Between Day and Night

For Lee-kyung, the line between day and night had never been distinct.

His life moved always in that seam, and it was always the same. Home, the studio, home, the studio. Someone else might have called it a tedious existence, but for him it was balance. The insomnia that had set in a few years back still troubled him now and then, yet it had grown so familiar that it was hardly an inconvenience anymore. Every dawn he swallowed a pill out of habit. Today he skipped it, got behind the wheel, and drove out into the dark.

1:56 a.m. The hour Won-young would land in Korea. The asphalt at that hour was barren. He could perfectly well have left at an easier pace, but he had hurried for no reason at all and arrived a full hour early.

What am I supposed to do.

One person. Six trees. Too many cars. He took in whatever lay in front of him and set it down in the empty margin of his mind. For Lee-kyung, painting was work much like this—the labor of lifting the tens of thousands of worries drifting through his head and transferring them onto a canvas. People liked his paintings.

There had once been a woman whose name swept the art world, and her name was Yeon Mi-hee. She was Lee-kyung's mother. His pictures resembled her style, and perhaps thanks to that delicate, elusive touch of the brush, the common verdict was that they felt alive. His manner of expression was so singular, besides, that people said the gift had been passed down in the blood.

If he differed from Yeon Mi-hee in anything, it was this. Whatever her reasons, she had refused to sell a single painting no matter how the requests poured in, while Lee-kyung sold every one of his, and at a steep price. So talk went around that the son, ill-matched to the fame of a mother who had painted in seclusion, was a little too hungry for money. Lee-kyung never bothered to answer gossip that petty. And if you looked at it closely, it wasn't even wrong. To him a painting was nothing but a way to earn his bread, not some ideal instrument of self-realization aimed at an artistic summit. He was an excessively realistic man.

He had been filling the canvas in his head when he realized it was nearly two. He got out of the car and started for the terminal, then changed his mind and waited in front of the entrance instead.

Once Noh Won-young decided on a thing, she saw it through no matter what. Because he knew her, he hadn't asked this time either. He would have been lying if he said he wasn't shaken. When she announced, out of nowhere, that she was coming back to Korea, his breath had stopped for an instant, and that had been no ordinary trick of the mind.

Ji-an had grumbled that he lived a truly boring life. Let her. Won-young was coming back—what sort of reaction was he supposed to give for it to count as interesting? He cast a brief look toward her as she came across the crosswalk, then pulled his gaze away at once.

…She hasn't changed.

He loaded her bags into the car. The season had drawn close to summer, and perhaps because of that the dawn air was not especially cold. A relief. Won-young felt the cold badly.

When he flung open the driver's door, she was fidgeting with her hair—a gesture meant to hide her nerves. On the phone she had tacked every stray word she could find onto every other, but faced with him in person after so long, she seemed a little shy. He glanced at her. Easy jeans, a loose beige knit. Not so sheer that her underwear showed outright, but the knit was not tightly woven either, and so it was perfectly plain that her bra was black. He knew well enough that fashion like this was no longer held against anyone in Korea these days. Even so, he wanted, for no good reason, to take off his coat and put it over her. He had not been a particularly conservative boyfriend when they were together, and yet today, of all days, her clothes grated on him.

"Did you miss me?"

For an instant his eyes met hers where she had been watching him in the mirror. Lee-kyung tugged at the tip of his nose, tossed back a short "As if," and started the engine.

It had been nine years since they last sat side by side like this. It ought to have been awkward. Instead he felt the ease that only she could give him, and a scent at once strange and familiar soaked through the car, soft as cotton.

"You said you were going to make a living over there for the rest of your life. What changed your mind?"

Won-young buckled her belt and grumbled, sharp about it.

"Couldn't even wait to ask, could you."

"I'm asking now, aren't I?"

"That's always been your problem, seonbae."

"Pick one. Call me seonbae, or drop it and say you."

"No. I'm doing both."

"Childish. Honestly."

"What did I even do."

He had said as much, but he did not answer her any further. She wasn't wrong. Back in those days, when there had not been time enough even for love alone, the fault had always been his. And yet even if he could turn the years back and return to that season, he was certain he would have arrived at the same end. To have spent the whole of it with Won-young would truly have been harder still.

He had wanted to be alone. It was a season he had wanted, bitterly, to endure by himself. In the days when he had wished to live cut off from the world like a man half out of his mind, there had been a Ryu Lee-kyung he never wanted Won-young, of all people, to see.

The man I was then, and the man I am now—how different can I really claim to be?

The car ran a long while. Cutting through the dawn air, the place he made for in haste was the house in her hometown where she had grown up. Their homes had not been far apart; close enough that they had gone to school together as children. His, though, stood in the middle of downtown Gangcheon, while hers lay far enough out to belong to a township even on the administrative map, rice paddies and fields crowded all around it.

The first time he met her was not long after he moved from Seoul to Gangcheon. The country school she attended had closed, and that year more than ten children transferred all at once, in a rush, into the elementary school he and Ji-an went to. Ji-an, whose quietness had been a worry, had at some point begun to bring Won-young up often.

Among all those many children, one who was unusually small, skinny as a stick. The child he had glanced past without interest began, from one day to the next, to tag along after him.

And he had them.

Her twentieth year. Those brilliant days a life is given only once. He had thought they would go on that way forever. There had been a time when he foolishly believed Noh Won-young would remain at Ryu Lee-kyung's side for a very long while.

Living is a continuity of ruptures. It does not run on unbroken. You take a ringing blow to the back of the head from a god who strikes however he pleases, and then, somehow, you carry on again. That is a life.

Even knowing it was a mound of ash soon to go out, each person tended an ember in the chest. When you looked upon the charcoal burned all the way down, and emptiness came in on the heels of desolation, God only said to light another fire—never knowing how far that shoved a person to the lip of a cliff, never knowing how pitch-black the inside of them had turned.

"What are you thinking about?"

He had driven for a long stretch without a word, and Won-young dipped her head to ask. He answered as if it were nothing.

"Old memories."

"What old memories?"

"I was thinking about the first time I saw you. You were seriously ugly."

"Seonbae!"

Her palm cracked against his forearm, and before he knew it he had put too much weight into that side of the wheel. He stared silently ahead, and only then turned his head a little toward her. It was a joke, but the sight of her face, gone a little hot, was pleasant enough. Maybe that was why he kept wanting to provoke her. As he turned the wheel to the right, he added,

"Don't you remember? What you were like the first time you looked at me. You looked exactly like a kid who'd popped out of a comic book."