Black Rain Over Seoul
I arrived home with Father. Standing before that chicken-coop of a house, I looked around… and saw no one. Whether the creditors simply hadn’t made it this far yet, or still had no idea we’d slipped out the hospital’s back door and were still waiting out front, I couldn’t say—but it was a relief either way. The only thing left to do was get inside and lock every door behind us.
People who live by stealing other men’s money really are a hard breed. You’d never put yourself through a nightmare like this unless you’d already steeled yourself for the worst.
Once we were inside and I’d laid out the blankets, Father collapsed onto them and sank into sleep as if he’d been knocked out cold. Even a burn on the arm must be agony for a human—pain spreading through the whole body, infection setting into the wound. They say even a small injury can kill a man that way.
Following the note’s instructions, I soaked cotton in plenty of disinfectant alcohol and cleaned the burned skin, then smoothed on burn ointment. Oil splash, from the look of it—second-degree burns about the size of a palm, scattered evenly along his whole arm. I finished bandaging him and sank down onto the floor.
The endless pit of poverty. Even that pit seemed to have finally hit bottom. If this house burned down next, would we be full-blown homeless? I hung my head under the weight of the thought.
There are shackles you cannot escape no matter how hard you thrash. For me, that shackle is poverty. But if the old saying is true—that even a king cannot save a man from being poor—then I am hardly the only one trapped in this cage.
“Haa…”
The only thing that came out when I opened my mouth was a sigh. Father’s street-food cart had burned. I’d been fired from the newspaper distribution depot.
Apparently the debt collectors had tracked me all the way there.
Of all the things in the world to seize—they’d come to garnish my newspaper-route wages in advance. Were there really people this absurd? Compared to the size of those debts, it was pocket change… and yet that was exactly how powerful debt was: it stripped the humanity out of people.
In the end, because of the debt collectors, I’d lost my job.
Damn it. They say if a scholar goes three days without food, even he will climb the neighbor’s wall. And I was a body that could vault a neighbor’s wall without the slightest trouble. Honestly, I was still wrestling with myself. Should I break the law and make money? Would that finally free me from this grinding poverty?
But how?
Even if I was a life-form that had transcended humanity, vaulting the neighbor’s wall wouldn’t pay off that mountain of debt. And did I even have the right to hurt someone else that way? What if I robbed a house and that family went bankrupt, tumbling into the same hell of poverty as me? They weren’t built as tough as I was, either.
I could work myself to pieces in a place like this and survive. Other people couldn’t. Damn it—climbing the neighbor’s wall really wasn’t the answer.
So how was I supposed to make money? Once you took illegal work off the table, there didn’t seem to be many ways left to earn with nothing but a body.
And yet, just as Dr. Kang had said… sending Father abroad wasn’t simple either. No—deep down, some part of me already believed that was the best option. Fleeing overseas to escape debt wasn’t even rare anymore. But if I agreed to it completely, I felt as though I’d become Judas selling out Christ, and I couldn’t bring myself to say yes.
“We know you’re in there! Get out here!”
“You said you’d pay us back! When the hell are you gonna pay?!”
People were raising hell out in the alley. Damn it—should I just sell a kidney? With even my tools for earning a living gone, how was I supposed to pay anything back? But they never considered our situation. Truthfully, they’d probably already given up on the money in any rational sense. Even so, something still sat heavy in their chests.
“Ah…”
Father, who had been lying in the corner, slowly pushed himself upright. I startled and tried to stop him.
“N-No. You need more rest.”
“If a man can sleep through this, is he even human?”
Of course no one could sleep with fists hammering the door—but hearing that from a man with burns on his arm made for the blackest comedy I’d ever heard. Damn it all.
“E-Even so, you can’t. If you open the door…”
I watched Father walk toward the entrance and panicked, trying to hold him back. But he only gave me a bitter look and said:
“…Even so, these are people who once trusted me enough to lend me money. When they’ve come all this way, slamming the door in their faces isn’t the way a human being behaves.”
“B-But those people out there are past the point of talking about human decency! You need to be human first before you can act like one!”
I protested. Rationally speaking, even if they beat us to death, this house wouldn’t cough up another ten won. And they knew that. So what kind of sense did it make for them to riot on our doorstep?
“I’m sorry. You never borrowed a single won, and yet here I am—calling myself a father, and I couldn’t even buy you one decent set of clothes. Either way, this is my mess. I’ll go out and talk them down.”
With that, Father opened the door. The moment it swung wide, the creditors poured in like a bursting dam, not caring in the slightest that he was hurt.
“Hey! Seo! Finally.”
“All kinds of weird bastards have been circling around, you know!”
“Yeah! You said you’d work hard and pay us back—so what about my money, huh?!”
They talked over each other as they grabbed Father by the collar and hauled him around. A few of them barged straight into the house, eyes darting around for anything worth taking… but what could there possibly be in a chicken coop that rented for a hundred eighty thousand won a month? For reference, the places where homeless people and elderly folks living alone stayed went for a hundred fifty thousand. So this was a luxurious living environment—three ten-thousands more refined, if you wanted to put it that way.
“Not in front of the kid. Let’s step outside and talk.”
Father said it carefully, conscious of my gaze. They weren’t having any of it.
“If you cared so much about your kid’s education, you shouldn’t have stiffed people out of their money, you con artist!”
A young man with the tattoo One Mind inked on his forearm glared at Father with bloodshot eyes. Mixed Chinese-Korean characters, was it? Given that education these days ran entirely in Hangul, the man might look young, but he’d probably gone to school through some pretty turbulent years.
Either way, the situation was so thoroughly rotten that hearing them call Father a con man didn’t make me angry so much as leave me speechless. Everyone’s had that moment when so many miserable things stack up in a row that you get too exhausted even to be shocked or furious. This was exactly that.
“Because of you, my kid never even made it to college! Of all the money to steal, you take mine? Other people’s money I might let go—but not mine!”
Well done. Judging by the look of him, the blood vessels supplying oxygen to his brain were already running short—how bright could the kid’s skull possibly be? If his son skipped studying to mess around, how was that my father’s fault? Don’t tell me the boy was secretly related to me. Maybe this man, unlikely as it looked, had once been Father’s closest friend—maybe they were Eskimos and, following the old custom, he’d offered his wife… Then sure, he could blame Father for the kid’s empty head!
“For fuck’s sake!”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I shot to my feet.
“What, you little shit? A brat who still hasn’t dried the blood out of his skull, looking to die?”
The man with the educational mixed-script tattoo glared at me with pure threat in his eyes. I walked straight up, took hold of the hand that was still locked on Father’s collar, and gripped it.
“You—!”
He answered instantly with a headbutt. That told me he was no stranger to a fight… but unfortunately for him, I wasn’t human. What would have been a very fast attack against a person looked, to my eyes, like a spoiled kindergarten brat half-assing a greeting at the classroom aide.
“Hmph.”
I yanked his arm and used it to stop his own head. The man who’d just smashed his face into his own forearm let out a pathetic scream.
“Agh! Oh, so this bastard hits people? You can’t even pay your debts and you go around swinging at people, you little—!”
They say that once someone who’s been swaggering on half-baked fists gets thoroughly humiliated, the next step in this business is always wanting to settle it legally. But once I’d already put hands on him, what reason did I have to turn down violence?
I clenched a fist, seized him by the collar, and hoisted him clean off the floor. A man heavier than me, lifted as easily as a mannequin. In that instant, the noisy crowd of creditors all went quiet.
“Y-You little—!”
A middle-aged man who looked like one of his companions pulled a collapsible baton from his jacket and swung it at me without a second thought. He was slow too. I kicked his arm with a back heel—as arrogantly as I could manage. The baton flew from his hand and buried itself in the wardrobe door. Everyone froze, startled. Only now did they seem to realize they’d been dancing naked in front of a tiger—and it was already too late.
“You really want to see me hit someone? Once I start, you’re going to need a long-term liquid diet.”
Honestly, I was in such a foul mood I wanted to grab anyone and beat them until I’d had my fill. Especially some rude bastard who stood right in front of me, yapping and hauling my father around by the collar—I didn’t think I’d feel a shred of guilt no matter how hard I hit him.
Because I held absolute superiority over humans in raw, primitive violence, there were times I wanted to solve everything with it. To borrow the words of my friend Choi Hyuk-jin—who never even went to the military—it was the machismo of a short-timer sergeant.
“Rin! Stop it. What do you think you’re doing?”
Father reined me in then. Defending the very bastard who’d had him by the collar a second ago… that was Father, all right. Since I already had the man hoisted by his collar, I slammed him into the ceiling once for good measure before setting him down.
“Hmph.”
“I-I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”
Father was bowing and scraping, apologizing to them. Damn it. Every time I lost my temper at these people, Father had to humble himself that much more—so I couldn’t even afford to get angry. Chest tight, I shoved my way out through the crowd of creditors and ran blindly into the street.
“Rin! Rin!”
Father called after me, but I ran with everything I had.
I had no idea how far I’d run. I sat under a streetlamp, staring blankly at the passing time.
Shhhhhhh…
Thick ropes of rain came pouring down. The noise of cars racing along the road drained away through the city.
“…Damn it.”
I’d run hard enough, but my shoes hadn’t held. An old pair of sneakers—in the end they couldn’t take the force of the sprint and tore open.
“What a pathetic sight.”
I sat under the streetlamp in the rain. I didn’t know how many hours had passed.
“So this is where you were.”
Then Father appeared beyond the streetlamp. He walked toward me carrying a large umbrella.
I tried to stand, but my body wouldn’t move. From sitting too long, maybe. Father lifted the umbrella and held it over my head. It had been stitched and mended so many times that rain leaked through in places—but neither of us cared about that.
“What are you doing out here, getting soaked?”
He asked me that. He was hurt himself, and still he’d come out into the street—rain or bullets be damned—because his perfectly healthy son had bolted. Thinking how long he must have been searching for me… my chest locked tight, and my throat closed so hard the words wouldn’t come.
“Did they leave?”
“They did. I’m sorry. You never did a single thing wrong…”
But the real reason his business had collapsed was the sabotage of a father-in-law and brother-in-law who had come to hate him! And the one who’d pulled the trigger on that hatred had been me…
If only I had never been acknowledged, they could have lived comfortably…
“Rin.”
“Yes?”
“I think… I need to take that doctor’s advice after all.”
“…”
I had nothing to say, so I shut my mouth. In truth, it was the ending I’d wanted. Father’s sense of responsibility was uselessly strong; if he stayed in Korea, he would never see daylight. With the creditors this vicious, that sense of duty would only make everything worse.
But the problem was that the reason he’d reached this decision was responsibility toward me. I didn’t want to be Father’s burden. I hated that he felt weighed down by me.
Of course my life so far hadn’t been happy—but even so… when this half-Korean, this thing that wasn’t even human, first set foot in Korea, I had found a family. And because of that, Father’s business had fallen. If anyone should be taking responsibility, it was me!
“…All right.”
But what came out of my mouth was the opposite of what I thought. Father and I shared the umbrella and walked home. The whole way, father and son didn’t exchange a single word. There was nothing to say… and my chest was so full of feeling that every kind of thought crowded in at once. My tongue simply wasn’t long enough to turn them all into speech.
Shhhhhhhh…
Seoul’s rain is black and heavy. My shoulders and my heart were just as heavy. Still… if Father fled overseas to escape the debt, would things lighten even a little? And if they did—would I be allowed to hold even a little hope for the future?