An Independent Magazine (1)
31.
Not long after that, the thing I had been waiting for and waiting for finally came to pass.
I was moving at last. I called a packing service and had them haul every last thing out of my one-room apartment.
I was never one to grow overly attached to possessions, so I threw most things away and bought them anew. But there was one exception.
I carried Modern Criticism Theory with me into Paju as if it were precious enough to sleep with under my pillow. The moment I finished unpacking, I set a date for a housewarming party.
I invited the seniors from Editorial Team 1, along with Team Leader Lee, on Saturday.
A housewarming was best when it was loud and bustling, after all. The moment they stepped inside, they all gasped in admiration.
“Ooh! This place is amazing. Why is your apartment so nice?”
“You punk, Mok—living in a three-room place in your twenties?”
“Wow... at this location, you could probably walk to the company. How did you get in here without a single won in debt? This is seriously insane.”
The seniors’ eyes shone with envy.
Even Team Leader Lee let out an impressed “Ohhh.” Heh. It was deeply moving.
There had been a time when I wrote seven criticism pieces just to pay off my loan with the prize money—not that I had expected to debut at seven different places or anything. “Mok. We pooled our money together. It’s a gift.” Senior Kim said as he thrust a large box toward me.
It was an air purifier.
“Oh—thank you.” I tore into the box with relish.
Things like air purifiers were the sort of thing you usually bought later, and you could tell these people had a good sense for that kind of thing.
“With a place this nice, you should’ve just bought it outright. Isn’t the price difference between jeonse and ownership not that big these days?”
“Haha. Yeah, that’s true.” I smiled and brushed it off. In truth, I could have bought it.
But I hadn’t.
For some reason... I felt like I could earn more.
And if that was the case, then I ought to move to an even bigger place, shouldn’t I? Of course, if I said that out loud, they’d only call me full of myself, so I kept my mouth shut. “Huh? Mok! Why is that book over there?” Senior Yang, who had gone into the bedroom, asked.
I had gone in after setting up the air purifier more or less at random, and he was pointing at the wall shelf. A shelf mounted a little high up.
The thing I had placed there was Modern Criticism Theory.
Beside it sat the plaque that Editorial Team 1 had given me.
“I can understand the plaque you gave me, but what’s that book? Aren’t you supposed to put a cross or a Buddha statue in a place like that?”
“Ah...” What was I supposed to say?
That I had gotten hit in the head with it and become a genius?
“That is my religion, Senior.” It was the least deranged answer I could come up with.
Even so, Senior Yang’s expression, as if he were looking at a lunatic obsessed with literature, was almost tolerable. Then—ding-dong. Ding-dong.
“Who is it? I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
“Flower delivery! Flowers!”
Flowers? I opened the door.
The courier from a flower shop looked down at his notebook and said, “Are you Mok Hyunsun?”
“Yes. But I didn’t order any flowers.”
“They’re from Mok Pilhyun.”
My father?
He had been asking about the move, so maybe he’d sent congratulatory flowers. ...That was a little touching, perhaps?
He had never shown up for my kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, or high school graduation ceremonies, and not even brought a bouquet. But now, belatedly, he was expressing his feelings like this.
My father was trying, too.
Suppressing the lump rising in my throat, I said, “Then I suppose they are for me. Please, bring them in.”
“Yes, then I’ll carry them in for you~.”
?
Carry them in?
Before I could react, the courier swung the door wide open and hauled in a massive standing floral wreath I had somehow failed to notice.
Across the wreath sash, in large formal calligraphy, were four characters.
IND
EPEN
DENCE
CONGRATULATIONS
Before I could make sense of it, the courier set the wreath in one corner of the living room and left.
It took up a ridiculous amount of space, needless to say, and the wreath was the obvious star of the apartment now.
When the seniors saw it, they burst out laughing.
“Wow—your father doesn’t hold back, does he?”
“Writers really are different. If I didn’t know better, I’d think there was a March First Movement commemoration going on.”
“It’s all fresh flowers, too. He really put some thought into it, didn’t he? Nice, man. This instantly lifts the whole apartment’s mood. Yeah, a place needs flowers.”
I could only laugh weakly.
At last, I understood.
Why my mother had never complained much about my father’s indifference.
It was... because if he tried to express his feelings, something like this happened.
An age-old mystery had been solved in the most absurd way possible.
Anyway, the food I’d ordered kept arriving one after another, and we sat in the living room drinking together.
Back in my one-room apartment, I couldn’t even dream of inviting guests over, and now here I was in a living room so large that even a massive floral wreath and five grown men could fit with room to spare.
Mok Hyunsun had really made it.
A strange warmth settled over me, and a smile crept in before I even noticed it. I poured out another round and said, “Thank you all for coming today. I also know you all took care of me, even when I didn’t notice it, after I joined the company. I’m grateful for all of that, too.”
It might have sounded embarrassingly sentimental, but on a day like this, it felt right to say it.
“Good that you know it, punk. Do you have any idea how annoying it is when everyone’s eyes are on us?”
“Exactly. If you’re curious, just ask us directly. Why do you keep coming to us?”
“He looks cold, you know. We’re easier to approach. Anyway, thanks for noticing. Cheers, Team Leader.”
“All right then, let’s do it. Mok, you worked hard moving. Cheers.”
“Cheers!”
I knocked back the drink in one go.
Soju after so long had a sharp, clean burn to it. Senior Kim snatched up an appetizer and said, “By the way, Team Editorial 2 and 3 were saying this: you look cold, but you’re surprisingly good at office politics.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. After your debut, you gave up reviews entirely and snagged the ‘Editorial Criticism Column,’ didn’t you? Honestly, if you hadn’t done that, all the reviews would’ve kept going to you alone. In that case, there’s no way the editorial department wouldn’t have started talking.”
“I’m glad they recognize it. I didn’t want to fight over the review slot either.”
“You’re kind of a pain in the ass, but I’ll give you this—you’re loyal. If it were me, I’d just get promoted and ask for a raise.”
Senior Yang slapped my back with the air of a man delivering seasoned advice.
I just laughed, “Haha.”
From the way they talked, it sounded like they assumed my salary had stayed the same because I hadn’t been promoted. Well. My real salary absolutely could not be mentioned.
For the sake of my peaceful company life.
Anyway, since the next day was Sunday, the others drank with the intention of sleeping over.
I had a fairly decent tolerance for alcohol, so I kept pace with the seniors. A few hours later,
the seniors had collapsed in no time flat, and the only one still half-awake was Team Leader Lee, swaying as he sat there.
“Hey, Mok.”
“Yes.”
“What’s your dream?”
What kind of drunk talk was this? Normally I would have laughed it off, but Team Leader Lee’s expression was unusually serious.
“Well. To live my whole life doing what I want to do?”
“That’s vague.”
“But I think it’s already starting to come true.”
He hiccupped with a gulp. “Mok. My grandmother’s actually a shaman, you know?”
So his drunk talk was a full-blown TMI party.
He pointed at his own eyes with a finger and said slowly, “That’s why I’m pretty good at reading people. The first time I saw you, I knew you were the real thing.”
“...Didn’t you give me crap every day for missing emails?”
“...I mean, ever since you wrote ‘Hemingway is Coming!’”
Then this wasn’t about reading people so much as recognizing talent.
I held back the urge to argue. He was drunk, after all.
Meanwhile, Team Leader Lee remained completely earnest. “Mok. Lately, watching what you do has got me thinking.”
“Thinking what?”
“That someday, after enough time passes, a lot of people are going to ask you questions. Not just about literature... but about life, about art, about the universe, about the future—basically everything in the world.”
“...”
“They’ll line up all the way to the end just to hear one answer from you.”
“...”
“And I think you’ll answer like an absolute badass. I just feel like... maybe a day like that will come. Hey, damn it, don’t forget I treated you well...”
His eyes slowly closed, and then his head slumped forward.
...Your drunk talk is more extravagant than I expected.
And with that, everyone passed out as though they had been strewn across the room.
I got up, thinking I should clear the bottles, when Team Leader Lee muttered in his sleep, “...the intellect of the age, something like the intellect of the age...”
The intellect of the age.
My superior clearly had some splendid dreams about me.
As I collected the bottles, I glanced out the window for a moment.
“...”
It wasn’t that his words had charmed me.
My future goal is to become the intellect of the age.
If I said it like that, I’d sound insane... but if I could become it naturally, without forcing it?
There was no reason to refuse that either.
It would be a pretty wonderful life.
─┼
The next day, after Editorial Team 1 had left, having even cooked hangover ramen before going home, I stepped out to enjoy my weekend.
I headed to a bookstore.
Since I had only been at Gyeongseong Publishing, I was curious what other publishers were putting out. But there weren’t any particularly noteworthy new releases at the bookstore.
In the end, I left empty-handed and went to a book café in the alley beside the bookstore. I ordered a coffee and sat down, only to find a row of thin magazines laid out on the counter.
?
Literary magazines, maybe?
They were all unfamiliar to me.
“Owner. Where were these magazines published?”
“All over the place. They’re independent magazines. Feel free to take a look.”
Independent magazines.
They were magazines that rejected the existing publication system, or that printed only very small runs for economic reasons. They didn’t contract with large bookstores, and instead sold their books mainly through places like book cafés, private bookstores, and independent shops.
Money?
They probably didn’t make much of any.
My curiosity piqued, I began flipping through them one by one. The book design was rough, but there was a spark of energy to it. The images were strange or avant-garde. The layout was unlike that of the established quarterly magazines.
I looked at the fiction inside with growing anticipation.
“...Hmm.”
Not great.
Structurally and artistically, most of it was rather awkward.
In the worst cases, the spelling was off too.
Disappointed, I checked the authors’ bios.
And then I understood.
Most of them were unpublished writers in their early twenties.
Well, that changed things.
The very experience of making something like this would be a valuable asset in itself. One thing was absolutely clear in their fiction: guts.
But in many cases, I got the sense they were intoxicated by those guts of theirs, and that was a shame. I was starting to rein in my expectations when I picked up the last magazine.
The magazine’s name was ZZ.
The title of the story inside was Cooking, X-Sex, Murder.
“Oh-ho.”
It passed the test for grabbing interest.
I couldn’t very well not read it.
So I picked it up with light expectations and started reading the story.
But then...
“...Huh?”
It was pretty good.
Cooking, X-Sex, Murder took place at a certain restaurant.
The restaurant only opened at night, because the owner suffered from severe social anxiety.
She took orders during the day, cooked at night, and delivered the food by morning.
The woman’s cooking gradually becomes famous.
Then one day,
a man suddenly shows up and tries to place an order.
A group meal for his wedding, he says.
The woman recognizes him at once.
He had once been the lover who cruelly dumped her.
It was because of him that she developed her social anxiety in the first place.
And what enraged her most was this:
the man couldn’t even remember her.
Consumed by fury, the woman begins stabbing him with a knife.
But I wasn’t captivated by the sensational plot itself.
The real value of this story lay in the rhythm of its sentences, which felt almost like listening to a musical.
[Thud! Slice! Cut it nicely. Thud! Slice! Gah! The blood spraying out can be wiped away. The warm towels are ready. Thud! Slice! Shred it up and the bone and flesh separate cleanly. Good thing I sharpened the knife. Swish, swish. Don’t stop now. As fast as you can. Things like this rot quickly, stink quickly, and get you caught quickly, after all. Swish, swish(...)]
The shamelessness of describing murder as though it were just prepping ingredients for a meal.
And yet, the infectious rhythm of the prose made it impossible not to keep reading.
As I went on, it felt almost as if I were participating in the murder myself.
And enjoying it quite a lot, too.
“Now that’s the real thing.”