I Don't Want to Eat Alone
The man, who had seemed to regain some of his senses, met my eyes for a brief moment before fainting clean away again. Watching a man collapse the instant our gazes locked, as if he had seen a ghost, was far from pleasant.
Still, he had recognized me, and he seemed to understand what I was saying. I had heard that prolonged high fever could scramble a person's mind, but thankfully he did not appear broken in that way, which was a relief.
While waiting for the collapsed man to wake again, I tidied the room that looked as though a thief had ransacked it. Racing home thirty minutes earlier and bringing every last emergency medicine I owned had left the place in chaos. As I bent to gather the rolling medicine caps and bandages, a second reaction came from the fallen man.
He stopped moaning, opened his eyes, and turned his head precisely toward where I stood. Whether it was my imagination or whether sick men simply grew docile, I—who only remembered him from the moment we had just parted—found myself suspicious at the sight of those lowered, tail-tucked eyes.
“It still hurts, doesn’t it.”
The man blinked slowly, as if his mind were still elsewhere. Even with those cold eyes, I believed he had recognized me, because his expression showed a subtle difference from when his fever had hit forty degrees.
Whether he watched or not, I got down on all fours and wiped the floor with a wet rag. The price of fearlessly shuttling between our houses, ferrying side dishes, rice, and medicine, was next to nothing. The moment I rose from my place, he would surely shoo me out like an annoying fly and stun me with words I had never heard before.
I would probably regret volunteering for his household chores an hour from now, but I could not help the moved feeling that came from seeing the wet books and notebooks he had set out to dry. Leaving the silent man behind, I stepped outside with the water bowl. Looking up at the sky brightening with dawn light, I twisted my waist left and right. Crack, crack—my whole body seemed to scream. Checking his fever every five minutes, I had barely slept at all.
I came into the kitchen, set down the water bowl, and opened the pot. In a house without even a microwave, the only way to feed him warm rice was to boil it myself. Thinking thin rice like porridge would be better, I put a little rice and water into an empty pot and turned up the heat. Waiting for it to come to a boil, I gauged the timing to slip out of his house. Mother, who had to go to work, probably would not come home unexpectedly, but leaving the house empty all night still weighed on my mind. Watching the pot lid rattle, I set the table and carried the porridge, kimchi, and spoons toward the sliding-door room. As I moved, the silver spoons danced cheerfully against the tray. Even they seemed glad at the news of the man waking.
I opened the sliding door with my toes and went in. Carefully setting down the tray, I looked up without thinking and nearly had my heart drop out of my chest. The man was sitting propped against the dresser, watching me steadily. It was an observer’s gaze, without a single grain of emotion floating in it. One eye that would not open properly was closed, and with the remaining eye he had been watching my every move.
“You can sit up now?”
I dragged the tray in front of the man who gave no answer, like a servant. A fair bit of life returned to the gaze that scanned the rice that looked like porridge and the neatly arranged side dishes. The man I had thought would ignore me and tell me to leave somehow picked up a spoon and scooped a little rice. Unlike his previous behavior, it was careful spoonwork. Was it hot? Like a grandmother watching her grandson, I sat with my neck craned, guarding the head of the table. Then, as if unable to bear my stalker-like stare, the man bit his lip. Only after our eyes met when he turned his head did I understand what he meant.
“I’m sorry. If it’s uncomfortable, I’ll just go. No—I was about to leave.”
My nursing skills were clumsy, but I had used half a tube of ointment and even put on pain-relief patches. That was the full extent of the tricks I could perform. Since I had not done this to receive his thanks in the first place, it was better for the uninvited guest to exit around now. Holding the first-aid kit I had neatly arranged, I withdrew my feet as if being driven out. But in the gap where the sound of his spoon playing grew quieter, the man’s cracked voice rang through the narrow room.
“You eat too before you go.”
His pronunciation was mangled because of the wound by his mouth, but not so bad I could not understand. My foot, which had almost slipped out the door, hardened like stone. I shook my head in refusal, but there was the man who had set down his spoon as if he would not eat until I came back. The emotion visible in the one eye that had barely survived was hot.
“Even if you don’t want to, eat for me. I don’t want to eat alone.”
I had no intention of making a show of it, but my stomach thundered at the word “rice.” Mother would have woken up at her friend’s house, gone to work, and only come to see me around lunchtime. Strictly speaking, it was not as if I had no free time at all.
I quietly slipped out, portioned my share into a rice bowl, and returned to the room. I brought another set of utensils and sat across from him. Only after I took a spoonful of rice did the man pick up his spoon again.
He could see just fine with one eye, I supposed. While picking up side dishes with chopsticks, I saw the man’s hand trembling as if he had a tremor. The hand, thick with bandages, seemed to find even lifting a spoon an ordeal. He was someone who had only just been learning to use chopsticks anyway. To him, who had been scooping only plain rice since earlier, I picked up some stir-fried dried squid strips and gave them to him. The gaze of the man who had been blankly scooping white rice rose hesitantly, like a broken radio.
“What kind of taste is eating only rice. Eat the side dishes too.”
“…Yang Ji-eon.”
“Yes.”
Don’t you dare give me side dishes with those filthy spit-covered chopsticks, stop acting cocky and get the hell back to your house, this is the last time I’ll see you. Those were the farewell quotes I had imagined alone while the man slept. The man’s words were sharp as fangs and sometimes stabbed deep into my chest. So I had prepared defenses in advance with the worst assumptions. Just as I was curious what words he would use to suck the life out of me, the man who had set down his rice spoon spoke.
“I was originally.”
I paused with the spoon halfway to my mouth and threw my gaze to his lips. The man did not even look ahead, lowering his eyes as if the table were his enemy.
“The kind of personality that can’t stay with anyone for long, and makes even the ones who are there fall away. That’s why I killed my little brother too, and made the older guys teaching me the work nearly die…”
“You’re saying you killed Eui-joo?”
“Almost.”
I had expected him to criticize me for meddling carelessly, but I never dreamed he would string out self-deprecation about himself. Unless the man was confessing that he had stabbed Eui-joo to death with a knife, this kind of self-deprecation was not pleasant to hear.
“You know.”
The man who had swallowed rice and words together looked at me with his ruined face. Who knew feeding him one meal would be this hard. As the gaps between words lengthened, before I knew it the sound of a rooster crowing could be heard. The man’s weary eyes waited for an answer. His change, as if he would accept any punishment—no, any words at all—felt fresh.
“Even while you were hurt and out of your mind, you kept calling for Eui-joo.”
“……”
“I was so happy.”
The eyes of the man who would have no memory after collapsing stirred greatly. My lips overcame his tickling gaze and continued to spit out the next words.
“I thought I was the only one in this world who remembered Eui-joo. I thought even you, his older brother, didn’t remember. When you fell asleep calling Eui-joo’s name, it felt like Eui-joo was asking me to save him. I’m sorry for sticking my nose in again with my big mouth.”
“Ha.”
Suddenly the man let out a hollow laugh the moment my words finished. The smile of the man laughing with that multicolored face completely killed my spirit. I felt like I had become the neighborhood crazy woman who ran her mouth without knowing anything again, and my appetite dropped flat.
“Yang Ji-eon.”
“Yeah.”
That was not because I wanted to use casual speech; it came out like a habit. I flinched alone after answering, but the man maintained his expressionless face as if he did not care.
“You’re kind.”
“…What?”
“Thank you.”
Before I could even collect my heart, startled by the man’s unexpected words, a single clear drop of water fell onto his swollen, injured cheek. He had cried. Just one tear, but. The one eye that had released that tear soon dried under the spinning fan’s wind. But unlike before, the man bravely lifted his spoon and scooped rice. Watching the spoon go into his mouth, I attended to the patient. To keep it from being boring, I picked up some radish salad and placed it on his rice again. He paused briefly, then ate the rice with the side dish more naturally than before.
After that the man neither cried nor laughed, but among the meals I had shared with him, today’s was the most comfortable. Seeing a fully grown man cry—it’s the end of the world, the end of days.
“Eat that, and later eat this too.”
“I’m not a pig.”
I know. There’s no pig that cries while eating, I was about to say, but I held back a move. In the blink of an eye the man had emptied his rice, and at my words that I was leaving now, he came out to see me off with his injured body. It was the first time receiving a send-off from the man. That was a truly monumental event.