6 – III: Runaway
-Soul-
After I find his note, I begin to hear music.
Deep into the night's quiet, when even the owl's begin to nest, the guitar's voice wails from somewhere above me. Sometimes it begins as a low, long moan, or as a soft, unrelenting whine, like that ringing in your ear after listening to loudness. Yet other times it strikes like lightning, rumbles and rolls across the roof like a thunderstorm, vengeful, unannounced and uncaring for order.
All I got is time; got no meaning, just a rhyme.
The first time it happened, I ran up to the roof where I hoped to catch him. He'd probably sneaked back when I'd been sleeping. But when I reach the roof, there is never anyone there.
Take time with a wounded hand, 'cause it likes to heal.
Sometimes I sit on that roof all night and wait for him to come back, if not to see his teacher, then maybe for that guitar, his invisible fifth limb.
But mostly, I retreat to the warmth of my apartment and stand in the doorway to Hwoarang's room. I never enter. But I allow myself to look upon the remnants of what I have partially made, upon the posters of rock stars and abstract paintings lining the white walls, to the beaten leather boots and frayed punching bag hidden in the far corner. To the windows with blinds drawn, like eyes closed, to the amplifier gathering dust. To the red and black guitar leaned carefully against the unmade bed, the imprint of his body yet rumpling the sheets and denting the pillow, as if he'd awoken but this morning and is wolfing down breakfast in the kitchen, the wooden chopsticks moving like heat-lightning from bowl to mouth.
But nothing remains now but this desultory museum of the life I once nurtured with my two hands, a nucleus turned to powdery shell. I have made history, at least. I have lived to see life and death as one.
Sometimes love destroys more than what it creates.
I'm half the man I used to be.
One day I lock Hwoarang's bedroom door and force my ears to hear nothing. Silent night, unholy night.
The boy has a gift for breaking beautiful things. But oh, how beautifully he breaks.
-Seoul-
He wrote his name on a paper napkin and set it in front of her, gesturing for her to do the same.
"Go on," he urged, patting the pen. "Write your name. I want to know who you are."
But the voiceless seamstress merely smiled and continued her work. Sighing, Hwoarang turned away and crumpled the napkin in his hand, but held his frustration in check; he wouldn't dare become angry over little things, not when she had agreed to work so hard for him—not when she'd agreed to let him stay with her until things calmed down. Who knew how long that would take. Months, maybe. Years, likely. The blood was still fresh. He could taste it in his sleep.
"You remind me a lot of my mother, you know," he began.
He didn't know why he was talking, just that he was talking and needed to hear the words. Maybe it was easier talking to someone who couldn't speak back, who couldn't offer pretend compassion or spew small talk to subdue those impromptu confessions of pain. But though she was silent, the seamstress judged and spoke equally with her eyes as others did with their words, and in her gaze Hwoarang knew he was a coward for taking advantage of her silence like this; he could insult her and she would utter nothing. He could hurt her and she would not shout. He could tell her his heart's secrets and she would tell no one, no matter how horrific they may be. But instead he spoke to her mercifully and helped her with her home, not because he sought vindication through domestic duties and not even because of some goodness in his heart, but because he knew she was all he had left, she was one who could not understand, and in her ignorance he found a private salvation, like getting lost in a good book before reality and social obligation pushed you into the outside world to fight for things that never belonged to you in the first place.
"Sometimes I think I was born with a big mouth so I could balance out her silence," Hwoarang continued with a faraway smirk. "I wish she was here so she could see that I'm finally getting hanbok, you know? 'Wings,' she called them. Whatever that means. Old people always talk in metaphors anyway."
But she hadn't been old, had she, when she'd first woven him the story of the moths? Thirty maybe. Twenty-five? Hwoarang didn't bother to remember. Rather, he watched the seamstress, who was indefatigable in her work. A flicker of her eyes indicated she was listening. Of course she was listening. Lose that skill and she would lose the world.
He wondered when the seamstress would die. Right now, maybe, when relatively young. Soon. Wrapped in regretful, mouthless cocoon, as the world moved, indifferent, and sang and wept and churned and danced on. How did moth days compare to human years?
Sometimes you dream about Sung. Sometimes you can't get that Chung Hee kid outta your head. Sometimes you find yourself taking too many looks behind you as you walk.
Five evolutions to get it right.
Eat, shit, fuck and die. Kinda like humans?
-Soul-
I remember the last time I was happy.
I'm not talking about orgasmic release, or amusement park excitement or pride or even peace. I'm talking about raw bliss. A poisonous, fleeting, wild bliss that leaves you thinking, for one stupid moment, that everything is all right.
As dumb as everyone thinks I am, the truth is I'm smart, but I just can't seem too smart. Otherwise people start expecting things from you. It's enough that you've already developed impossible expectations for yourself. I can paint metaphors, I can sit in the library reading Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare, and I can study physics for three hours straight—I just won't. I'm not programmed for the stories of other men.
I suppose that's why I used to steal and fuck and kill as I please. I was learning man's mistakes all over again. Perhaps that makes me an embarrassment to evolution. I guess I'm not so smart after all.
What was I talking about? Oh yeah. Being happy. That ultimate cliché, the only cliché, that matters.
Happiness. Now there's some sort of airy, heavenly, cheesy ass quality to that word that makes you wanna eat candy and choke. "Hap" starts like a laugh or like a sigh, "pi" a little harsher but still on wispy clouds, and then the "ness," the lowered intonation, the descent, the final realization. I'm on the "hap" part, but I've experienced it to the "ness" only once.
The funny thing is that that genuine "ness" moment had nothing to do with my mother or with Baek, not even with my guitar (I miss that damn thing by the way).
I reached "ness" with my father. It was the closest thing to enlightenment I've ever experienced—sorry, Siddhartha—but I can honestly say that it happened.
It was before I became his punching bag. We were at the grocery store of all places, the most boring, uninspiring setting for a heart-to-heart-to-happiness, but that's where it was. I was six. He was looking at the prices on the jars of kimchi. Unlike my mother, Dad liked to talk. He told jokes every day he got home from work; he talked about the ins and outs of his job, about the gum he stepped on outside; he talked through his soup and in his sleep, and when he wasn't talking he was singing. He was by no means the stereotypical strong silent breadwinner, though he was built like a redwood tree and stood taller than I stand today at nineteen.
Anyway, on that grocery trip he got quiet, as he always did when he was making crucial decisions—red bean or sesame?—and as a typical kid who worshipped his father, I watched and adored his every move.
Then Dad paused at the freezer, fished out a box of Popsicles, tore the thing open before he'd paid for it, and stuffed a honey dew flavored one into my sticky mouth. Then he smiled at me, big and crooked, and told me not to tell my mother. Every now and then throughout that day he'd stop what he was doing and just look down at me and smile.
That's it. Pretty fancy, huh.
So when he started beating me I got all fucked up, as you can imagine.
Maybe that's why I'm still fucked up now, in the streets, between walls, hiding, fighting for wrong reasons, watching people die and hurt for sport. Something in the wiring went amiss, and I guess I shouldn't blame Dad, because I'm supposed to mature and "get over it."
I love how people say that loneliness is a choice, and that you have a goddamn choice to suck it up and forgive, forget, and move on. Rise above the lower ladders and be a better man. It seems so easy when they say it, but strap them into your boots and see how they fare. Then there are two monsters instead of one.
You can't hustle happy. You can't pull the trigger to happy. You can't win happy.
But sometimes you can remember it—or, at least, imagine how you would remember it.
You wait for it your whole life and you don't even know you're waiting. You chase it forever.
-Seoul-
Nights bled into days without clotting; they were, to him, one and the same. One book opened. The other closed. Silent stories of the wished-for-but-never forgotten. He wasn't the sentimental type, but every feeling he'd ever suppressed flooded his chest harder than a kick to the groin. Bedridden, he could not even protest as the seamstress covered him with blankets and left steaming soup and rice at his bedside table. Only a few days, he promised himself, promises that turned into a few weeks. A year.
A year later he rose from the bed, as if a beast from its snowy hibernation, and stepped outside. The sun felt nice on his face, like the smile that had fled his mouth. He must look like death. Lingering, creeping, pale death, Seoul his River Styx, soul his dead companions and undying grief—he folded that away, tucked it under some softness in his chest like a diary under a mattress. No one but he knew it was there.
Before depositing his dishes into the kitchen sink, he raked a weary hand through his hair and slid on some old jeans he forgot he owned, and then, slowly, tugged on a T-shirt Sung had bought him for his sixteenth birthday. He really had to stop being so sentimental.
"'Morning," he mumbled, bowing his head slightly to the seamstress already seated at the table. He shuffled to the sink and began to scrub at his dishes, hard, as if to scrub away the porcelain itself. The dishes screeched long black lines in the sink.
"Sorry," he said when the seamstress turned to look at him. "It's just…they're pretty dirty."
But she knew everything already, of course, and flashed him a half smile, but looked away just as quickly; she understood he hated that look, any look for that matter, that reflected even the slightest inklings of sympathy. He was twenty now, almost twenty-one, but numbers didn't matter, for he felt seven again, curled up in a ball in a corner as his father's booted feet came crashing down onto his body. He never thought a person could diminish past forgotten, past sorrowed nothingness, but there he stood doing dishes, in someone else's sink, trying to turn things back white, hiding like a shunned dog with its tail between the alpha's teeth—he scrubbed the dishes harder.
"I'm goin' out today," he announced, so loudly the seamstress shifted in her seat. "You said you needed more red. Right?"
He was lying, and they both knew it. All the silk the seamstress had was sufficient, as his mother had been terribly thorough in her selections, but what other excuse could Hwoarang make to step out of this cave and find out what the world had left him with, what he had missed? He supposed he could just leave and return as he wished, because the seamstress wouldn't be able to protest anyway. But he still felt, out of some unprecedented courtesy, that he had to ask for permission, or had to at least make some sort of announcement. He should be freer than ever now, and yet he felt chained to her silence, as if being silent in return would break her. It was embarrassing; hell, she wasn't even beautiful.
Pulling on his boots, he strode out the door with the confidence of a man who owned the world, who had nothing to lose, and perhaps it is only the ones reduced to nothing, the ones who own nothing, that can begin to claim anything of the world as theirs. To have nothing is to have everything. Right? He thought so, even as the sun pierced his eyes like a blade and the roar of Seoul's crowd tempted him back into the seamstress' silken silence.
He sneezed as the passing smells of grease and pollen and floral perfume flooded his nose, and for a few seconds he felt as if he'd wandered into another land, one that was not his own and not of his formation. But no, there was the jewelry shop owned by the same two brothers with the same laugh, and there were the boats in the marina on the west side of the bridge, and still there was the same kimbap and fruit vendor across the street from the marina, managed by an old lady with a scar down her nose. Still standing yet, in silent defiance, were the traditional style gardens with their stone statues and yellow birds and budding cherry blossom trees. Was it spring already?
Nothing had changed. But things were different. It was like believing you knew a person, and then discovering they were someone else entirely once you started asking the right questions. They'd never changed; rather, they had always been so. You just never bothered to look closer.
Hwoarang crossed the street before the walk sign dictated it was safe to, and meandered his way to the American taco joint jammed between that jewelry store and the bank. Why that location made sense for foreign food was beyond him, but he opened the door anyway and ordered something or other, he couldn't remember. All he remembered was that he was waiting and that he knew, right before the gang member swaggered in, that Byung would come by around noon for his daily burrito fix. Byung was too damn predictable, and Hwoarang wondered how the Jung-gu bastards hadn't offed him yet. He still looked the same, hair gelled up in that corny Mohawk, the rusted studs in his earlobes, the jagged hangul tattoo on the inside of his right wrist—"Strength" or "Honor," something false and overused. Same shoes too. Some things weren't so different after all.
He didn't have to say a word. Though Byung didn't see Hwoarang at all, even as he sat at a booth some ten feet from him, he felt the redhead's familiar gaze as if it were the sun's heat on his neck.
"So you finally outta hiding, huh?" Byung smirked, turning to face his leader. "Never thought you to be that type."
"You know what type I am," Hwoarang replied. "Why don't you eat with me? Let me know what's going on?"
Byung knew it wasn't a request. Uneasily, he sat across from the redhead and folded his arms over his chest.
"Kwan's dead," he began. There was no point in pleasantries.
Hwoarang didn't flinch, or blink for that matter, though his heartbeat quickened. He had to act like everything was his, like everything was still under control, even if he'd been gone for more than a year. Even if everything had gone wrong.
"How."
"Jung-gu, of course, two of 'em. Waited 'til Kwan got off the graveyard shift, cornered him and shot him. Twice. In the heart," Byung continued. "I told him to watch his fucking back."
"That's kinda hard to do with a damn bullet comin' at you," Hwoarang hissed, showing the first signs of emotion.
"Boss, we just couldn't hold it together. When you disappeared like that…everything disappeared too."
"Except for the Jung-gu."
"Well, yeah."
"Fuck…"
"I know."
"Shut up."
"What'd I do?"
Hwoarang rose from the booth, his hands in his hair, and paced back and forth, back and forth, his tacos untouched in front of him. Don't lose it, don't you dare lose it…but it's the only way, isn't it.
"It's suicide," he sighed on ragged breath. "We're only two. We can't take 'em all on."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, it's over, Byung. The gang."
The truth was that he and Byung could probably handle what was left of the Jung-gu boys. But he couldn't risk losing another one, the last one. Even though Byung was an imbecile—the dumbest of the bunch, in fact—he was still one of his, and always would be.
"Just go live your life. Lemme deal with this, all right?" Hwoarang said.
"Mwo? Just 'cause it's over for us doesn't mean it's over for them. They're looking for you, Hwoarang! They're gonna kill you!"
"You think I'm just gonna let them kill me? You watched me beat Yeuno to death; you know what I can do. They can't beat me."
"Really, huh? So I assume your fancy kicks are faster than a bullet?"
"Just go, Byung. It isn't your problem anymore."
"Bullshit. This isn't like you, man. Are you giving up?"
Without warning, he seized Byung by the neck and slammed him into the wall. Why didn't they ever listen the first time? Did he always have to use force to be convincing? He shouldn't have been reluctant to do so; these were street matters, after all. Dirty blood. He used to thrive on this.
"I'm not giving up. I know exactly what needs to be done. I've always known."
"Is that why you accidentally killed Yeuno?" the gang member wheezed.
Hwoarang's grip tightened dangerously around Byung's neck; for a split second he imagined he saw him dead under his hands, mouth agape in its futile gasps for air. The thought invoked an image of the dead Jung-gu leader, writhing on a blood soaked ground, but Hwoarang urged the memory away. This was different. This was setting the record straight, saving a life, even as he felt the lies building in his throat, even as he felt Byung's frantic pulse beneath his fingers, fluttering like his own.
But Byung was right. A year ago, Hwoarang would have used every gangster to the bone if he'd had to, to win. He never would have broken something he'd worked so hard to create; blood was a part of the bargain. He knew he was expected to march into fights as arrogant as the leader he'd made himself to be, and cut down any and all rivals in his way, and he'd done it before, countless times before, until he'd believed it to be of his nature. Then again, things were different now. The only truths of nature were that things, even the ones seemed rooted in time, always changed, metamorphosed into something more salient, if not profounder.
"Listen, you little wiseass," he growled. "I know things have been tough. But I am, and always will be, better than you. It's done when I say it's done."
At this, he tightened his grip as hard as he dared. "You know what I can do. Ah de suh?"
After several more seconds, Hwoarang released his former comrade. "Go," he whispered. Byung turned without another word, disappearing out through the glass door as if he'd never been.
Before leaving, Hwoarang slapped a few won onto the table, for the taco store's owners to fix the crack on the wall from where he'd slammed Byung's head. He didn't know why he now bothered to consider the damage he'd done—to the restaurant and otherwise—but he walked on and bought himself a plate of bulgogi and thought of it no more.
What he did think about was how he would face the Jung-gu gang when they did find him, because find him they would. Seoul was large, but not that large. And with a reputation—and, unfortunately, hair—like his, it was just a matter of time. He decided hiding was still his best option until he could think of something better.
As he finished the last few bites of his lunch, he noticed that Chinese-ish girl with her little Happiness cousin—Huan? Yeah, Huan—leaning over the bridge railings throwing rocks into the ocean. She laughed when the boy couldn't lift a rock that was larger than his head, so she seized the rock from his pudgy hands and threw it over the railing for him. He thought it funny that he was seeing them again; he'd always thought that you never saw someone twice in Seoul, not unless you specifically sought them out. But there the woman stood with that thief of a child, throwing rocks into the ocean, which churned and twisted and danced with aquamarine-white froth.
Hwoarang thought seriously about confronting the woman—she'd a mouth like a ripe strawberry, he remembered—but he wiped the grease off his fingers instead and stalked off in the opposite direction, still walking tall and straight, his eyes loose and serene, even as his heart quivered like a moth's wings too close to a flame. Burned. Almost ashen. Third time would be the charm, he supposed, if not the fifth. If he saw her again, he'd say something. Right now, he was worthy of no one's company but his own.
Glossary
Ah de suh? - Do you understand?