Scenes from Another Life
At a Marine post near the Imjin River, two Marines stood watch.
“Hey, Daejun.”
“Private First Class Hwang Dae-jun.”
“How many days until Senior Corporal Kim Soo-min gets discharged?”
Hwang Dae-jun glanced at the watch on his wrist and said, “Senior Corporal Kim Soo-min has exactly 27 days, 6 hours, and 50 minutes left until discharge, starting from now.”
“Then how many days do you have left, Daejun?”
“I have 11 months and exactly 3 days left.”
“Convert that to hours.”
“To hours, sir...?”
“You’ve got one minute.”
At that moment, Hwang Dae-jun found himself weighing two things.
Whether he really had to calculate the rest of his military service in hours.
Or whether he should report the senior standing beside him for abuse.
And then Hwang Dae-jun spotted something drifting downriver.
“Senior Corporal Kim?”
“What are you, Einstein? You already done calculating?”
“No, sir. I think you should take a look at that.”
“Where?”
Hwang Dae-jun pointed toward the middle of the river.
Kim Soo-min peered through the military binoculars at the spot he indicated.
“Shit... looks like a person...”
It was Kang Hae, unconscious.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Discovered by a Marine sentry, Kang Hae was taken by ambulance to a nearby military hospital.
He was in bad shape.
From his pulse to his blood oxygen saturation, every reading pointed to death.
But there was a bigger problem.
The duty military doctor found a gunshot wound in Kang Hae’s side.
“We can’t handle this here. He needs to go somewhere bigger.”
Kang Hae was transferred by helicopter from the military hospital to Seoul First General Hospital.
Seoul First General Hospital was an emergency medical center serving the northeastern region of Seoul.
As soon as Kang Hae arrived, he was rushed straight into the emergency operating room and taken into surgery.
The operation lasted three hours.
Afterward, Kang Hae was moved to the intensive care unit.
The surgeon and the head nurse in the ICU exchanged a brief conversation over his motionless body.
“What do you think, doctor?”
“Hard to say. Thankfully, the nerves and blood vessels seem fine, but... he lost too much blood... Let’s watch him for now.”
“Understood. Thank you for your hard work.”
The surgeon left the ICU.
And inside, he thought to himself that if Kang Hae had been operated on the moment he was found, his chances of waking would have been much higher, but too much time had been wasted before the surgery.
So it would be a little difficult.
And Kang Hae, with his eyes closed, was dreaming a deep dream.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
High school student Kang Hae was sitting in class at school.
Tap—
Tap-tap—
Tap-tap-tap—
Raindrops struck the classroom window, and the rain gradually grew heavier.
But Kang Hae paid it no mind, concentrating on taking notes for the midterm exams coming up soon.
Then the classroom door opened.
Kang Hae’s homeroom teacher entered.
For some reason, his expression was grim.
“Kang Hae...”
“Yes?”
His teacher called him in a worried voice.
“Pack your bag and come outside.”
Without understanding why, Kang Hae did as he was told, packed his bag, and stepped out into the hallway.
“Teacher. Is something wrong?”
“Well, Kang Hae... your older brother, Donghae...?”
The moment he heard the name of the brother who had gone missing in Cambodia a year earlier, Kang Hae shouted, “My brother?! You heard from him?!”
“Kang Hae... I think something happened to him...”
“S-something happened...?”
“Yeah. Go home right away.”
As Kang Hae left school, he took out his phone and called his mother.
The ringing went on for a long time.
And then, after a while, his mother’s sobbing came through the receiver.
“Mom...? Mom, what’s wrong...!”
“K-Kang Hae...”
“Why? What happened!”
“Do... Donghae...”
His mother couldn’t finish and broke into sobs again.
“Brother, what about him!”
“He... h-he’s dead...”
The scene shifted to the funeral hall.
A framed photo of Donghae, smiling brightly, stood in view.
Beside it stood Kang Hae’s father, mother, and Kang Hae himself.
Kang Hae’s mother collapsed on the spot while receiving condolences.
Then another scene rose up.
It was one year before Donghae’s funeral.
Kang Hae, just started in high school, returned home after class.
When he opened the front door, he spotted military boots left by the entrance.
“Huh?! Hyung, you’re on leave?!”
Kang Hae hurriedly kicked off his shoes and ran inside.
His older brother, home on his final leave before discharge, sat at the dining table and smiled at him.
Their father sat opposite him.
Their mother stood in the kitchen, ladling soup into bowls.
Both his father’s and mother’s faces were nothing like they would be after his brother’s death.
They were full of life, full of smiles.
“Kang Hae, come sit down. You need to eat.”
When Kang Hae sat beside Donghae, Donghae reached over and patted his head.
Meanwhile, Kang Hae’s mother placed rice and soup in front of him.
While Kang Hae ate, the three who had already finished their meal chatted softly among themselves.
“Dad. When I’m discharged, I’m thinking of going to Cambodia for a bit.”
“Cambodia? Why, planning a trip?”
Then his mother said, “A trip sounds nice~ Donghae’s dad, what was that movie Angelina Jolie filmed in Cambodia...? ”
“What was it again? Ah, Tomb Raider!”
“Right, right, Tomb Raider. We said back then while watching that movie that once the kids were grown, we should go see Angkor Wat sometime.”
“Then when Donghae gets discharged, should we all take a family trip together?”
“Oh~! A trip~!”
Excited, Kang Hae shouted.
Smiling, Donghae said, “It’s not really for a trip. I was planning to work a little before going back to school.”
At his words, his parents’ expressions darkened for a moment.
“Work? In Cambodia?”
“What kind of work is there in Cambodia?”
“I’ll be managing servers for some domestic IT companies. Their servers are in Cambodia.”
“Why not just rest a little and tutor or something?”
His mother spoke with concern, or rather with pity.
“Come on~ If not now, when else am I ever going to get the chance to work abroad?”
Then Kang Hae quietly called out, “Hyung.”
“Yeah?”
“Does it pay a lot?”
“Yeah. It pays a lot.”
“Then I can look forward to it, right?”
At Kang Hae’s childish remark, his mother clicked her tongue.
“You, Kang Hae! Your brother’s saying he’s going to work hard to earn money.”
“Mom. They say hardships in youth are something you should buy for yourself.”
“Listen to this one.”
Unable to beat a single word he said, the whole family burst out laughing.
Warmth and harmony spilled over the dining table.
The scene shifted again.
The blazing sun and dense rows of palm trees came into view.
Beneath those palm trees stood a three-story pool villa.
Korean gangsters covered in irezumi tattoos and Cambodian women in bikinis splashed around in the outdoor pool.
A man who had been groping a woman’s breasts in the water checked the time on his phone.
He got out of the pool, wiped his body with a towel, and headed into the villa.
In the first-floor living room sat a leather sofa and table.
Across the floor lay empty condom wrappers and liquor bottles.
On the table were unidentified pills and powders, along with syringes.
The man sat on the sofa and jabbed a syringe into his left arm.
His pupils turned bloodshot after the injection.
Breathing hard like a dog, the man picked up one of the liquor bottles scattered on the floor.
Then he poured the alcohol straight into his mouth.
After a while, the man staggered to his feet and headed toward one of the rooms on the first floor.
He shoved the door open.
It was a dark room, sealed from the sun by blackout curtains.
Several computers were set up inside, and men who looked to be in their twenties sat in front of them.
The man walked up to one of them, grabbed his hair, and yanked his head back.
Donghae’s face came into view, full of fear.
His eyelids were swollen.
His mouth was split open, covered in blood.
“I told you to finish it by noon this morning.”
Terrified, Donghae spoke in a trembling voice.
“P-please... spare me...”
The man picked up a keyboard and smashed it down on Donghae’s head.
Donghae collapsed to the floor and clutched his head with both hands.
The man kicked him mercilessly.
Thud, thud, thud—
The other men in the room watched the monitors with frozen faces, too afraid to move.
“I’m going to gouge your fucking eyes out today.”
The man pulled a knife from his pocket.
Just then, a Cambodian woman in a bikini entered the room.
“Oppa~ no, no~ dangerous~.”
“Dangerous...? What the hell is this bitch saying...?”
“No, no~.”
The woman wrapped her arms around the man’s back.
“Look at this fucking bitch, all horny. Okay, let’s go have some fun.”
“Fun...?”
“Go, go, bedroom.”
With his free hand, the man groped the woman’s ass.
The woman smiled shyly and tapped his back with her clenched fist.
The man looked down at Donghae and said, “If I come back after fucking this bitch and you still haven’t finished, then I’m really going to rip your eyes out.”
After the man left the room, the men seated at the computers approached Donghae.
Donghae’s face was even more wrecked than it had been a moment ago.
The scene changed again.
A lonely road in Cambodia after sunset.
Donghae was running barefoot down the road.
A black SUV chased him from behind.
The SUV slammed into Donghae.
Sprawled on the ground, Donghae let out a groan.
Men with full-body irezumi tattoos got out of the SUV.
They lifted Donghae, lying there on the pavement, and threw him into the vehicle.
Another scene shifted in.
The same road from just moments ago.
The sun was rising.
The black SUV sat in view.
The car stopped in the middle of the road.
The rear door opened, and Donghae tumbled out of the vehicle.
The door slammed shut again, and the SUV pulled away.
Donghae lay motionless on the ground.
Heat shimmered above the road, and his body grew cold and stiff.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Kang Hae, lying in the ICU, stirred restlessly in pain.
Alarms blared from the devices attached to his body.
Beep—
Beeeeep—
Doctors and nurses in the ICU rushed over.
The monitor’s ECG graph and numbers were dropping.
“Cardiac arrest!”
The doctor pressed down on Kang Hae’s chest.
Meanwhile, the nurses prepared the defibrillator.
“Doctor, the defibrillator’s ready.”
The doctor stopped chest compressions and grabbed the device.
“150 joules.”
“Charged.”
“Everyone clear. One, two, shock!”
Kang Hae’s body jolted.
The doctor resumed chest compressions by hand.
The ECG line climbed again.
The machine’s warning tone faded.
And Kang Hae slowly opened his eyes.
A single tear slid down the corner of his eye.