Wearing the Dead Man's Name
That afternoon, a message arrived from Gonzales through the Sky app.
What’s with this guy? His temperature’s higher than mine.
An hour later, someone knocked on my hotel door.
“GB!”
Before opening, I checked through the lens, then confirmed his hands were empty. Clean except for a document envelope.
“Yes~”
He handed over the items and left. A South Korean passport and documents. A passport for a man named Choi Eunsu bearing my face, along with papers recording his history.
‘Hyung, Eunsu is dead.’
‘He might still be alive.’
‘Live as him until he comes back.’
I stayed holed up in the hotel room until the flight date.
I am an orphan. Hyung had been the leader at the orphanage. I don’t know his name or family name. Have you heard of baby boxes? The director raised me after finding me in front of the welfare center.
When I was eight, I overheard Hyung and the director talking. That was when I started suffering from social withdrawal.
Eunsu was my peer from the baby box. We were a week apart, but the director simply called us twins. “I’m the older one,” Eunsu would say, treating me like a little brother, while I just laughed it off.
After turning eight, I spoke to no one except the director, Hyung, and Eunsu.
In elementary school, when the world was about to ostracize me, if Eunsu hadn’t looked out for me, I wouldn’t be here today.
Eunsu was good at fighting. Big frame. By fifth grade he was already over 160 centimeters tall. Whenever kids bullied me, he got revenge. Sure, the director would come and scold him like clockwork, but after a few juvenile warnings, no one at school dared touch Eunsu or me.
If it hadn’t been for that incident in middle school, we might still be picking pockets together.
Looking back, it was a common story. A sexual assault case at the orphanage. But the girl who was assaulted had been following Eunsu around because she was close to him after me. That was the spark.
He used to loudly declare that he would marry her, have kids, and live happily. “You naive kid, you think marriage is that easy?”
That day there was a sponsorship event with the director’s supporters. Photos, games, ceremonies. But the girl’s expression looked terrible. I didn’t pay it much mind, just noticed. I didn’t even know her name. Can’t even picture her face now.
That was me. Indifferent to the world.
From the next day on, I never saw Eunsu again. No contact, no sightings. I erased him from my heart.
Now that I understood how the world worked, the next day at Cancun Airport I upgraded to business class. Didn’t want to be an A4-paper chicken. Luckily there were seats left.
Five hours from Cancun to LA, fourteen hours from LA to Incheon, all lying flat. So comfortable. Should’ve done this last time too.
Once back in Korea, I’d check the blacklist and live as Eunsu for a while. Had to be careful.
Sitting in business class, I opened the documents. Back at the hotel I hadn’t even wanted to look at the name.
Name: Choi Eunsu
Hanja: 崔恩需
Gender: Male
Education: Hwaseong Elementary School graduate / Hwaseong Middle School dropout
After dropping out of middle school, whereabouts unknown
Simple. Good.
I wondered what kind of life Eunsu would have lived. Over the Pacific.
First thought, given what Hyung had said and assuming Eunsu was alive: at best, a gangster. With his leadership, maybe a team leader by now? But that world was just as dangerous as mine, hidden in the shadows.
I listed my considerations.
First: I needed to operate without external interference. I had actually considered the elite route too. Studying with the Vietnam hyung had made learning fun. Picking up new things. There were those fake elites—prosecutors, judges, doctors. The accountant-like broker last time had seemed decent too. But they were all inside the system, full of restrictions. Have you seen how public officials do whatever they please? Doctors have to go through medical school. Might be tough with my brain.
Second: it would be better if it was in the light. Become the opposite of the me who operated in the shadows. That way I could live with peace of mind, right?
After landing in Incheon, I scanned the passport and took the photo. Then I disappeared.
“Choi Eunsu-nim.”
“Yes~”
Where was this? Noryangjin GED academy.
After returning to Korea I kept thinking, and eventually realized that to enter the system I had to start with the GED. Korea’s single-digit illiteracy rate meant most people received universal education. So I concluded I needed at least a high school diploma.
I worked to create a natural history for Eunsu so that anyone digging into him would find it believable. In other words, I tried to look like a runaway teen who had tasted society’s bitterness and finally started studying seriously.
At the GED academy the ages were varied. Young kids and older folks alike. But the level was far too low. Still, I endured. What would people think if a suddenly elite orphan appeared out of nowhere? “Isn’t that someone else?” Suspicion breeds identification, identification breeds arrest.
I deliberately wrote with crooked handwriting, dozed off in class, but showed up every single day. While doing so, I also kept an eye on our crew.
Then I received shocking news from Hyung.
‘Where are you?’
While studying Korean history at the Noryangjin academy, a message from Hyung. Been a while since I’d seen his face.
‘Seoul.’
‘Where in Seoul?’
He seemed urgent.
‘Noryangjin. Doing laundry work.’
‘Exit 2 in 30 minutes.’
I left the academy in the middle like someone skipping class. Funny how, since it was the adult class, no one said a word. Meaning, leaving didn’t get you scolded. In Cancun it would’ve started with getting hit.
Waiting at exit 2, a Benz approached with a heavy exhaust note. The same car from before.
“Get in.”
“Yes.”
It merged onto the western arterial road, and he spoke.
“What have you been up to?”
His tone sounded angry.
“What do you mean? I told you I’m laundering Eunsu’s identity.”
“Saving up cash little by little, putting down a deposit, registering the move-in, signing up for the GED academy and attending classes.”
“Planning to go to university too, still thinking about which department.”
“Ha…”
He sighed, and the next words caught me off guard.
“Welcome to the nationwide blacklist, you dumbass.”
From what he said, Hamo hyung’s dollar delivery had begun. Fifty thousand dollars were on the line. Hamo hyung had said he deposited everything properly, even used part-timers. I’d thought using part-timers was a smart move, but apparently things don’t always go smoothly.
After that, there had been a delivery accident. They traced the seized dollars and it led back to me.
Why? I asked, and he shot back whether I was the police, so I shut my mouth.
Fortunately it was still at the identification stage; they hadn’t grasped the full picture yet. Just a step up in classification.
But this was a different league. Not just one region’s police and prosecutors chasing, but every single one across the country.
Damn. I needed to be more careful. Maybe hole up in some resort for a couple of years?
And after a long time, I received Hyung’s drug-studies lecture from the beginning again before we parted. It overlapped with the leader of the trio brothers and triggered my PTSD.
He dropped me off at Line 1, so I took the subway toward Suwon and thought.
What should I do from now on?
One thing I’d learned while living this life: if you don’t know, ask.
Why did I always turn into a whiner whenever I talked to Sparkle hyung?
Not me, though. I’d been avoiding it. Because I’m a coward.
As expected of our Zhang Liang, Saint Gabriel, life guide.
What? Find someone better than Hamo hyung or Yangcho hyung and make them agents? Where would such a person even be?
Eunsu didn’t want that.