The End and the Beginning (1)
"Still stings."
I rubbed my forehead. The pain was as vivid as if I'd cracked my skull on the desk getting up, and yet what had just happened was unmistakably a dream. Strange.
"What did I even hit?"
Something had whipped across my vision and struck me square on the brow. A wooden club, maybe. Or the long shaft of a spear.
"Woke up quick this time."
It was winter, so the room was still pitch-dark. I groped around until my hand found the phone.
Five in the morning. Back when I was swallowing one or two sleeping pills a night, I would have stayed under well past this. Half a tablet, and I'd come up early.
"Not expecting anything. Might as well look."
They say that going to check for a response at all means you're still holding on to some scrap of hope. What a fool I am.
"Yeah. Of course."
An aspiring writer who still couldn't let go of the dream. Reality, meanwhile, had been patiently talking me out of it.
When had I started clinging to a dream I was never going to catch?
Everyone dreams big as a child. Then the dream proves absurdly hard, or they slam into the great wall of the real world, and most people give it up. They make their peace with what is.
In my case, back in elementary school, I had wanted to be a scientist. An inventor, no less. But as I grew, reality turned out cold enough that I had to ask myself whether that dream had ever been anything but a hand grabbing at clouds.
Then, in high school, a friend put all kinds of novels in front of me, and the job of writer began to look beautiful. Someone whose world and whose story other people acknowledged. A trade that left a name behind even after time had moved on.
Everyone around me seemed to have at least one thing they were good at. One kid could play basketball. Another could play soccer. One understood his lessons so easily that the top ten in the school was never out of reach, even if he barely studied. Another could draw. I had nothing like that. I was only an ordinary high-schooler. Student A. Even so, I wanted to find one thing I could do well. I wanted to tell people the world and the story I had made, and I wanted them to recognize it.
So I was working toward that dream when the first ones to trample it turned out to be my parents.
It was around the time we were settling on universities. I told them I wanted to be a writer. What came back was ice—colder by far than the days I'd brought home a prize and gotten hardly a word of praise.
From then on I lived inside the shock. Living stopped being any fun. Whatever I saw or heard, a laugh lasted only a moment. I lost the smile that stays, and depression took its place.
What I wrote shared my fate. Almost no one read it, and the response was cold. Now and then a warm comment would fall the way rain falls in a drought, but it was nowhere near enough.
Time poured on without me. Discharge from the army. Graduation. The national civil-service exam. And at the end of it, unemployment.
It wasn't that I couldn't study. I'd finished university on little more than scholarships. But a dream you cannot forget is the most haunting thing there is. I had already surrendered the inventor's dream back in middle school. The dream of being a writer was the one I did not want to give up.
Didn't want to. And now I think I might.
Scenes from films I'd watched drifted past. Captain Colter Stevens, who wanted to remain inside a happy-ending parallel world even if it meant stopping his own brain. A movie whose sharpest line belonged to some extra—an old man—while the heroes prepared an operation. One of the protagonists had said:
"You're coming here to sleep, aren't you?"
The old man denied it.
"No. I'm coming here to wake up. For them, the dream is reality. Dream or waking life, I suppose there's no difference."
In the end it meant one thing. People addicted to dreams.
For those people, the splendid self inside the dream is the one they want to be real. Return to the world, and that self is erased. Only a wretched reality is left. So they keep searching for the dream until they're hooked. At some point they know it too—that this isn't normal. They still can't let go. The dream is that sweet. Which is why they come, every time, meaning to wake from it.
Those scenes lasted only seconds, or a few minutes at most, but what they left behind was large. And for me, who had seen them, being a writer was a brilliant dream I still could not abandon.
Was it leftover longing? Lately I dreamed, every time I slept, of the world I had built. I possessed a character inside that dream and went through every kind of misery, and even so it was plainly one of the stories I had made. Put it into words, though, and there would be no one to read it.
If it was a story no one would read, then I at least wanted to wander inside that dream forever.
And then a thought surfaced. If, the way it happens in the movies, the real me died while I was still dreaming—what then?
A one-room cell in a gosiwon, one of those cheap boarding houses where people hole up for the civil-service exams.
My parents had cut ties long ago. The only person who might ever come looking was the landlord. I looked at the bottle of sleeping pills within reach.
Air dry enough to parch a throat. Fire raging. Screams from every side.
A beginning I knew by heart. The opening of the dream I always had.
"Hey! You, over there!"
A familiar voice. Theo.
"Don't just stand there gawking in the middle of the road, idiot! Get over here before the raiders see you!"
Tch. As if he weren't the idiot. He'd walk right into the raiders' obvious threat later, and he had the nerve.
I didn't dislike him, though. I'd watched this kid too many times. Maybe I'd grown fond of him. I smiled as I answered.
"Yeah. I'm coming, I'm coming."
I came toward him grinning, and Theo's face pinched.
"What's so funny? Does this situation look fun to you?"
Coldly speaking, there was nothing fun about it. But chasing my dream, even inside a dream—that was the only pleasure I had.
I wiped the smile clean off and answered him.
"No. Theo, do I look like I'm enjoying myself?"
Theo's expression locked. The way my face changed so fast seemed to throw him. He asked, voice shaking.
"Y-you... you... you're okay, right?"
"Sure. I'm fine. Not even hurt."
"Then how do you know my name? I don't know yours—"
I set a finger against his mouth, and he stopped.
"Quiet. First we get out of here."
"Okay."
Theo turned toward where the children were hiding, and this time I followed without a word, going wherever he went.
"P-please, spare me..."
"Got no use for a man."
"Aaaagh!"
Slaughter and plunder on every side. If money clutched everything in a capitalist world, then here it was strength alone that clutched everything. No money, and you were stepped on. No strength, and you were stepped on just the same. In a way, it was only natural.
I was following behind him, so I couldn't see his face, and I was curious. A heart that young, looking at something that raw—what expression would he be wearing? Shock and terror, frozen stiff? Or a face twisted, as if he'd seen what he shouldn't have seen?
No. The kid right now was probably wearing something close to my face out in the real world. Blank. Not an ordinary blank, either. The look of someone whose soul had gone somewhere else.
"Wait."
At Theo's gesture I ducked behind the fence with him. He was about to speak. I got there first.
"The place you're headed—the raiders have camped there, haven't they?"
"Yeah. You saw them too?"
"Didn't see them. Just a guess."
"What are we supposed to do..."
I answered his fretting with a question of my own.
"Why are you even worrying? If there are that many raiders, it means the kids have already been caught. Isn't it too late to save them?"
"Well, yeah, but..."
"Don't tell me you're actually thinking of saving them."
"......"
He had nothing to say. Apparently I'd hit it.
"And how exactly would we save them? Can you even swing a sword?"
Theo forced the words out.
"N... no."
"Look at the size of us. You think we can take on all those huge raiders?"
"No."
Shadow crept over Theo's face, little by little. He looked like me in the real world, having my dream denied.
I was sorry. But this was reality.
"Right? Then we can't save them."
"But..."
"But what?"
What Theo said next was something I had never once heard, not in all the times this dream had repeated.
"I think the village ended up like this because of me..."