The Twelfth Life
Ki-jo returned to July 7, 1953.
He opened his eyes in the shantytown on Mount Gudeok in Busan, in a dawn so black the sun had not yet thought of rising, and lay in the dark of the plank house staring blankly up at the ceiling. His twelfth life had only just begun.
He could feel the healthy body of a man of twenty-four. Nothing hurt. A hot vitality ran the length of him. He clenched both fists and opened them again. These were the years he had spent as a day laborer on the docks, and strength still brimmed in his hands. Because he had come down to Busan earlier than anyone and secured a foothold, he had been able to find work at the harbor.
Only in his eleventh life had he managed to bring his wife and son all the way to Busan without losing them. Before that he had repeated the same regression ten times over. Fool that he was, he kept returning to June 25, 1950, and getting the family safely evacuated to Busan had proved far too difficult. Only after the tenth attempt failed did the belated realization come to him: he needed to go back a few days earlier. Until then his mind had been swallowed whole by the fact of war, and he had never had the room to think properly.
Still… thank God there's one last chance left.
He owned nothing. But he had already lived all the way to 2019, and he was certain that from here on he could live better than anyone.
While he was lost in the thought, his wife, Sunrye, woke.
"I'm sorry, dear. I overslept…"
She said it in a voice worn thin with exhaustion. All day she cleaned at the American base, and after her shift she sold U.S. Army goods at the Yankee Market. The work was brutal, and she was raising a four-year-old besides; three bodies would not have been enough. Even so, she was apologizing to him.
"Sleep a little longer…"
The words caught in his throat and would not finish. To suffer like that, and die in '79 before she was even fifty…
But a different life was about to unfold. This time he would change hers.
"I'm awake. I'll make breakfast."
Four-year-old Yeongsu slept on, breathing soft and even, dead to the world.
Poor kid…
In the eleventh life his son had not lived past fifty either. Yeongsu had died at only forty-seven, in a traffic accident. Ki-jo stroked the boy's head in the dark and turned it over. Why had the child never dreamed big?
He had been without ambition from the start. Through that eleventh life Ki-jo had carried a quiet hope for him — the hope that his son, too, might possess the power to turn time backward. If he did, how magnificent it would be. He would not have to squander a precious gift the way Ki-jo had, spending it to keep his family alive through a war. With the power to regress twelve times, couldn't a man become president, or the founder of a chaebol? The mere thought warmed him.
But no matter how long he waited, he never caught the slightest sign that Yeongsu had any such gift. The boy was always content with what he had, and never reached for anything large. He studied well enough, yet his only goal had been a national university with cheap tuition. When Seoul National looked out of reach, he entered the University of Seoul. He meant to be a civil servant — but he never sat for the Higher Civil Service Examination. He took the ordinary Grade 7 exam and passed on the first try.
Ki-jo had thought it a mercy, at least, that the boy had landed in the tax service. Then Yeongsu applied not to the powerful National Tax bureau, where the real influence lay, but to Customs. National tax officers took plenty of money under the table and lived rather well. His son spent his days inspecting for drugs at harbors and airports.
Why does he only ever take the safe road? Why doesn't he want anything…
It only made Ki-jo ache.
When Yeongsu brought a woman home young and said he meant to marry her, Ki-jo had opposed it. The girl was, at a glance, a truly good one. But Ki-jo's own life stood in the way. He had started a household early, and once children came he had burned through far too much of his regression for their sake; that was why he tried to talk his son out of marrying young. More than anything, the boy was too young. Marriage in his junior year of college… The moment he came home from the army, he brought a younger classmate from his department to the house. A man who meant to do great things was better off marrying a little later, and the thought left Ki-jo bitterly disappointed.
Yeongsu set up house anyway, steady in the face of his father's opposition. It was unexpected. The boy had never once rebelled against his parents in his life. His will to marry the person he loved was so strong that Ki-jo found himself wondering whether this side of his son had been there all along. Scolding did nothing. Coaxing did nothing. He married while he was still a student, and Ki-jo supposed that was why he had rushed the civil service exam and never even dreamed of the open-ended grind of the higher examination.
For a time he resented his daughter-in-law. It felt as if she had caught his son by the ankle just when the boy might have done something greater. But she was a good child, just as his first impression had promised. Around the time she became pregnant with their first, Ki-jo asked her forgiveness and formally took her into the family.
And in 1974 their first grandchild was born.
Only then did he understand, for the first time, the old saying — that a grandchild was a child so precious you could set them in your eye and feel no pain. The birth moved him more than the birth of his own son had. The joy had been greater in 1949, when Yeongsu was born, but nothing in that joy could compare with what struck him in 1974.
Then, in 1979, that first grandchild ran from the neighborhood lot into the road after a ball and was struck by a car. He died on the spot.
Perhaps it was the shock. His wife, already ill with cancer, worsened all at once, and after the grandchild she too left the world.
That was when Lee Ki-jo meant to use the last regression remaining to him. He held it back. If Yeongsu also had the power, then surely the boy would use it. He expected the remorse of losing a son to open Yeongsu's eyes to the gift, the way his own eyes had opened on the Nakdong River front.
One month. Two months. One year. Two years…
No matter how long he waited, his son's power never manifested.
Does Yeongsu simply not have it?
A grim premonition settled over him: perhaps the ability belonged to him alone.
One day he called his son to a place where the two of them could be alone, and asked.
"Yeongsu."
"Yes, Father."
"If you could go back to the past, what would you want to do?"
"Sorry? What do you mean?"
"I mean… if you were given the power to climb backward through time, what's the first thing you'd want to do? That's what I'm asking."
"How could a thing like that even exist…"
Ki-jo's chest tightened.
"No — listen to me. When your son died, didn't you even think of it?"
Yeongsu looked at him then with an expression of pure disbelief, and Ki-jo regretted the words the instant they left his mouth. His son's eyes held a grief too large for them.
"Father. What's past is past."
He said it and lowered his head.
"I'm sorry, Yeongsu… I spoke without thinking. I truly am sorry…"
He despised himself for saying such a thing to a father who had lost his child. He felt cursed.
"It's all right, Father. I know what you're trying to say. But if I let myself think that way, my wife and I suffer too much. We just live looking forward."
Ki-jo wept, and held his son's hand tight.
While he was still lost in that past, the child Yeongsu woke. The boy opened his eyes, caught the arm that had been stroking his hair in a small hand, and spoke.
"Father, you're up…"
Tears sprang to Ki-jo's eyes.
"Did you sleep well, Yeongsu…"
He gathered the four-year-old tight against him. A child who had lived so very kindly, and then was gone. Sunrye smiled, watching her husband hold their son.
"You like Yeongsu that much?"
"Of course I do. He's my son…"
Crushed in his arms, Yeongsu said,
"Daddy, I can't breathe…"
That morning the three of them sat facing one another across a small table.
"Dear, let's open a can of Spam."
Ki-jo said it looking at a meal whose only side dish was kimchi.
"We have to sell it… something that precious…"
Sunrye answered the husband who, for no reason she could see, wanted an expensive breakfast.
"We've got a long way to go. We ought to eat something that will hold us."
"A long way? What do you mean?"
"Just bring out a can of Spam first."
From beneath the bedding Sunrye drew out a single precious can.
"Take out three. One for each of us."
Her hands slowed. This was Spam she had come by with difficulty, cleaning at the American base. Sell three cans and she could buy enough rice to feed the family for three months… She didn't think it would go down her throat. And her husband's sudden talk of a long road felt ominous. Every hardship of the flight from Yangju down to Busan came back to her.
Then, all at once, she remembered the times her husband had been right.
On June 1, 1950, when he abruptly quit the tenant plot they had barely managed to secure in Yangju and said they should move to Busan, she had been dumbfounded. But less than a month after they arrived the war broke out, and when she heard that Seoul had fallen in three days she understood that he had been right. Her husband was a man who had fled to Busan ahead of even Dr. Syngman Rhee.
"Where are you trying to go this time?"
Sunrye asked it as she opened the can.
"Yeoncheon."
"Yeoncheon?"
She started so hard she nearly dropped the can opener.
"Dear, Yeoncheon is… closer to the Thirty-Eighth Parallel than Yangju. No — that was north of the parallel. That was in the North…"
"Which is exactly why we have to go."
Ki-jo answered with a grin.
Sunrye could not believe it. They had fled south at such cost, and now, with the war not even over, he wanted to turn north again…
When she had opened three cans of Spam and set them on the table, Ki-jo smiled with his whole face.
"Come on. Let's eat. Each of us has to finish a whole can."