Are You a Sex Addict?
Work started at eight in the morning.
Breakfast was always something I handled at the office.
While the other employees usually rolled in about ten minutes early, coffee in hand, and settled at their desks, I always arrived a full thirty minutes ahead so I could eat the breakfast the company provided.
Today was no different. I nuked a slightly stale croissant, spread apricot jam over it, tucked two slices of Swiss cheese inside, and rinsed a green apple while I waited. Then I pulled a lungo from the espresso machine, sat down, and my simple morning routine was complete.
That had been my breakfast menu for the past several years.
Lunch I took care of at a bistro not far from the office. A grilled cheese sandwich, coffee, and a cookie as a lunch set—seven dollars before tax, plus a dollar for the tip.
I was paying for the meal myself, yet I liked eating food someone else had prepared. Whatever the reason, seeing a plate set out for me always made me feel like someone was looking after me, even a little.
A grown adult hoping someone would take care of him.
I hated wallowing in self-pity, but moments like that made me think the sense of having been abandoned from the start was something you never quite shook free of, no matter how long you lived.
My earliest memories were hazy. I couldn’t recall the faces of any parents or guardians, but I had known how to speak Korean, I had remembered that my name was Lee Jun, and I had remembered a birthday when snow was falling.
Not that any of that had ever helped me find my birth parents.
I grew up in a quiet American country town where there were no other Asians. When the other kids asked where I had come from and why I looked the way I did, the Mother Superior would answer:
“Jun’s eyes aren’t small and his skin’s on the pale side, so he must be mixed.”
It wasn’t even an answer to the question of where I had come from, and looking back it was a rather ignorant, casually racist remark—but the children accepted it without protest.
Even now the whole thing still left me speechless.
The Mother Superior who occasionally drifted through my thoughts had been a truly singular person. She was a chain-smoker with a more imposing presence than most men. And though no one knew how the story started, the rumor always went around that she kept a revolver in her desk drawer, so you’d better watch your step.
Kids will be kids. As if a nun would actually keep a revolver.
A double-barreled shotgun, maybe.
I wiped my mouth with a napkin, left my wandering thoughts on the table along with the tip, and stepped out of the bistro.
A sharp gust of cold wind made me pull my coat tighter; the phone in my inner pocket rang.
It was the Mother Superior.
Saturday morning, near the orphanage.
“Thirty minutes is enough?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
The orphanage was an hour from home—too expensive for a taxi and poorly served by buses. I couldn’t simply turn down the Mother Superior’s request, so I had asked Greg, the colleague I was closest to at work, to drive me out, promising him drinks sometime soon.
I had no intention of staying long, either. Thirty minutes would be plenty.
I got out near the alley and started walking toward the orphanage when I spotted several trucks and a crew of workers. Renovating the building, maybe? It had already been old when I lived there, so a full-scale renovation wouldn’t have been surprising.
Angelus Orphanage
I passed the faded nameplate and cut across the lawn. There was no time to get sentimental about returning after so long; I dodged the people moving furniture and stepped inside, only to hear a baby crying from the director’s office.
Knock knock.
When I rapped on the door, a face I had never seen before opened it. Probably a newly arrived novice nun. Her large blue eyes stared at me in silence, which felt awkward enough that I stated my business right away.
“I’ve come to see the Mother Superior.”
The blue-eyed nun still said nothing, but she swung the door wide open for me.
Beyond the doorway I saw a baby wailing inside a basket shaped like a fruit crate, and the Mother Superior, who somehow managed to look stern even amid the chaos, peering at paperwork through her reading glasses. She lifted her head, gestured for me to come in, and rose from her seat.
“Come in, child. You haven’t changed a bit.”
That was exactly what I had wanted to say.
The director’s office, visited after all these years, looked completely unchanged. Even the Mother Superior herself seemed not to have aged a day. The solid voice, the imposing frame, the face that still looked as unyielding as ever—she must have been born wearing that exact expression.
The Mother Superior handed the baby to the blue-eyed nun.
“I have important matters to discuss with this young man, so please take the baby and give us a moment.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Eloise Beret. The woman in her mid-fifties still looked far more like an active-duty soldier than a nun.
The moment the two of them left, she opened the window and lit a cigarette. I remembered her never smoking in front of the children. Maybe it no longer mattered now that I was grown. She must have noticed my gaze on the cigarette, because she asked:
“Want one?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“So you don’t smoke. Somehow I thought that might be the case.”
What did that mean? Before I could settle on any conclusion, the next question came flying.
“Then are you a sex addict, by any chance?”
“No.”
I half-doubted my own ears, yet the flat answer left my mouth first. The strange questions kept coming.
“Debts?”
“None.”
“Criminal record?”
“No.”
“Have you done anything else that would make you ashamed before the Lord?”
“No.”
I had no idea what had prompted this barrage. Still, I carefully avoided mentioning that I no longer crossed myself before meals or that I kept neither a crucifix nor a Bible at home.
Instead I asked carefully:
“May I ask why you called me here?”
“I’d like you to look after the baby Sister Greta just took out for a while.”
“……Suddenly?”
“You saw on the way in—we have to do renovation work for some time.”
The other children had already been placed elsewhere, but this baby had arrived at the orphanage only a few days earlier.
“No matter how I looked at it, this wasn’t a suitable environment for an infant, so I’ve been searching for someone who could care for the child for the next several months.”
She exhaled a long stream of smoke.
“Couldn’t you just send the baby to another orphanage?”
“The nearest one is already at capacity, and I don’t want to send the child somewhere far away in case the parents come back.”
“Even so…… I still don’t understand why you called me of all people.”
“The ones I managed to reach before you were all chain-smokers, sex addicts, buried in debt, or sporting criminal records.”
Truly lamentable news.
“And as I recall, you were always good with the younger children.”
“Was I?”
This was exactly why a person should never do good deeds. Contact with those kids had all but ended the day I left the orphanage, yet here I was being summoned because of it.
I was still trying to figure out a graceful way to refuse the sudden proposal when the Mother Superior stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and pushed a stack of papers across the desk toward me.
“Everything a foster parent needs to know is in there.”
Pamphlets and booklets that looked as if they had been printed twenty years ago. Policies might not have changed much since then.
I found myself glancing sideways at her desk and the cabinet behind it. Surely there wasn’t actually a gun in there.
“If nothing unexpected happens, the construction should wrap up within six months to a year, so just hang in there that long.”
“……According to this, becoming a foster parent requires at least several months of training. And more than that—aren’t there people who actually want to be foster parents?”
“Times are hard for everyone these days. Finding a decent foster home is like plucking stars from the sky. If anyone asks about the training, just say you completed it properly.”
“There has to be a record at the center.”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. That part is already taken care of.”
Dear God.
“……Mother Superior, I’ve never even been to the center listed here.”
“That isn’t a problem.”
Why not?
“Mother Superior, I do want to help. But the required training hours listed here……”
She raised one hand to cut me off and picked up the receiver of a rotary phone that looked older than I was.
Click-click-click, clack.
Click-click-click, clack.
How had that thing never broken down? A miracle that rewound time itself must have settled over this room.
Click-click-click, clack.
Click-click-click, clack.
The steady whir of the dial suddenly made me uneasy. This town had a long history, and the Mother Superior was essentially a local powerbroker.
Click-click-click, clack.
Click-click-click, clack.
Perhaps, thanks to the people’s faith, she wielded more influence than most politicians or wealthy men……
Click-click-click, clack.
Click-click-click, clack.
……and she was holding a holy shotgun……
Click-click-click, clack.
Click-click-click…… clack.
While the ten digits spun, I frantically tried to invent an excuse to escape the situation, but it was useless.
For all the time it took to dial, the conversation itself was extremely brief.
“The boy says he’ll do it. Make sure the paperwork is clean.”
“Got it, Mother Eloise.”
Click.
That was it.
“…….”
Holy Mother.
Why are You testing me like this?
“Those pamphlets and booklets are just for reference. Nothing else to worry about.”
“But……”
“My little child.”
Yes.
Under that firm voice that brooked no argument, I instantly became a small child again and could only answer with my eyes.
“At most a few months. Newborns get adopted faster than older children, so your fostering period might end sooner than you think.”
A lie. Most of us, myself included, had never been adopted and left the orphanage at eighteen. As far as I knew, more than a hundred thousand children in America were still waiting for adoption.
“By then, no one will care that you were underqualified.”
I tried hard not to sigh and gathered the last of my courage to ask once more.
“……I feel like I’m lacking in so many ways. Are you sure this is all right?”
“Better a young man with all four limbs working than the half-helpless old folks around here who can barely take care of themselves. Besides, the government provides a subsidy.”
“Isn’t the subsidy barely enough to clothe and feed a baby?”
“Money isn’t the important part. When you die and rest in the Lord’s arms, won’t you be praised for taking good care of a child who had nowhere else to go?”
With those words she rose from her seat. The conversation was finished.
A discussion that had required logic and consideration had ended in bottomless faith.
……Lord.
Outside the director’s office the noise returned in full force.
Furniture scraping across the floor as it was hauled out, voices from every direction, ringing phones, even a neighborhood dog barking. Too many sounds. My head was spinning. I stepped outside the building and sat on a bench, but it was still loud.
While the racket scrambled my ears and seemed ready to blot out my vision as well, the baby’s cry grew steadily closer until it sounded like thunder.
A child abandoned the moment it was born. A child no one wanted to take responsibility for. And above all, a child who was not my responsibility.
“…….”
This really didn’t feel right.
But the blue-eyed nun must have been given prior instructions; she hurried up and promptly deposited the baby and a shopping bag of unknown contents into my arms.
Excuse me……
“Please take good care of the child. May the Lord’s grace be with you.”
With that she vanished without a backward glance.
Since the nuns seemed beyond reasoning with, maybe I should find the priest. Or leave the baby at the guardhouse. This really was……
“…….”
If I left the child here, would it simply be dumped somewhere else like luggage again?
As I stared blankly down at the baby, its soft golden hair, now that the crying had stopped, glittered in the sunlight.
……Would even a child who shone this white someday turn the same gray I had become?
Would it grow into an adult who lived a flavorless daily life, endlessly telling itself that everything was fine?
In that moment the baby stretched both arms toward me.
It might have been nothing more than restless squirming from discomfort, but that was how it looked to me.
I reached out on reflex, and the baby seized my finger.
“……Want to come with me?”
As if in answer, the tiny hand tightened around my finger.
“……All right then. Let’s go together.”
The words left my mouth before I knew it. I stood up carefully, gathered the child into my arms, and walked out of the noisy grounds.