Maybe from Umma.
I really wanted a sincere apology from her. To hear her say, at least once in my life, that she was sorry. But that was never going to happen, was it? The thought that it would never happen turned my resentment into self-mockery for having thought such a thing in the first place, which then led me to think that I should just get my things and go. I got up, leaving him snoring on the bed. And for the first time ever, I left his house before daybreak. Like the decadent by-product of American imperialism and Western capitalism that I was.
?
Around this time, I got a call from one of my old bosses from that company I’d worked at as an intern. Unlike me, running in place on the hamster wheel of life, she had moved ahead to lead her own division. They had just landed a North American contract worth ten billion won and needed workers desperately. While they could only sign people on with temp contracts, the workers could have their time count toward relevant work experience later if they went on to be hired permanently. We both knew this promise of a permanent contract was her dangling a nonexistent carrot, but things were dire enough for me to reach for it anyway. I kept bowing on the phone (as if she could see me), saying, “I’m your man.”
On the day I got my first paycheck, I proposed that he and I take a walk to Chosun Hotel.
—A hotel? The two of us? Now?
—Not to sleep. Let’s go to a nice restaurant there. Have some steak, some pasta.
—I’m not sure if I can afford that.
—Don’t worry. My treat. To celebrate my new job.
He shook his head and said he didn’t really like eating meat. Which was total garbage, because we’d been to about a million barbecue places together by then. He insisted he liked barbecue but didn’t like steak. When I suggested pasta, he said we should get something like seafood stew instead. Or grilled clams, or seasoned crab.
—Jesus, hyung, do you like seafood that much? Were you a shark in a former life?
—It’s just too strange.
—What is?
—Two men eating pasta at a restaurant.
And that’s how our fight started.
—Do you think the world will split in two if two men happen to walk around together? What if, gasp, they were to even breathe the same air!
—While we’re on this subject, I think you try to touch me a little too much when we’re walking together.
—Oh, fuck off, no one is paying any attention to you on the street. Do you think you’re still student council president or something? Enough with the diva complex!
—Do you know how obviously gay you are?
And that’s how things got really nasty.
—Are you saying you’re ashamed of me?
—Yes, that’s right, I’m ashamed of you. You want to hold my hand in public, you call me baby. I mean, what would anyone think?
—Well, you know what, I’m ashamed of you, too, hyung. Your hideous, stupid trousers, your T-shirts with the stretched neck, your tattered backpack filled with all that crap—not even North Korean spies walk around in that kind of getup.
He stopped in the middle of the street. And for a while, he simply stood there. I simply stared at him standing there. Then, he turned his head and, without saying a word, walked away from me. Who does he think he is? I thought, and before I had the notion to go after him, he had already swiftly disappeared from view.
Had I made a mistake?
That was the first time I had seen him walk away from me.
Then, silence.
He stopped contacting me. No one picked up when I called. The phone indicated he had read my messages, but he never replied. This was the first time I had experienced such total and thorough radio silence from him. My lips dried out, and my heart seemed to shrink into itself with worry. I forgot about the rut we had fallen into. I again devoted every minute of my day to thinking about him: the first thing I thought when I opened my eyes in the morning was, Is he going to call today? and when I went to sleep with my phone under the pillow, all I dreamed of was him. There was only one question in my mind then.
Who was he, and what was I to him?
The longer I spent with him, the more I realized just how incompatible we were. It should have been obvious. He’d made it known from the start that he’d never wanted to accommodate me in any way, that he called me in the middle of the night when no one was around because he enjoyed fucking me and lecturing me afterward. He saw me as someone to teach and change, and I was unfortunately not receptive to that. There were many nights when I’d find myself unable to sleep, thinking of all this.
Then, after a week of silence, he texted me back.
How are you?
It almost made me mad at how easygoing he was being. Or to be honest, I was mad at myself for the burst of happiness I felt, but I couldn’t help feeling that way. Tears came to my eyes. The more he seemed like a mysterious world I would never fully know, the more I wanted to conquer him. I wanted to squeeze him until he couldn’t breathe. He didn’t care if I was his, but I wanted him to feel that it was either me or nobody else. I wanted to grab his life by the balls and do with it whatever I pleased. So I made a huge, life-changing decision.
I would introduce him to my mother.
My suggestion was made in a light, casual way, as if it meant nothing to me, over a dinner of angler stew and soju. He was busily deboning the fish when I popped the question.
—Would you like to meet my mother?
He looked up with an expression of Now what?
—Why would I want to do that?
—I don’t know . . . The weather is so fine these days. It would be nice to take a walk together in Olympic Park . . . I don’t know.
His chopsticks searched for more angler flesh among the masses of bean sprouts in the big shared pot between us before giving up.
—All right. Let’s.
—OK, hyung. Let’s take a walk together on Sunday. And maybe have some coffee together.
—All right . . . I’ll meet you at Olympic Park.
That was easier than I thought.
?
As the date of her second operation approached, Umma made a big fuss about the nightmares she was having. Look at her go, I thought. She had always been so panicky when it came to work, her child, and her education. This was after her tumors had been removed, and the procedure coming up was only a simple one where inflamed tissue was being removed to aid blood flow. Someone would have to really try in order to mess it up. I thought this would be a good opportunity. The brief window that would open when the procedure was over, when she was about to begin her new second life, free from disease, filled with love for God and humanity and the universe . . .
That’s when I would throw a bomb into her life.