I Wanted to Die Today

Young Eui-joo once stepped on a shard of broken glass and was rushed to the hospital. After that month's entire living expenses were swallowed by the medical bills, the kitchen cabinets filled with hard-to-break plastic bowls and paper cups. Eui-tae, who attended school only sporadically, was beaten by his father every three days the way one slaughtered a dog on the hottest day of summer. The neighbors around them were gamblers and thugs, a mother who frequented bars, a grandfather left crippled by the war. Households made miserable by their own separate stories gathered together and lowered the bar for what counted as ordinary.

Cut off from society's gaze that way, Eui-tae might not have known addition or subtraction, but he knew the price of cigarettes and liquor by heart. Once he grew a little older, his school friends taught him what shame was, what humiliation felt like.

For Eui-tae, who struggled with clumsy chopsticks and spelling, mockery and ridicule were everyday weather. After he shot up in height in the upper grades of elementary school, he raised his fists. From then on, no one inside the school defended him and no one spoke to him. As a middle-schooler, Eui-tae looked at the scabs hardened on the backs of his hands and thought: better to buy fear than to endure mockery.

His isolated school life eventually climbed past the level of children's quarrels and reached the point of summoning parents. Yet even when a serious problem arose and the teacher called or made a home visit, Eui-tae's father never responded; he became a legend inside the school. Then one day, irritated by the teacher's and the school's nagging, the father signed the withdrawal papers and walked out. Even when someone sneered "half-breed bastard," even when the kitchen flooded in the rainy season, Eui-tae had stayed indifferent—but for the first time he understood what it meant to feel ashamed.

"Hyung."

He wanted to go to school. University was a dream he never entertained, but he wanted a high-school diploma. To young Eui-joo—the only person he still considered family—he wanted to show that even in a shit-hole house like theirs, a person could still attend school.

"Where are you going."

A year after he dropped out, he learned that the reason his father had pulled him from school was not the violence. It was to use the son who was good with his fists as collateral against gambling debts. When the debt was transferred to the Yeong-gam famous in the region for daily interest loans, the matter grew large. He entered under the Yeong-gam—who would cross the sea to drag a man back and collect—at the age of eighteen.

"Can't you not go? Hyung?"

To the younger brother who coughed through all four seasons he owed a debt of the heart. Eui-joo was the son born to his stepmother. The stepmother could not endure a father for whom hitting came as naturally as breathing. So she fled at dawn with the house deed in her hands, and Eui-tae even witnessed that flight. He had gotten up to put rice in the pot and become the last witness; he did not stop her. Eui-joo was only ten—an age when of course a child would miss his mother.

"They say they'll feed me if I go there."

He peeled the crying Eui-joo off him and headed for the lodging the Yeong-gam had designated. If he went out to work and earned money, Eui-joo's circumstances would improve too; whether he brawled at school or brawled while escorting the old man on collection runs, it would amount to the same thing. Choosing to leave home with a single travel bag, Eui-tae was still a greenhorn who knew far too little of the world.

As he was dyed by the underworld where violence and threats were everyday currency, his mind began to break as well. Feeling the real danger that he might live and die only as the tail of the organization he belonged to, he coldly cut off contact with home. He sent money without fail, but he never met Eui-joo for fear his heart would weaken.

From the moment he became an adult who no longer needed to mind anyone's eyes, he felt as though he were finding his usefulness inside the group. Gathering bottom-rung lives and using them like his own hands and feet was the Yeong-gam's nasty hobby, yet one could not deny that thanks to it everyone's household improved. He obtained a house in the countryside with clear water and clean air, far from the hillside slums—somewhere even his father, who had a nationwide wanted order on his head, did not know.

However the Eui-tae who gritted his teeth and endured simply to survive must have looked, he was able to enter the real power's inner quarters as the youngest; the true hardship began then. Not content with working people without a single rest day, the Yeong-gam would kick the shins of sleeping men and enforce military discipline every weekend dawn. Among the youngest a joke circulated that going to the army three times would be easier. Even if you succeeded in pleasing the Yeong-gam enough to enter the inner quarters, lasting there was another problem entirely. So to Eui-tae, who was counting the days until the debt would be paid, one day the Yeong-gam's order arrived.

"Kang Eui-tae."

"Yes."

"What kind of bastard doesn't even graduate high school? Middle-school graduate—what is that, middle-school graduate. Go learn more. Don't come back until you've got all of it."

The Yeong-gam's sudden threat that he must at least finish high school before returning was abrupt, but Eui-tae was not in a position to refuse orders; he began preparing to return to his hometown.

"Yes."

"Are you family of student Kang Eui-joo?"

And his younger brother died on the street. Just last month he had called and told him that to him family was only his hyung. People around them clicked their tongues, asking why he was so devoted to a half-blood stepbrother. But if not Eui-joo, there was no one left to call family. The mother who had given birth yet whose face he had never seen, the father who had given the seed yet was better off absent—should he call them family? The stepmother who, even while fleeing with disheveled hair, had told him to take care of himself, and Eui-joo: those two were his family.

After he finished Eui-joo's funeral, summer arrived. Eui-tae came down to Chowa-ri to pack the remaining things and found a bankbook under the pillow. The money he had sent, penny by penny, telling him to go to the hospital—Eui-joo had never spent it; he had saved every bit. On the bankbook he had also written a memo in neat handwriting.

Even if it had been a long time since he last read anything, he could understand that much. The reason Eui-tae—who had intended to sell the cursed house at once—crawled back into Chowa-ri was that single line.

He sent the money Eui-joo had saved to the Yeong-gam and paid off every last bit of his father's remaining debt. Saying it was the first time a bastard had paid a debt so promptly, the Yeong-gam apparently praised Eui-tae highly in front of his subordinates. Perhaps that rankled someone; they came all the way into Eui-tae's neighborhood and beat him without discrimination. If he had resisted or fought back there, he could have been left completely crippled. He had to accept it as a kind of regularly recurring ritual, like a memorial service, if he wanted to keep living in the inner quarters.

The Yeong-gam was a man who watched the gang's fights; he never stepped in to mediate. Only the strong survived and stayed by his side. How warm could the heart of a man who wiped his ass with dirty money ever be?

Even though there was no meaning to living, no family, and no money, Eui-tae opened a book. Whenever regret over the past suddenly rose or his mood sank, Eui-tae thought of the next thing. That next thing was tomorrow's side dish, tomorrow's study, the people he would meet tomorrow. If he organized his thoughts starting from the nearest things, a person's heart grew simple.

If he thought too long about what he had lost, if he regretted too long the choices that could never be undone, the only place left for Eui-tae himself was heaven. So he kept his thoughts simple, and his life simple as well. If he failed to enter the Yeong-gam's inner quarters he would be nothing more than an errand boy in some mediocre office. Die then. If even after killing Eui-joo out of greed for money he still ended up mediocre—die then.

"Open your eyes."

His chest rose as if he were breathing for the first time. Into his blurry gaze came a white electric fan. Not a dusty, yellowed one. Clean and new, as if someone had washed it. Was the wind blowing from there cool like peppermint candy?

"Wow—wow, thank goodness."

Following the noisy sound of feet coming and going, he shifted his gaze. Vision that blurred and then sharpened again met the bright light and everything became unclear once more.

"I really thought a person was dying and even prayed for the first time."

That chattering voice seemed to echo from every direction, perhaps because of his aching head. The continuous footfalls at a steady rhythm were maddening. Every sense was so excessively dull that the whole scene felt unreal. From the lips exhaling hot breath came a pain as if the skin itself were peeling.

He had been beaten beyond all measure, yet for Eui-tae right now there was no thought at all. The fact that even with this body he still wanted a cigarette told him this life was already screwed.

Probably he had invented the auditory hallucination of someone caring for him as well. Lying alone at home, he must be deluding himself that a nurse existed. At the moment he found his own situation pathetic enough to laugh, a damp wet towel covered his eyes.

"Still, the swelling has gone down a lot."

Was he confusing a human voice with the sound of the fan? Eui-tae raised a hand whose joints ached and slowly gripped the wet towel. By this point any delusion ought to have faded. After setting the towel aside next to his head, he furrowed his brow. The vision that had spun as if he had drunk an entire bottle of whiskey finally began to clear.

"Why are you taking that off?"

Hair thin as threads tickled Eui-tae's forehead. Coming fully to his senses, he forced his eyes open with difficulty. Eyes, nose, and mouth attached themselves to the flickering shadow. The lamp light that had made everything look like a white background became the woman's wings. A smile rose on the face that had been like a water-blurred painting, and only then did she become a real person.

"If you have the strength, eat something."

Close enough that her breath reached him. In the place where he had removed the wet towel, the woman laid her hand. Her warmth traveled all the way to his chest and stole Eui-tae's mind in an entirely different way.

He remembered. Even when the pain was bearable, or when it hurt enough to kill him, or when it hurt right up to the edge of death, no one had ever cared for him. So it was unfamiliar, and so—

"Can't you get up?"

Today, I wanted to die.