A Good Trade
[Hello, this is the Demon.]
[I would like to propose a deal.]
[For the price of 20 years of your lifespan, your acting ability can be enhanced.]
[Will you accept the deal?]
That day, the demon posed the very same question to two boys.
Astonishingly, both boys gave the exact same answer.
“If I take the deal, can I cry right now?”
One of them was trapped in a situation that amounted to child abuse, forced to produce tears on the spot in a cold of minus ten degrees. The other was straining to mimic a crying face for an educational video, at a developmental counselor's request.
Both accepted the demon's proposal and handed over twenty years.
“Hey, dammit, you're finally crying.”
After surrendering twenty years of his life, Lee Heeyoon — ten years old by Korean reckoning, nine by international age — began to weep. Crying, he trailed after the mother who was abandoning him and walking away.
“Mom, Mom…….”
It was such a bitterly cold day that his cheeks and face had already flushed red with mild frostbite before the tears even started. The director, who had been throwing a tantrum because the child actor wouldn't cry, slapped the okay sign down the instant he got the shot he wanted.
When the scene wrapped, the child actor pressed in beside the adult performers, soaking up the warmth of a heater. There was no one to look after him — his parents were nowhere on set.
Unable to bear the sight of his frost-reddened face, one of the actors wiped it down with a handkerchief and said, “Honestly, the people who bring a kid here ought to watch over him……. Take some vitamins when you get home so you don't catch a cold. Got it?”
“…….”
“What's with this kid? Won't even answer when someone talks to him.”
The truth was, he didn't really know how to answer.
He'd had almost no experience with actual conversation, and until then he had learned how to speak only through dramas.
Still, from that point on, whenever a scene called for tears, he could produce them on demand, and he ended up doing all sorts of acting because of it. A good trade, Lee Heeyoon had thought — and still thought, to this day.
Strangely enough, I felt a lump in my throat on and off through the entire run of our team's play, Boundary.
“They're really good.”
The words slipped out of me before I knew it.
Honestly, I hadn't expected them to be that good.
Setting aside questions of technique, you could feel that every actor on that stage loved the role they were playing. It reminded me of when I first started acting. I had hated it, because I'd been shoved into it by circumstance, chasing money, never by choice.
Which was why watching someone begin the way they had — out of love — made me a little envious.
When someone glanced toward backstage, I scribbled the line large across my sketchbook and held it up. Aside from that one close call, there were no close calls at all.
The moment all three plays ended, the vote was taken. The Cherry Orchard barely scraped together any ballots, Sherlock Holmes took a couple of teams' worth, and our Team 3 swept nearly everything else — and of those, two-thirds of the votes were ours.
The instant the regular performance was decided, the entire Boundary team leapt out of their seats and cheered.
“We did it! Guys! We did it!”
Their supervising teacher, Hong Hyeonsang, came running over, cheering right along with them.
When I thought about it a little longer, it no longer seemed to matter that I hadn't started out of love.
Before I regressed, I had died wanting to act. It may not have been my first love, but it was my last. In the end, what matters is who you love at the moment you die. A first love is romance; a last love is a life.
With the three plays finished and the regular performance decided, I was now barred from taking any further part in it. The directing would pass to a professional director, and I had to go off and shoot a film.
On that note, I also bowed out of the celebratory dinner the supervising teacher offered to buy. Everyone already knew why I couldn't come, and they left making exaggerated gestures of mourning on my behalf.
With everyone gone, I stayed behind in the auditorium.
Woo Woongbae had stayed to set up the camera, and Ki I-an, lingering in the main hall for a moment before heading off to the dinner, said, “Hey, is this thing balanced?”
“Yeah, it's fine. I'm the professional here. You a professional?”
“You're not a professional either.”
“I know more than you, so don't act like you know better.”
“I know a thing or two about cameras myself.”
“Don't talk nonsense.”
Those two just did not get along, I swear. They bickered like this every single day.
And yet, for all their fighting, they let me do anything I wanted. Ridiculous pair, the both of them. I suppose it's because they'd never be able to get close without me — so they treat me like some kind of adhesive.
Those two understood that there were things I couldn't work out through directing alone — things I had to resolve by performing them myself.
I began to act the thirty-minute play from that day, from beginning to end without a break. Jang Chaerin's asides, the villagers realizing the royal family's remains had been dug up, the officials' terror of death, down to the madness itself.
Now that loosened something in my chest.
Woo Woongbae noticed the auditorium door opening partway through and turned around.
Ki I-an had left for the dinner midway, and only Woo Woongbae and Lee Heeyoon remained in the hall.
The guard had told him the main auditorium doors closed at six-thirty. Thirty minutes would be just barely enough time to finish.
And in the direction he had turned, an actor from Team 2 — Han Jeonghyeon of Sherlock Holmes — was walking in.
Han Jeonghyeon strode over and dropped heavily into a chair near Woo Woongbae.
He wore an oversized sky-blue jumper, somehow a size larger than his own considerable frame — God only knew where he'd found it.
Insanely handsome.
It was the kind of face with just enough polish to be exactly what girls fell for.
Woo Woongbae, fundamentally friendly toward Lee Heeyoon, basically disliked Han Jeonghyeon — but as an aspiring director, there were moments when he couldn't help letting his imagination run wild about what it would be like to use Han Jeonghyeon as an actor.
The thirty minutes of performance ended, and so did the shoot. The moment the camera stopped, Han Jeonghyeon spoke to Woo Woongbae with perfect composure.
“Watching amateur acting and then watching Lee Heeyoon act makes me feel alive again.”
Just then, Lee Heeyoon came down from the stage.
“You got everything?”
“Yeah.”
Still unaware of Han Jeonghyeon's presence, Lee Heeyoon was talking to Woo Woongbae when Han Jeonghyeon curled the corner of his mouth and cut in from the side.
“Gives you chills, doesn't it? Me talking right here, and only you can hear me.”
A genuine shiver ran down his spine.
Han Jeonghyeon stayed where he was and went on. “Hurry up and figure out I exist. It's lonely acting with these pieces of trash.”
“You lunatic.”
When Woo Woongbae blurted it out, Lee Heeyoon scowled. “What the hell, man.”
“Not you.”
“Not me?”
Lee Heeyoon looked baffled, then glanced around the room. Han Jeonghyeon, fiddling with the cigarette in his pocket, said, “Tell him to come see Voyage of Evil. He said he wanted to see it at our Small Theater.”
“Voyage of Evil?”
At Woo Woongbae's words, Lee Heeyoon answered. “What about Voyage of Evil?”
“He says he wants to see it.”
“Yeah. But I heard the run ended.”
Han Jeonghyeon replied to Lee Heeyoon's words. “They're bringing it back. This winter.”
“They're rerunning it in winter.”
“How do you know that?”
“I'm listening right now.”
“He's here? Right here?”
“Yep.”
Han Jeonghyeon laughed out loud. Then he rose to his feet.
“Come no matter what. This is for you to see.”
The moment he said that and left the auditorium, Woo Woongbae shuddered and scrubbed his arms raw with his hands.
“Fucking hell, I can't live like this. That's terrifying!”
“What have you got to be scared of? Be scared of me — I'm the one you can't even see.”
“Oh, for God's sake, do you have any idea how scary it is relaying what a guy's saying from right next to you? It's Ghost, that's what it is. Wait, hold on — is that bastard actually alive? Or not. I have to suspect both sides. Lee Heeyoon, are you even human?”
“Snap out of it.”
“Come to think of it, it was a little weird that I made a friend at the start of the semester without lifting a finger……”
Lee Heeyoon faltered at that, then said, “Now that you mention it, the kid in The Sixth Sense didn't know he was dead either……. Wait, am I dead? Actually, come to think of it, I did die.”
“Ah, quit it! You're scaring me!”
Woo Woongbae's voice rose as genuine terror took hold. Suddenly even the auditorium, empty except for the two of them, felt horrifying, and Lee Heeyoon and Woo Woongbae hurried out of the main hall.
The days were getting longer, so it was still fairly bright outside. Woo Woongbae said, “Today's Boundary — it was really good.”
“Watching mine, those guys are amateurs.”
“Can't you wait until I'm done talking before you interrupt?”
“Then skip the fluff before and after and get to the point.”
“You are literally incapable of accepting a compliment.”
Grumbling as he was, Woo Woongbae went on. “The reviews for Voyage of Evil are seriously good.”
“Yeah?”
“The response was so strong I heard they might run it again. A bigger venue this time, apparently.”
“But will I actually be able to see it? Even during Sherlock Holmes earlier, there were stretches where the stage itself just… wasn't there for me.”
Having said that, Lee Heeyoon soon shrugged. “Eh, I'll figure something out.”
With that, the two parted ways without so much as a goodbye, at the corner where the road split between Woo Woongbae's house and Wooheonjeong. Over the coming month, Lee Heeyoon would be filming a movie, while Woo Woongbae was set to join the set of a film an older acquaintance of his was shooting.
Lee Heeyoon, already walking away, stopped short, turned back, and said, “Hey, Woong. But.”
“What?”
“I'm not dead, right?”
“You're STILL on that?!”
Woo Woongbae yelled, a chill crawling over him. Lee Heeyoon scratched the back of his neck, muttered “just in case,” and turned away. Woo Woongbae, briefly worried, looked back after him — and only relaxed when he saw Lee Heeyoon walking off distracted and nearly colliding with a passing stranger.
But the moment he relaxed, his imagination conjured up a movie starring Lee Heeyoon and Han Jeonghyeon.
In Woo Woongbae's mind, the most fitting material for the two of them was a certain famous American comic.
In it appear a repentant dark hero, and that hero's arch-nemesis — a politician villain.
In the picture inside Woo Woongbae's head, the dark hero was always Han Jeonghyeon. Which meant Lee Heeyoon was playing the arch-nemesis.
He hoped Lee Heeyoon would register Han Jeonghyeon's existence soon. He was curious, too.