Happiness Is Not a Clean Thing (5)
A thin, keening wind—winter air cold enough to cut the skin. Kim Seonil stared blankly around him. When he came to, he was somewhere else entirely.
Something cold was falling from the sky, and he looked up to see what it was. White, and heavy: great flakes of snow, piling soft and deep.
“….”
It was bizarre. A moment ago his foot had been on the accelerator, and now everything was different. Stranger still, the place was all too familiar to Kim Seonil.
…This place.
The entrance of a public bathhouse. The place where, in a distant past, Kim Seonil had been abandoned.
Had there been an accident? Or had he blacked out behind the wheel? Either way, it had turned out as he wanted. He'd been looking for an excuse to walk off the shoot as it was.
But then Kim Seonil startled badly—because at the bathhouse entrance, he saw a familiar face.
“Go in and take a bath. Mom will wait right here.”
“What about you, Mom?”
“Mom already washed at home. Seonil, especially—you play outside and then you barely even wash, don't you? If you aren't the least bit clean, you are not coming in the house. You wash as clean as you possibly can.”
His young self and his little sister nodded, their small hands clasped. Their mother pressed the warning into them, looking exactly as she had remained in his memory. Vivid. Yes—that vividness was the problem.
“….”
On the face of his mother as she turned away like someone fleeing, Kim Seonil saw an expression he had never once seen back then. Eyes grown weary of something, and a face cold enough to frighten—something the children, able only to stare at her retreating back, could never have imagined.
“Hey.”
Kim Seonil called after his mother.
“Hey!”
His words never reached her. He tried to catch her by the shoulder, and his hand passed straight through, as if he had touched a mirage. In the meantime, the children made up their minds to bathe.
“Oppa, I'll go wash and come right back.”
“You're taking the doll in with you?”
“Mm-hm. It's boring all by myself.”
Kim Seonil could do nothing but watch. How much time passed after that? The children came out of the bath with their skin gone soft and pale, hands clasped tight, and with the pocket money their mother had—unusually—pressed into them, they had each bought a bottle of soy milk.
“Hot, hot… it's hooot…”
“You have to blow on it.”
The children drank their soy milk without a second thought. Not in their wildest dreams did they know it was money their mother had given them to lighten her own guilt.
The wind kept on, and the snow kept piling, soft and deep. The children waited and waited, even past the moment the last warmth left the bottles. To a small child, nothing was more absolute than a mother's word.
“Oppa, when's Mom coming?”
“She'll be here soon.”
So the children did not doubt her. They even started to play, patiently packing the fallen snow into piles. For children, was there any toy more delightful than snow? Their movements were so innocent that Kim Seonil's chest drew tight just from watching them.
And their mother did not come. Not after a long while. Not after a very long while.
“Oppaaa, Mom's not coming.”
“Yeah.”
“I'm cold…”
“Let's wash again. We got dirty again, too.”
Even in a heart he had thought long since gone numb, Kim Seonil felt thorns pricking him, over and over. The self of those days had been younger than he remembered, and purer.
“Don't wait. That woman isn't coming. Not ever.”
Kim Seonil muttered it under his breath. But the siblings washed several times more after that, and they never once doubted their mother. They stopped playing in the snow, in case she saw and got angry.
At last, when the blazing sun had hidden itself, something rather unexpected happened.
“Oppa. Oppaaa.”
“Yeah.”
“I lost my doll. We have to find the doll.”
“The doll?”
…What? Did I remember this wrong?
No such part remained in his memory. He was fairly sure they had simply waited until the next morning. But Kim Seonil soon cast the doubt aside. This was a dream. And if it was a dream, then nothing that happened ought to be strange.
Then his small self shook his head.
“No. What if Mom comes while we're in there?”
“But… my doll…”
“Let's just wait for now.”
“No… we have to go now…”
His little sister was near tears.
“Mom bought it for me. If she finds out I lost it, she'll be even madder…”
In the end the young siblings went back into the bathhouse, and only hours later did they reappear. Their mother still had not come. His sister, at least, had found the teddy bear.
“I found it! Thank goodness!”
“Haa…”
Unlike his sister, beaming, young Seonil's face was thick with anxiety. It was only natural. However young the both of them were, Kim Seonil was still older than his sister. He read a situation faster. His thoughts couldn't help running deeper. Little by little, his young self was growing uneasy.
A long while passed. Then another long while.
“I'm cooold…”
“Yeah.”
“Oppaaa, I'm cold…”
Around the time the sun rose again, the siblings began to tremble with fear. The cold was bad enough, but the fact that their mother still had not appeared was far more frightening. Walking home on their own was out of the question. Their mother had set the two of them down in a far-off, unfamiliar place; this was the entrance of a bathhouse in a district they didn't know at all. They had never even considered wandering the area.
That is the nature of belief. These small children believed so fiercely that their mother would be back soon that the thought held them fast, and they never so much as considered looking around.
Then, at a certain moment—
“Oppa…”
His sister parted her frozen lips.
“Mom… she's not coming, is she…?”
“What are you talking about.”
At once, irritation edged young Seonil's voice. In truth, no one was more anxious than he was.
“Why do you keep whining. Just wait.”
“Buuut…”
The weather was as bitter as weather could be, and snow had heaped thick over the siblings' fur hats, but even that failed to matter much. They only waited for their mother to show her face.
“Oppa, Mom—Mom's not coming…”
“She will.”
“No, Oppa, Oppa… Mom's not coming…”
In the end his sister began to cry.
“Oppa, we have to go find Mom…”
“Wait.”
“Nooo… we have to go look for her…”
His sister was young. She said it because she believed her oppa was someone who could do anything. But young Seonil, for his part, was realizing just how powerless a little kid he was.
“Let's wait.”
And so the same answer was all he could give.
“Oppa, Oppaaa… Oppa, you go find her…”
At some point, young Seonil's eyes flew wide.
“Shut your mouth! This is your fault to begin with!”
“…!”
His sister startled violently, her whole body trembling. For a little sister, her brother's anger would be a shock past all telling. And at the same time, Kim Seonil, watching, remembered.
I remember now. This memory…
He remembered. This was not a dream. This had actually happened. He had flown into a rage at his sister—his heart racing, more anxious than anyone, and his sister, trusting only a powerless him and fussing, had seemed so stupid that it made him more anxious still, and so he had taken it out on her. Why had he forgotten it all this time?
Young Seonil bellowed.
“Mom might have just left! She might have just gone while we were looking for the doll! Because of that stupid doll!”
“O-Oppa…”
“Damn doll! What the hell is that doll even worth!”
“Stop.”
Kim Seonil said it. It felt as though his heart were being wrung dry. But young Seonil did not stop.
“It's your fault! Mom's not coming because of you!”
“….”
“I said it's your fault! You!”
And in that moment Kim Seonil understood why his little sister suffered from a speech block. Just as the grown Kim Seonil could not forget the day they were abandoned, his sister would not have been able to forget the memories of her childhood either. Just as he had blamed himself, believing his own failure to be clean was why their mother left, his sister must have carried guilt toward him all this time—when in truth there was not a single thing she needed to be sorry for.
….
Kim Seonil closed his mouth. After that the siblings said nothing at all, quiet as the dead. That night. Until other adults found them where they had collapsed.
“….”
Kim Seonil's mind went blank. But this unknowable space never once stopped showing him things. The scenery changed, and he saw himself a little older. Middle school, perhaps. By then he was already fairly successful—already set on an actor's path, his face successfully shown in several dramas, already at the point where he could buy his sister every last thing she wanted.
But looking at his young self, Kim Seonil felt something off.
Was I really wearing a face like that?
Seen from the outside, it showed. His middle-school self wore an expression so precarious he looked ready to collapse at any moment. He seemed pursued by something, and he had the look of a boy carrying every misfortune there was upon his shoulders. Stuck to the rehearsal-room mirror were goals he had written himself.
1. Succeed, and make a lot of money.
2. Buy my little sister whatever she wants.
3. Cleanliness.
Nothing but upright, sensible goals. But to the Kim Seonil of now, they looked nothing but strange. Was it because of his conversation with Sua the other day? Because he had learned why his sister blamed herself? The thing called happiness was nagging at him now. There was nothing about happiness in his goals at all. And that, surely, was not what his sister had wanted either. They looked now like endlessly insufficient goals.
Then days upon days of the rehearsal room flowed past before his eyes, and all that met him was his younger self, his expression crumpling by the day. He looked deeply unhappy.
Why?
Kim Seonil tried to find a reason of his own. Why on earth was he unhappy? More precisely—why did he look as if he were growing unhappier even while his circumstances improved? Wasn't that beyond common sense?
Because his sister is sick? Because that weighs on him?
But right afterward he knew the guess was wrong. On the day his sister had seemed fully recovered and was discharged for a time, the self of that day had worn a dark face too. It was only something near relief. There was never a trace of happiness.
Kim Seonil kept searching for the reason, and soon he found it. He could tell simply from watching his own past.
“….”
His past self was scrolling through social media on his phone, all sorts of photos reflected in his eyes. Someone meeting someone and eating something good. Someone meeting someone and going somewhere nice. Someone gathering people and having a wild good time. Social media is full of posts like that. And his past self, looking on, reacted briefly.
“Pathetic.”
From that, Kim Seonil took one piece of information. He regarded happiness as an obstacle. At last he understood what was wrong. Living it from the inside, he hadn't known at all; holding a third person's gaze now, he saw it plainly. He had never, from the start, meant to be happy. If he had to put it into words, Kim Seonil had thought himself a person who was not allowed to be happy—because for him, happiness was a waste of time.
For children who had lost their parents, there was no weapon against being looked down on except social success. And he had taken happiness for something that could not run alongside it. He thought success was a thing you won only by fighting tooth and nail, and so he felt an aversion toward happiness itself. He had equated happiness with his mother. Happiness could betray you whenever it pleased, couldn't it? However much you stepped forward swearing you would live in joy, in the end wasn't it only success and money that secured a life?
And at a certain moment, his past self seemed to have finished his acting practice. His young self took up a broom and began to clean. Then, abruptly, he stopped sweeping, looked into the mirror, and muttered, with eyes as hollow as eyes could be.
“How did it end up like this? Do I have to live like this my whole life?”
Even his voice was depressed enough to grate.
“Why am I always this exhausted?”
A question he had once let pass, telling himself that if you worked hard, being tired was only natural. A question he had set aside, thinking exhaustion was proof he was living busily, and that he ought rather to be proud of it. But Kim Seonil knew the answer now. Perhaps the self of that time had already sensed his own unhappiness. The hardship his young self had spoken of was closer to naming a sickness of the heart than the fatigue of the body. He understood it only now.
“…You. No. I.”
And so Kim Seonil said it.
“I won't admit that I'm pitiable. That I'm pathetic.”
He had striven to be immaculate, and he had striven to be without a single gap, until he became a person worthy of success. But none of that had any relation to happiness. Through all of it, he himself had lived without even knowing what kind of person he was. He had thought himself solid, when in truth he was more fragile than anything; he had believed himself clean, when in truth he was like something transparent, unable to hold a single thing. He was nothing but a blank page, with nothing written on it.
Yes—just like his young self, who had now begun rubbing hand sanitizer into his skin. As if he had caught some illness, the boy was wiping his hands like a madman, because the dust from cleaning bothered him. Before long it spread to his arms. The movements grew violent, as if he were having a fit.
“I have to be clean. Always. I have to be clean…”
A compulsion for cleanliness. In truth, it was closer to bleaching.
“I—I… I can't be dirty…”
So as not to admit he was someone his parents had thrown away, he had to bleach himself without end. He hadn't known which thing was happiness and which was misery, and so he erased everything that touched his body and his heart. Then at least nothing bad would remain. And so he had desperately erased all of it. Always. So that he would not be wounded.
Looking at his young self, Kim Seonil thought.
So what am I supposed to do from here?
He had more or less realized why he was unhappy. And yet he still did not know how he himself could be happy. Even if he resolved that he wanted it, there was no chance the self who had shoved happiness away all this time could produce it on the spot. It was only natural, if anything was.
But Kim Seonil soon denied the thought.
No. I know why I'm unhappy. If I clear that unhappiness away, won't that alone make me happier than before?
His thoughts reached somewhere else.
I only have to hold on to a few kinds of courage. The courage to accept that I'm a pitiful bastard. The courage to admit I'm a brat my parents threw away. The courage to try daubing anything at all onto my body and my heart.
That was when it happened.
“…!”
His young self's eyes flew suddenly wide. He had found the Kim Seonil watching him, and their eyes met. Kim Seonil felt it by instinct as well: from here on, he could intervene in this world.
“Wh-who are you…!”
But Kim Seonil did not answer. Instead he seized a handful of dust from the trash can and flung it at the boy who was slathering on sanitizer like a madman.
“U-uaaah! What—what are you doing!”
His young self convulsed, pathological. It was only to be expected. A person ruled by cleanliness had been forcibly covered in dust. How vast that revulsion must have been. But Kim Seonil drew a deep breath.
Yeah. I think I understand now.
What he had needed—he thought he knew, now. The next instant, he hoisted the trash can and shook it out over his own head. Truly, like a lunatic.
Thud—! Thud—! Thud—!
Tissues, empty bread wrappers, dust. Every time he shook it, the garbage inside came crashing down over his head. Even so, he did not stop.
Thud—! Thud—! Thud—!
His young self was badly shocked.
“Wh-why are you doing that? Are you crazy?”
He had no room to listen. Kim Seonil was busy gritting his teeth. The cleanliness compulsion was his as well; his body answered the touch of dust with a pathological reaction. This was close to torture—insects crawling over his entire body. But he did not stop. No. He put more strength into it.
Thud—! Thud—! Thud—!
What I need is the will to try painting something—anything—onto myself.
Rustle—! Every kind of garbage fouled his body. The appearance he had labored over for the sake of cleanliness was ruined in an instant. Pain like thousands of insects tearing at his skin; a sensation like fainting. But Kim Seonil had no thought of stopping. He had made up his mind to change.
All my little sister wanted was nothing more than this.
The girl had simply wished for Seonil to be happy. And now one more thing was added onto that fact. Now he, too, wanted himself to be happy. And so he would not retreat.
Every sort of garbage had already brushed him; there was nothing left of Kim Seonil that could get any dirtier. And yet the dust, as if it would allow not even a tiny gap, kept on clinging. So he let it. He let the dust cover every part of him.
How much time passed? A long while later, when the pain that felt like madness had at last gone by—
“….”
At some point he had the trash can perched on his head like a dunce cap. Covered in dust, shabbier than he had ever been, he faced his young self. The man who had hated holding anything in his heart, and so had chosen to dodge it all and wipe it clean, had now taken on the resolve to accept everything. Late as it was, he held a feeling.
“….”
A brief stillness. But the quiet did not last. Soon—
“Ha, haha…!”
His young self, seeing the state of him, burst out laughing.
“Hahaha! What is that! Hahahaha!”
Kim Seonil quietly watched him laugh. The sight of his young self laughing was not so bad. A moment later, he looked in the mirror. Himself, covered in dust, was not so bad either.
He knew that if he got things on his pure-white self, painful things and dirty things would get on him too. But at the same time he realized there is no greed so great as trying to get only the good things on himself. That is a coward's excuse. Happiness that would stain him vivid even amid every kind of misfortune—Kim Seonil thought it would be enough if a thing like that could come along, even once in a while. And as that, in turn, became what he wanted, he quietly closed his eyes and opened them.
With a thin, rustling shiver, the world shook once more.
“…!”
Kim Seonil opened his eyes. His foot was crushing the accelerator, and the car was tearing, breathless, through a tunnel. He knew it by instinct. This is real.
Checking his surroundings in a rush, he realized he had only just passed a little beyond the tunnel's halfway mark. What in the world had he just seen? Had his whole life flashed before him in a single instant?
Right then, the radio crackled.
“Lee Kang-cheol! Remember! If not now, we won't catch that bastard!”
A shout from Seo Yeon-ju, in the role of Ha Yun-jin.
Wait. If this is when that line comes out…
The final stretch of the script. From here, he had to fill the scene with nothing but raw invention. He had come to the moment he had to choose one of the two options written in the script and go on—at the climax, no less.
And yet.
“….”
It was a truly bizarre thing. For the Kim Seonil of now, the answer was visible with perfect clarity.
Lee Kang-cheol had built his career up cleanly until this moment. The instant he let this culprit slip away, a great stain would remain on the record he had been so proud of. But Lee Kang-cheol—no. Kim Seonil seized the radio at once.
“Understood.”
He didn't even need to think it through.
“However.”
What he had to say, and what he had to do, was already decided.
A happiness that would remain even among a few stains. That was enough. And friendship, surely, would count itself among that happiness.
He stamped the accelerator harder. The car, as if it had been waiting for nothing but Kim Seonil's decision, began to push its speed to the limit. His vehicle actually overtook the culprit's—but he did not wrench the wheel to cut in front of it. He only drove faster, without end, peeled off onto the left-hand fork, and raced like a man who had lost his mind.
Lee Kang-cheol felt no hesitation at the stain this would leave on his career, and Kim Seonil felt no fear at performing a scene the script had never written. Neither of them would regret it.
“…!”
The entire crew, watching through the monitors, shot to their feet. They were that shocked. Lee Kang-cheol as he stood now—who had not revealed a single private feeling through the whole of the story—had shown a desire for the first time. He was not moving for the sake of what had to be done. He was moving for the sake of what he wanted to do. Yes. What Kim Seonil wanted was clear now.
He pressed the accelerator harder still. Now he knew.
Happiness is not a clean thing.
But that is precisely why it is happiness. Only someone with the courage to be soiled can take hold of it.
“Kim Yu-han. Requesting a response. Currently en route.”
Why—just like the ___ racing on right now, without a single regret.