Park Jeong-shin (2)
Park Jeong-shin was puffing with irritation.
I told him, “If you don’t think you can give me the manuscript, then let’s cancel the assignment as if it never happened.”
“…What did you say?”
“I’m saying we’ll run a different novelist’s work in the winter issue of Gyeongseong Geul. We can’t just leave a hole in the magazine, can we?”
“Ha. This guy is unbelievable.” Park Jeong-shin finally got out of bed.
He stood there at a slant, looking at me with a sneer. “Do you really think a petty little editor like you can pull that off?”
“And why wouldn’t I be able to?”
“You know how desperately your senior had to grovel to contract with me? And you think you can toss that aside with your own two hands? You’ve got some nerve.”
“I wouldn’t be tossing anything aside myself. You’d be doing that by not turning in a manuscript.”
“Hah.” He swept back his curly hair.
His forehead was annoyingly clean. “Hey. Do you even know how many fans are waiting for my writing?”
Probably a lot.
Just from Modern House, that much was obvious.
And from that face alone, too. “If I call Gyeongseong Publishing and tell them I’ll never sign with them again because of you, you’ll be fired. If I say a few words to N-Star, you’ll have a hard time finding work anywhere in this industry.”
He was playing around. His logic was fundamentally rotten.
The one who hadn’t written a novel in years was Park Jeong-shin, not us.
And our contract had been sitting untouched for some time now.
The winter issue of Gyeongseong Geul was the last line we were offering him. If he truly hadn’t wanted to hand anything over, then his side should have broken the contract long ago.
And if he was still acting like this, there was only one reason.
His childish pride. He wasn’t refusing to give me a manuscript.
More precisely, he couldn’t write one.
“However hard Gyeongseong Publishing may come down on me, that’s not something you need to worry about, is it? You don’t have a manuscript, do you?”
“You really are rude for an editor. Fine. Yeah. I don’t have anything for you.”
“Then I’ll go ahead and take that to mean there won’t be anything from now on either. We’ll call off the assignment.”
“Hey! Who said you could just decide that on your own?!” Park Jeong-shin hurried over and grabbed me.
A glance told me his face was full of panic. He probably had no idea until now who had been handling him.
He had no idea how fragile a self was hidden inside that terrible attitude.
But I had seen it clearly.
In his writing.
“It’s not that you don’t have a manuscript. It’s that you can’t write one, isn’t it?”
“! W-What do you mean, can’t write? Do you think a novel just pops out whenever you want? You need inspiration, all of it—”
“It seems this Mister Inspiration of yours has been a no-show for quite a while. Am I wrong?”
Gulp.
His swallowed breath sounded especially loud.
As expected of a writer, he grasped the situation quickly.
He realized his tantrum would not work on me. “…Okay. So give me some time.”
Anyone watching might have thought I’d come here to collect money. But in truth, once a writer bows this far, it’s usually better to let him off the hook.
Still, Park Jeong-shin needed to get his head straight.
“That won’t do.”
“What?”
Now.
I decided to touch the fear he was trying so hard to hide. “There are plenty of people who write novels in a style similar to yours.”
“!!!!”
“I’ve already found a writer who can replace you.”
That was a lie.
No one could replace the individuality of Modern House.
And that was the absolute reason Gyeongseong Publishing couldn’t bring itself to abandon him. Park Jeong-shin’s face went pale. “Y-You’re lying, right? There can’t be someone like that.”
“You’ll see when you read the winter issue of Gyeongseong Geul. I should be going.”
“N-No.” Park Jeong-shin blocked my path as I turned away.
And then he… started begging. “Please, please don’t withdraw the assignment. Gyeongseong Publishing is all I have left right now.”
“...”
“I-I really can write a truly one-of-a-kind novel that nobody can imitate, you know?” He even went so far as to kneel.
He was more emotional than I’d expected.
“I’m trying. Damn it! Even if it doesn’t look like it! I’m working my ass off to write something that’s mine!”
I couldn’t tell whether he was pleading or just worked up enough to be vicious.
Probably both. Just as I’d expected.
Park Jeong-shin’s fear was simple.
It was the fear of having his “uniqueness” taken away from him.
I hadn’t realized it ran quite that deep. But the intimidation phase was over.
It was time to start talking for real.
“So, will you drink the coffee I brought you?”
─┼
A little later.
Park Jeong-shin and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table. Slurrrrp… He kept sucking down the iced Americano through a straw until the bottom of the cup showed.
Too embarrassed to meet my eyes after what had happened earlier, he kept his head down.
He was supposedly thirty years old.
Yet his looks and behavior made him seem like he was twenty.
“Ahem, Editor. Is it really true? That there’s another writer who could replace me?”
“If there were, I wouldn’t have come all the way here.”
“Wow—shit, I really got played. Why don’t you just go work for a loan shark? You seem suited for it.”
“Writer, I can hear the relief in that burst of anger.”
He flinched, caught out.
“…How did you know? What I was afraid of.”
“I read Modern House.”
“My debut work?”
“Yes. The feeling the professor’s family had toward the neighbor family that imitated them. The work describes it as ‘disgust,’ but I read it as fear.”
“!”
“By the end, the professor’s family is completely replaced by the neighbors. Even the staging there is rendered in a deeply eerie, grotesque way. At that moment, the professor’s family feels helpless, doesn’t it?”
“So?”
“Helplessness is one of the classic responses to fear.”
Just like Park Jeong-shin sprawled across his bedroom floor earlier.
“It’s the kind of writing you can never produce unless you know that fear yourself.”
“Uh… well, that is…” Park Jeong-shin’s mouth went dry; he wet his lips with his tongue.
And before I knew it, he was looking at me with something close to awe. “Hah… even the psychologist I saw took half a year to figure that out. What the hell are you?”
“You go to counseling?”
“I go to a hospital too. For depression and lethargy. I’m not lying.”
“Hmm. Because you can’t write?”
His fingertips trembled.
“Honestly… my family is, well, kind of well-off. My father’s in politics. And my brothers are all accomplished. I’m the only one who… I guess you could say I’ve had a faint sense of presence since I was young? Anyway, debuting felt good. It meant I’d achieved my dream. But then….”
“And then?”
“It got too scary. Whatever I wrote felt like something I’d seen somewhere before, and no matter what I wrote, it felt like my own individuality was disappearing… I don’t want to be like this, but I’m going insane.” His voice had started to shake as well.
He must have been under a great deal of stress. What a mess. I wasn’t exactly gifted at comforting people.
So I asked him instead, “Do you have something you’re working on?”
“...”
“You do. Let me see it.”
“Ah. I do have something, but if it’s finished…”
Anyone would be reluctant to show an unfinished piece.
But I needed to see Park Jeong-shin’s work.
If I left him like this, he’d never write fiction again.
“I need to bring back at least something if I’m going to keep your contract alive.”
“Ugh.” At the word contract, he shuffled off to his workroom.
He came back with a freshly printed manuscript. “It’s a short story, and I’ve only written about two-thirds of it. It’s just a practice piece, so I’m going to throw it away anyway. Don’t take it too seriously.”
Throw it away after writing it? That was something else, all right. The title was Moving Dream. It was about a man who remembered every dream he had ever had.
In contrast to the man’s plain, ordinary reality,
his dreams were stimulating, fantastical, and at times even obscene.
And then, one day, the man realizes
that his dreams are creating a vast world, a universe of their own.
After that realization, every time he dreams, he meets another version of himself living inside it.
That was as far as he’d written.
“It’s interesting.”
“What do you mean? It’s only been three minutes. Are you reading too carelessly?”
I briefly summarized the plot of Moving Dream.
His eyes widened. “Huh? How did you read it that fast…?”
“More importantly, this novel is in the same vein as Modern House. Another version of the self appears here too.”
“Oh! Now that you mention it, it is, isn’t it? I had no idea while I was writing it.”
“It’s quite compelling up to this point. It has your distinctly mysterious quality as well. What happens next?”
I realized it again then.
Park Jeong-shin really was talented.
Korean fiction was usually emotional, passionate, hot-blooded.
That was simply the temperament of Koreans.
A writer who produced something this symbolic and cold?
There weren’t many.
“The rest… I’m not really sure. At first, I planned to have the protagonist kill the person in his dream. But once I actually started writing it, it felt strangely too brutal. No matter how I killed them, it felt the same. And it didn’t really fit the tone of the opening anyway.”
“Then there’s always the option of not killing them.”
“I thought of that too, but wouldn’t that make the protagonist too anxious?”
He’d said he was going to throw this story away, but that was just posturing.
If he truly intended to discard it, he wouldn’t have inserted himself into it so transparently.
To put it a little too simply, Moving Dream was Park Jeong-shin’s autobiography in disguise.
“What am I supposed to do, seriously?” He looked up at me with watery eyes.
In any case, I did have to help the writer.
That was part of an editor’s job, too.
But how was I supposed to help Park Jeong-shin? A number of words were already forming in my head.
The same self. Fear. World. Universe. And then… dreams.
Dreams?
“!”
In that instant, a book opened in my mind.
One section from a psychology elective I had brushed past back in college.
That part might be useful.
“Writer, you know the psychoanalyst Freud, right?”
“...I’m a writer. Don’t you think you’re underestimating me a bit?”
“Sigmund Freud, complete works, The Interpretation of Dreams, revised 2015 edition, page 145.”
“Pardon?”
“The publisher was Gyeongseong Publishing. Read it.”
“What does that have to do with—?”
“Call me once you’ve finished the manuscript. I’m taking this as collateral to keep the contract alive.”
The unfinished novel went into my bag just like that.
Park Jeong-shin only stared at me, speechless. Now that I’d finished my work, it was time to clock out.
─┼
A new editor. I think he might be insane. Park Jeong-shin wandered through the large bookstore.
He had his cap pulled low and a mask on too. If anyone saw him, they might think he had a celebrity complex, but that wasn’t why he was doing it.
This was a bookstore, full of people who loved books.
The odds that someone would recognize his face were high.
And if they did… they would ask. When’s the new work coming out?
That was the question Park Jeong-shin wanted to avoid.
At the same time, no matter how he thought about it, it still felt strange. I can admit that editor’s analysis skills are no joke, but memorizing book pages too? Does that even make sense? Suspicious though he was, he eventually found the Freud complete works.
There was clearly something overwhelming about Mok Hyunsun.
“Found it. The Interpretation of Dreams. Page 145, right?”
He flipped through the book in a hurry.
On page 145, there was a long quotation adapted from a poet’s words. The fantasies within dreams are a kind of free repose.
“Free repose….”
Dreams, a delightful play like children’s games, interrupt our weary seriousness.
“Interrupt our weary seriousness….”
Thud.
“...”
He closed the book.
For a moment, it felt as though Mok Hyunsun’s face were floating before him.
That sharp expression, those eyes that seemed to dissect him.
Now he thought he understood what the man had been trying to say.
Born rich and living as a writer, Park Jeong-shin had spent his whole life hearing the same thing.
Live more seriously. Be like your brothers.
So he had written each and every sentence with deadly seriousness.
He might have pretended otherwise, acted tough, but in front of fiction he was always tense.
Crushed beneath the fear of being replaced.
And to him, Mok Hyunsun was saying something no one had ever said before.
Be a little freer in the face of fear.
It was all right to handle that fear like child’s play.
It was all right to do that inside a dream.
His shoulders slowly lightened.
It was as if the pressure pinning him down was disappearing.
“Hoo…” For the first time in a long while, he took a deep breath.
His head felt clear, and energy was beginning to rise through him again.
And he admitted it.
Mok Hyunsun had told him exactly what he needed to hear.
He put the book back on the shelf. “…Right. Fine. I’ll give it a shot.”
He strode briskly out of the bookstore.
For the first time in ages, he felt like writing fiction as soon as possible.