Life Has No Goalposts
Rumors spread among children with almost insulting ease. Television, radio, newspapers—every mass medium hammered the story day after day. Unless you were deaf and blind, there was no way to ignore it.
Still, if you thought about it, the whole thing was strange. Even if they had been lured into suicide by Jack-o'-Lantern's coaxing, the choice itself had been theirs. Wasn't the freedom to decide one's own fate the foundation of individualism? Why, then, was society so frantic to catch Jack-o'-Lantern?
"Hey, Hyun-woo. You hear about it?"
"Hear about what?"
"Someone jumped from the middle school next door!"
"Whoa. What time?"
"Dunno. They jumped right after school let out, so of course you wouldn't have seen it. I was playing soccer on the field, though. Totally saw it."
The kids went around bragging about having seen a suicide as if it were some great honor. Honestly, it was childish. Hyun-woo had spoken with Jack-o'-Lantern himself—had even been praised by him. Quite the grasp of things, the man had said. That recognition was something Hyun-woo had seized for himself, right there among a crowd of adults.
An elementary-school fifth-grader, acknowledged by the criminal currently stirring up a national uproar. That put him in a different class entirely from the kids who strutted around boasting that they had glimpsed, from a safe distance, some discarded doll Jack-o'-Lantern had grown bored of playing with.
"Well. Kind of a shame."
Hyun-woo muttered the words as he looked at his so-called friends. Friends? What, exactly, did he share with these idiots? Being born in roughly the same year did not make people the same. And the moment a society decided to treat unlike people as if they were equal, that society began to warp.
Pretending to treat everyone fairly while the reality remained unfair was the wedge driven into that warped society. It was as cruel as the thumbtack pinned through a butterfly caught in a collecting net—the harder the insect thrashed, the more firmly the pin fixed it to the board.
No wonder people killed themselves.
"I'm stressed out."
Hyun-woo rose slowly from his seat. Idiots, every last one of them. Having to spend a long life mixed in among idiots like these was enough to make anyone irritable. A life with no guarantee of happiness, shoved into the frame called society and left to tumble around inside it—what was the point?
What do you get if you study hard?
You become a fine person.
And what's so good about becoming a fine person?
You make a lot of money!
And what's so good about making a lot of money?
You can buy whatever you want.
What is it you want?
Oh, this and that. A game console, a nice house, a car, a swimming pool…
That isn't the answer I wanted. What does "wanting something" even mean? Why do people come to desire ownership of those things? Does having them make you happy?
…
Answer me.
…You fucking little shit.
Hyun-woo's thoughts trailed off there. Life, in the end, had no goalposts. People liked to say that every living moment mattered, as if it were the easiest thing in the world. But how different, really, was what the Buddha understood under the Bodhi tree from what he had known earlier, when he was still a Brahmin wandering in ascetic hardship? Write it down and even enlightenment looks pretty meager on the page. That was why the process of grasping and understanding it mattered so much more.
In the end, life was a rather unremarkable thing, one way or another. But unremarkable or not, suicide was still idiocy. Because killing yourself now only proved that you were a doll that had slipped from Jack-o'-Lantern's hand after he'd finished playing with it.
"Hey, Hyun-woo. You're on cleaning duty. Hello? Hello!"
"Huh? You calling me?"
"I said you're on cleaning duty."
"I switched with Sang-gyu."
Hyun-woo delivered the line with total confidence to the sanitation officer who was hassling him, then packed his bag and walked out. Faced with that level of pure assurance, the sanitation officer could only nod and mumble, "Oh… okay."
Schoolteachers were busy. Their quitting time was more reliable than most people's, and they even got vacations, but schoolteachers were busy all the same. For example: they had to go pay their respects at the funeral of a student who had thrown himself from a building…
"Oh, dear. Oh, dear…"
The funeral being held quietly in the university hospital's funeral hall carried a strong atmosphere of wanting the whole thing finished as quickly as possible. A body with its neck stretched from a fall off a building, death by suicide—there was no shortage of elements guaranteed to draw unwanted eyes.
If some tactless reporters showed up with cameras, how would the bereaved family feel? Around now, you might expect at least one of them to lash out at a schoolteacher, yet the place remained quiet.
"Whew."
Teacher Jeon let out a breath of relief. Thinking back to high school, when a friend of his had died on a motorcycle and the family had taken it out on the homeroom teacher, the restraint here felt almost gentlemanly. Then again, that restraint also meant a teacher's responsibility—and authority—had shrunk.
These days, no one pinned a student's death on the teacher. Because teachers no longer had any real influence over their students. They simply repeated the service called education until the children moved on to a higher school, at which point the teachers shrugged and greeted the next set of students—no, the next set of customers. It was a bitter thing that people whose job was to teach human beings held less sway than a murderer known only by the name Jack-o'-Lantern.
"Damn it."
Not that Teacher Jeon had any particular pride left as an educator. Magnificent teachers like Mr. Keating existed only in novels and movies—and even there, they got crushed by the outside world.
"Suicide as a fashion… feels like we've wandered into some science-fiction world."
He muttered the words and stuck a cigarette between his lips. The vice principal beside him shot him a look, but he ignored it. He had been dragged to the funeral of a child from another grade simply because he had been the first teacher to find the body. He could have this much, couldn't he?
"Huu."
Teacher Jeon exhaled a stream of smoke and rose from his seat. Smoking in a funeral hall was wrong, of course. Not the behavior of an educator meant to set an example. But whose example was he supposed to set? The strings of text people scribbled on the internet—chat, whatever you wanted to call it—were, in that moment, nothing more than strings of text. What kind of model could an educator be if he couldn't even overcome a string of text?
"Disgusting."
He stepped outside. The dead child was pitiful. Getting angry because those kids never recognized their teacher was just him throwing a tantrum. And a grown man throwing a tantrum was unmistakably ugly. Yes. This nauseating world and everyone in it—maybe it wouldn't be so bad if suicide wiped the whole lot of them out.
"Jack-o'-Lantern…"
An internet reaper who scattered deaths for which no one could take responsibility, and for which no one did. Teacher Jeon admitted, at least to himself, that there were parts of that philosophy he could almost agree with.
In a quiet back alley, a young man parked his bike and pulled off his helmet. Green-dyed hair, parted to one side, emerged from beneath it.
"Whew. Been a while."
He climbed off the motorcycle and pulled out a bag. Inside were a serviceable pair of escrima sticks, a wooden sword, tonfa, and a few other weapons.
"Tch. Not much else to do these days. Might as well pay back that knife they stuck me with last time."
He grumbled as he headed for the building. The roughness in his tone made it clear he was not joking. Paying no attention to whether anyone was watching, he strode with a menacing air into the unusual building whose entrance opened onto the alley.
"Huh?"
He stopped short almost at once, thrown off. This was a gang office. Even if the place was short-staffed, at least one goon should have been hanging around making a nuisance of himself—and there was no one. The interior itself felt oddly hollow, as if the whole building had been emptied out. No—it had been emptied out.
"What the…?"
Come to think of it, a printed notice for office rental was stuck to the window outside. He had assumed the gang was joking. Apparently not.
"What the hell? The whole gang ran for it?"
Han Se-gun, who had gone to the trouble of arming himself only to draw a complete blank, grumbled under his breath. He had time to kill and hunting vampires was a little inconvenient at the moment, so he had come to rough up the Sangdong Faction—only to find that the so-called organized criminals had packed up and moved out as a group.
"…This is ridiculous."
Then again, when some maniac with firearms could kick the door in at any moment, not relocating would have been the stranger choice. People in this country who had watched too many adult comics might think gangs soared through the sky like superheroes, but organized crime was still just something people did to put food on the table.
"Come on. Even so."
He had practiced hard on purpose so he could thrash the bastard who had thrown a knife at him last time—and the guy had simply vanished. Se-gun felt the fight drain out of him. He wasn't going to school, and he didn't have any other particular work, so he tended to waste most of his days. Vampire-resistance training and combat drills were daily, sure, but doing nothing but that would get old fast, wouldn't it?
Using a gang office as a casual pastime is a little messed up, I'll give you that.
Se-gun loaded the weapons back onto the bike. He had been hoping to pick a fight with the Sangdong Faction, and them slipping away like this was a real inconvenience.
"Maybe I'll kill some time at Arjuna."
He tipped his head back and looked at the sky. Thick clouds—probably gearing up to drop some spring rain. Rain. Weather like this always dragged his mood down; it felt like the depression was about to flare. A perfect day for putting a gun to your head, if you happened to be carrying one. Se-gun himself had thought about suicide more than a few times.
He put the helmet back on and pulled out onto the street. On a nearby electronic billboard, text broadcasts about Jack-o'-Lantern and the chain of suicides were still scrolling. The public service ad association was already drawing up suicide-prevention measures, and there was even talk of lowering the import tariffs on the antidepressant Prozac.
Prozac… Prozac, huh?
Come to think of it, this was an age when you could buy happiness with money. Se-gun clicked his tongue at the thought. A small pharmacy sat right where the alley opened onto the main road, so he walked in without a second thought.
"Uh… do you have Prozac?"
"Hm?"
The pharmacist looked him over for a moment.
"You need a prescription from a psychiatrist for that. You got one?"
"No? Can't I buy it without one?"
"Hmm. No insurance coverage, then."
Maybe Se-gun looked young; the pharmacist dropped into informal speech the second he saw him. In Korean society half your status was already decided by age, so there was no point getting offended about it now. Se-gun's only real concern was not whether the man was talking down to him, but the Prozac itself. On a day like this, if he didn't take some, he wasn't sure he could keep himself in check.
Pat-pat-pat.
Outside the window, the spring rain began to fall. Se-gun bought a bottle of Prozac and stepped out of the pharmacy.