Afterward, we continued to meet up now and then and drink through the night. Seven years dragged by in this way, with each of us seeing in the other a crooked mirror image of our own pathetic lives: failing to gain any qualifications; being involved in a car accident; getting into debt; suffering injury or illness; meeting kind-hearted women who made us dare to believe that our suffering was finally over, only to see it all turn to shit through no one’s fault but our own, and eventually end up alone again. Burdened by nightmares and insomnia, numbed by painkillers and sleeping pills, we were no longer young. There was no longer anyone who would worry over us or shed tears over our pitiful lot. We even despised ourselves. The interrogation room of that summer was knitted into our muscle memory, lodged inside our bodies. With that black Monami Biro. That pale gleam of exposed bone. That familiar, broken cadence of whimpered, desperate pleas.
At some point during those seven years, Jin-su said to me, “There used to be people I was determined to kill.” His deep black eyes, not yet entirely clouded by intoxication, watched me intently. “I thought that, whenever my time came to die, I would take those people with me.” Wordlessly, I filled his glass. “But I don’t have those thoughts anymore. I’m worn out.” Hyeong, he called me. Brother. But instead of raising his eyes to meet mine, he kept his head bowed over the glass of clear alcohol, as though any words I might speak would be found there. “We carried guns, didn’t we?” This didn’t seem to merit a response. “We thought they would defend us, didn’t we?” Jin-su smiled faintly down at his glass, as though used to answering his own questions. “But we couldn’t even fire them.”
—
Last September, I bumped into him late at night when I was heading home after my taxi shift. One of those drizzling autumn days. I’d just turned a corner and there, from beneath the rim of my umbrella, I saw Kim Jin-su waiting for me. He had the hood of his black waterproof jacket up over his head. Perhaps because I was so startled, I remember being gripped by an odd rage, wanting to punch that ghost-pale face. Or no, not punch it, just rub my hands over its contours and erase the expression I saw there.
Not that his expression was hostile, you understand.
He looked exhausted, of course, but that was hardly anything out of the ordinary. I’d barely ever seen him looking otherwise that past decade. But there was something else in the planes and shadows of his face that night, something different. Some inexplicable emotion that was not quite resignation, not quite sadness or even malice, was visible beneath those long lashes. Part submerged, like ice in water.
I ushered him through the darkened streets to my house. He never said a word the whole way.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him once we were home and I could change out of my wet clothes. He pulled his raincoat off over his head, folded it, and put it on the floor by the mattress. Then he sat down next to it, ramrod straight in a thin cotton T-shirt. His posture made me recall the barracks, and that unaccountable anger welled back up in me. Ever so slightly hunched, the sight was identical to the one I’d seen every single day that summer nine years before. The stink of his sweat was rank in my nostrils. As he sat there looking up at me, his dark face seemed a nauseating mixture of submission, resignation, and blankness.
“I can’t even smell any booze on you; how long were you waiting for? And in this rain.” Eventually, he opened his mouth.
“There was a trial yesterday.”
“A trial?” I repeated.
“You remember Kim Yeong-chae? He was in the cell with us.” I sat down facing Jin-su. At first, I sat up straight as though imitating him, but I quickly realized what I was doing and lolled back against the chilly wall. “The stutterer. My distant relation.”
“Yeah, I remember.” For some reason, I didn’t want to hear whatever Jin-su was going to say next.
“He’s ended up in the psychiatric hospital this time.”
“Right.” I got to my feet and went to have a look in the fridge. The shelves were practically bare, but four bottles of soju were lined up in the salad drawer. Two days’ worth of emergency medicine.
“He’ll probably never get out.”
I pulled out two bottles and stood them on a tray with a pair of shot glasses. I gripped the bottles by the necks to remove the lids; cold droplets of condensation made my palms slick.
“They say he almost killed someone.”
I scooped some stir-fried anchovies out of a Tupperware container and onto a plate, then some beans boiled in soy sauce. It was all I had. I suddenly had the idea of putting the soju in the freezer compartment. What would it feel like to crunch on cubes of frozen soju, to hear them crack against my teeth?
“There’s not much in the way of snacks.” I set the tray down by the mattress, but Jin-su didn’t so much as glance at it. Instead, he carried on talking, his words gradually speeding up.
“The public defender said Yeong-chae had slit his own wrists six times in the past ten years. That he had to take sleeping pills and get drunk every night just so he could get to sleep.”
I filled Jin-su’s glass. With any luck I’d be able to get away with just a single shot, then I could spread out the quilt, lie down, and try to get some sleep. I’d tell him he could carry on drinking for as long as he wanted, and go home whenever the rain let up. I didn’t let myself wonder about how often Jin-su had met up with that kid in the nine years since we’d shared a cell, or how the latter had been living in the meantime. Whatever Jin-su had come here to say, I didn’t want to hear it.
The dawn’s faint light was beginning to leach into the sky, but the rain was still mizzling down and outside the window it was as dark as evening. Eventually, I spread the quilt over the mattress and lay down.
“Get some shut-eye,” I told him curtly. “You look like you haven’t slept in about a year.”
He filled his own glass and tossed it back. While I tossed and turned in my sleep, the quilt pulled up to my face, he carried on talking at me. A slurred stream of high-flown words and random babble. It was no good to me.
—
Looking at that boy’s life, Jin-su said, what is this thing we call a soul? Just some nonexistent idea? Or something that might as well not exist?
Or no, is it like a kind of glass?
Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they’re good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.
Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.
—
That was the last time I saw Kim Jin-su alive.
I saw his obituary in the paper that same year. I had no idea what had happened to him in the meantime, during those three months that had seen autumn give way to winter. He did leave a message at the taxi office once, but we weren’t allowed to make personal calls during work hours, and when I called him back after my shift was over, he didn’t pick up.