The Bullied Intern
“That’s all. You may disperse.” At Team Leader Lee Jae-woon’s words, the interns got up and left their seats.
He made one copy of each assignment, sent the originals up to the chief editor’s office, and came back with the photocopies. Team Leader Lee Jae-woon settled into the head seat of Editorial Team 1 and said, “Now then, let’s take a look~.”
Just then, his subordinate and fellow editor Kim Ji-woon drifted over. “Team Leader, you were really laying it on thick with the interns earlier.”
“Was I cool?”
“Come on, the chief editor’s the cool one. You were just funny.”
“Shut it, punk. Looking for trouble first thing in the morning?”
At their back-and-forth, the rest of Editorial Team 1 snickered.
Kim Ji-woon could be a little irritating, but he was also the team’s ace, so the team leader asked, “How did you read the submitted manuscripts?”
“Well, One of Us wasn’t bad. Not good enough to choose as a winner, though.”
“That’s it?”
“Hmm… Ah, actually, The Man Who Searches for Ghosts keeps lingering in my head, but I can’t make sense of what it means.”
“There you go again, Kim Ji-woon. That’s why you’re still not there yet.” The team leader gave a quiet laugh. “That thing that keeps lingering. That’s proof the novel succeeded. Think about the plot of The Man Who Searches for Ghosts. There’s a Korean soldier who gets separated during the Vietnam War.”
“In the damp, sweltering jungles of Southeast Asia, he keeps searching for a ghost.
He doesn’t know why. He’s driven only by the obsession that he must find it. Along the way, he battles his own trauma, mistakes beasts for ghosts and gets himself into danger, and sometimes even gives up everything to wait only for death. But in the end, he gets back up again.
Muttering only that he has to find the ghost. In the final scene, he emerges from the jungle and comes upon a lake.
And when he sees his own reflection in the water, he gives a faint smile. It’s a strange novel. As you follow the man’s first-person monologue, you start to feel as if you’re right there in the jungle with him, almost breathless.
You even get the illusion that you’re searching for the ghost alongside him.”
“It does have a strange kind of charm.”
“Right? Masculine, yet eerie and heartbreaking. Even established writers have a hard time pulling off that atmosphere.”
“Still, the meaning is too vague. Since it’s first person and the narration jumps around, you could almost argue it’s just the fantasy of a madman.”
“Haha, that’s interesting too. Still, it’s a little regrettable. It would’ve been better if the author had sprinkled in just a few more keywords.”
“What did the interns say?”
“I was just about to check. Let’s look together.” The two of them went through the interns’ photocopied assignments in order.
The work chosen by Song Min-hoon and Yoo So-hyun was One of Us.
“See? They were completely taken in by the author of One of Us. They never noticed how stale the novel was; they just fell for the convincing prose.”
“Hmm, yes. Everything they wrote as a selection reason is just stuff like ‘the sentences are good’ and ‘it’s stable.’”
“That just means their eye for writing is still at a student level. Well, I suppose it’s too much to expect from interns.”
Then Kim Ji-woon, who had been reading the last page first, looked surprised. “Huh? But Mok Hyunsun picked The Man Who Searches for Ghosts.”
“What? Mok Hyunsun? Give me the assignment.”
The guy looked decent enough, yet he couldn’t even handle checking his email properly.
And he had the nerve to show up late, then scribble out his assignment right in front of everyone as if that weren’t enough to make a person speechless.
Kim Ji-woon chuckled and handed it over. “But what’s with the one-line comment? Heh, who does he think he is, Im Dongjin?”
“What did he write? Hmm? ‘Hemingway… returns’?”
The team leader had only just been bewildered when one work naturally came to mind at the mention of Hemingway.
Could it be, The Old Man and the Sea…?
The Old Man and the Sea.
The famous story of an aging fisherman, little more than a relic, who fights a desperate battle and returns with a great fish.
Even though sharks tear the flesh from the fish in the end,
the old man carries his pride home and falls asleep peacefully for the first time in a long while. Huh? Something seemed to connect.
Both works place enormous emphasis on the act of “searching.” In The Old Man and the Sea, what he finds after a fierce struggle is his self-respect. He’d gone so long without catching anything. Then what was it that the man in The Man Who Searches for Ghosts was trying to find…? Given the soldier’s circumstances… ah!
The team leader marveled inwardly. …His “humanity”? Something he had to lose while killing Viet Cong. What had been invisible became visible.
Even the emotion embedded in the novel emerged clearly before him.
So that’s why it felt so heartbreaking. The form of humanity the man is searching for is a ghost. He knew from the beginning that his own humanity had disappeared. How sad must it be to wander after something that doesn’t even exist in the world.
“Hah.” He let out a dry laugh.
That grand, tragic, and sprawling meaning—was it really all condensed into a single word, “Hemingway”?
He glanced casually through the glass door toward the interns’ room.
Was it just his imagination?
Mok Hyunsun, with a hand pressed to his forehead, seemed to be in fairly serious anguish. If this is real… that’s incredible.
─┼
Some time later.
Team Leader Lee visited the chief editor’s office.
He had business matters to discuss, and while he was at it, he wanted the chief editor’s opinion on the interns’ assignments as well.
But even after the business discussion was over, Chief Editor Im Myeong-eul didn’t say a word. “Uh, Chief Editor. Do you have anything to say about the interns’ assignments—”
“No. You may go.” He cut the conversation off cleanly and kept his eyes on his monitor. To be fair, he was always busy.
He was the head of the serial publications department, one of Gyeongseong Publishing’s core operations.
Not only that, he was in charge of Editorial Teams 1, 2, and 3,
but he was also a critic with a name of his own.
I thought he’d have something to say about Mok Hyunsun. To the chief editor, it must’ve been nothing more than an intern assignment.
Maybe he alone had been making too much of Mok Hyunsun’s one-line comment.
In the end, Team Leader Lee bowed his head. “Yes. Then I’ll be on my way.”
It was the moment he turned to leave.
His gaze happened to catch a small wastebasket.
And the interns’ assignments inside it, too.
Tsk. I guess he really wasn’t satisfied.
Feeling oddly awkward, Team Leader Lee was just about to step out when—
“!”
He saw it.
On the inner side of the desk, next to the personal printer, lay a single sheet of paper at random.
It was unmistakably Mok Hyunsun’s Hemingway Returns.
The team leader’s eyes trembled.
─┼
…Looks like becoming a permanent employee is a lost cause.
After I came into the interns’ room, my head had gone cold.
In more ways than one, I had been lucky.
First, I realized One of Us wasn’t that great.
Second, I managed to recognize the value of The Man Who Searches for Ghosts even if it was a little late.
I thought my reason for selecting it had been fairly accurate, too.
Even when I managed, right at the end, to come up with that one sentence by pure luck, I felt a strange, indescribable thrill.
The problem was… it was a one-line comment.
Ugh, seriously, ugh.
I had said I’d do it, but still.
Who did I think I was, Im Dongjin? What kind of business was a one-line comment, anyway?
I rested a hand against my forehead.
My past struggles flashed through my mind like lantern slides.
After leaving home with nothing but the clothes on my back, I’d scraped by long enough to graduate while juggling manual labor and school.
On top of that, I’d kept my GPA up and even completed an editing academy program, so I really had worked my ass off.
Of course, in this world, effort alone didn’t make everything happen.
I had to take out all sorts of loans, too.
In other words, I needed a job as fast as possible.
…And all of it was because of those bastards.
Right.
Since things had already gone this far, I might as well have a plan of my own.
“Hey, Hyunsun, listen—”
At that moment, Yoo So-hyun rolled her wheeled chair over toward me.
She wore a thoroughly affectionate smile.
Every now and then, Yoo So-hyun came at me like this.
As if trying to divert my attention.
By now I could guess why she did it.
It meant she no longer thought she could fool me.
“Shut up.”
“…Huh?”
“I said shut up.”
Leaving Yoo So-hyun staring with wide eyes, I went over to Song Min-hoon.
He quickly closed the internet window.
It had been for only an instant, but that had definitely been an email window.
“What’s going on all of a sudden?”
“So this was it?”
“What was?”
“Whenever an email comes in, Yoo So-hyun distracts me, and in the meantime you move the email somewhere else.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Have you ever actually had an email disappear? You missed it yourself, so why are you accusing innocent people?”
“You probably restored it later, when the timing was right. After I’d already missed the assignment and the schedule.”
I could hear Yoo So-hyun swallowing hard.
So my guess had been more or less right.
But Song Min-hoon wasn’t ordinary.
“You were going on about Hemingway and whatnot this morning. Our Mok Hyunsun is more imaginative than he looks. So, do you have any proof we did that?”
“An innocent man starts with an explanation, not a demand for proof.”
And did I say I came here with proof?
If I’d come to catch the proof, maybe. Song Min-hoon glared at me, keeping perfectly still.
Until yesterday, I’d been smiling and trying to get along with my fellow interns.
He probably hadn’t expected me to come at him like this all of a sudden.
I intended to cling to this right to the very end.
If I went down, you went down with me.
Then I noticed a Word file open on his dual monitors.
This was… the review of One of Us?
“Song Min-hoon, why are you writing a review? Did you hide the assignment again?”
“Get lost. Don’t look.”
He immediately minimized the Word window.
And at that very moment—
…!
The same thing happened as in the conference room.
The text remained in my head like a photograph, and something inside me seemed to pierce straight through it.
“Don’t act like a lunatic; it’s not an assignment. We already chose a submission, so I’m just practicing for the next one, which is probably a proper review.”
Blah, blah, bark, bark.
“Being able to write a good review is part of an editor’s skill set, too. Though I honestly don’t know how you’d develop that gorgeous one-liner of yours into a full review.”
Woof, woof. Yap, yap.
The dogshit kept coming, but I didn’t flinch.
I had plenty to say to him in return.
“You wrote it like complete garbage.”
“What? That’s not something you can say after just a brief glance—”
“Who the hell can’t turn a story about a poor couple being oppressed into a social class analysis? Any first-year Korean literature student could do that.”
“…Hey.”
“And then you try to explain that by applying Marx’s Capital, and finish by calling the ending, where they still don’t lose hope despite being poor, ‘humanism’? Marx defined humanism as a state in which economic problems have been resolved, you moron. If Marx rose from the grave to slap your face, you wouldn’t have a word to say.”
Song Min-hoon’s eyes went round.
That meant the criticism had landed hard.
I had plenty more where that came from.
I could have torn apart every single line.
But why should I do that for his benefit?
Instead, I said, “Go on. Argue back.”
Song Min-hoon’s face went red.
Being embarrassed in front of Yoo So-hyun, who had been acting like his older brother, probably didn’t help.
I snorted.
Got under your skin, did I? Too bad. If you get rattled, you lose.
“Fuck, hey. I double-majored in philosophy. Do you even know Capital?”
“It’s in pages 317 to 322 of Gyeongseong Publishing’s 2010 revised edition of Capital, asshole. What, do you want me to tell you the editor’s name too?”
The interns’ room finally went silent.
The dumbstruck looks on their faces were something else.
At that point, I decided to land the final blow.
If I was going to be bitter about this parachute-hire crap,
I might as well make use of my father one time now that things had already become irreparable.
“Looks like I’ll have to have a drink with my father today. He’ll certainly have a lot to say about his son’s intern life.”
“!”
“H-Hyunsun!” Yoo So-hyun sprang to her feet. “I have nothing to do with the email—”
“So-hyun!” Song Min-hoon cut her off immediately.
I wasn’t sure if they were trying to flirt or just pretend to be friends, but it was pathetically flimsy either way.
I shook my head in disgust and left the interns’ room.
Then I went to the emergency stairs where no one was around.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and stopped the recording app.
“Too bad. If she’d only gone a little further, I could’ve had solid proof.”
If Yoo So-hyun had finished that last line, it would have been great evidence.
But because Song Min-hoon cut her off, the whole thing ended up inconclusive.
Still, after what I’d just done, they wouldn’t be able to look down on me quite so easily anymore.
“Hoo…”
At least my blocked-up breathing felt a little better now.
I slumped down onto the stairs.
But… there is something weird about me, isn’t there?
This was no longer something I could write off as a mood, coincidence, or luck.
Instantly identifying the contents of Song Min-hoon’s review from a brief glance,
or remembering the page of Capital I’d once seen in a college general-education class—wasn’t that a little excessive?
“Hmm.”
Looks like I’d need to borrow the power of science.
“I think I need to get my brain scanned.”
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