Sketch (3)
"When I was little, I got racially bullied at school for being Asian. I used to feel so sad that my parents and I had different skin, different faces. I hated Korea. But isn't it ironic? The path I took as a composer ended up bringing me right back here."
"…You don't remember anything about living in Korea?"
Jay thought for a moment at Nari's question.
"Well… around the time I was twelve, I still remembered my Korean name. But it faded. All I've got left are scraps of memory — living with my mom in a tiny one-room place, and a downhill road lined with a red brick wall that curved as it went."
"Nothing left in the adoption agency records?"
"No. They abandoned me without leaving any. I guess they didn't want me coming back to find them."
Nari quietly nodded at Jay's words.
Neither of them offered clumsy comfort. They simply told their own stories, calmly, and listened to each other.
They sat on the embankment, watching the stream flow past in silence.
The screen held on that quiet image for nearly ten full seconds — two people sitting without a word. And yet not a single person in the audience found it awkward or strange. Soft sniffling and the sound of people wiping their eyes could be heard throughout the theater. They had already poured so much of themselves into Jay and Nari on the screen that all they could do was sit with the conversation they had just heard, turning it over in their minds.
Then Nari looked up at the night sky, which had grown dark without either of them noticing, and spoke.
"Jay, do you know how big our galaxy is?"
"The galaxy? Never really thought about it."
Nari spread her arms wide.
"They say it takes a hundred thousand years to cross from one end to the other at the speed of light."
"That's enormous. I heard light takes about seven minutes to get from the sun to Earth — so if the sun exploded, we wouldn't even know for seven minutes."
Nari nodded, then widened her eyes as if to say, don't be too shocked yet, and kept going.
"And there are something like two trillion galaxies like ours in the universe."
Faced with a number too vast to even imagine, Jay looked up at the night sky.
"…Not the sun. Galaxies. We're dust."
"Exactly. From the universe's point of view, we, the earth, even the sun — we're all just things that flash once and vanish."
It was a strange thing to say, but Jay nodded seriously, as if it were the most natural truth in the world.
Watching him, Nari spoke again.
"You know something, though? I think Shakespeare knew that too."
"Shakespeare?"
The name came out of nowhere. Jay echoed it, and Nari gazed out across the stream toward the grass on the far bank.
Jay quietly looked at her.
Nari met his eyes and went on.
"So I want you to find your mother. We're things that will soon depart. We don't have time to hesitate."
Ordinarily, he would have shaken his head at once. But maybe it was because of Nari. Maybe it was the power of the sunset. Or maybe it was the nursery song he had only recently remembered. Jay felt his heart thrashing violently inside him.
I want to know what kind of person she is. I want to meet her just once. My mother…
He returned to the lodging with a great deal on his mind. Nari seemed to sense the tangle of his feelings, and she did not bring the subject up again.
"Oh my, Jae-hee's here."
"Halmeoni. Annyeonghaseyo."
"Come in."
The next day, Jay stepped into the grandmother's house and greeted her in clumsy Korean. When he walked into Nari's studio, she hurriedly closed an internet window.
"Ah! Jay, you're here. Uh — hi?"
"What? Were you looking at something weird?"
Nari's face went red.
"No! I don't look at that kind of stuff."
A mischievous impulse seized Jay. He crossed to the computer, snatched the mouse, and opened the browser window.
"Ah!"
"Oh…"
What filled the screen was a street-view service from a portal site. A sloping road of red brick, curving as it descended. There were easily ten tabs open — every single one a different window, and every single one a brick road.
"I just… I couldn't get it out of my head, so I started looking…"
"Thank you, Nari."
Jay glanced around the studio, then looked up at the ceiling. It was covered in glow-in-the-dark stars. For a moment, he seemed to see not plastic stars but galaxies beyond the universe itself.
"'Love fiercely those things that will soon depart.' I think that line is right. I want to try finding the person who gave birth to me."
Nari's face lit up.
"Jay! Then look at this. What do you think? Doesn't it look like the place? A sloping road with a red brick wall curving down!"
Jay stepped closer and studied the monitor. It matched the road in his memory reasonably well.
"Well… it might be…"
"Then what about this one?"
She clicked another tab. Another similar road appeared.
"Nari, how many of these did you find?"
"Hehe. Once I started looking, it got weirdly fun."
Together they rode public transit all over, going in person to the places they had found on street view. Along the way, videos of the two of them casually playing guitar and singing — on buses, on the street — began to appear online, and their subscriber count slowly climbed.
Wait, is that actress an actual singer? Her voice is incredible. And the guy's pretty skilled with instruments too.
It wasn't only the subscribers inside the film who fell for the music. Franz Meyer, a professional film critic, had been so completely absorbed in the theater that only afterward did his mind turn to the songs themselves. Several tracks had already played as the film progressed, and the fact that this thought was only now occurring to him was proof of how thoroughly he had been pulled in — how completely he had stopped seeing the people on screen as actors and started seeing them as a young composer and an indie-band vocalist in the flesh.
As the journey to find the hometown neighborhood where Jay had lived with his mother continued, the music grew steadily more refined.
"Jay. They said it's fine if we perform here."
"Yeah? Then this is our stage for today."
A weekday afternoon. They had come to a park on the outskirts of town. Piece by piece, they pulled equipment from their bags and set it up in a corner of the park. People who had first peeked over out of idle curiosity realized a performance was about to start once the gear came out, and their eyes lit with anticipation.
"Honey, I think those people are going to sing."
"Looks like it. That's a lot of equipment. Should I film it?"
The songs began with quiet guitar accompaniment. As they went on, the two of them used a loop station to layer violin, guitar, and hand drum into increasingly complex harmonies.
In the Theater am Potsdamer Platz, Jake — who had been sinking deeper and deeper into Sketch — was simply, purely astonished by what he saw on the screen.
Wow. Editing helps, sure, but fundamentally that male actor actually knows how to play.
Jake worked as a film music director in Hollywood. To his eye, this was not a movie where actors merely mimed playing while a soundtrack was laid over the top. The shapes of the actors' hands matched the notes, every one.
They might even have recorded the tracks themselves.
And as the performances continued on the journey to find the place in Jay's memory, Jake's mouth fell further and further open.
This is like a set of milestones.
The first song in the film had been the one Nari performed as a solo act at an indie festival. The drums and keyboard had been pre-recorded; she had played the guitar herself, awkwardly.
The second set of songs were the unfinished works Jay had heard after finally making his way to Nari's studio. Once his color was layered over them, the incomplete pieces settled into harmony with each other.
The third had been the songs they performed busking at a campsite together — songs they had never finished, because they had been forced to face the painful memories of their pasts.
So this is the fourth movement.
The songs that emerged during the journey to recover Jay's memories grew more complete with every stop. No matter how complex the harmonies Jay built by switching between instruments and stacking loops on the station, Nari's voice wove through them like an instrument in its own right.
From a clumsy solo act to a breathtaking duo.
It's the growth of youth, mapped out in music.
The moment Jake understood the musical code running through the entire film, goosebumps raced up both his arms.
"This is the last of the roads we found, right?"
"Yeah…"
Nari nodded at Jay's question, looking briefly dejected — then lifted her head again and forced energy back into her voice.
"Even if this isn't it, we can just keep looking. Let's not give up!"
"Yeah. Even if we don't find it, it's fine. It's been fun."
Jay smiled faintly at the sight of her.
He had lost count of how many times they had done this. Who would have thought there would be so many "sloping roads with a red brick wall curving down"?
"I looked it up — official residences and older schools tend to have a lot of red brick walls."
Jay nodded at Nari's explanation.
They got off the bus at their destination and wandered the alleys with a smartphone, searching for the right path.
"I think this is it! Jay, what do you think?"
Nari watched his face carefully. Jay studied the street for a long moment, then shook his head.
"I don't think this is it. Honestly, I'm not even sure I'd recognize the road from my memory if I found it now. I'm sorry, Nari."
"It's okay. Let's look one more time."
They had started out bold, but no matter how thoroughly they searched, nothing turned up. Jay's guilt over Nari's wasted effort grew heavier by the hour. He peered down alleys on the off chance one of them might be right. None of them were.
Jay watched Nari, worried she was exhausted. Nari watched Jay, worried he was disappointed. A stretch of silence settled between them.
Then Nari clapped her hands as if a good idea had struck her and pulled out her phone.
"Jay!"
"Yeah?"
"Would you mind if other people found out about your story?"
"No? I've never been ashamed of being adopted. My parents are wonderful people. I don't care."
Nari held out her phone.
"We've already got sixty thousand subscribers! Honestly, that's not even close to famous — but do you want to try trusting the power of collective intelligence?"
"Hmm. Asking for help is fine, but… would people really go to the trouble for something that isn't their problem?"
Nari looked at him and wagged a finger.
"You still don't know the first thing about Koreans, Jay. When something like this comes up, Koreans show incredible solidarity."
Jay looked at her, half believing, half not.
"Think long, act fast!"
Nari pulled out her phone and started recording a video.
"Hello, everyone. We've only ever come to you with song videos until now, so this is the first time I'm speaking to you directly like this. I'm Nari, and the man next to me is Jay."
The channel was called NariJay, but this was the first time either of them had actually introduced who was who. The fact that sixty thousand people subscribed to a channel like that still felt faintly miraculous.
"The reason I filmed this video today is to help Jay."
She started with a brief introduction, then explained the whole story.
"That's how the NariJay channel was born. We'll post reference photos and an email address on the Community tab — so if there's a road like this near you, please tip us off!"
Nari bowed her head. Jay, standing beside her and understanding none of it, just stared blankly until she jabbed him in the side — at which point he bowed too.
Nari ended the recording. Beside her, Jay tilted his head.
"Do you really think people will help like this?"
Nari grinned at his half-doubtful face.
The next day dawned, and the two of them sat together in front of the computer in Nari's studio.
"All right — drumroll, please!"
"Drumroll?"
"In Korea, this is when you say dugudugu."
"Okay. Dugudugu."
They opened the inbox. A new-mail counter flashed 99+.
"Wow, ninety-nine?"
"No — ninety-nine or more. Thirty per page, five pages… that's almost a hundred and fifty!"