He despised himself for imagining this with Ina dead, but he couldn’t stop. Ina was dead, her husband would soon follow or continue half alive, and the loan shark would go to jail.

  He was suddenly overjoyed. He was the only one intact, now and in the future. Happiness overwhelmed him. He had resisted temptation, and even felt proud that he had protected himself from a crisis. Fanciful ideas like the origin of life didn’t matter; being alive was what really mattered. Only then did he feel he had truly grown up, as he proudly let go of the sentimental kid who’d read biographies and harbored useless dreams.

  He gazed at the man’s hand protruding from the sheet, then took the hand in his. It was warm and damp. The man might be squinting out at him, but his face was so bloated that it was difficult to tell. Even if his eyes were open, he probably couldn’t recognize anyone. Seojin gripped the man’s hand and whispered in his ear, “You woman-beating asshole, you’re dying. Or you’ll spend the rest of your life on your back like this, pissing and shitting uncontrollably . . . But guess what? I’m alive, I survived. And I love it. I fucking love it.”

  The mother returned and, seeing Seojin holding her son’s hand, thanked him for coming. Seojin slowly let go of the man’s hand as if he were a reluctant lover and comforted the mother. “He’ll fight back and soon recover. Don’t give up.”

  He left the room and began walking with his bag full of medical supply samples through the hallway, drenched in the smell of ammonia, toward the purchasing manager’s office. This, now, must be the new beginning to his life.

  Missing Child

  Bolt. The bolt that the mechanic turned aspiring singer was holding while auditioning onstage. While the young man continued singing fervently, Yunseok’s focus was on that solid metal part. If only my hand were holding something. Even a walnut, or a marble ball like the ones they used to sell in stationery stores when I was a kid. Yunseok stared down at his empty palm.

  The store was crowded that summer day. It was just before a national holiday. The three of them—Yunseok, his wife, Mira, and their three-year-old son, Seongmin, who was seated in the shopping cart—took the escalator down to the basement-floor supermarket. It was a scene that would replay in his mind for the rest of his life, but he didn’t know it then. A sale was announced over the loudspeaker, and screaming kids raced past the cart. Yunseok had wanted to stay home and watch a baseball game on TV, he really had, but Mira, not he but Mira, had wanted to go grocery shopping.

  “You can lie down all you want after you die! Come on. Get up and get the kid ready.”

  He did what she told him to. Much later, he would often remind Mira that if she had let him finish watching that baseball game, nothing would have happened and they would still be living in their sunny, south-facing apartment. Each time, Mira would blame his careless, indifferent grip, the one that had let go of what was most essential and allowed their entire life to slip away between its fingers. Still, they knew nothing about this yet, and got into their new compact SUV. Their three-year-old son already knew what a supermarket was. He knew that colorful products, free-sample corners where you could eat your fill, awaited him, and chocolates near the checkout counter called to him. Seongmin was excited as soon as he was seated in the car.

  Only after parking did Mira realize she’d left the loyalty card at home. She asked Yunseok, “What should we do? Should we just go back?” She always asked first. If Yunseok had said they should go home, she would have said, “Go back when we’ve come all this way?” He wanted to avoid such useless repetition.

  Instead, he said, “You should have had it ready earlier. It’s not like the points add up to much. Let’s go in.”

  He put Seongmin into the red shopping cart. The child was so excited that he couldn’t stay still. Yunseok pushed the cart behind the other customers, and halted at the mobile phone vendor. He’d wanted to replace his old phone now that his contract had ended, but with long days and late nights at the office, he hadn’t had time. “Is this the latest model?” he asked. He rubbed the Motorola that the sales assistant had handed him. It was plastic, but it felt as hard and cold as metal. The clerk continued his sales pitch, saying, “You won’t need anything else if you buy this. You can use it to make memos as well as take photos—it’s the best all-around phone. Have you used Motorola products before? They have the newest technology.” Yunseok’s right hand briefly let go of the cart to flip the phone open and examine the screen.

  “How much are the monthly payments?” Yunseok asked.

  The sales assistant promptly recited the many benefits offered by the phone company if customers signed a contract for twenty-four monthly installments. Yunseok was thinking that he could afford thirty
thousand won a month. He might even be able to manage forty. The mortgage payments had gone down last month, and his overtime hours had increased. His company’s new car model that launched earlier in the year was a hit, and there was a three-month backlog of orders. The factory was operating continuously, with three shifts daily.

  “How’s this phone?” He turned to his left to get his wife’s opinion. But she wasn’t there. He turned to the right. He didn’t see Seongmin either, who had been sitting in the shopping cart. Had Mira already gone into the supermarket with Seongmin? He returned the cell phone to the clerk and looked for his wife.

  As he passed the security gate by the entrance, he heard Mira’s voice from behind: “Where are you going?” She was holding her purchases from the cosmetics department. Their eyes met and their facial expressions simultaneously froze. They were looking at each other but seeing nothing. Mira let out a short scream. She dropped the shopping bag. Cotton balls and cleansing cream rolled out. Mira leaned over, collected the items, and ran toward the escalator. Yunseok asked the clerk if he’d seen his son. The clerk shook his head. A three-year-old boy could hardly clamber out of a shopping cart alone and wander off. Someone had taken the cart. Mira looked for their boy around the food-sample corners, running into carts everywhere she went.

  Wouldn’t there be surveillance cameras?

  He followed a security guard into a room with dozens of surveillance monitors, but found that cameras were installed only within the supermarket itself. There wasn’t a single one installed to monitor the rented spaces just outside the entrance. A missing child announcement was broadcast three times inside the supermarket, but no one had responded. Just hundreds of carts peacefully rambling like a flock of sheep. Mira wanted to shove between them and shout, Why aren’t any of you listening to the announcement? Don’t you have kids, too? This can happen to anyone, can’t it?

  Yunseok had looked down at his hand then, too. It had taken only a moment. As if someone had lain in wait, and as soon as he had let go of the handle, silently pulled the cart away and disappeared. Why had Seongmin stayed so quiet? Why hadn’t he resisted the stranger?

  Ignorance imprisons man in darkness. The couple entered that darkness and began hurting each other. The vanished two to three minutes of their lives existed inside that darkness. He’d say, “You’re such a careless mother. You should’ve said that you were buying makeup.” Mira retorted, saying, “Who’s the man so crazy about mobile phones that he neglected his son?”

  They spent the whole day going from the supermarket to the police station and back. By late evening, they couldn’t ignore the ominous feeling solidifying inside them. The sense that they had lost their only son forever.

  * * *

  Ten years later, Yunseok received the phone call. He had just returned from the night shift and assumed that it was the usual prank call. He didn’t even get angry anymore. Some—no, many—people enjoyed tormenting others.

  The caller asked, “Is your son’s name Jo Seongmin?”

  “Are you calling about the flyer?” Yunseok tugged off his socks with his free hand.

  One got stuck, so he switched hands, pulled the sock off, and tossed it into the corner.

  “Flyer? No, I’m not. Could you please confirm your son’s name? It is Jo Seongmin, correct?”

  “That’s correct. Did you see something?”

  Papers rustled in the background. It was a noisy place where phones rang incessantly.

  “Yes, here it is. You registered your missing child’s information on the genetic database, correct?”

  Was this a new type of scam?

  “Yes, that’s right. Seongmin. Jo Seongmin, like the baseball player.”

  “His name is different, but we have a child with a genetic match.”

  “A different name?”

  “The name was changed, but genes don’t lie. It’s a 99.99 percent match.”

  “Where are you calling from again?”

  “Daegu.”

  “Daegu? Where in Daegu?”

  “A police station in Daegu. Tomorrow, one of our employees will go up to Suwon with the boy. You will be at home, yes?”

  “If it really is Seongmin, I’ll drive down right away.”

  “Oh, there’s no need to drive down. These last few days, our employee and your son have developed a good rapport. He’ll be going up there anyway for work. We thought we would send them together.”

  Yunseok hung up and went to the bedroom. Mira’s eyes were fixed on the television. He said, “Mira, I just got a call. Seongmin, they say he’s alive.”

  Mira repeated Yunseok’s name a few times, gazed baldly at him, then looked back at the TV screen. Yunseok went and held her by the shoulders.

  He said, “Honey.”

  Still her eyes kept rolling to the right like a halibut’s. She frowned at Yunseok for blocking the television, so he released her and sprang to his feet. In his room, he hesitated, then made another call.

  “Mom, it’s me,” he said. “I think they’ve found our Seongmin.”

  Yunseok’s mother, who had spent the past seven years living in a prayer center in the mountains of Gangwon-do, was skeptical.

  “No, really, it seems real this time. Seongmin’s mom, well, you know her condition. I told her, but . . . No, she understands. I think she understood. I think she’s listening, who knows, who knows . . . He said they’re bringing him to me . . . I’m not sure. I said it’s for real this time. He didn’t even mention a reward. I said it’s not phishing. I even called again and got the police station . . . Daegu, I don’t know either, how he got all the way to Daegu.”

  He tried to calm his welling emotions by holding the phone away from his face. He breathed deeply.

  “Mom, don’t cry. You don’t have a car. But what should I do now, with our son coming tomorrow and no spare room?”

  When he suddenly looked behind him, he didn’t see Mira. The front door was ajar. He quickly slipped on his shoes and ran outside. “Mira, Mira,” he called.

  Though he knew his voice would only drive her farther away, he always called out his wife’s name as he looked for her. His wife would scramble up and down the steep, narrow stairs in their neighborhood like a wild goat. The only way to catch her was to take a shortcut. Yunseok had already passed through several front gates of neighbors whom he now knew, climbed onto their roofs lined with clay jars, and headed toward a spring that his wife often stopped at.

  He made excuses, saying, “My wife needs air,” but their neighbors knew that Mira was sick. That the schizophrenia had worsened.

  The social worker who visited once a week had said, “Most likely the shock of your son’s loss isn’t the main cause. There are many causes.”

  Yunseok, however, adamantly believed that his wife’s illness was a disease of the heart. If they hadn’t lost their child, she wouldn’t have become like this. When he arrived at the spring, the locals pointed and said, “She just left, the same way she always goes.”

  Mira was sitting on a hilly slope north of the spring and gazing at downtown Seoul. Yunseok grabbed her arm and, panting, sat next to her.

  “Why did you come here again?” he asked. “Do you feel good here?”

  She looked suspicious. When he tried holding her hand, her fist shot out and punched him hard in the stomach. His wife was rapidly losing the capacity to sympathize with others. His solar plexus hurt so much he could hardly breathe. He collapsed into a crouch and stayed like that until he was finally able to say, “Let’s go. Seongmin’s coming.”

  She said, “Seongmin?”

  She was herself again. That was a good and bad sign. When Mira was herself, she was depressed and prickly. Her words and reactions slowed, and her eyes filled with doubt.

  “Seongmin? How? Where?”

  “He’s coming tomorrow. They found him in Daegu.”

  Mira shook her head. “No, that can’t be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s got to be an
other mistake. How could it be Seongmin? He isn’t able to come to us. He isn’t able to come and that’s why he hasn’t come yet. There must be a reason. If he could have come, he would have come earlier.”

  As Yunseok led Mira back down, the madness overcame her again. She resisted returning home and threw a fit. She bit him and kicked him in the shin. He barely managed to shove her inside the house and follow her in. A huge mound of leaflets lay next to the shoe rack. On each flyer, a photo of Seongmin squinted upward.

  The past eleven years of Yunseok’s life were summed up in the flyers. He made a living so he could print the flyers, and he stayed healthy in order to distribute them. Each morning, he waited beside the subway and grabbed commuters by the sleeve; on weekends, he visited child protection centers and inquired about his son. He now knew to order extra copies before printers became busy during election season. There were flyers in every corner of his home, in the bathroom, their one bedroom, and stuffed in Mira’s worn-out, overflowing handbag. There were so many that it appeared as if a species of insect called “flyer” was slowly devouring the house.

  At first, Mira used to take a bundle of flyers and do the rounds with him. Yunseok quit full-time employment at the motor company in order to find their missing son, and Mira also quit the bookstore. If they had known that their son would be missing for nearly eleven years, one of them would have held on to their job. Instead, like an investor trying to recoup stock losses in one big gamble, they risked all to find their son. They lasted a few years by depleting their modest savings, cashing in their insurance policies, then selling their apartment. Three years later, Mira began work as an insurance salesperson, but performed poorly. Customers instinctively detected the scent of repressed, unbearable anxiety. A mother who loses her child is nervous, on edge; people sensed that they would be better prepared for imminent disaster in the company of a bright, energetic salesperson, and more readily signed insurance policies with them. Soon enough, Mira quit insurance work and devoted herself once again to flyer distribution.