Diary of a Murderer Read online

  ·

  I’d had my eye on Eunhui’s mom for a long time. She was an administrative assistant at my community center. She had lovely calves. Maybe it was the poems and the writing, but I felt I was getting soft. It was as if all this reflection and thinking were stifling my impulses. I didn’t want to get soft or suppress the feelings boiling inside me. It was as if I were being shoved into a deep, dark cave. I just needed to know if I was who I knew myself to be back then. When I opened my eyes, I saw Eunhui’s mother directly in front of me—chance is often the beginning of bad luck.

  So I killed her.

  But it wasn’t easy.

  It was disappointing.

  A murder without any pleasure. Maybe whatever change was happening inside me had already started by then. The second brain surgery merely made it irreversible.

  ·

  In the paper this morning, I read about another serial killing that shocked the local community. When were they saying the killing took place? Something was off, so I went through my notes and found I had jotted down information on the three earlier murders. Recently my memory’s been more erratic than usual. Whatever I don’t write down slips through my hands like sand. I jotted down the details of this fourth murder in my notebook.

  A twenty-five-year-old female student was found dead on a country road. Her arms and legs were bruised with rope marks, and she was naked. Just like the others, she had been kidnapped, beaten, and left for dead by the roadside.

  ·

  That jerk Pak Jutae hasn’t called me. But I’ve seen him around a few times. Too frequent to call it a coincidence. And there must have been times when I saw but didn’t recognize him. He’s prowling around my house like a wolf, watching my every move. If I approach him to talk, he quickly disappears.

  ·

  Is he after Eunhui?

  ·

  I’ve let more people live than I’ve killed. My father always used to say, “How many people in the world get to do whatever they want?” I agree.

  ·

  It seems I didn’t recognize Eunhui this morning. Right now I do recognize her. That’s a relief. The doctor says that soon Eunhui will also disappear from my memory.

  He said, “The only thing you’ll remember is the way she looked as a child.”

  You can’t protect someone you can’t recognize, so I put Eunhui’s photo in a pendant and hung it around my neck.

  The doctor merely said, “No matter what you try, nothing will help. The recent memories go first.”

  ·

  Crying, Eunhui’s mother begged me, “Please, at least spare my daughter.”

  I said, “Okay, then, don’t worry about that.”

  I’ve faithfully upheld that promise until now. I hated people who made empty promises, so I tried hard not to become that kind of person. But the issue is now. I’m writing this down again so I won’t forget: I can’t abandon Eunhui to her death.

  ·

  At the community center, the teacher taught a class using a poem by Midang. The poem was called “The Bride.” In it, a groom is heading to the bathroom on his wedding night when his clothes get caught on the door latch. He flees, assuming his new bride is the lewd type and has grabbed at him. About forty years later he happens to pass by the same place and sees that his bride is still waiting there for him, so he nudges her, and she turns into a pile of ash.

  The teacher and students alike went on and on about how beautiful the poem was.

  I read it as a poem about a groom who kills his bride on their wedding night, then runs away. A young man and a young woman. And a dead body. How could you read it any other way?

  ·

  My name is Kim Byeongsu. I turned seventy this year.

  ·

  I’m not afraid of death. And I can’t stop from forgetting. If I forget everything, I would no longer be the person I am now. If I can’t remember who I am now, if there turned out to be an afterlife, how would that still be me? So it doesn’t matter. These days only one thing occupies me: keeping Eunhui from getting killed before I completely lose my memory.

  The karma, and the pratyaya, of this life.

  ·

  My house is at the foot of a mountain, with its back turned from the main road, so passing hikers easily overlook it. Those on their way down are more likely to discover the house than those going up. A large temple stands at the summit, and some people assume my house is a hermitage or temple lodging. There’s the occasional dwelling a few hundred feet down the road. A couple with dementia lived in what the neighbors called the Apricot Tree House. At first it was just the husband who had dementia, but not long after, his wife received the same diagnosis. I don’t know what others thought, but the couple did fine. Whenever I ran into them on the street, they would put their hands together respectfully and greet me. I used to wonder, Who did they think I was?

  At first they thought they were living in the 1990s, but in their final years they traveled back to the ’70s. Meaning, they returned to a time when one wrong word could get you imprisoned, a period of emergency measures and the so-called Makkoli Security Law. So when the two ran into strangers, they became guarded and cautious. To them, all the villagers were now strangers, and they found it bizarre that these unfamiliar people were constantly coming and going around them. Then it got to the point where the couple stopped recognizing each other. That was when their son showed up to put the old couple in a nursing home. One day I happened to pass by their house and witness the couple on their knees in front of their son, begging him to spare their lives, saying, “Please don’t kill us! We’re not Commies, we swear!” They seemed to have confused their son, who’d shown up wearing a suit, with a National Intelligence Service agent. The couple who could no longer recognize each other united in front of their son. The son alternated between being furious and tearful, until the neighbors stepped in and forced the old couple into the car that drove them away.

  That could be my future.

  ·

  Eunhui keeps asking me, “Why? Why are you like this? Why can’t you remember? Why aren’t you trying?” To Eunhui, I must be the very definition of strange. Sometimes she thinks I’m purposely making things difficult for her. She says I’m pretending not to know things, just to see how she will react. She says that I seem far too calm.

  I know Eunhui cries alone when she shuts the door behind her. Yesterday I overheard her speaking on the phone with a friend. She said she was losing her mind.

  She said, “He’s not the same person. He’s a different person today and different tomorrow. And he was different just now than from a moment ago, then a second later he’s different again. Sometimes he’s obviously got Alzheimer’s, unable to remember what just happened, then other times he seems absolutely normal.

  “He’s not the father I used to know,” she said. “I can’t bear this. I can’t stand it anymore.”

  ·

  My father was my genesis. My father, who beat my mother and my sister, Yeongsuk, whenever he drank: I smothered him to death with a pillow. My mother pressed down on his body and Yeongsuk on his legs. She was only thirteen. Rice husks burst from the sides of the pillow. Afterward, Yeongsuk refilled the pillow with the swept-up rice husks and my mother numbly stitched it up. I was sixteen when it happened. Sudden deaths were common after the Korean War. No one paid attention to a man who had died in his sleep at home. Not even a constable came by. We set up a makeshift tent in the front yard and received mourners.

  When I was fifteen I could carry a sack of rice on my back. In my hometown when a boy was strong enough to do that, not even his father could lay a hand on him. But my father still beat my mother and younger sister. He’d strip off their clothes and chase them out of the house in the freezing cold. Killing him was the best solution. The only regret I had was getting my mother and sister involved when I could have done it alone.

  My father, who’d lived through the war, always suffered from nightmares. He also talked a lot in his sleep. Even a
s he died, he probably thought he was having another bad dream.

  ·

  “Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit. It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers.”

  That’s from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

  ·

  I began killing when I was sixteen, and I continued until I was forty-five. I lived through the April Revolution and the May Massacre. President Park Chung-hee proclaimed the Yushin Reforms as he dreamed of making himself dictator for life. First Lady Yuk Young-soo was shot to death. President Jimmy Carter visited, told Park Chung-hee to abandon his dictatorial ways, then went jogging, wearing only underwear. Park Chung-hee was assassinated. Kim Dae-jung was kidnapped in Japan and narrowly escaped with his life. Kim Young-sam was expelled from the National Assembly. Martial law was declared in Gwangju, and the army laid siege to the city and beat and shot people to death.

  Through it all I thought only about killing. I carried on a one-man war against the world. I killed, I fled, I lay low. I killed again, fled, and lay low. Back then there was no such thing as DNA testing or surveillance cameras. Even the term “serial killer” was little known. Dozens of suspicious-looking persons and the mentally ill were considered suspects, and were dragged off to the police station and tortured. A few even made false confessions. The precincts didn’t cooperate with each other, so when a similar crime occurred in a different precinct, they didn’t make the connection. Thousands of cops wielding batons climbed up the wrong mountains to investigate.

  Those were good times.

  ·

  I was forty-five at the time of my last murder. Looking back, it dawns on me that my father was also forty-five the year he suffocated under the pillow. What a strange coincidence. I’m writing this down, too.

  ·

  Am I a devil, or a superhuman? Or both?

  ·

  Seventy years of a life. When I look back, it seems that I’m standing in front of a gaping black cave. I feel little about my approaching death, but when I think about the past, my heart feels dark and vast. My heart was like a desert; nothing grew inside me. There was no moisture to be found anywhere. When I was younger, I tried to understand others, but it was too difficult a task for me. I always avoided eye contact so people assumed I was the shy and docile type.

  I used to practice making faces in the mirror. A sad look, a happy look, a worried look, a dejected look. Eventually I developed a simple technique. I just imitated the person in front of me. If someone frowned, I frowned, and if someone laughed, I laughed.

  In the old days, people thought the devil lived inside a mirror. The devil they saw in the mirror, he was probably me.

  ·

  I had a sudden urge to see my sister. When I said this to Eunhui, she told me that my sister had passed away long ago.

  “How did she die?”

  “You know—she died after a long struggle with pernicious anemia.”

  It sounded oddly familiar, as if I’d heard this before.

  ·

  I was a veterinarian. It’s a good job for a murderer. You can use all kinds of powerful anesthetics. You can bring an elephant immediately to its knees. In the country, vets make a lot of house calls. While our city counterparts sit in clinics treating pet dogs and cats, in the country you travel around treating livestock, from cows and pigs to chickens. In the past, you even encountered the occasional horse. Outside of chickens, they were all mammals. There’s not much of a difference between the human anatomy and theirs.

  ·

  Once again, I found myself somewhere unfamiliar. A neighborhood I’d never been before. Some local kids surrounded me and put me in a storeroom, keeping me from going wherever it was I kept trying to go. They claimed I had been scared and caused a racket. A cop came, and after radioing in on his walkie-talkie, he took me away in his patrol car. I continue to forget and end up in strange neighborhoods, surrounded by locals, until the cops arrive.

  The cycle repeats: the crowds, the encircling, the hauling off to the police station.

  To an elderly serial killer, Alzheimer’s is life’s practical joke. No, it’s a hidden-camera prank show. Surprised you, right? Sorry. It’s only a joke.

  ·

  I’ve decided to memorize a poem a day. It’s not as easy as I’d thought.

  ·

  I don’t understand the new poems these days. They’re too hard. But I do like the following line, so I’m writing it down:

  “My pain cannot be read, for it does not have captions.” From Kim Kyung-ju, “A City of Sadness.”

  From the same poem: “The times I lived were like bootleg liquor that no one had ever tasted. / I got easily drunk in the name of those times.”

  ·

  I was out shopping for groceries downtown when I spotted a familiar face prowling around Eunhui’s research lab. I couldn’t for the life of me tell who he was. It only came to me when I saw his jeep on my way home. It was that jerk. I took out my notepad and checked for his name. Pak Jutae. The guy had made his way to Eunhui.

  ·

  I started exercising again. Generally, I focus on my upper body. The doctor had said that exercise would help slow down the Alzheimer’s, but that wasn’t why I began working out. It was for Eunhui. In a fight, what determines life or death is upper body strength. You seize, restrain, and choke. The weakest spot in mammals is the neck, where the trachea is. If oxygen doesn’t reach the brain for a few minutes, you die or end up brain-damaged.

  ·

  Someone I met at the community center once said that he liked my poems and that he’d like to publish them in a literary journal. This was over thirty years ago. I said, “Sure, go ahead,” and not long after, I got a call. He said that the book was out and asked where he should send the copies. Then he read off his bank account information. When I asked if I had to pay for them, he said all the contributors do. When I replied I didn’t like that, he whined, “The books are already printed, and if you do this to me now, it puts me in a bind.” When he used the words “in a bind” so casually, I had a strong urge to correct him. But I had brought this situation on myself, with my bourgeois desires. It wasn’t solely the guy’s fault. Some days later, two hundred copies of a small regional publication with my poems in it arrived at my house. There was even a card tucked inside congratulating me on my debut. I saved one copy and used the rest for fuel. They burned well. My poem-heated floors kept me warm.

  Anyway, after that I called myself a poet. The way you feel about writing poems that no one reads and committing murders that no one knows about is not that different.

  ·

  While I was sitting on the wooden veranda waiting for Eunhui, I watched the sun set behind a distant mountain. I wondered if the sun’s blood would soon stain the barren winter peak, but it quickly turned bleak. If I now enjoy things like this, it must be my time to go. I’ll likely soon forget everything I’ve just seen.

  ·

  They say that if you study human fossils from prehistoric times, you will discover that the majority were murdered. The most common clues are said to be holes bored into the skull or bones severed by sharp objects. Natural deaths were rare. Alzheimer’s would have been near nonexistent: it would’ve been hard to survive to late middle age. I feel like a prehistoric human who somehow landed in this period he doesn’t belong and where he has lived for far too long. My punishment is Alzheimer’s.

  ·

  Eunhui was once bullied at school. She didn’t have a mother and her father was old, so the kids teased her. Without a mother, a girl doesn’t know how to grow into a woman. The girls had a sixth sense for this and picked on her. One day Eunhui went to the school counselor for advice about a crush she had on a boy. By the following day, a rumor that Eunhui was obsessed with boys had spread across the school. The kids teased her, called her a slut. I read all this in Eunhui’s diary. I had no idea what
to do.

  There are things that a serial killer can’t put an end to: the bullying of a preteen girl.

  I don’t know how she got out of that situation. She’s doing well now, so does that mean it’s okay?

  ·

  These days my father keeps showing up in my dreams. He sits at a low-lying wooden desk and begins reading something. My poems. With his mouth full of rice husks, he looks at me and laughs.

  ·

  If my memory serves me right, I have lived with two women. The first woman bore me a son, but one day they both disappeared. Since she took our son when she fled, she might have sensed something in me. I probably could have found them if I really wanted to, but I left them alone. She wasn’t the kind of woman worth reporting to the police. The second woman and I were actually married. We lived together for five years, until she said she couldn’t stand me any longer and asked for a divorce. That she could speak so openly makes clear she had no idea what kind of person I was. I asked what was so wrong with me, and in what way, and she said, “You have no emotions. It’s like living with a stone.” The whole time, she was carrying on with another man.

  A woman’s facial expression is a difficult code to crack. It seemed to me that my wife always got worked up over nothing. If she cried, I got annoyed, and if she laughed, I got angry. When she went on about something, I would get so bored I could barely stand it. There were times I wanted to kill her, but I controlled myself. If a married woman ends up murdered, her husband is always the prime suspect. Two years after she left, I tracked down and killed my ex-wife and the bastard she’d had the affair with, dismembered them, and tossed them into a pigpen. Back then my memory wasn’t like it is now. I never forgot what I wasn’t supposed to forget.

  ·

  Because of the number of serial murders in our area, a lot of crime experts are being featured on TV. A man who’s supposed to be an expert profiler, or something like that, said: “A serial killer can’t stop once he’s begun. He ends up desiring an even stronger sensation, and tenaciously sets about hunting down his next victim. The addiction factor is so strong that even in jail, he thinks only about the next murder. If he starts believing that he won’t be able to commit another one, he feels despair and tries to kill himself. That’s how strong the drive is.”