The Fencer, Jeong Jae-ha

I was an eleventh-century swordsman, born into the wrong century.

I rose by the blade and stood at the summit of the world.

Then I lost the blade, and I fell all the way to the bottom.

I loved swords. Japanese katana, the Korean hwando, Western swordsmanship, fencing—the blade itself, the art of wielding it, everything a sword was meant to stand for. All of it. I started in elementary school with kendo and Haedong geomdo, the old Korean way of the sword, and from middle school on I trained in Western swordsmanship alongside them.

"You like swords, don't you? Want to join the fencing club?"

I joined as if there had never been another choice, and the club was nothing short of heaven.

"Eight to fifteen! Jeong Jae-ha wins!"

They say the one who works hard can't beat a genius, and a genius can't beat the one who simply loves it.

"Five to fifteen! Jeong Jae-ha wins!"

I was the one who loved it.

"Three to fifteen! Jeong Jae-ha wins!"

City meets became provincial championships, provincials became nationals, nationals became the world. I won, and I won again, and somewhere along the way I was on an airplane with the national emblem on my chest and the Olympic rings across my back.

"Nervous?"

"No?"

"You like it?"

"Yes!"

I traded one last word with Coach—the man who never tired of comparing us to medieval swordsmen—and stepped up into the ring.

All right. Let's have some fun.

A fighter has a ring called the octagon. A fencer has a ring of his own. The piste: a battlefield fourteen meters long and two meters wide. You meet your opponent on that piste the way you would meet him on a single-log bridge.

"Jeong Jae-ha! Jeong Jae-ha! Jeong Jae-ha!"

"Andre! Andre! Andre!"

Tens of thousands of spectators screamed our names. Tens of millions watched from afar. In this place, there were only the two of us.

"Salut!"

Beneath the pouring lights we offered each other the old salute—the same greeting eleventh-century knights once gave before a king and his ladies.

"En garde!"

We leveled our blades and made ready to launch. Hips low, eyes locked, the free arm lifted light, all the strength bled out of the arm that held the sword.

"Êtes-vous prêts?"

Are you ready? I answered with the smallest nod.

"Allez!"

At the cry even people outside the sport know now, I kicked off the piste.

"Ha!"

Clang! Kraang! Kraaang! KRAAAANG!

I went for Andre's torso. Several times in a single second the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠blades met and shuddered in the air, and the point driving in from above, below, left, right, front, and back was like staring naked-eyed into the sun. I lifted my gaze past the mask and found Andre's eyes—heat and fighting spirit, and the weight of a man who belonged on the world stage. Mine was not a face like that.

"Ah—hahahaha!"

I laughed.

Pap-pap-pap-pap!

I drove the point in from every angle.

"Attaque, attaque, attaque! He's pouring it on without a break!"

One step, then another, I advanced down the fourteen meters of the piste.

"Jeong Jae-ha! Parade sixte into a riposte—a magnificent counter!"

I caught Andre's reply high on the outside and answered, and the point was mine. I felt the weight of the blade in my hand. I threw it up toward the sky for all of them to see.

I stood before the Olympic rings with a sword in my hand and a gold medal at my throat, and I laughed. Coach, who loved his web novels, called me the World's Greatest Swordsman from that day on. Yes. Of the seven billion people on earth, I was the best with a blade. The one who loved the blade most. I was seventeen. It was summer.

At seventeen I was called the World's Greatest Swordsman.

"You really were born in the wrong era. You shouldn't be an athlete in the twenty-first century. You should have been a swordsman in the eleventh."

"I think so too."

At eighteen, and at nineteen, and at twenty, they still called me the World's Greatest Swordsman. Gold at the World Fencing Championships. Gold at the FIE Grand ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Prix. Gold in fencing at the Asian Games. Whenever an international podium went up, my name was on it.

"Jeong Jae-ha, Jeong Jae-ha! Jeong Jae-ha!"

Honor, money, fame. There was a time when all of it simply followed from the one sword I loved.

Twenty-one. I stood beneath the Olympic rings again. On the fourteen-meter piste I faced my opponent, and the man waiting there was the same one I had met four years before.

"Allez!"

I beat Andre's blade aside and put my point into his chest.

Beep.

The light didn't come on. A malfunction, I figured. It was fine. The gap in the score was still wide, and when the exchanges are that short even a referee missees things. An athlete owes the referee his respect. I smiled, and I lifted my blade again.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

When the same thing happened three more times, the smile was gone. I turned to the coaching staff and signaled, plain as I could: what is this?

The referee looked at me, and at our coaches, with the same bewilderment. The crowd traded its cheers for boos. Even Andre faltered, his blade sinking. And still our coaching staff said nothing. The place had gone as quiet as if someone had pressed mute.

That year's gold went to Andre. I don't resent him. He did his best inside the rules as they were written.

"Why didn't you say anything, right there?"

Our coaching staff was another matter.

"No. That's something you should have told the referee at the time."

"And what do you expect us to do about it now? Hm? Take the medal off Andre and hand it to you?"

"Why don't you take a little break while you're at it?"

They went on saying things I couldn't make sense of. They even moved to keep me out of the trials for the next Asian Games.

"Jae-ha. I looked into it, and..."

"Gambling?"

The coach who had named me the World's Greatest Swordsman went digging through the association's inner workings for me—though he hadn't even been there that day, and anyone could see that touching it would get him hurt. From what he found, the men at the top were tied to an international sports-betting site dealing in hundreds of billions of won. They had pocketed billions by helping my defeat along. The rage split me open. I did not, of course, take a sword and storm the association.

"I've heard something I can't believe."

I tipped off the press, and the interviews followed. I tried to settle it inside the rules of a twenty-first-century society.

That effort ended one evening.

"Chae-ha?"

I came home to a door that had been ripped open with a crowbar.

"Who the hell are you?"

Cigarette smoke packed the living room, and a pack of tattooed thugs—pigs, the lot of them—had made themselves comfortable. Under their feet my little sister, Jeong Chae-ha, couldn't even scream. She only twitched, limp, against the floor. One of them had a sledgehammer raised, as if he meant to bring it down on her head.

"I asked who you are!"

I was on him before the thought finished, both hands on the hammer's haft, wrenching it out of his grip. None of it made sense. The tattooed pig turned and looked at me.

"Pal. Quit stirring things up with the press and all that noise, and just keep your mouth shut. We didn't want to do this either."

"Keep making a fuss and next time we really crack this kid's skull. You hear me?"

The pigs around him snickered. I looked to Chae-ha first.

"O... ppa...?"

Her hands—twisted, bent back, soaked through with blood—trembled, then went slack. I ought to have been checking whether she was even alive. But my mind had gone blank, and only one picture would come: Chae-ha with a guitar, singing. Her dream had been to be a guitarist.

"This can't be."

These bastards had done that to a guitarist's hands.

"Chae-ha—Chae-ha has an audition. She can't die."

Snap. Something broke inside my head.

She has to live. She has to make that audition.

She has to make that audition. She has to live.

My sister had only been living, earnestly, one day at a time. Overnight she might have to fear for her life instead of her dream. That drop was what drove me mad.

"Walk out of here and come back, and one of that kid's wrists is on the piano and the other one's on the guitar. Yeah? Stay home and watch the brat. Don't even think about press conferences out there."

"Look at his eyes. He's gonna swing, isn't he?"

The tattooed pigs turned to me and smiled, thin and mean.

"Works out. We were told to grab this guy and do his hands anyway. Might as well finish the pair of you today."

"Well then, Mr. Champion. From now on you'll be holding that sword in your left hand, yeah?"

"Bet you've never even seen a real cutting. Cry all you want about how much it hurts—we're not going easy."

"Let's just put hands on him and be done. I'll take it off nice and clean."

One of them came in with a baseball bat cocked over his shoulder. The others showed me kitchen knives, the handles wrapped in tape. To think men like these would threaten me like this. The gall of it was past believing. My heart beat slow. My head was full of fire.

"A real cutting?"

I turned my eyes to the live blades hanging on my wall.

"Want me to show you one?"

I had collected those swords without trouble and with pleasure, as an athlete and as a man who simply loved them. Today I would have to put them to a use that wasn't pleasure. There was no referee here anyway.

"Thank you for your time."

"Yes. Thank you."

The interview was over. I turned the wheels of the chair and started for the infirmary.

Rattle. Rattle. Rattle.

The sound of the wheels ran the length of the corridor, and a corrections officer watched me go, every kind of feeling crowded into his eyes.

Rattle. Rattle. Rattle.

Looking at that gaze, I remembered a few ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠months back. That day I had cut those tattooed pigs down without so much as a scratch on a finger. I hadn't truly meant to kill them. The ones with the kitchen knives went down, and the one with the bat threw it aside and tried to run. That was when the police arrived. They said they hadn't recognized me under all that blood. They said they had taken the thug—bat discarded, already fleeing—for the homeowner, terrified of a madman with a sword. And because I was holding a bared live blade, they said they never even thought of drawing a baton.

Bang!

The bullet passed clean through my thigh. My step broke on it, and the edge that should have taken the tattooed pig's wrist took his neck instead.

"Ah."

The trial ran for more than a year. Justifiable defense, excessive defense, death resulting from injury, aggravated murder, life imprisonment, a suspended sentence, the mood of the public. Legal terms without number went back and forth, and in the end I was given ten years. Prison itself was not so hard. An island off the south of Korea, a newly built prison reserved for model inmates—the facilities were decent enough, and more than one officer pitied me and saw that I was looked after.

Rattle. Rattle. Rattle.

But whenever I thought of my sister, left alone outside with her dream already gone—whenever the doctor's words came back to me, that they might have to take the leg—

"Damn it."

A deep sigh was all I had.

"You're here?"

"Yes. I'll be in your care again today."

I rolled into the infirmary.

"Mr. Jeong. There's something I have to say to you today."

I greeted the medic who had been helping with my physical therapy, and the look he gave me was one I couldn't have named.

"Mr. Jeong, modern medicine cannot restore that leg. The main nerve in the thigh is completely dead. Complications could bring on necrosis. Rehabilitation is meaningless."

I knew why he was saying it.

"There are times I feel something."

"Mr. Jeong!"

"There were movements I couldn't do, either."

"I'm sorry?"

"A hundred times, a thousand, ten thousand—do it until it works, and in the end it does. This isn't a speech about grit. It's about what repetition does to a nerve."

He had no answer to that. Then he would understand why I was saying this, too.

"Even when the main nerve dies, there are cases where the auxiliary nerves in the surrounding muscle develop and take its place. Aren't there? Ordinary people have managed it. I was an athlete. There's no way I can't."

"All right."

The medic let out a long breath and stepped out of the infirmary.

"If you can come this far without the wheelchair, I will ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠do everything in my power to help you rehabilitate."

That was what I had been waiting to hear.

"But if you can't make it here, then as a doctor I will proceed with amputation. What will you do?"

When a thing must be done, conditions don't matter. I closed both hands hard around the handles of the chair.

"Please remember what you just said."

Standing was the easy part. My left leg was fine. Now I had to take a step, and my right leg had no intention of moving so much as a fraction.

"What's the matter?"

"It's nothing."

I thought of the fencing advance—the forward step, weight committed as you travel. You lead with the front foot anyway, so almost no force goes into the back. Manage that force well enough, and I could probably do it on the left leg alone. Whether I could keep my balance was another question. I might go down backward. I might go down on my face.

I breathed out and met the medic's eyes. He was watching me from up ahead, and the look was full of pity. I knew it too. The chance this leg would heal was small. One in tens of millions, maybe. But I was a man who had stood at the peak of eight billion.

Tap.

I launched an advance straight at him—the step I had planted hundreds of thousands of times. My left leg went forward. My right did not follow.

"Ghk—!"

My weight tipped back, and I nearly toppled where I stood.

"Mr. Jeong!"

The medic shouted.

"I didn't fall! I didn't fall!"

"What's going on?"

A corrections officer came at a run and stared at the two of us. I drove every bit of strength I had into my core, curled my torso forward, and just barely held myself up. I set my teeth and made ready for the next step.

"I'll get there! Even if I have to crawl, I'll get there, so please—please, just help me with the rehab. Please!"

That day, in the end, I walked out of the infirmary on my own two feet.