A World Hard to Believe
"It keeps curling back up."
"I can smooth it out for you just fine."
"You're the one who crumpled it."
"Don't you me. You know my name. Oppa would do just fine."
"……I don't like oppa. I'll use your name."
"Suit yourself."
"……Your pork gukbap is ready."
"Thank you."
"Enjoy your meal."
The server's lukewarm manner brightened at a single greeting from me, her voice lifting a full pitch. Rahee, who had been glaring at her, stared quietly down at the bowl before she spoke.
"……Where did you hear that rumor?"
"Oh, from Changsu, earlier. The one I went running with."
"Yes, I know him…… I must have seemed awfully repulsive to you."
"Mm. No."
I breathed in the milky broth, scooped up a spoonful of salted shrimp, and stirred it through until it dissolved.
"Well. I'm a third party, so maybe it isn't my place to say. Still, I think I would have liked it. If it had been you, Rahee."
"……Huh?"
I'd tossed it off in passing, but Rahee froze with a mouthful of pork gukbap still between her teeth.
"Isn't that hot?"
"Ih hot."
"Swallow, then talk. What was that."
"……You nearly stop a person's heart, and you expect the food to go down?"
"So it was nice to hear?"
"No, that's not—"
I took in the sight of her flushing and flustered all over again, then lifted a spoonful to my mouth. This was it.
"This. Hah. That's good."
"……You certainly eat well. After ruining someone else's appetite."
Muttering like that, she no longer seemed particularly tense. Maybe the teasing had been worth it.
"Still, the way you stick it out at work—you've got grit, Rahee. Members whispering is one thing, I suppose. No workplace harassment, though?"
"The other trainers work different hours from me, and the owner understands. She just can't do much about my personal-training hours shrinking."
"Fair enough. I heard PT is a trainer's main income."
"It is. So I've been thinking it over. There's nowhere decent to go, though."
"The pandemic's over. Gyms ought to pick up now, no?"
"A lot of them closed. And there are more female trainers than anyone needs."
"Ah. So that's how it goes."
I nodded and pushed another spoonful into my mouth.
"You really are different."
"Different how, this time?"
"Men all pick at their food. You eat like you mean it."
"Gukbap only tastes right in big bites."
"Exactly. Pfft. You've got a grain of rice stuck there."
I brushed the left cheek she was pointing at, and my fingers came up empty.
"Not there. Come here."
She reached across herself, plucked the grain from my right cheek with a fingertip, and held it up for me to see.
"Honestly, what a mess you—hn—"
A mischievous impulse rose at how pleased she looked with herself, and I pushed that finger straight into my mouth. The tip of my tongue flicked across it. Rahee clapped a hand over her lips and swallowed a moan.
"Thanks."
"……Wh-what on earth was that……"
"You've got a stammering habit, Rahee. Not a great one."
Her face was red enough to burst at a touch.
"Eat. It'll get cold."
"……And whose fault is that. How can you do something like that so casually……"
"If you didn't like it, I won't do it next time."
"N-next time?"
"Ah. So this was the first and the last? Only I was serious. Again."
"No, it's not like that……"
"Or is this just dinner once, because I'm a member? That would hurt, you know."
"It isn't. You really do make a person feel strange."
"Then we'll have dinner together again?"
I studied Trainer Rahee's face. She blushed and dropped her eyes to the gukbap.
"……If someone like me is all right with you."
"Oh. You're blushing."
"……Be quiet."
Sulking, then. I huffed a laugh at the way she stabbed at her soup, and picked up my own spoon. By the time we left the gukbap house we felt far closer than when we'd walked in. People get closer when they share a meal. Absolutely not because I had teased her. Out in the cold I was drawing my coat shut when Rahee spoke.
"……Are you heading home?"
"Disappointed?"
"Yes."
"Honest at last."
"I think I've got you figured out. If I pretend I don't care, you sniff it out at once and tease me over it."
"Sniff it out? It's an excellent conversational tool. Hmm. What should we do. I'm afraid someone will say I'm being careless again."
"……You're just as small-minded as every other man."
I snickered at the glare she shot me. Rahee sighed and pointed down the inner alley.
"There's a place that does good highballs."
"Highballs sound good. Let's go."
I followed her into the alley, and a little later I had no choice but to stop. Every building in front of me was a villa. Even at the far end of the lane there wasn't a single shop light.
"So you're the owner of this highball bar, Rahee?"
"……You caught me."
"Hmm. We've known each other a little over five hours. What exactly were you planning, taking me home? And don't try to wave it off as nothing but a drink."
"……I really did come on too fast, didn't I."
At least she didn't reach for some hopeless excuse. Fresh, in its way. The highball line was worth stealing sometime. I watched her look nervous and turned it over. I had no reason to refuse, here. I could feel she wasn't the sort to spread rumors, and given the talk about her already circulating at the gym, even if she did, no one would believe it. The problem was that it looked too easy. Which meant I would have to make it look less easy from some other angle.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you."
I had been standing there in silence, and Rahee, who had only been watching my face, apologized.
"Hmm. Unexpected. Are you confident?"
"……What?"
"Confident you can satisfy me."
"O-of course. I can. I will."
How to put it. Like a puppy? Maybe the women of my old world had felt something like this. She looked cute to me—though that might only have been because Trainer Rahee was that good-looking.
"Got a condom? I don't."
She tilted her head at that, and asked me back instead.
"A con……dom? What's that?"
"……What? It's contraception…… isn't it?"
"Contraception? Why would anyone use contraception?"
A condom wasn't only for that, of course, but that wasn't the point just now. The conversation had slipped its track. Something was going wrong.
"What were you going to do if you got pregnant?"
"What do you mean, what? I'd have it."
"……I wasn't thinking about kids."
"……? I don't really understand what you're saying."
"If a child happened, I'd be its father. I have no interest at all in children, or in raising them."
"You'd be the father, yes. But why would you worry about raising it?"
"……What do you mean?"
"I give birth to it, so of course I raise it. Hold on."
She set a hand against my forehead, checking for a fever. Only then did I realize that shock had carried me straight through the conversation without a thought for how it sounded. Since we'd come this far, I decided it was better to confirm things, even if she found me strange.
"……You must be tired. I'm sorry. I didn't even consider that. I was only thinking of what I wanted……"
At her apology I put the next question to her as if nothing were wrong.
"Let me ask a few things. I'm confused. So parental rights over a child belong only to the woman?"
"……? Of course. It's a child from her own body."
What Rahee had just said was as good as a total denial of marriage. A matriarchal society, and men nothing more than studs for sowing seed. The thing called a household—the system that guaranteed, between one man and one woman, the preservation of genes, a stable outlet for desire, and the making of a family—turned into an empty name. I knew that as single-person households multiplied, family itself was growing faint. This was a problem of an entirely different order.
"And men, then? No responsibility at all?"
"You're being strange. If you just come by now and then and play with the child, that already makes you the best kind of father. Do you know how many kids grow up without ever knowing their dad's face? I don't know mine, either. They say that back when the marriage system existed, that was what they called a family—but it was abolished in the Joseon era, because it didn't solve the population problem. It made it worse."
She was looking at me as if I were the strange one. That wasn't what mattered now.
"Marriage—they did what? Abolished it?"
"Yes. It was abolished then. If two people really want to live together, they file a cohabitation notice. It's a modified take on the French PACS, their civil partnership. Not much of a difference. Just a couple certified by the state."
"……Even granting all that, was there reason to go so far?"
"In practice, once marriage was abolished, the population stabilized. It's hindsight, but they say the problem was legally binding men—already too few—to a single woman. Two people making a home still carries a bit of fantasy, so these days it just turns up now and then as material for stories."
"……And the cost of raising a child?"
"Obviously the mother handles that herself. There's state support, so it's easy. If it's really too much, you can leave them at a facility."
"A facility?"
"Yes. I grew up in one, and spent my evenings at home with my mother. About half of all births? That many actually live at the facilities. The school's right next door, so it's very convenient."
Listening to her, it didn't sound like an orphanage at all. It sounded like a state facility devoted entirely to childcare and education. Was that actually possible?
"……And the career break for mothers?"
"Career break? Oh, right. I haven't heard that phrase in ages. The moment you give birth, you're registered as a civil servant under the Ministry of Maternity and Childcare, and a set salary comes in. If you need more money, you go into a facility and look after other children, too. They recognize up to three years of career credit, and you can return to work whenever you want, so your choices actually get wider. Support keeps coming in as well. Neighborhood offices, district offices, city hall—each one has its own policy."
"That's just talk. Aren't there places that won't take you back? And what about people gaming it?"
"It's not common, but a company that tried could genuinely go under. The Ministry of Maternity and Childcare hunts them with their teeth bared. In a severe case they hang a charge of insurrection on it, and you can consider the company gone. Every asset reverts to the state. Usually it gets absorbed into the Ministry. It's more or less the same all over the world. Now that I think of it, I don't believe I've heard of a case recently."
I watched Trainer Rahee tip her head, lost in thought, and asked.
"……There's hardly any talk of men, though. Are there no duties?"
"There are, but they're empty formalities. No real penalty, either. That's why people argue about it. Shouldn't we be creating benefits?"
"What are the duties?"
"If your partner gets pregnant, you report the mother's information. That's about the extent of it. If the genetic records overlap and a child of close kin results, that child has to be specially managed, and the earlier the better. But even if you don't report, men's genetic information is already on file, and the moment the mother confirms the pregnancy at an obstetrics clinic, before the birth, it's registered automatically. So there's no need."
"And this talk about benefits?"
"Men are so…… reluctant to go to bed with anyone. Unlike women, there's no reward in it, so they show even less interest. That's why there's so much argument lately. One side wants support policies, just to get them interested. The other says leave it to women's desire, the way it has always been. There's a more radical camp that wants to take only men's sperm and grow the population through in vitro procedures, but that's too extreme. It's disgusting, isn't it? People aren't livestock."
"……"
I was speechless. The shock of it ran deep. And a system like that carried a danger with it. Once one person kept multiple partners, that danger arrived as a matter of course.
"……Then if a man were exposed to an STD, that would be enormously dangerous, wouldn't it?"
"An STD? Oh, you mean like AIDS?"
I had meant the ordinary kind, and she had gone straight for the final boss. She spoke of it the way someone might mention a cold, as if it were nothing at all, and all I could do was nod.
"Shinwoo. Were you locked away somewhere, eating nothing but fried dumplings for years? These days one injection and you're cured. You get the vaccine in school, too. A-and it's my first time, so you don't have to worry."
If anything, she was telling me there was no need to worry about her, looking embarrassed as she said it. Which meant there were no shackles on a man at all. The best. This could not have been a better world. They were offering to slip the bridle off the colt. No reason to decline.
Mother. Father. I was wrong. I suppose this is as far as holding back goes.
"Sorry for killing the mood."
"It's all right. Go in and rest. I'm worried about you. I must have stressed you too much. I'm sorry."
Rahee's brow was drawn. She seemed genuinely concerned for me.
"Yeah. Let's go in."
But I took her hand, gently.
"……Y-yes?"
From the moment I had met Hyunji that morning, I had been riding the brake. In this instant, I let it off—at least part of the way.