Drifting House Page 9

  Still not looking at you, he says, “Assistant Manager Seo, once, our company was family for life. But with the IMF…now there are no guarantees.”

  You pick your ear with a ballpoint pen, as is your habit. You say, “I appreciate the warning.”

  “It’s headquarters’ orders.” He squints over your shoulder. “You know I’m like an older brother to you, but your job…no longer exists.”

  Using his official work title, you say, “­Bujang-nim, there must be an alternative.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Seo. It’s a terrible time to live in.”

  He grips your hand and shakes it hard. He says something about trying to help you in any way he can, which embarrasses both of you. You bow mechanically. The entire time, his eyes lock on the clock, as if he no longer has time for a man whose future he has just erased.

  You steal to Yeoido Park a few blocks from the office. On the benches men in suits are reading newspapers. You sit and, before you’re asked, fabulate to the man next to you until the story of this prosperous company you own doesn’t sound plausible even to you. It makes you angry, how each man in the park and in the libraries will come home to his family and say, Yeobo, work was fine, until there’s no money left in the bank account. You feel the mandible crush in the endless lies they must tell, and swear not to be like them, though you, too, are ­thirty-five with two kids and a wife to support, little savings, a rental apartment, and now unemployed in the middle of an unprecedented financial crisis. Your company has abandoned you, but you are not finished.

  At night you descend the bus and pass dozens of matchbox apartment blocks identical to yours, gaping commercial buildings, a playground. In the six years devoted to your company, you worked, ate, worked, ate. You drank because Mr. Kang, like most deputy managers, expects it; two reluctant drinks, a less reluctant third, then a fourth, and a fifth, on the corporate expense account. Late at night after you arrived home to the suburbs of Gunsan, near kilometers of apartments built so close to one another that you can see neighbors at night changing their clothes, you stopped at the playground and imagined yourself ten years later with the same company, returning to your wife and two ­college-age kids. You dreamed modestly.

  In one hand you clutch a sable briefcase, and in the other, pink delphiniums. You make it as far as the stairs and stand there until the security guard asks, “Is something wrong, Mr. Seo?” You smile and wave at him.

  In front of your door you listen for the sounds of your children. Yoona, the spirited, earnest one, is loudly arguing for Bach over Mozart. Your wife disagrees; she enjoys a good quarrel. And Jeongmin? He is too affable to care about right or wrong. As they debate, he may be rolling his rice into balls and feeding the complacent cat. You leave the flowers on the mat. You are a salaryman who ­works—worked—for a respectable company, so how can you confess that you can no longer support your family? You find a pay phone by the playground, and call home.

  You’ve turned fragile in the last few hours; your wife’s forceful greeting is enough to crack the porcelain veneer of calm you have maintained. Still, you tell her to take the substantial apartment deposit, the bankbook, and the children to her mother’s house near the hills of Andong.

  “Forget me,” you say, but the underbrush of your voice thickens. You snap the cord against the phone box. “I’ll be fine. I can come get you when prospects improve.”

  “Yeobo, don’t be ridiculous. Come home,” she says, her voice tender but querulous.

  You allow that you specialize in the ridiculous: remember the bicycle ride you attempted drunk across the steep Kangwondo Mountains?

  She hiccups, a sound you love.

  But as she drills you on whether or not the company will release your pension, for new bankruptcy laws exempt it from its responsibilities, you imagine her anxiously tracking you as you skim newspaper ads. You remember the one year you were un­­employed, and how the bitter potions of ground deer antlers and the heart of the rare Jirisan black bear (at least that’s what the hanuisa told you as she mixed the medicinal herbs), the fortifying dog meat stews, and other ­heem-producing foods could not bring back the heat and light you normally shared with your wife. You can combat the long work hours, the company drinking, the children’s demands for attention. You can bear anything but witness your incompetence, so you decide you would rather sleep in the park. You try to sound confident, but your voice breaks at the end of the conversation, and even to you, you seem pitiful.

  At sunrise you queue behind hundreds of other men at an employment center. When you finally meet a public servant, he informs you that over two thousand people have applied for the advertised sanitation job. It’s still a government job, he explains; the economy’s paralyzed. The convenience stores and restaurants hire only young people for minimum wage. Other jobs require specialized knowledge such as interpretation skills or orthography. You do not have a fancy degree from overseas or parents who can support you. You do not speak three foreign languages. Still, you tell him that you are a college graduate, and have job experience. As a proud Daehan Minguk citizen you have mastered Korean and have competence in English. You fill out all available applications, though you are told not to be too hopeful.

  Seoul Station may stink of urine and flesh and futility, the police may hound these subterranean arcade residents, the other city, but it keeps you warm, and this matters, for last night you woke up outside shivering with dew on your lashes. Now your back hugs the cold wall and drunk voices boom as you fish for your wallet with its family photos. But it has already been stolen. That’s when you realize you are no longer needed.

  You avoid conversation. When heading toward the bathroom, you arc away from the other men as if they are contagious. One man lies on his wasted face. Another must be at least sixty. Tiny indentations, like flecks of sea lice, discolor his neck and cheeks. A crust of mold growing between his toes smells of pickled radish; one black toenail is rotting off. He is old enough to be your father and in a sane society would have been cared for by his children. But Korea is no longer sane; you no longer feel sane.

  The fluorescent arcade lights puncture your eyes; the subway bathroom line is unbearably long. You stand behind men who have lost their homes, or are fleeing the homes they have. Some hide tiny bars of soap and razors in their hands, and a few grip toothbrushes. Most laugh when you scrub your hair with paper towels. Over the months you will get used to standing in such long, senseless lines.

  You get used to many things. For instance, queuing for a free meal at Tapgol Park before noon. Clearing out of the chilly arcade each morning when the police hustle you. Estimating time by studying the sun after your watch battery gives up. Trudging to the job center. Digging in the scree of the city dump for edibles and clothing. Finding an occasional bed in a shelter. Begging. When you have money, drinking the alcohol that during your regimented corporate years has become necessary to you. Waking up underground to the bitter bouquet of your comrades’ bodies in monsoon season. For you have found a few comrades by now.

  It is sometime in late July or August. When you wake up, Yeongsuk offers you and Daehoon soju. The cheap rice wine burns and you sip only enough to take the edge off of waking slick in your own sweat. Yeongsuk has pale, aristocratic skin, a portly, graceful carriage, and lynx’s eyes disguised behind thick glasses. He won’t return home out of shame, for just before the crisis, he had taken the bulk of his parents’ retirement fund and traded and lost his savings, as well as theirs, in futures. He is alarmingly generous with his food and alcohol, a habit you have found rare in those who come from plentitude. Even now he urges you to accept half a stick of gum.

  Daehoon takes a long swig from the bottle, then flexes his considerable biceps before beginning his exercises. He is a ­twenty-seven-year-old nonunionized worker who punched you in the nose the one time you asked about his family. In between sets of ­push-ups and a half dozen different exotic ­sit-ups, he struts around in bleached jeans that hug his testicles. His barrel chest
protrudes over a ­girl-size waist; he often scratches himself generously while you’re looking. When you’ve had a few drinks, you allow that he is “entertaining,” and though you would rather not wake up each morning to his trucker’s mouth, you do feel safer with him. In their company, you do not feel as lonely.

  After Daehoon completes a third set of fifty ­push-ups, he bounds up and spits a wad of thick jelly, which vaults onto your shoe. You are secretly pleased that you cut off too much from his hair yesterday, which now tufts up at the top.

  He says, “They say if you get yourself in debt to a gang and can’t pay, they chop off your legs and make you beg for a living. Pick you up, drop you off, give you food and a bed. Not a bad life.”

  “Without legs?” you say. “You can’t do ­push-ups with no legs.”

  You fear those men, some of them debtors and industrial accident casualties, and still others neglected Vietnam veterans from back in the seventies who, with their stumps wrapped in thick industrial rubber, propel their torsos by skateboard. You dread their clawing hands, their truculent faces. In dreams, they suffocate you with their gutted legs.

  Daehoon slaps his heavy thighs. “These two stumps, are they doing anything for me right now?”

  “I’d rather go to America and do hard work,” says Yeongsuk. “Perhaps drive trucks or labor on a chicken farm. Perhaps even get another finance job.”

  “America!” Daehoon snorts. “And I’m President Roh ­Tae-woo! You got the kind of money to pay off visa sharks?”

  “And what if I do?”

  “I don’t care about your fancy foreign suit covered in dirt, or your fancy education,” says Daehoon. “If they let you in, I’m capable of marrying me a rich bitch from the Kangnam neighborhood. I’d just as soon chop off my legs, sell what I’ve got.”

  “Did you know that on the black market, one of your kidneys could be valued at over twenty thousand dollars?” says Yeongsuk. “That’s at least thirty million won. No, near forty, I think, with the present currency devaluation.”

  Both of you stare at him. Yeongsuk entertains himself by doing things like reciting the periodic table, tracing word etymologies, and deducing the possible whereabouts of former dictator Chun Du–hwan’s reputed illegal fortune of two hundred million U.S. dollars. He knows the strangest things.

  At noon the three of you head toward Jongro where a thin ­meat-bone soup and rice will be served by humorless Christians. Past enormous yellow cranes that slumber over the many halted building projects, already the line weaves around the block. That doesn’t stop Daehoon from cutting in front of the smallest, youngest man he finds.

  The man, though slight and stringy, collars Daehoon and says, “Gaesaekki!”

  He stitches curses together so quickly it sounds like a foreign language. The man drives back Daehoon, who clearly expected instant capitulation.

  The man adds in ­ban-mal, his language casual and disrespectful, “It’s saekkis like you I hate.”

  “Who’re you using ­ban-mal to?” Daehoon cocks his fists. “You’re talking to someone older than you!”

  You secretly wish that Daehoon will be vanquished; it is difficult to like a man who mimics your ­high-pitched voice when you are excited and tells you that you walk like a woman. He is so large, he makes you feel insufficient. But there are too many people watching and he cannot lose face, so he grabs the man’s shirt and caroms into him. Only after Yeongsuk pokes you with a chopstick, you help drag Daehoon off to the side. He struggles just enough to show he is eager to fight.

  The pickled radish is fresh and spicy, the clear, meaty broth salty and smooth, but Yeongsuk, as usual, eats rapidly, then rises. He will call his parents and his wife, as he does every week, pretending to be in America. He will tell his parents that he, the oldest son, is their guarantee. He will promise to bring his wife over after he gets settled. When you once asked how he can lie so creatively, he said that he’s not, quite, for he has set aside an emergency fund and paid a reputable immigration company. Give me time, he said equably. Even though he went to graduate school and was an investment banker and knows many useless things, you don’t believe him.

  After the soup is gone, you think about Jayeong, the children. You touch your inner suit pocket where the dried chrysanthemum rests. You miss your wife’s rapturous laughter, sleeping against her soft, irregular snores that wake you up. You even miss the arguments.

  Daehoon watches the fan above and demonstrates his usual conversational skills by wondering if your skull would split apart if it fell off. When you tell him that you will return in five minutes, he grins as he scrapes Yeongsuk’s and your leftovers into his bowl. He is as hefty as a wedding chest; maybe that is why his constant hunger disgusts you. You straighten your yellowed collar and sling the briefcase over your shoulder. From a distance you are still a salaryman.

  “Hello? Who’s speaking?”

  It is Jayeong. Since you hang up if your mother–in–law picks up, it has been a month since you two have spoken. Her small, quick hands, her arms of pressed lavender and lavish, dogmatic certainty; you can almost smell them.

  You deposit your last coins. “Yeobo, it’s me.”

  “Yeobo? Are you safe?” Her voice strains with forced welcome, and you hear this immediately.

  “What’s wrong?”

  There is a silence.

  You say would it hurt to be a little positive? She has the warm bed, and she has the children. You force a laugh. She responds that she has been thinking. She recounts your drinking and the cycle of debt. The money you sent your in–laws. The creditors that have be­­gun circling. Now this. The debt, you say, helped pay for the children that she’d wanted. You are startled by your cowardice, your cruelty.

  She says, “They say more than half of divorces are about money.”

  The word divorce silences you for a moment. “Who are ‘they’?” you finally say.

  “I need to protect myself and our babies. They’ll take the money that’s left if it’s in your name. If I’m not careful…Others are doing the same, too. It’s just a piece of paper.”

  Your armpits become hot. You start to see white spots. Odd, you say, how a man loses value overnight without a salary.

  She says, “It’s not about that, not at all. I can’t be derailed this time.”

  You say, even over the phone, you can smell her lavender and garlic.

  She says something about Seoul and court documents and how she needs a guarantee against any possible future debt of yours; you retort that she is being capricious as usual. You say that she will regret this tomorrow, so let’s just not continue. She persists, so you begin chanting some of Yeongsuk’s etymologies of words over her rising cant. You cannot let her continue because your family is your last possibility for a world that seems more and more distant. You cannot listen because losing your wife will rend the little left of you. You will not because you want to live.

  When she says, “Please, please cooperate, don’t make me crazier than I already feel,” you hang up.

  The passing crowds overwhelm ­you—their talk of school and meetings and weekend plans. All these ordinary people with their lives intact.

  You enter the nearest convenience store and open up a bottle of soju and drink it right there between the Pringles and the dried cuttlefish. After you pay the clerk with your last bills, you spit on a hairdresser’s towels hanging outside on a clothes rack. The world you see is your enemy. You kick the glass doors of each business establishment, determined to break one in. You only bruise your toe.

  In the morning you still visit the employment center because that, at least, is reliable. Miraculously, they are able to set up an interview for you. They require someone with computer skills and job experience, no advanced degree. That is you exactly. But you are a little nervous. Last night you almost called your wife, but instead you drank with your comrades.

  Yeongsuk coaches you once again on interview techniques and tucks bus fare and a little lucky money into y
our inner jacket pocket. You call him Older Brother for the first time, and mean it.

  After you arrive at the interview, you wait with hundreds of other applicants. Your suit is freshly pressed and your hair washed and cut, but you slur when you speak. You hadn’t meant to but you were so nervous. When you had stopped by the store on the way to the interview, you had meant to have only one little sip.

  By fall, you agree to meet your wife. You washed as best you could, shaved, shined your shoes and briefcase, and while strolling through the department store sprayed yourself with a sample of Ralph Lauren Polo cologne. You almost look presentable. You had come to the designated café in a gentler neighborhood of Seoul braced to finesse, to persuade, to argue if necessary. But you lose confidence as soon as Jayeong arrives. Those are wild, uncertain eyes, desperate for change. She has even armed herself with the children, dressed in their Sunday finery, which you had not prepared for.

  Yoona hangs back shyly, but on command pecks your cheek. Afterward, she darts back as if afraid of you. “Appa,” she says, “your eyes are red and you smell funny.”

  You clutch her palm but still feel stained with the stench of the streets. As you present Yoona with pink delphiniums, you say, “That’s because Appa’s been up all night picking these for you.”

  “When things are better for you, you can give Yoona flowers anytime.” Your wife’s voice is brisk and vigilant. “We’re ready to come back anytime, really anytime you want.”

  “Visit?” Yoona pulls at her lace collar as if to tear it. “No more visits! Let’s all go home!”