The Spoon and the Statue
A few days had passed.
Kang Hyeong-seok was sipping coffee on the building rooftop. It was that awkward in-between hour as quitting time drew near, and there was no one else around.
Or so he believed.
"Section Chief Kang!"
Shin Jeong-ah stuck her head out as though popping up from nowhere, fishing a cigarette from her pack. "What were you doing all by yourself?"
"Nothing, really."
"You looked like you were thinking about something."
"Is there anyone who isn't?"
Thoughts were never in short supply. What to have for dinner tonight, when to finally get around to that bank errand, when to binge the drama everyone kept talking about—and so on.
"Hmm."
Sensing it was nothing serious, Shin Jeong-ah gave a nasal grunt and lit her cigarette. Then she exhaled a long plume of smoke, fixed her gaze on the distant view, and opened her mouth.
"Free tonight?"
"Why do you ask?"
"No particular reason. Ha-yoon was saying she'd like to see you again."
"Attorney Lee Ha-yoon?"
"Oh, drop the 'attorney.' She's my friend—talk to her comfortably. It's not like she's your boss."
Lately, it felt as though they'd been running into each other a fair amount. Just a little while ago, the three of them had shared fried chicken and beer at a pub.
"Yes. Tonight works fine. But nothing's wrong, is it?"
Without a sound, Shin Jeong-ah creased her brow, her face plainly saying ugh.
"What is it?"
"Well... it's a friend thing. Not Ha-yoon herself—a friend of hers and mine."
Someone else's affair, then. Which was why Shin Jeong-ah rubbed at the back of her neck for no reason, looking embarrassed and sorry all at once.
"Something seems to have happened to him. So—what I'm asking is, could you come?"
Kang Hyeong-seok wordlessly raised his cup to his lips.
Barely a few seconds of stillness had passed, yet Shin Jeong-ah seemed to be squirming with suspense, while Kang Hyeong-seok, for his part, sipped his coffee in perfect serenity.
It was after his fifth sip that he spoke.
"Yes, all right."
"Really? You'll come?"
Shin Jeong-ah asked back, more startled than anything, and Kang Hyeong-seok nodded, one corner of his mouth tugging upward.
"What's so hard about it? We're hardly strangers."
"Still... I'd be taking up your time, Section Chief."
"You said he's your friend, didn't you?"
With Shin Jeong-ah, theirs was a relationship of give and take, you could say. And Lee Ha-yoon had done him a favor not long ago—so one might call this the chance to repay it arriving sooner than expected.
"But what is this business that needs me, exactly?"
"I don't know the details myself. He's closer with Ha-yoon than with me."
"Hmm."
"We agreed to all meet up tonight anyway, so you'll hear the whole story there."
Kang Hyeong-seok nodded his assent. An appointment landing on him out of nowhere was disconcerting, true, but today happened to be one of those days with nothing in particular waiting after work.
Arrangements that spring on you like that are always the same. They come out of nowhere, so it's no surprise when yet another abrupt thing piles on top. Like the present situation, for instance.
"I'm so sorry. He just said out of the blue that he couldn't make it."
They were near Lee Ha-yoon's office, a while past quitting time, around when the sky had begun to deepen into dusk. Lee Ha-yoon looked mortified—and there was no one else beside her.
"Hey! Do you have any idea how hard I worked to bring Section Chief Kang out here!"
He had come with no trouble whatsoever.
"I'm really sorry! Truly, I'm so sorry."
Caught squarely in the middle, Lee Ha-yoon apologized all the more flustered, and Kang Hyeong-seok eased her with a faint laugh.
"It's quite all right. But what exactly is this about?"
"Ugh, he's the friend who always ends up on night duty. Today someone else was supposed to cover his shift, but apparently they made an excuse and just walked off."
And so it seemed that, right up until now—just past quitting time—there had been no word from that friend at all.
"I hardly know how to apologize."
"Apologize for what? It isn't as if it's your fault, Ha-yoon."
"Still..."
Kang Hyeong-seok shook his head with a wry smile and pointed to a restaurant some distance off.
"Let's start with dinner."
"Ah... I really am sorry. Honestly."
Lee Ha-yoon passed along her thanks with a strained smile, and Kang Hyeong-seok steered the two of them toward the restaurant—a place that specialized in grilled fish.
"Boss, the set for three here, please! And a bottle of soju while you're at it."
Shin Jeong-ah ordered the moment she sat down, but the owner—his gray hair permed into a frizzy mop—didn't spare them a glance as he set a frying pan on the cooktop. It looked as though he merely reheated fish grilled in advance, so the taste was not to be counted on.
"So... something happened with your friend, was it."
When Kang Hyeong-seok filled a glass with water and put the question to her, Lee Ha-yoon let out an exaggerated sigh that laid her feelings bare.
"Ugh, normally you'd be hearing this from him in person."
Then, brows drawn together, she toyed with her water glass and went on.
"His family's a bit unusual. They run a factory, and the parents are strict, too."
"A factory?"
"You didn't hear any of this from Jeong-ah?"
He hadn't heard a thing of the kind, so Kang Hyeong-seok shifted his gaze to Shin Jeong-ah, who merely kept wearing a smile that looked faintly scheming.
"So you didn't tell me on purpose. Hey!"
"It might've come to nothing—that's all. I figured you'd tell him yourself."
"Honestly, that personality of yours."
Lee Ha-yoon fired a look at Shin Jeong-ah, heaved a small sigh, and turned her eyes back to Kang Hyeong-seok.
"There'd be nothing but upside in getting close to him. All the more so, given the line of work you're in, Hyeong-seok. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, you know."
"Ah... is that so."
"Yes. A family that makes spoons, as it happens."
"Pardon?"
Screeech!
Lee Ha-yoon slid open the drawer fitted beneath the table and fished out utensils. It was an old restaurant, so the tableware came in no uniform shape. Even so, she rummaged through the spoons and picked out three bearing a consistent stamp on the end.
"They have them here too, sure enough. You know this spoon, right?"
"Yes. It's one you see all the time."
"They're the ones who make it. It was originally a workshop for hand-hammered bronze ware—the old bangjja yugi—before it turned to mass-produced tableware. But lately I hear they're planning to try traditional yugi ware again."
"Ah. Ahh."
Only now did Shin Jeong-ah's conduct make sense. She'd arranged all this to hand him one more account.
Last quarter, Kang Hyeong-seok had been buried in the purchasing side, and Kwak Young-ho had urged him to devote some care to the sales side as well. A client to which he could supply raw materials for yugi ware, or for the spoons themselves, would be a considerable boon to him.
Shwip. Shin Jeong-ah raised a thumb with a face that was somehow bashful, and Kang Hyeong-seok laughed out loud and gave a small nod.
"But what exactly is the matter with this friend of yours?"
"He's working somewhere else at the moment."
"Employed?"
His family ran a company. All he had to do was inherit it, so why take a job elsewhere? The question must have shown on Kang Hyeong-seok's face, because Lee Ha-yoon carried on in a tone that said she understood his puzzlement.
"His family's like that. Before handing him the family trade, they had him get a job at a different factory to learn the work firsthand, apparently. Heir schooling, of a sort."
If that was the idea, it was a sensible one. People struggle to understand what they've never lived through. No doubt the plan was to let him feel the workers' grievances and see how the machinery of a factory turned before putting the business in his hands.
"And your friend—what is he like?"
"He's gentle. Kind-hearted."
Just as Kang Hyeong-seok nodded, a sharp sizzle! rose from the kitchen. There was a clatter of tableware mixed in, so the food would be coming out before long.
"Then it isn't his family going through something bad—it's this new workplace of his?"
"Yes, yes! Exactly right."
Lee Ha-yoon, who had been peering toward the kitchen, turned her head to answer him, and like a relay baton, this time it was Shin Jeong-ah who threw her gaze at the kitchen.
Then it came.
"He's the permanent man for night duty there, and apparently the place is a little off. He says his body keeps getting worse and worse, too."
"Night duty...?"
"Yes. Apparently he's living in a container building."
Kang Hyeong-seok drank his water, his face crowded with thought.
Shipping containers were never built to be lived in. Unless someone took special care, the soundproofing and insulation could turn into a shambles—and then the human body fell apart in no time. And fixed night duty on top of that? His health would only keep sliding. Everything Lee Ha-yoon worried over rang true as anything.
"If that were all, it would be on the mild side."
"Well..."
He didn't look flustered, so apparently that had been the answer she expected. After a beat of hesitation, she opened her mouth with a grave look.
"I'm not even sure I should be telling you this, but."
"Please, speak freely."
"He keeps seeing a Buddha statue—a shrine, something like that—in his dreams. Not just once or twice. Practically every other day, he says."
Kang Hyeong-seok was a shaman. It was a remark she'd had no choice but to tiptoe around.
Watching Lee Ha-yoon squirm even more than she had when the plan fell apart, Kang Hyeong-seok tipped his glass back and wet his throat. Then he nodded and let out a heavy sigh.
"Understood. Let's set a date."
"A-are you sure you're all right with that?"
"I know better than most how much a dream can matter."
Kang Hyeong-seok had received revelation through dreams before. And the fact that something religious—a Buddha statue, an altar—had shown itself in this one snagged on his mind as well.
Because the possibility of god-sickness couldn't be ruled out, either.
God-sickness was a genuinely terrifying thing. Right up until he received his deity, Kang Hyeong-seok himself had been tormented relentlessly by ghosts—and even at that, his passage had been a relatively smooth one.
Paralysis of the limbs. The deaths of family. Illness with no name. If it was truly god-sickness, its force only mounted as time went on—which meant what a person needed was someone who could give them a firm answer at the very beginning. No one who had never lived it could ever know how precious it is, in your pain and confusion, to have someone tell you the right answer.
"Next time, instead of meeting him halfway, we'll go to him ourselves."
"Ah! Thank you, Hyeong-seok."
Lee Ha-yoon's eyes went soft with genuine feeling, and Kang Hyeong-seok answered with nothing more than a smile.
Whether the taciturn owner had been reading the room, or the cooking had simply come due, he began setting dishes from his tray onto the table one by one. The place had made a truly poor first impression. But when grilled hairtail and mackerel arrived—evidently seared fresh on the spot, contrary to every expectation—Kang Hyeong-seok's face turned pensive. It was because even that felt, to him, like a hint of what was to come.
Click.
Early as the hour was, Chae Young-sik switched off the light.
It was after work, but the place he lay down was not his home. It was the container building. Lee Ha-yoon's friend—and a worker at the factory.
"Uuuugh..."
Lying in bed, he groaned and rolled over. He was strangely exhausted, and his body didn't feel like his own. It wasn't the sudden night duty—his condition had been plummeting ever since some unnamed moment.
"Mmm... uhhh..."
Cold sweat pouring off him, he begged for nothing more than to fall asleep in peace. But before sleep could even take him, a faint sound like a drumbeat drifted into his ears.
Today, too, it was beginning. That strange dream.
Doom— dum— doom.
As sleep pulled him deeper, a shape began to take form. A Buddha statue wearing a face as fearsome as the Four Heavenly Kings who guard the temple gates. And an altar set out among them. A nightmare that grew more vivid with every return.
Doooong. Dooong.
As the faint drumbeat thudded on, Chae Young-sik gasped for breath and looked up at the statue with a trembling face. It was, unmistakably, a Buddha statue—and yet its two eyes were alive, gleaming with a living light as they glared down at him.