Photographic Memory (2)
Before I realized it, I had become completely absorbed in Photographic Memory.
Not as a critic, but as a reader. Fragments of memory, circumstances of the case.
A detective, stitching them together thread by thread through deduction, inference, and reason.
As he tightened the net around the truth, he came to the decisive realization. On the day the incident occurred, the detective had not been attacked in the front yard at all.
That day, he had climbed onto the roof to repair it.
And there, after someone followed him up, he was attacked by the assailant. As his consciousness faded, the detective saw it.
The assailant climbing down from the roof and entering the bedroom to murder his wife.
No, according to his reasoning, he must have seen it.
It was not something he recalled through photographic memory; it was something he inferred from the evidence. Yes. The place I was attacked wasn’t the yard. It was the roof, and after I witnessed the crime, I fell from there. I don’t remember that moment, but by my deduction, this has to be right. The detective trusted his own reasoning.
And as he reconstructed that missing scene,
the novel surged toward its climax. Remember it, I have to remember. Even if the memory of the incident itself has evaporated, I still have the memories from before the murder and after it. The bedroom I glanced at absentmindedly before going up to fix the roof. And the bedroom I looked at after the incident. What was different between those two scenes? The police said there was nothing unusual, but... yes. The vase by the door. Its position had changed. By about seven centimeters. There was no way his obsessively tidy wife would have left it that way. And one more clue. There were no footprints from an intruder entering the bedroom. Statements like that continued to unfold.
It was all happening only inside the detective’s head,
and yet the way the fog gradually lifted had me gripping the armrests. Imagine it. My wife notices the vase has been moved. She goes to the door and puts it back. Then she hears a knock. I, her husband, never knock. Of course she would have stayed on guard and stepped back... but if she didn’t stay on guard, who would she open the door for right away? ...Only ‘that person,’ then? Impossible. My assistant? That was where the reasoning led him.
Then, with a sudden rush, the lost memory came flooding back.
It matched almost perfectly with what he had deduced.
A cruel thing, though, because it even included the scene of his wife being murdered. She smiled as she welcomed the young man.
The gesture toward the ceiling suggested she was saying her husband was up on the roof making repairs.
The young man raised the knife. The wife’s eyes flew wide open.
And in that instant, the detective saw the crucial detail.
It was the assistant’s face reflected in the wife’s pupils. After that, as suspicion hardened into proof, the assistant was brought to trial and found guilty.
The case had been brilliantly solved, but the detective, having lost his family, could not feel pleased. The final paragraph.
As he smoked a bitter cigarette in the park, the detective thought, I can’t forget my wife’s eyes. The most beautiful pupils in the world held the most hideous intent imaginable. How could those two things coexist? Isn’t this some devil’s joke no god could ever explain?
The only comfort was that my wife, until the very end, kept staring at my assistant with that fierce, unyielding gaze. And even as I was losing consciousness, I looked at my wife until the end as well. In her last moment, she still believed I was somewhere looking at her through her eyes.
“Splendid.” I closed the book.
Not only the process of the deduction, but also the ending, which reasserted the love and trust between the detective and his dead wife, had left a deep aftertaste. There was nothing more to think about.
Park Jeong-shin’s Ordan.
Yoo Yeong-mi’s Bubbles of Carbonated Water.
If these three works, including Photographic Memory, were the first issue of my quarterly journal, they would be more than enough to carry it.
In particular, detective fiction, as a genre novel, fit my journal’s motto of being able to “criticize anything” perfectly. I could already feel it.
Something in me thudded, eager to be written. Just as the detective had done, I closed my eyes.
The language of Photographic Memory filled my mind. I needed a keyword.
A keyword that would let me explain this work brilliantly from my own perspective. The first thing that came to mind was, naturally, “deduction.”
The detective’s reasoning lay out neatly like a diagram. With not a single error. But... no. Rejected.
The deduction itself was excellent, but it did not fit the purpose of my criticism.
Explaining the deduction in a critique of detective fiction would be no more than an instruction manual, not criticism. Then what next? Revenge. Or love.
The two words that floated up were hot to the touch.
So they must have been the force that allowed the detective to keep reasoning until the end.
But they had little to do with the work’s overall structure.
The force was only the force. I wanted to explain.
Why the process of this deduction was so compelling.
Why it had seized my attention. Then, almost by accident,
one word surfaced. “Mok Hyunsun.” ...Right.
The way I searched for a keyword and the way the detective reasoned did resemble one another. So that was it.
What made the detective’s reasoning so fascinating was that it all happened inside his own head.
A chain of inference driven forward by no one’s help, relying on nothing but himself. But even so, I could not use “Mok Hyunsun” as the keyword.
What could I substitute for “Mok Hyunsun”?
Nothing came to mind at once. I opened my eyes.
If my thoughts had stalled, then I needed more information. So I googled the author of Photographic Memory, Song Man.
I wanted to see whether I could find the writer’s earlier works or basic profile.
But then. “Huh? What’s this?” Among the images that came up was a photo of Park Jeong-shin and Song Man together.
Both of them were dead drunk.
─┼
I had been planning to visit Park Jeong-shin anyway.
I needed to tell him I was quitting as his editor.
Up until now, I had wrapped things up properly with the writers I had been handling through email. But with Park Jeong-shin, well.
I thought I’d probably have to tell him in person, since we had long since crossed the point where resentment had become a kind of bond.
Besides, I had quietly helped him more than once when I was putting Soop together,
and I had also used his new work in a proposal without telling him. It was obvious as day. He would throw a fit about it.
Still, what else could I do?
I would just have to make him accept it. So I went to Park Jeong-shin’s place under the pretext of talking about Ordan.
And the moment I sat down on the living-room sofa, I told him everything.
My resignation as editor and the creation of a new quarterly journal.
Park Jeong-shin went pale. “...You’re quitting as my editor?”
“Yes.”
He let out a tiny, strangled sound, as if he had just taken a knife to the gut.
For him, that probably was a knife wound.
He had a fragile mind, and I was the only person in the literary world he trusted completely. I had come prepared with a whole arsenal of defensive explanations, expecting him to come at me in a frenzy.
But he swallowed his emotions and said, “...W-well, that’s good, then. Better to be called an editor-in-chief than just an editor.” Oh. He’s grown up.
It was still clear in my mind that he had once thrown a cushion at me the day we first met.
“But if you leave, who’s going to handle me?”
“I’ll connect you with a good editor in the Korean literature division. I was doing work that should have been handled by the Korean literature department in the first place.”
“...Right, I see... ” He accepted it, but he still seemed deeply shocked.
He popped open a can of beer with a bitter look on his face and started gulping it down. It was touching, really, how hard he was trying not to show how hurt he was.
“Don’t take it too hard. And the first critique in the new quarterly journal is Ordan, so take a look at it later.”
“You wrote a critique of Ordan? Already?”
“Yes.”
“Can I see it?” Normally, critics did not show their criticism to the author like this.
There was supposed to be a certain distance between writer and critic.
But as for keeping that distance with Park Jeong-shin... it was already too late.
“As long as you don’t ask me to change it, cut things out, or add things in.”
“I won’t. I really won’t. I’ll just look and keep my mouth shut.” I pulled a document envelope from my bag and handed it to him.
He opened his mouth at the weight of it. “What is this? How many pages?”
“Thirty.”
“Thirty pages for one work? You had that much to say? No, wait, that’s not something the person who wrote it gets to say. So you’re printing this whole thing as is?”
“Yes. It’s a criticism quarterly, after all. Just as literary quarterlies sometimes publish novellas, long-form criticism can be published too.”
“...Amazing. A thirty-page critique of my novel? Is this a dream?” With trembling hands, he rustled through the pages and began reading with intense focus.
Park Jeong-shin reading the manuscript with a grave expression. “Vast sea... the many miseries of life... why live... huh, yes. Unknown energy.” At first he muttered like that now and then,
but little by little he fell silent, reading the words without so much as a twitch.
Gulp.
His Adam’s apple moved up and down. “...Waiting for Godot... right. I really love that work.” He glanced at me covertly.
As if asking how I had known that.
“That active prayer of hope may have been what carried the little boat to the empty island.” He read the final sentence in a trembling voice.
Then he simply tipped backward and lay down,
spilling the manuscript across his face. “Huaa... ” Rustle. The pages of the critique scattered wildly across his face and the floor.
With one sheet of manuscript pressed over his face, he burst out swearing. “Damn it! This is way too good?! What the hell is this? Are you a genius?”
“You’ll organize the manuscript properly, right?”
“Who cares about organizing it?!” He shot to his feet.
The pages fluttered down again and mingled with one another. “You stripped away everything down to the core and the depths of the characters I made, both consciously and unconsciously. No, that’s not even the level of organization. Right, you resurrected them. The vast sea as a metaphor for life was my own idea too. But I never even thought about things like the meaning of a guide, or all that. You even figured out how to connect it to Waiting for Godot...!”
“It was obvious. Waiting for Godot.”
“...I only realized it after reading this critique myself, that I’d been influenced by that work. I hadn’t been conscious of it at all before now.”
“That’s the pleasure of criticism. The pleasure of identifying even the writer’s unconscious. Or the pleasure of recognizing meanings the writer never intended.” In that sense, Park Jeong-shin had written well.
The fact that good writing could come out even when it was not intentionally engineered meant that he had a tremendous depth of craft and talent. A critic does not merely read a writer’s intentions.
He reads the consciousness visible in the writing, the unconscious, the meanings born by accident, the meanings born like fate.
He identifies all of it and then creates a new story of his own. “Hey, no, Chief Critic Mok.” Park Jeong-shin swallowed hard. “...If I say thank you here, am I not supposed to? As a writer and all.” I gave a snort of laughter. “You know more than that poet Yomo does, at least.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s enough about Ordan. I don’t really like having this kind of conversation with authors. In fact, there’s another, real reason I came to see you.”
“Wait, wait, let me catch my breath.” Thunk.
Park Jeong-shin seemed thirsty, so he opened another can of beer, drank it, and asked again. “Hah... fine. So what’s this real reason?”
“Do you know a writer named Song Man?”
“Song Man?” He narrowed his eyes as if searching through a memory from somewhere very far away. After a while, he said, “Ah! Song Man? Of course I know him.”
“You seemed to take a while for someone who knows him well.”
“If I can remember him, that means I know him well enough. My network is about as deep as a sheet of paper, but it’s broad. When my first book did well, I got dragged around to all sorts of places because people liked me, and I met Song Man at one of those drinking parties.”
So that photo had been taken at a drinking party.
Since Park Jeong-shin had some fame of his own, the picture must have leaked somehow.
“Why? Want his number? If I dig through my old phone, I’m sure it’s still there.”
“No. I don’t need to contact him personally. I’m just curious what kind of person he is.” I had not expected much from someone I had only met once at a drinking party, but I asked anyway.
What came back, however, was something that struck me squarely in my tastes. “That guy? Hmm... he’s completely insane.”