An Advance, and a Father's Clouds
While Jeong Jinwook went to meet the writer Lee Munhyeok, I was in Jo Sudeok's lab. Perhaps it was only that I had time on my hands.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms...
I let myself sink into the memory. Back then, as I recalled it, the thing had been little more than a title I knew existed. And then — ah, I wanted to know it. If you meant to enjoy Heroes properly, the Romance was required reading, and after that I began to devour anything with those words on the cover. In that telling Zhuge Liang was painted as something close to a Daoist immortal, and thanks to it I could lose myself even more deeply in Crouching Dragon.
That ought to have been enough. The hunger hardly paused.
What I found next was Lee Munhyeok's Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Ten whole volumes — a truly staggering length, and not a page of it felt long to me.
Couldn't Author Lee, while he's being generous, just write me sixty volumes at a go?
I think my young heart entertained that wish often. At any rate, the Cao Cao Lee Munhyeok had interpreted was terribly attractive. Maybe that was why. I could still see, clear as yesterday, the scene where I loaded my save again and again, desperate to keep Dian Wei alive.
The Romance had filled one of the great pages of my life. Publishing Lee Munhyeok's Romance of the Three Kingdoms, counted a masterpiece even among them — even for me, that was meaningful work. And since the subject had come up:
Later, once I acquire Meiyo... should I hound them until they make a sequel to Mengde?
I was adrift in thoughts of that sort when a strange sound turned my head.
"Nnngh."
Step. Step. Jo Sudeok was circling a single patch of floor like a puppy in urgent need of a bathroom, wearing an anxious look I had never seen on him. If I had to guess, he was worrying over his student, Jeong Jinwook. Through the doctoral course he could look after the man himself, but now Jinwook was wholly my employee — and on that face the worry, first assignment, was he managing, had climbed all the way to the chin.
"I took you for a man who wouldn't give up a drop of blood if someone stabbed him. You have a human side after all?"
"Pardon?"
"You're worried about your student, aren't you?"
"Th-that can't be."
"Then why are you like this?"
Instead of answering, Jo Sudeok let out an awkward laugh. At a time like this he was a teacher to the bone.
"Sit down, won't you? Worrying doesn't make anything better."
"If I'd known I was going to fret like this, I should have gone myself."
"Heh heh heh."
"Let's speak plainly. Once a man turns thirty, he ought to look after his own affairs, shouldn't he? A teacher can't trail after him forever. Honestly..."
That was the moment. Jo Sudeok had been pouring out complaints right up until then, and a single knock shot his ears upright.
Knock, knock!
"Jinwook?"
The door opened, and the man who poked his face in was, without question, Jeong Jinwook.
"Well? The contract?"
At Jo Sudeok's urgent question, Jeong Jinwook did not answer. He grinned, bright as anything.
The contract lay on the sofa table, and across it the name Lee Munhyeok was written clear as day.
"President, I am not the sort of man who recommends people carelessly. No, sir. I may not know much else, but raising talent — that, I am a specialist in. And here's the proof, isn't it?"
Jo Sudeok looked as happy as a man who had just sent a late-born child off to Seoul National University. Then his eyes turned to his student.
"How did you do it? Tell me properly. Hour by hour, in detail."
The teacher set the stage, and Jeong Jinwook opened his mouth with a shy face.
"Author Lee Munhyeok is certainly a man of fierce pride. The idea of taking a publisher's commission and manufacturing a product... he had a violent allergic reaction to it."
"Then how did you get the signature?"
"I persuaded him whenever there was an opening. 'It will help you grow as a writer. Where else will you find the chance to write a story this vast? Once you've written so many generals, there won't be a character left that you can't write.' I took what you told me, President, and put flesh on it as the moment required."
"And then?"
"That brow, knotted so hard, began little by little to loosen."
"Oh!"
"Even if the work is for the sake of younger writers, a novelist entering his prime sinking several years into a single book — that's a heavy burden. But after he heard me out, I think his mind changed. He saw there might be something in it for him as well."
"So in the end he signed?"
"Not right away. He kept turning it over. It looked as if he were settling into a long deliberation, so I stepped in."
"How?"
"I went all in with the budget you authorized."
"An advance of five hundred million won?"
"Yes. I told him to begin his research with that money, that it didn't matter if the book came out late, that he could think it through for as long as he liked and write afterward. He seemed quite moved."
Of course he was. What publisher in Korea hands a writer an advance of five hundred million won? And not only that — they put all that money in his hands and say the manuscript may arrive whenever? A gamble only a man who knows the future can place.
"I thought he would sign then and there, but he said there was one thing I absolutely had to tell him. A newborn publishing house offering five hundred million as an advance made no sense. Who was behind it?"
"What did you say?"
"I told him it was the Hyeon-gang Cultural Foundation. Only then, as if that settled the matter, did he take out his fountain pen."
The result of it sat before my eyes. I let out a breath. From here on, my publishing house would walk a well-paved road. Perhaps he read that on my face.
"President, what are you going to do about a company building?"
Jo Sudeok asked it with a face so sunny I almost doubted my eyes.
"Say the word and I can scare one up in a snap."
"No. That sort of thing should be left to Team Leader Jeong Jinwook."
"T-team leader?"
Jo Sudeok looked from me to Jeong Jinwook with a peculiar eye.
"He was hired today, and he's a team leader from the start?"
"He distinguished himself. I'll raise his salary, too."
"A raise before he's even drawn a paycheck..."
"Heh heh heh."
"Do I throw away this damned school and come all the way under you, President..."
"Director, what is it this time?"
"Ah. I am a director!"
"Of course. There's the matter of holding two posts, so for now you'll be an outside director. That's all right, isn't it?"
"More than all right. But... where do we belong? The publishing side?"
"No. The American corporation."
"Then... the salary is in dollars?"
I nodded. And nodded again.
"Well, now. That's stylish!"
Jo Sudeok turned at once to Jeong Jinwook.
"You came up in the world overnight, didn't you? It feels like yesterday you were moping because the American study abroad fell through, and now you're drawing your pay in dollars. Hey!"
Jeong Jinwook rose and bowed deeply.
Oh, come on. Then I have to stand up too, you old man!
I grumbled it that way, but honestly the feeling was superb. It was good, my own people gathering one by one, and I was glad all over again that I could treat them as they deserved. A day like this called for a drink!
Nngh.
If I were only a high schooler, I might at least try to talk them into letting me have one. An elementary schooler drinking... that was a bridge too far, wasn't it?
"Let's eat, then head home."
"I've been waiting with my eyes about to fall out for you to say that."
"How about Korean beef?"
"President, a day like today calls for pork belly."
"Don't tell me you're worrying about my wallet."
"Perish the thought. Korean beef is wonderful too, but if you set pork belly and kimchi on a kettle lid and grill them... ah, that is a delicacy like nothing else. I didn't think you'd know it, so I meant to introduce you."
Know it, my ass! In my last life, every company dinner was pork belly without fail.
Well. I only suggested Korean beef because I wanted to buy them something good. On taste alone, I lean toward pork belly too... ahem.
"All right. Pork belly it is. But the two of you have to drink soju."
"Pardon? With you sitting right here, how could we drink..."
"Isn't pork belly without soju a kind of torture?"
"It is, but how do you know that..."
"My grandfather said so."
When you're at a disadvantage, you sell your grandfather. Always.
"As expected of the Chairman!"
See? Convinced on the spot.
"Understood? I'll have a soda, and the two of you will drink soju. Deal?"
The words were barely out of my mouth.
"Deal!"
"Thank you!"
The happiest smiles in the world caught at the corners of both their mouths.
After the company dinner, Jeong Jinwook, drunk, moved with heavy steps. Shuffle. Shuffle. His room stood at the very edge of the Sillim-dong goshiwon quarter. When he opened the wooden door, its base rotted clean through, a dim kitchen met him — a place he used strictly as a sink, since he never cooked. An absurd house with no bathroom, so that a shower meant going to campus. Still.
"Dad, this place too... it's going to rise soon."
He said it looking at the photograph hung in the room. Maybe it was the drink. His dead father could not hear him, and yet Jeong Jinwook murmured on.
"I think I might be able to live like a person."
In a corner of the room, where a bare bulb flickered, he dropped down heavily and went on.
"I'm sorry I came back after eating something good all by myself. But... do they eat in heaven? You don't have to worry about every meal there, so... maybe that's why it's heaven..."
Jeong Jinwook's father had been a painter, an artist with nothing to leave his son but poverty. He had lacked the knack for getting by, and yet his hand with a brush had been nothing short of astonishing.
"On the way back after landing Author Lee Munhyeok's contract, I was so happy I looked at the sky. I wanted to boast to you. And the clouds — they were incredible."
In that moment Jeong Jinwook thought it. Dad saw all of it. To congratulate his son, he set a magnificent work on the canvas called the sky. While the bulb lost its light, he called the clouds he had seen back into his head.
"In heaven you don't have to sell off this and that just to buy paint, right? So you painted that enormous cloud... as much as you wanted, didn't you?"
How much time passed that way. Jeong Jinwook opened his mouth heavily.
"Dad, our president says he'll help poor artists. It's such a good thing, and when I heard it I was honestly sad."
He let out a sigh deep enough to chill his chest.
"If the president had only been born thirty years sooner, you could have lived in a way that made people stare. Dad, your paintings were really something."
At that table of pork belly and soju, tears had kept welling, and Jeong Jinwook had done nothing but pour the drink down.
"You saw all of that too, didn't you? Still, just listen. It's only your son talking because he's drunk."
But in the end he could not get the words out of himself. Instead, like a sigh he failed to heave up, he pressed several sentences down hard into his chest.
I'm not going to paint anymore. The truth is, I don't even have your talent. And strangely, I'm not sad about it at all. When the president said he would help poor artists, I thought of you and felt low, but once I heard the rest I was honestly a little stunned.
President Park Jihoon knew the life of a starving artist in genuine, minute detail, as if he himself had lived that way. A third-generation chaebol heir, for whom ignorance of poverty was only natural — and only eleven years old, at that. How could he know a life so completely opposite, down to the bone?
A rich man talking about poor people, and strangely I didn't resent it. No — far from resenting it, I was in awe. How can someone immerse himself that deeply in another person's life? And then, little by little, a certainty seemed to take shape. If there was a lord worth giving a whole life to, wasn't it this man? This must have been how Guan Yu and Zhang Fei felt when they met Liu Bei. Maybe the thought struck so hard because we happened to be contracting the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Come to think of it, I've never even properly read the Romance. Nngh. The day Author Lee Munhyeok finishes the work, I'll read it slowly then.
Jeong Jinwook made a resolution that was not quite a resolution, and spoke.
"Dad, if you really are in heaven, tell the people up high about me. Ask them to let me keep this job a long time without getting fired. I won't be walking out on my own, so look after me a little. And don't just paint clouds across a perfectly good sky... all right?"
The murmuring lasted only a moment.
"......"
Jeong Jinwook could not fight the exhaustion pouring over him, and toppled onto his side.
A little later, a crackle, then a longer crackle, as if standing in for his dead father's answer. A thin electric whine — and the faint bulb, too, sank into a lightless sleep.