I'll Be Right There (24 page)

“Seeing you armed like that is scary enough.”

He laughed.

“I deserted my post,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“If they find out I’m with you, I’ll be court-martialed.”

“Is it that bad?”

Dahn laughed again at how serious I sounded.

“Don’t worry. When you do coastal duty long enough, you realize that everyone does what they have to in order to see their family or girlfriends. We all look the other way. The company commander and first sergeant probably know about it. No one believed me when I said I had a girlfriend, so they made a bet.”

“On me?”

“Sorry.”

“What was the bet?”

“They said if you showed up, they’d let me stay out overnight.”

“This is too dangerous. I don’t want something bad to happen to you because of me.”

“Bad? What are you talking about? I’m so happy right now. I can’t believe you’re here beside me.”

I was nervous, but talking to Dahn made me feel better.

“What was the scary story? More spiders?”

“I’m not afraid of spiders anymore.”

This was not the same Dahn who had worn a headlamp to accompany me to my mother’s grave, the Dahn who trembled in fear of stepping on a spider. He told me that his fear of spiders went away while he was in the special forces. He said that after all of that daily hiking, crawling, jumping, and soaring up in the mountains, he found himself grabbing spiders with his bare hands.

“Really? So there is some benefit to joining the army!”

Dahn’s laugh sounded hollow.

“So what’s your scary story?” I asked again.

Dahn pointed to some spot in the dark, to where the sound of the waves was coming from.

“There’s a guard shack down there, between the bunkers, where the soldiers take turns napping during their patrols. They say a soldier fell in love with a girl from one of the villages nearby. The girl would come by from time to time and spend the night with him in the shack. Whenever she came to see him, she always brought a pot of ramen for him as a midnight snack. But after the guy got out of the service, he took
off without giving her his phone number or even so much as a glance back. She was so heartbroken that she hanged herself from the ceiling of the shack where they had been sleeping together. Turned out she was several months pregnant. After a while, rumors started to circulate. Whenever a new arrival fell asleep in the shack, he dreamed that a pretty young woman opened the door, smiled, and came inside. Carrying a tray with a steaming pot …”

“… And?”

“The soldier would take the tray and open the lid to find the pot filled with ramen. Bright red ramen boiling in blood.”

I shrieked and grabbed his arm.

“Is it true?” I asked. “Did you see her, too?”

“Of course not! It’s just a legend that’s been passed down in our unit. The Legend of the Blood Ramen Ghost … Soldiers probably made it up to tell their girlfriends when they visited, like you. The girls get scared, just like you did, and grab their boyfriends’ hands or leap into their arms.”

“What?!”

So he had been trying to scare me, too. I tried to shake off his arm, but he pulled me closer and said, “I’m so glad you’re here!” With the sound of the waves coming to us through the darkness, we passed a cornfield and walked single file along a ridge between two pepper fields until we came to a house. We decided to ask if we could stay there, since we couldn’t keep walking all night. The woman who lived there must have been used to overnight visitors from the base, because she immediately led us to a tiny corner room with a porch. Dahn asked if there was anything to eat. She was surprised that we had not
eaten yet and told us to wait a moment. Soon she came back with a tray filled with battered and pan-fried slices of squash, steamed and seasoned eggplant, kimchi, rice, and soup. She set the tray down on the porch. As she turned to go back to the kitchen, Dahn asked if there was any soju. She started to say there was none, but then she asked if we wanted her husband’s half-empty bottle. Dahn thanked her. She came back right away with the soju, two shot glasses, and a small dish of pan-fried tofu. She told Dahn to take off his helmet and rifle. “Doesn’t that scare your girlfriend?” she joked, and looked at me as she laughed. She told us the room would warm up in a moment and turned to leave. We ate on the porch. The plates were old, but the eggplant smelled savory and aromatic, like it had been freshly seasoned with sesame oil. Dahn filled his own glass with soju and looked at me. As I shook my head to say I didn’t want any, I spotted a spiderweb dangling above the porch.

“Spider!”

Dahn took a look and stood up. With his bare fingers, he plucked the spider as it crawled down its web, trembling in the light, and tossed it into the yard.

“I’m not afraid of them anymore,” he said.

Dahn sat down again and drank his soju. He looked at the kimchi and tofu but didn’t touch any of it. I had a few bites of eggplant and then set my chopsticks down. I was hungry but couldn’t eat any more than that. While Dahn drank, I stared at his combat boots and my sneakers where we had left them in front of the porch. I stuck my feet out and slid them into his boots. They were loose. I got down from the
porch and staggered around. Dahn laughed out loud. “How on earth do you wear these heavy things?” I asked. I took off the boots and opened the door to the room. On the yellow linoleum floor were two blankets and a flat pillow. It must have been past midnight by the time we went inside and spread out the bedding. Dahn’s helmet sat on the floor next to us. We lay side by side, Dahn still dressed in fatigues and me still dressed in my street clothes. When we were little, we used to go over to each other’s houses to play and wind up falling asleep. Either his sister or my mother would come find us and carry us home on their backs. The sound of the waves surged in through the small window and lapped the rim of my ear.

“The ocean must be right outside,” I said.

“Just the beach. The water’s farther off. How are Miru and Myungsuh? Are they good?”

“Miru started looking again for the guy who disappeared, and Myungsuh is almost always at Myeongdong Cathedral, protesting the government.”

“Who is Miru looking for?”

What was I supposed to tell him? Though I had brought it up, I did not have the heart to tell him the story when he was already looking so low.

“You know the house where we all stayed for a few days? Miru’s parents sold it to someone else.”

“So now we can’t go back?”

“No … It’s not her house anymore.”

Brokenhearted over losing the house, Miru had started looking for her sister’s boyfriend again. She would show up at my place looking disappointed and weary, stay for a few days,
then set out again. I had gone looking for her, to see if she wanted to go with me to visit Dahn, but she was gone.

“How are you doing?” Belatedly, I asked Dahn about his own life.

“Like I’m trapped in a spider web.”

“I thought you weren’t afraid of spiders anymore.”

“I’m not. Not of the spiders that live in the mountains. But I think I’ve found a much bigger spider.”

He sounded sad. I felt him move toward me, and suddenly his face was directly over mine.

“I hate the sound of rifles. And the feeling of my finger on the trigger.”

The smell of the soju on Dahn’s breath filled my nose. He stared deep into my eyes. They wavered, and then his lips were against mine. His uniform pressed against my street clothes, and his hand slid inside my shirt and over my breast. When his breathing grew rough, I pushed him away from me. I could feel the strength in his hands when he grabbed my wrists.

“Dahn, please.” I felt his breath against my skin. “Don’t.”

I tried to push him away, but he wouldn’t stop. As I struggled, my hand brushed his cheek and I felt his hot tears. His lips pressed against mine again, and he tried to unbutton my shirt.

“You’re the only exit I have left,” he said.

The next thing I knew, my shirt was pushed halfway up my chest, and Dahn was trying to unzip my pants. I twisted away from him, but he climbed on top of me and held me down. I do not know if it was because of his tears on my fingertips,
but I felt confused and lost all strength in my body. I realized that the whole time I had been debating how to respond to Dahn’s invitation, I had known deep down that this would happen.

“You don’t love me,” Dahn said finally, and rolled away from me. “It’s because of him, isn’t it?” he asked. I knew who he was referring to.

E
mbarrassed by what had happened, the two of us probably got no sleep all night. I reached out and felt for Dahn’s hand, but he did not move. At some point, it started to rain. If the sound of rain could be counted, I probably would have counted the drops. In the morning, our eyes met as we were folding the blankets up. His eyes were bloodshot. We took the same path we had taken the night before. I felt indescribably sad. We walked over the pinecones wet from last night’s rain, made our way along the deserted forest path, and stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the sea. Below the dazzling sun sitting just over the horizon, barges were rocking in the waves. The sun seemed to shine even brighter after the rain. A tractor made its way around the driftwood and fishing nets scattered along the beach. What was a tractor doing on the mudflats? It was an unusual sight for me, as I was more accustomed to seeing cultivators moving back and forth between rice paddies. Each time the wind blew, the water wrinkled and grazed the sandbanks, one fold after another. The distant sound of engines sounded like something in a dream. A flock of seagulls wheeled through the morning sky and called out to one another.

“About last night,” Dahn started to say, a glum look on his face. I quickly cut him off.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m fine. We’ll forget all about it in a few days.”

“Okay.” He nodded gravely.

“So, have you caught a spy yet?” The question popped out before I could stop myself.

“No one in my unit has, but they say someone caught a whale a few years ago.”

“A whale?”

“Yes. We don’t normally get whales in the West Sea. But once in a while, one gets lost and crosses the South Sea to this side of the peninsula. They say that when whales swim toward the coastline in the dark, they sound like North Korean spy submarines infiltrating. The soldier on duty followed procedure and fired off a flare, then remote detonated a claymore and opened fire with a machine gun. After the sun rose and they went in for a closer look, they discovered that it wasn’t a spy, after all, but an enormous whale floating belly up and ripped to shreds.”

“Poor whale.”

“The colonel gave the soldier a commendation and rewarded him with a seven-day pass because he performed his guard duty properly without dozing off.”

After the story of the whale mistaken for a spy, we didn’t have anything else to say. It was the first time we had ever felt awkward around each other. We walked back between the cornfield and pepper field that we had passed the night before and arrived at Dahn’s unit. I told him I would be on my way and turned to
leave. After a few steps, I glanced back to see that he was still standing there, glued to the spot, watching me go. After a few more steps, I glanced back again, and he was still there. I gestured at him to go on in, but he did not move. I got farther away and looked back again. His head was hanging down.

Yoon
.

Right now, the rain is falling. A heavy bluish mist hangs over the pine forest and the sea. I keep picturing the way you glanced back at me the day you left. When I’m lying under my blanket, your breath and your voice tickle my ear. I wonder what you’re doing right now. Are you also looking out the window at the falling rain?

A
fter that visit, I stopped answering his letters.

I
lowered my head until my chin was nearly grazing the paper and started to write to him.

Dear Dahn
,

The places I have visited the most in this city are Gyeongbokgung Palace and the museum on Sejong Street. At first, it took me about an hour and ten minutes to get there from my neighborhood. Now I can get there in fifty minutes. I’m not walking any faster, I just know the streets better. But I don’t always go inside once I get there. If I’m on my way to school, I just pass by. Also, sometimes I like to walk around the outside wall of the palace rather than going in. I walk all the way to Samcheong-dong and then head home from there. I only go inside the museum or pay for a ticket into Gyeongbokgung Palace on days when the things I don’t want to think about have built up inside of me and filled my head with noise. It’s strange, but entering the palace is like entering another world. The moment I step through the gate and walk onto the palace grounds, the hustle and bustle of the world outside, the speeding cars, and the sky-high buildings all vanish. I guess that’s why I go there. When I am inside the palace, I forget about who I am outside the palace. The first time I went there, everything felt so fresh and new. I felt stupid for never having realized how close I lived to a royal palace. Did I tell you about my plan to walk around the city for a couple of hours every day? I started doing this so I could learn about the city, and so far it has helped me to discover these places. All of these city dwellers live beneath the sheltering wings of this palace, so why don’t they visit it more often? It’s strange to me. Considering that I had always thought of Gwanghwamun Gate as just another intersection and not as the front gate of Gyeongbokgung Palace, I never even took a good look at the gate itself until after I had gone inside. Of course, it has only occurred to me that those are my two favorite places now that I am writing you this letter
.

Last Sunday, it started drizzling in the middle of the night. I got up very early and walked to Gyeongbokgung Palace. Carrying an umbrella seemed like too much of a bother, so I wore a hooded jacket. The drizzle was very light. By the time I got there, my hair and clothes were damp. The palace is usually crowded on Sundays, but there was hardly anyone there that day, probably on account of the weather. I hadn’t planned on going inside, but I changed my mind because there were no lines at the ticket booth, and the palace looked abandoned and alone. I had been inside numerous times, so I thought I knew it really well. But the old buildings looked completely different in the rain than they did on sunny days. Even Bugaksan Mountain, which I could see from Geunjeongjeon Hall, looked like an entirely different mountain. The hexagonal Hyangwonjeong Pavilion on the island in the middle of the wide lotus pond where I went all the time also looked new to me. And that’s not all. Gyeonghoeru Pavilion looked so mysterious in the rain. It was only a little rain, and yet everything looked so different. As I walked through the palace, I came across something new. Every time I go there, I make a point of going to Gyeonghoeru Pavilion, so I know the area around it really well. But this time, I spotted a wooden staircase that I had never noticed before. The stairs led up to the second floor. There was a “no trespassing” sign, but I went up there anyway. The pavilion was open on all sides. I was stunned by all that open space. It was even more overwhelming because I had only ever paid attention to the outside of the octagonal roof, which looks like it could take to the air at any second, or the decorative tiles shaped from wet clay to look like open-mouthed birds before they were baked and affixed to the ends of the roof ridge. The bottom floor had stone pillars, so I guess it never occurred to me that the second-floor pillars would be made of wood
.