Am I a God?
Then, was I a god?
I had been certain I would be one in a million.
Everyone thought so.
And I was nobody.
I rewrote In the Line of Fire for a very long time, tore the whole thing down and rebuilt it from the ground up, fixed every last piece of it.
It was a chance I had managed to win for myself.
Through my conversations with Editor Kim Jinhee I had been given time to look hard at who I was, and that let me finally step free of my arrogance.
I was not someone who wrote novels that well.
They had debuted me at sixteen and called me a genius, and for a while I had forgotten the truth.
I was twenty-seven; the year turned and I was twenty-eight.
A sixteen-year-old Seo Yuja writing the words of a twenty-eight-year-old might count as genius territory, true.
But I was no once-in-a-generation prodigy, and not every path I walked was the right one.
I had forgotten that.
I went back to the beginning.
In the library I pounded at the keys of a computer.
I kept writing In the Line of Fire down onto the page.
I had been writing it from a third-person observer’s point of view; I tore the novel apart and rebuilt it in first-person from the protagonist’s eyes.
Yes. This was the way it had to be.
I was not there to report the facts of what had happened. I had to write Yoo Hanjin’s torment.
I had to write the Yoo Hanjin who was forced to weigh lives against one another.
Of course I thought every last one of those partisan bastards had to die.
Why?
I went to school without missing a day and lived my ordinary life with care.
When you were writing a novel about death, you could not let death get too close.
I made sure to eat breakfast and dinner with my family, and lunch with Lee Hyeon and Kim Dain.
In the spare moments I read novels, recommended a few to Mom and Dad.
By living the everyday well, I kept the contrast with death even sharper in my heart.
Death was empty and hollow; you must never write it lightly.
Without Editor Kim Jinhee I never would have known.
I had been counting the ugly hours I spent writing straight through, thirteen, fourteen at a stretch, as if that meant anything—novels were not that kind of thing.
Writing nonstop never guaranteed a good novel would appear.
I threw away the arrogant idea that I would only work on this one at night, and I wrote it honestly.
June passed slowly.
And if I had to pick the biggest thing that happened in the middle of June, there was only ever one answer.
An email came from Kanye.
The very first message was from someone who seemed to be roughly Kanye’s manager; it proposed a podcast.
They wanted me to fly all the way to America and sit in front of a camera for a conversation.
I refused, of course.
I had a deliberate mystique concept of never doing interviews; going on a podcast would only burn that image, and the public would start remembering me as an entertainer instead of a novelist.
The next offer was a video call so I could talk with Kanye directly.
I refused that one too.
Embarrassing as it was, my spoken English was nowhere near that level, and besides I wanted to gather my thoughts slowly before we spoke.
Then the final proposal came from Kanye himself.
Editor Kim Jinhee called me in complete fluster and sent screenshots of the mail Kanye had written me.
The message written entirely in capitals made me laugh.
That was how sincere he was, I supposed.
Exchanging emails was fine, so I accepted.
Remembering the address I had deleted before, I made a new account.
Then I told Editor Kim Jinhee to have him contact me there.
Kanye and I traded one mail a day.
At first it was formal—he asked my name, and I told him what “Yuja” meant.
Next he asked about the moment when Yu meets Sally again, and I asked what he wanted to know.
Kanye said he wanted to know why I kept calling Sally “Monkey.”
Calling her a fucking bitch, a whore—that he understood. But monkey? Wasn’t that racist?
I told him racism had never been the point.
Everyone can see what a monkey does inside the zoo, yet no one truly respects the monkey, no one truly believes the monkey is alive.
They are only looking at something on the other side of the glass.
That was the way we looked at Sally, I said; it was metaphor.
Honestly, when Kanye started talking about race I felt a little afraid.
In the future he would pour out a whole series of related outbursts; right now he was probably only thinking those thoughts.
So I answered as carefully and politely as I could.
A few hours later Kanye sent back “okay...okay...”
After that, silence for a while.
I supposed I should take it as a good reaction.
Honestly it was a strange and delicate feeling.
I had always imagined that someone, somewhere, might be affected by my novels—but I never dreamed it would be someone this big.
Once the exchange ended I focused on writing again for a stretch.
Part of it was finishing In the Line of Fire, but I also ended up writing an entirely different piece.
There was a school writing contest.
I submitted a very short story, a conté of about fourteen hundred characters, and of course I took the gold prize.
The only reward was a line under my school record: first place in the campus writing contest. Nothing else.
I did not take it for granted.
I received the certificate, spoke briefly with the principal, and that was the end of it.
July was approaching, and just as I was slowly wrapping up In the Line of Fire, one thought brushed across my mind.
…I wanted to talk with other novelists.
Can a newborn baby and an old man who cannot walk become partisans?
The partisan who was cradling a dying child asked me that.
I could not say a single word.
They had been together, three of them, and that was the only reason I had done it.
I had thought they were partisans.
But in truth they could not have been, so what the hell was I doing right now?
I had killed innocent people.
No—I needed to think about this for a long time.
Innocent or not, the war had already lasted seven years this year.
In all those seven years I had never once thought this thought.
I had killed people. Whether they were innocent or not had never crossed my mind at all.
This one has sins so it is all right to kill him; this one is innocent so I must not kill her.
That was the thinking I had been doing until a moment ago.
A small child cannot become a partisan, so I must not kill him; an old man who cannot walk cannot become a partisan, so I must not kill him either.
Then is it all right to kill a partisan?
How had I been making these judgments for the last seven years?
This person may die, that person must not.
Weighing lives against one another was not something a human being could do.
Then was it a god?
Was I calling myself a god?
Calling myself one or not, I was already doing it.
I was weighing human lives and killing them.
I had no right to do that at all—so who gave me the right?
From beside me a voice called, “Platoon Leader?”
This was not a right.
It was a duty.
“I want to talk literature with other novelists….”
I sprawled bonelessly in the chair and said it out loud.
Living every day so diligently had put a little distance between me and literature, and that distance had piled up into a quiet craving.
It was paradoxical.
I had focused on ordinary life so I could write a better novel, and now literature itself felt like something I was only skimming; I wanted to sit down and have a real, thick conversation with other novelists.
In martial-arts terms, it was the urge to spar a round with the real masters.
“Nothing I can do about it….”
I was already thinking of it that way.
Almost every novelist held their get-togethers in bars.
Most of the places where I had talked with novelists and built friendships in my past life had been bars.
A seventeen-year-old novelist could not get friendly with other novelists in a bar.
I would just have to wait; once I was an adult the invitations would come of their own accord.
Through the publisher, maybe, or through a novelist who already knew me.
Some award after-party where everyone gathered to drink, congratulate the winners, and talk….
Just thinking about it made me tired.
What I wanted was not that; I needed someone I could actually talk literature with.
But did that person absolutely have to be a novelist? I wondered, and started turning faces over in my mind.
Mr. Lee Hanhyuk and Editor Kim Jinhee were too business-like, so they were out. Lee Hyeon and Kim Dain knew less than I did.
Kim Dain had a fairly deep appreciation of literature, but not deep enough to satisfy me.
Lee Hyeon went without saying; everything he knew about literature was something I had taught him myself.
Novelist Jeong Yuru’s face floated up for a second, and I erased it just as quickly.
I had not seen her once since we ran into each other at the Manchang studio.
Talking with her felt like it would ruin my novel.
I had decided a long time ago that I should keep avoiding her for a while.
“Ah, come to think of it.”
I switched on my phone and searched for numbers.
Half a year had already passed since I debuted at the Yongsan Daily.
I had never once contacted the novelists whose numbers I had exchanged when we met as judges at the end of last year.
I sent both of them messages asking if we could meet, and started getting ready to go out.