Drifting House Read online

  “Who are you?” said Gilho. “What are you doing to my life?”

  Wuseong bowed repeatedly in apology. An elephantine tear slid down the slant of his cheek. Gilho’s heart exploded with language, but he was locked into silence, searching for words, when Wuseong scooped up the goose and leaped away and out of the noraebaang, as graceful as a bird taking flight.

  At work the next morning, Wuseong’s alarm, the shadow of Gilho’s palm across his face, haunted Gilho. He composed excuses for his behavior on company letterhead, then an hour later fed the pages into a paper shredder. He thought of his wife and children. Once he completed the half day’s accounts, he hurried home. By the time he unlocked the front door he had convinced himself that nothing had happened, which was not difficult; raised in a media and around conversations where such feelings did not officially exist, he could not fathom them. But when he discovered that Wuseong had disappeared, goose in tow, Gilho sat watching the empty veranda until the sun came up.

  He called in sick for the first time in his working life. He trudged through December’s first snow, a stickiness that turned to slush as it hit the pavement, past the homeless camped inside Seoul Station, past the wealthy ­clientele—Soonah’s ­people—on gallery row near Gyeongbokgung Palace, past a platoon of soldiers, mostly college boys fulfilling compulsory military service, surrounding the U.S. embassy, past the shivering applicants queued up all day for elusive American visas, as wind cut through his long underwear, disturbed his hair, and left him disoriented. On impulse he snuck into the nearest broker’s office.

  The manager with a bald spot the size of a dessert plate pulled out laminated charts. As he directed Gilho’s attention to a graph with a laser beam he whipped out from his velvet jacket, Gilho thought of Soonah, their children, and the 457 days that he had spent without them. ­Business-investment visa, ­skilled-worker visa, education visa, visas, visas.

  “You’re lucky!” the man said, though Gilho did not feel lucky. “With your background you have so many options.”

  After the consultation Gilho signed the contract. For a green card, for escape, he was prepared to sell the apartment and stocks to reinvest in a country already fat on the world’s wealth. Only then he saw too clearly how it would be: he would be a stuttering dwarf in a land of blond giants; he would arm himself behind a liquor store counter for the rest of his days. He would lie next to his wife, a stranger forever to him. This was no true escape. As Gilho ripped up the contract, he thought of the goose in its glassed–in balcony, ferociously defending its little bit of space.

  He walked through the forest of skyscrapers into the slums of Chongyecheon, where shopkeepers weaved through traffic on bicycles and peddlers sold domestic porn films that showed little more than a mosaic of faceless body parts. Later, behind the Chongryangri Lotte Department Store, two prostitutes in Technicolor halter tops dashed out of their window displays and began their sales pitch. While peering left and right for the indifferent police (there had been yet another theoretical crackdown), he picked the one with long, straight hair, long legs, a little baby fat. He kept his hands firmly cupped around her ­pear-shaped breasts, but each time he blinked, the curve of her waist became a boy’s hips. When she asked in a stale voice, “What is it about me, Ajeoshi?” he could not tell her the truth. Her eyes reminded him of Wuseong’s.

  On Wednesday Wuseong still had not returned. Gilho called the police on Thursday and found himself repeating to the impatient policeman that the boy was memorable. On Friday, after struggling with the tidy figures scrolling down his work monitor, he arrived late for his college alumni gathering in Yeoido. His friend Taeyeong greeted him with a slap on the shoulder and said, “I thought the goose got you.”

  Gilho almost left the barbecue restaurant, but only squeezed his friend’s shoulder as he sat down.

  They took turns pouring one another’s shot glasses with the clear rice whiskey they had drunk together for over twenty years. They were all born in the same year, 1960, so they could speak ­ban-mal to one another, they could be comfortable together.

  “Geombe!” they said.

  “One shot!” a friend named Duik shouted, so they clicked their glasses, downed their drinks, then held the glasses ­upside ­down over their heads to show that they were empty.

  They ate small chunks of roasted pork straight off the charcoal grill with garlic and wrapped in lettuce leaves. The owner’s caged–up pet pig looked on. Gilho wondered briefly if it could smell the flesh of its own kind. He had been to this restaurant several times, but he hadn’t considered the pig before. This perspective, he thought, was also what Wuseong opened up in him.

  Jonghun to his right poured him beer mixed with soju.

  “Friend, it’s too early to drink poktan–ju,” Gilho said. “We haven’t even gotten to our second bar!”

  But you should never refuse a drink from a friend, so he accepted the glass.

  They were drinking; they were happily forgetting; they were slowly reaching the stage when they were no longer individuals and more like members of a group; the uri, the we in which everything dissolved: Duik’s mother’s death, Gilho’s and Taeyeong’s departed families, Sangwon’s hostile marriage, Minjun’s fragile solvency.

  As the men drank, what seemed like a world of young people drifted past the large windows; at the next table a group of university students drank, still able to do anything and go anywhere, or become anyone.

  Duik sighed. “Remember when we couldn’t pay the bill and they hauled us to the police ­station—what was it, five in the morning?”

  “Or when we ran out of money and walked six kilometers back home?”

  “That was nothing compared with military service. They would keep us awake five days in a ­row—”

  “For me it was a week.”

  “They’d give us a tiny bowl of water in the middle of summer after we’d run fifteen miles, and tell us to wash with it.”

  “Everyone was so thirsty we’d fight to drink water from the toilets.”

  “Now they get real food and cry when their squadron leader hits them.”

  “Koreans need to be beat.”

  “If they don’t get beat, nothing gets done.”

  “They say the young kids these days get in taxis and run away without paying. Young people these days, they have no ui–ri. They’ve got no honor.”

  And yet they envied the young.

  Within another hour, as was the custom, they moved to a bar for icha, the second round. Duik, his hair a glacial white since he’d turned thirty, stood up and sang into an empty soju bottle. Minjun picked through all the vegetables and ate only the chunks of cod in the spicy fish egg stew until another whacked him across the head.

  When they talked about women, Gilho become quiet; when they’d had enough soju, they scrutinized their server’s breasts.

  Taeyeong said, “It’s like visiting a brothel without paying for it.”

  His voice was merry, but his face wore the cost of two years’ separation from his family.

  Gilho looked up, his face bleak.

  Taeyeong gripped his hand in mistaken sympathy. His wife and children had also left for America; he, too, understood what sacrifices it took to free your children from the sixteen hours of mindless daily cramming at school and ­after-school institutes that ran past midnight, the special Oriental medicines to keep them awake for college entrance exam studies, the temptation of suicide. But Gilho had been avoiding Soonah’s calls for the past week.

  The men kissed one another on the cheeks, their hands across one another’s shoulders and backs. Taeyeong said, “My chingu,” and kissed Gilho on the lips. They had attended boys’ schools, served in the military, and worked in corporations run like the army; they were more at ease around men. They were friends, they were men with ui–ri, loyal, steadfast men, and for their generation, that meant that they would underwrite one another’s debts if asked, they would die for one another if needed.

  Minjun, who had be
en sleeping with his head on the table for the last half hour, rubbed his eyes, yawned, and stood up on his chair.

  “I love you. I love you all,” he said, striking a skiing pose though they all knew he could not afford the sport. “I want to love you guys, so you better let me get the bill,” he said.

  While they fought with one another to pay, the piece of paper snatched from hand to hand, Taeyeong, who was a lawyer, quietly stood up and paid for them all.

  That night, after the last round of drinks at a drinking tent, Gilho returned home after four with Taeyeong draped over him like an overcoat. He rested his friend on the couch, then slid to the floor. It was then that he saw Wuseong on the balcony. When their eyes met, the goose tucked its ­hammer-shaped head underneath Wuseong’s neck and made a rough, throaty sound.

  Gilho slid the balcony glass door open. “Ah–yah,” he said, “where were you?”

  Wuseong looked at him shyly; his body was tense and guarded, as if ready to bolt.

  “Were you worried?”

  “Of course!” Gilho’s voice shook. “You disappear with no note, no call…it’s okay. You’ll be okay.”

  Wuseong stood up, his arms still crossed. A goose feather stuck up from his hair.

  Gilho’s head thundered with confusion. He wanted the boy to know that he was sorry, but he was too proud, too afraid to admit it.

  Wuseong’s eyes fastened on Taeyeong, absorbed by the Hugo ­Boss–clad, reclining misery, as if he were another species altogether. Wuseong smiled a bright, tired smile. “We should be going to bed.”

  Gilho patted the boy on the head. He almost patted the goose before he remembered that it was just a goose. He said something about his best bottle of Bordeaux. “I expect we’ll drink to the morning.”

  Snow flurries fell against the glass. Gilho returned to the kitchen and clumsily chopped at a chunk of dried squid with a steak knife. Wuseong pressed his face against the glass. On the other side, Taeyeong rubbed his eyes and breathed heavily from the sofa. All of them, strangers in their lives, watched the wintering landscape.

  A shriek shattered the silence. By the time Gilho bolted back to the living room, Taeyeong, his voice dancing with fear, was gripping his bleeding hand.

  Wuseong hopped nervously from left leg to right.

  “Your friend kept trying to pluck her,” he said. “I tried to stop him, I did.”

  Taeyeong moaned. “One ­feather—I just wanted one. To see if you can really write with one of ’em.”

  Gilho headed straight for the balcony. Alcohol heightened his notion that a man should protect his friends; he was ready for a confrontation. As if it sensed his animosity, the goose trumpeted and hissed with its bill wide open; it charged, its wing billowing in the air like a stiff petticoat. Gilho grasped at the beating good wing, and felt the webbed feet on his foot. His hand seemed to reach through nothing, as if there were no body underneath the feathers. Its black pupils locked with his.

  He gripped the goose’s ­tubelike neck as best he could with both hands. It startled him to sense this immense power that one could have over life. In the haze of alcohol, he felt convinced that if this bulbous creature was extinguished with one twist, somehow his life would be simplified.

  An unfamiliar shadow passed over Wuseong’s face. It flickered, disappeared. He looked at Gilho as if he saw right through him, and forgave him for his cowardice.

  Gilho released the goose and staggered back inside.

  He said, “Why do you look at me like that?”

  Taeyeong stared, his hand forgotten.

  “Ajeoshi,” Wuseong said wistfully, “the world’s full of mystery—it’s our duty to accept it.”

  Wuseong dashed to Taeyeong’s side and inspected his hand. Gilho heard him humming as if he weren’t completely alone in the world; as if he weren’t living with an older man cracking up with love; as if a bleak future were not awaiting him. He hummed as if hope were enough to sustain him.

  An hour into sleep Gilho woke up to the first full moon of the new year. He went to the kitchen for water, then standing with the empty glass he watched car beams flashing on the nearby riverside highway, alone with the lie that he was. He no longer wanted to be different from other men. As he turned to go he heard a muffled whisper from the living room. One figure, then two, moved on the balcony. There was a woman. She was around Gilho’s age with hair as black as a coffin, a body thin and frail on top, with rotund legs. She rested her head against Wuseong’s shoulder. Her face was weathered with dirt and death, but her eyes were generous and untroubled, her lips were a seamless line of perseverance. The cool moonlight brightened the balcony. As the boy’s hand gathered around the woman’s head, her face brightened. Gilho saw her attenuated fingers, her delicate, ­blue-tinted feet. He saw what he had been resisting all this time: the world through Wuseong’s eyes.

  Gilho took a step toward the balcony, then another. When he slid open the door, Wuseong looked up, unsurprised. He slipped his hand into Gilho’s.

  “Isn’t my mother beautiful?” Wuseong said.

  Gilho nodded, afraid to say anything. He breathed in shallow bursts.

  “Ajeoshi, are you all right?”

  Gilho rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  He did not care that Taeyeong might stumble out of the guest room, looking for the bathroom. It was the first full moon of the new year, Daeboreum, the day hundreds of people hiked up the mountains to catch the rising of the moon for a year’s worth of luck, and bonfire festivals replayed the fires of the past that had driven away evil spirits. Tonight the apartment was Gilho’s mountain where he was ­caught in the moon’s light. He was ready to go anywhere with Wuseong. Anywhere to be far from Gilho’s position, the eyes of his parents, his friends, anywhere where they could be themselves. He wanted to ask the goose for forgiveness. For wanting her son in an unforgivable way. For being a married man betraying his family. Forgiveness, because he was prepared to scandalize. Tonight he was going to kiss the boy he loved. He turned to Wuseong.

  “I’ve been lonely,” he said, and shuddered, when the woman’s arms, the goose’s good, stiff feathers, circled over them. “I’ve been lonely all my life.”

  THE SALARYMAN

  WHEN YOU ARRIVE at seven in the morning, your ex­­hausted colleagues are already at their cubicles. Once again you stride past, trying to appear necessary. You are wearing the only suit you allowed your wife to buy at full price beyond your means, a navy wool blend with a red silk tie from Hyundai Department Store that disguises your stomach’s pouch and your rural upbringing in Iksan of street markets and communal toilets.

  On the way to your cubicle, you bow to Manager Han, who stares back with glazed eyes in what has become his only expression. He lost his savings in the plummeting company stocks, then lost his wife, and may be contemplating suicide. You, too, lost your savings, but thankfully didn’t have much to lose. Ms. Min, the only woman in marketing with you, has divorced her husband, employed in the strategy planning department. You suspect this shameful state of her affairs is a paper divorce only, for companies like to fire married women who can rely on their husbands. Just last month, after his company released him, an acquaintance of yours drowned off Seongsu Bridge in the Han River. The truth of his suicide was muzzled so his wife and children could subsist on the life insurance money. Nightly the nine o’clock news parades such stories. These clips, rare to Korea before the 1997 IMF crisis destroyed the ­job-for-life policy, are suddenly so ordinary that when you attended your acquaintance’s funeral, your mourning felt like a forgery.

  As she does each morning Ms. Min delivers newspapers and memos across the floor. Perhaps because you have the kind of face that people easily forget, she smiles as if you two have just been introduced. This doesn’t perturb you; being singled out is what flusters you. You turn the computer on, scan the memos, and admire your immaculate desk: documents arranged in ­color-coded files, books stacked on a ­two-tier shelf, pencils honed to fine points, all which
accurately reflect the desk of a person who takes care in the work done. You have never pocketed a single office supply. Unlike your wife this morning, colleagues express pleasure in your company.

  Your wife, Jayeong, began your day with kisses that traveled your neck before the children were awake and crawling into your double bed, but by breakfast she launched into you with talk of money. Children are expensive. Rent is expensive. She said if your parents had planned for their future, you wouldn’t have to send a monthly allowance to them in Iksan. But they live off of what little money their alleyway eatery brings in and you are their only son, the one whom they worked hard to send to college, and they depend on you. You made the mistake of adding, well, what about her new scarf, the one designed by some Frenchman, that cost as much as your parents’ monthly grocery bill? You suggested that she had unreasonable shopping habits.

  Jayeong’s eyebrows peaked. She said, “At least we don’t have to support my family.”

  When necessary, she will remind you of this.

  You wanted desperately to make her happy.

  “I’m just a stingy ajeoshi,” you said. “The scarf is perfect on you.”

  Yoona and Jeongmin interrupted to pin a parents’ day pink chrysanthemum to your suit lapel. Jeongmin’s feral eyes were milky with sleep as he balanced expertly on your feet. Yoona called out to him in a plummy voice, but the next moment, she pushed her brother aside and stood in his place. Even if she is a girl, she is your secret favorite, a scrappy beauty who once cried because she would never be able to personally meet Marie Curie.

  They are five and seven and heavy, your burdens that you hoisted in your arms. You were smelling the garlic and ginger of their skin when Yoona said, “Appa, are you a drunkard?”

  She has been listening too closely to the family’s arguments.

  The day is like any other day until Deputy Manager Kang calls you into his office.

  When you open his door, Mr. Kang’s squat fingers are spread out equidistant from one another. He is as pale as rice, and so short that his feet dangle from the ergonomic leather chair. More than once you have been tempted to push him off. When you apologize for your tardiness that day, he looks through you. He normally greets you with confidences, for you are capable, conscientious, and maintain a Swiss neutrality in the labyrinth of office politics. Though the company, like countless others, has declared bankruptcy and is restructuring, you had never imagined it would be you called to the office.