Do You Have People Around You?
"Have a seat. Make yourself comfortable. The company's quite busy right now. That's a good thing."
Not that he hadn't already made himself comfortable. Through the conference-room glass, her face had looked like someone who had lost the entire world. The atmosphere in the office hadn't seemed particularly good, either.
The Ghost's voice came from behind him, thick and wet, and a sigh slipped out before Jaewook could stop it. No. Of course it did.
People react on reflex more often than you'd think. Someone tosses a word at you on the street — and if you already know the person speaking, an answer just falls out of your mouth. The Ghost had been running his mouth without a break since earlier, and Jaewook had already chewed him out for it more than once. And he was still doing it. With another person sitting right there.
Please. Just keep your mouth shut...
The Ghost would be fine. Jaewook was the one who'd get treated like a lunatic. He'd look like a man muttering to empty air.
And in that exact moment, the woman sitting across the table — the one called Yoona — opened her mouth.
"Nice to meet you. I'm Director Choi Yoona."
"Yes. A pleasure. My name is Lee Jaewook."
"Lee Jaewook... so it is."
That faintly unfriendly edge was not his imagination.
"......"
What, exactly, was he supposed to say to that? The Ghost had gotten dramatically chatty ever since they'd walked into the place where he used to work. He hadn't always been this tone-deaf.
"......"
Jaewook bit his lower lip. If he didn't, a lecture was going to come out. Not that he'd swallowed a lecture so much as he'd swallowed the part where he almost got himself treated like a madman.
She was pretty, though. A person's looks were subjective, and he didn't consider them a metric he had any business grading anyone on. But the Ghost had spent years as a celebrity manager, and his assessments of appearance were blunt to the point of rudeness. Maybe that was just the industry. Jaewook had done the same thing in his own work — constantly checking people's capabilities. In entertainment, looks were capability. He supposed evaluating them out loud was simply part of the daily weather.
So he took another look at the interviewer sitting in front of him.
Extremely young. No — young wasn't even the right word. She looked young enough that little might have been more honest. Compact, finely drawn features — eyes, nose, mouth, all of them small and neat. If you went by the image those features projected, she had the fragile air of a high-school girl. As if to bury that, she had dressed in the textbook uniform of a career woman: a white shirt under a black two-piece suit. The mismatch was so complete it only made the cute face stand out more.
Like a kid wearing her older sister's clothes.
Director Choi Yoona herself did not appear to know this. Even the way she talked sounded like a student doing an impression of a grown-up.
"Applicant Lee Jaewook. You attended Korea University?"
It had begun.
"...Yes."
Fortunately, Director Choi had asked a question at the same moment, so it wouldn't look strange. Jaewook straightened his back and arranged himself into something that at least resembled a proper applicant. Director Choi's eyes moved between the resume and his face.
And then.
"I'll be blunt. This resume says you're thirty... five. But the work history after graduation is a complete blank."
"......"
He hesitated. Director Choi put on her best imitation of a cold-blooded interviewer's stare and pressed again.
"Korea University. Excellent grades, even. And it's just... blank? Is that actually right?"
Director Choi in front of him. The Ghost behind him.
Fine. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it. She'd said it was the right play, so it probably was. They'd sent in a resume that empty and still been called in for an interview. That was an answer of its own, in a way.
Jaewook squeezed his eyes shut.
"Yes. That's correct. I didn't work. I played games."
In the end, he delivered the prepared line.
The satisfied, there we go tone in the Ghost's voice, standing behind him, was strangely infuriating.
My brilliant career history...
Sliced clean off. On the Ghost's vehement insistence that he would never get hired otherwise.
"Ah... um. Games... games are good. Games."
And it seemed to be working? Was this actually the right call?
Jaewook and the Ghost were in the middle of a heated debate.
"I can't do it that way."
"What? Why not? I already gave you the answer. Why on earth not?"
"Why should I hide my career? I didn't commit a crime."
"You are genuinely exhausting. I have told you, and told you, and told you. If you actually write all of that down, they will never hire you. I take pride in my work, I do — but realistically, this is not a job that looks good from the starting line. You know that."
"Even so..."
Unlike his usual self, the Ghost cut him off without even listening and barreled forward like a storm.
"An actor's manager? Minimum wage, and you don't just skirt the labor laws — you violate them on a regular basis. Ah, our company does pay overtime, to be fair. Still a pittance, though. The work is brutal. Kids these days would rather work a part-time job. Manager? They won't do it. So why does anyone?"
"Why does any—"
"Because they work their asses off! So that someday they can go independent with their own actor, start their own company, and actually make it! That's the future they're working toward. And sure, getting friendly with famous people along the way is a shallow motive, but it's a motive."
Well. The argument was coherent enough that Jaewook was hard-pressed to find a hole in it. The problem was that he hated where it landed.
"What about this, then? I wanted a new challenge. I applied because I wanted to support celebrities instead of a National Assembly member. Something like that?"
"Oh, for crying out loud! I said no! How are you supposed to write that with a straight face? Special-appointment, special-appointment, fine — you still made Grade 4. I looked it up. That is an extremely high rank!"
"...I'm telling you, we're a little different. That's just how the classification works. It isn't that high."
"Please. Don't try to fool a ghost. I looked into it plenty. Even the ones with their heads peeled bald were bending over backwards to stay in your good graces."
Having made his point at full volume, the Ghost changed expression in an instant and leaned in, sly and confidential.
"Gaming shut-in. That's the only option. Truly."
"...It's been over ten years since I graduated. I accepted not writing the career history. That far, I understood. But a gaming shut-in? Come on."
"Then what? Do you have another alternative? You're always the one who says it. When you're lecturing people older than you. Don't just raise the problem — propose a solution."
Ha. This was why a person had to watch what they said and what they did. The bullet that hurt the most was always the one you'd fired yourself. He didn't have an alternative. Not yet. But that didn't make this one acceptable.
"So a man who did nothing but game for ten years — they're going to hire that? Overqualification would have better odds."
At this last desperate thrash, the Ghost looked at him as if he understood everything, as if he already held the answer, and fixed him with a stare full of conviction.
"You spent ten years as a gaming shut-in, and now you want to return to society. You applied because you want to do something meaningful. I — that's you, Jaewook, the 'I' here — anyway, I want to go out into the world now. I'm going to work hard! It was only a game, but I played that one game for ten years. Trust that tenacity!"
The Ghost, who had been delivering something uncomfortably close to a Goebbels speech, clenched both fists. And then, as if even a slapdash theatrical script could still stick a spectacular landing, he delivered the final line with total confidence.
"...What the fuck."
"Huh? Did you just swear? That's the first time I've heard you curse."
Jaewook could not produce an alternative strong enough to beat the Ghost and his preposterous argument. And so his hollowed-out resume rode the network all the way to Nine Entertainment.
And then.
A reply came two days after he'd submitted the resume.
"They're telling me to come in for an interview."
"See? I told you I was right!"
"...Would it be too late to just settle this with money? I'll sell the house if I have to."
"What good is money I can't even spend?"
"Or I gather some people and support Nine Entertainment as an investment?"
"The system is the problem! And if you take investment? That's outside interference. No. If that were a solution, we would have done it a long time ago!"
"...Fuck."
"Huh? You're swearing again?"
And so Jaewook set his glittering career as a chief aide behind him and walked into the interview as a gaming shut-in.
Once it had gone this far, a stubborn streak started to itch at him. What the hell was a manager, that he had to go this far for it?
"I'll show you what a real manager looks like."
"Oh, come on. Just get the job first, okay? Please?"
Back to the present.
Choi Yoona was already in chaos, and the applicant sitting across from her was adding a fresh layer of it. She was working extremely hard to keep her face under control.
"Ah... um. Games... games are good. Games."
"......"
Still, looking at the silent man in front of her, she found herself seeing him a little differently. An elite, graduated from Korea University. And yet he had never quite managed to step over the threshold into the world, and had lived as a gaming shut-in well past thirty.
In that absurd gap, Choi Yoona read the more-than-ten-year blank in a new way.
How much resolve did it take him just to get this far?
Through a prejudice that had thinned by a single layer, she looked at the man in front of her. Until three years ago, Choi Yoona herself had known nothing about the entertainment industry — let alone being the person in charge of a company.
That had been someone else's story.
She had graduated from a four-year teachers' college and was preparing for the licensing exam when Uncle Taewoo had his accident. Her father had been in so much pain that she had come into the office just to lend a hand for a little while. That was how it started.
Every day since then had been a trial. She woke up wanting to run. She swallowed the urge to treat the commute like running away from home, and she went to the office anyway. She tried to act strong to hide it, and got ignored for her trouble more often than not.
It can't be helped... the staff know the company's situation better than I do. The work, too...
Was that why? Something distinctly emotional rose in her at this man's courage.
"It must have been... really hard. Right?"
"Pardon? Ah... yes. Yes. It was... hard."
See? He couldn't even get the answer out cleanly. And he had overcome all of that to sit in this chair.
The muttering at empty air a minute ago... I suppose that's what happens when you've done nothing but game by yourself for too long.
She felt an unexpected pang of guilt for having frowned at him.
But hiring on emotion would be absurd.
He was a full-blown hikikomori. Twelve years of seclusion, to be exact. He looked fine on the outside — which only made it impossible to guess what, exactly, might be broken underneath.
However short-handed they were, attaching a man like this to Ha Eun-yul as her road was too much of a risk.
Road. Or, to use the more precise and respectful term, field manager.
The job didn't ask for much. A driver's license and diligence. A decent habit of not causing incidents. A reasonable amount of social skill, or at least sociability.
This man, though. A severe deficit of social skill was looking increasingly likely. And so Choi Yoona wrestled with herself all the way to the last possible second.
That was when it happened.
Bzzzzzt—.
She picked up her phone and checked the message.
Team Leader Baek Sungwook. The one who had walked out a few minutes ago.
Choi Yoona could have driven the schedule herself if she had to. But Choi Yoona had Choi Yoona's own work to do.
The client from the commercial Ha Eun-yul had shot not long ago had asked for a meeting.
A complaint, no doubt...
They would want to know how the agency planned to handle this latest scandal. They might even start talking about legal action. The only person who could sit across from that was Choi Yoona herself. However much she got ignored, she was still the one responsible for this company.
Which meant.
It's this man or nothing...
Things weren't just tangled. They were knotted tight. On any ordinary day, she would never have hired him.
"Do you have a lot of people around you? Do you go out drinking often, by any chance?"
"......"
Ah. She shouldn't have asked that. A hikikomori twelve years in the making was not going to have friends, or drinking parties.
That's actually a huge plus.
But she still didn't have the one decisive reason. Unable to commit, she asked the stale question interviewers always reached for at the end.
"Is there anything you'd like to say before we finish?"
"Some...thing mean...ingful..."
Grit.
Grit?
He was grinding his teeth, forcing the words out, and the sincerity in them was almost painful to hear. The man fought himself every inch of the way and still finished the sentence.
That's it... he's in.
Hired. Humanly speaking, it would have been wrong not to pass him.
Wasn't the entertainment business, in the end, a field that sold illusions and dreams? The man in front of her had stood up, openly, to fight the world. He had come through twelve years to do it.
Choi Yoona had not seen sincerity this raw in a very long time. She looked straight at the face of the man who kept trying to avoid her eyes.
I received your sincerity, loud and clear... so have some confidence.
That was the signal she meant to send.
"Would you be able to start working today?"
Right. First, put out the fire in front of them.