When the Days Grew Short
When had a day become this short?
Back when I was still in school, the stretch from walking in each morning to walking out again had seemed to take forever. Somewhere after I became an adult—I couldn't say exactly when—a day started feeling far too brief.
Not that the hours I spent working flew by. The time I was actually at the company dragged on, miserably long. And yet I would endure those endless minutes and seconds, and when I came back to myself it was already time to leave. A month would be gone before I noticed. Then a year. Then ten.
There had been a time when twenty felt impossibly far away. Before I knew it, I was nearly forty. One more of those short decades and I would be fifty. Ten years after that, sixty. If the years when a person could truly enjoy life ran to about eighty, then it was fair to say more than half of mine was already behind me.
Seen that way, life felt achingly vain. Not that the thought left me anything I could actually do about it.
What worried me more was the future. For now I was still scraping through each day, earning a living, keeping up some semblance of a life among other people. The truth was that everything I had once been responsible for had vanished. I wasn't the type to chase luxury, and even when I cut loose, all it ever amounted to was lying around and playing games. Every time the company dealt me some shitty little experience, the urge rose to walk out for good and spend the rest of my life in a corner of my room with nothing but games.
The age when I would have to start worrying about my health was closing in by the day. Was it really right to jam the last remaining thread of my youth into office life?
...
Well. Follow that thought far enough, and I always arrived at the same place.
Even if I had given up on the family, I still thought of Jia as my daughter. We kept in touch now and then, and last week she had even come by the house. At the very least, I needed enough to spare that I could buy her a meal when she showed up, or press a little spending money into her hand. I couldn't live like a complete idler.
I shoved the stray thoughts aside and looked out the window. A red sunset was sinking across the sky. The clock said it was already time to leave. Getting through the day was one thing; I had no passion left for staying into the evening. I started gathering my things so I could escape the office as fast as possible.
That was when a woman's voice came from the desk beside mine.
"Heading out, Assistant Manager?"
The voice belonged to my subordinate, Lee Miyoung. She had joined around this time last year and, somehow or other, ended up as the junior under me, so we worked together. Nothing about her stood out, but nothing about her was badly lacking either—an ordinary employee. Set against the average new hire these days, it wouldn't have been unfair to call her above average.
"Yeah. Why? Something up?"
"If you have time, would you get dinner with me?"
"Dinner?"
It caught me off guard. This wasn't a company dinner, and here was a subordinate suddenly asking her boss to eat. A superior inviting someone out was common enough. The other way around was rare. I studied her face, wondering if she had something important to tell me. She looked as if she had spoken with no particular intention at all.
"Yeah. I heard you've been eating dinner alone lately, Assistant Manager."
"Well, that's true, but..."
"Going back to my studio and cooking feels like too much, and eating out alone makes me self-conscious. If we're both eating anyway, we might as well eat together."
Only then did I understand. It was the shared nuisance of people who lived alone. Delivery felt awkward to order, cooking was a hassle, and walking into a restaurant by yourself at dinnertime drew looks. Strange, that the person she'd chosen wasn't someone her own age but an uncomfortable boss like me, an older man. Still, it meant she found me easy to be around, so I didn't feel bad about it.
"All right. Where do you want to go?"
"Let's eat whatever you feel like, Assistant Manager."
"I don't care what it is."
"Oh, come on. You'd hate it if I said mala tang."
"...There's ordinary food. Things you'd have with rice and side dishes."
"Like what?"
"Spicy stir-fried chicken, or braised chicken, or even soup and rice..."
"Then let's get the stir-fried chicken. I can go for soup and rice by myself."
"All right."
I left my subordinate behind her, beaming as she packed up to leave, and picked up my own preparations again. Tonight's dinner, at least, probably wouldn't be entirely lonely.
Once we were actually eating together, there wasn't as much to talk about as I had expected. If we'd been closer in age it might have been different, but nearly ten years stood between us, and it was obvious she had lived a completely different life from mine—a high school graduate who had spent close to twenty years raising a child.
We talked a little about work, and when the conversation refused to go anywhere, I found myself bringing up the time my daughter had come to see me.
"Your daughter's already old enough for college? That's wild."
"Yeah. Time really does fly."
"Other people are only just at the age to get married, and you've already finished raising her. That's honestly amazing."
I couldn't tell whether I was supposed to be pleased or not. I hadn't had a child because I'd planned to, and for all my claims of having parented well, I was the father who had come full circle, divorced, and abandoned his family. I didn't want to drag out a conversation that heavy, so I simply nodded.
"Miyoung, you haven't been out of college that long, have you?"
"Not that long? It's been ages. Five years at least."
"Five years isn't that long, is it?"
"Five years on paper. The boys who started school when I graduated have already finished their military service and graduated themselves."
"Hm... hearing it that way, it does feel like a while."
Then again, she was nearly thirty herself. College was too far back to be talking about. I had thought that if I was lucky I might learn what my daughter liked, what kids these days did for fun. The gap between me and this woman was about the same as the gap between me and Jia. Even so, she would still know better than I did.
"I miss college. Those days really were good."
"You're still young. Why talk like an old woman?"
"I'm not that young anymore. I'll be thirty soon."
"Thirty's still your prime."
"Next to twenty, I'm an ajumma."
Miyoung let out a sigh. I couldn't exactly relate, but I didn't fail to understand either. I offered something agreeable and kept eating.
Still, it had been a long time since I'd had someone to talk to over dinner, and my mind felt a little easier for it. Going home alone, there wouldn't have been anything to do. Sitting down to drink with a younger woman—before the divorce, I couldn't even have dreamed of it. No one was left to stop me now, so if I wanted to go ahead and indulge, nothing stood in the way.
"Oh, hold on. I've got a call."
A phone rang. She saw the name on the screen, and her eyes went wide as she stared at it, plainly flustered. She gave me a small nod, then hurried out of the restaurant and answered.
I was a little curious who it was, but I had no wish to pry. I sat blankly at the table, turning my cup in my hands, and let the time pass. It mustn't have been a long call. Lee Miyoung came back to her seat.
"Sorry. An old friend called out of nowhere."
"You could have talked longer."
"Oh, we're not even that close. I was just thrown because the call came out of nowhere."
Had it been someone asking to borrow money? If an old friend she wasn't close to called with something unpleasant, nothing else came to mind. Whatever it was, she would have handled it. I didn't want to dig. It would have been nosy, and getting too familiar with someone from work never did you much good.
"Assistant Manager, is it all right if I order soju?"
Maybe because of the call just now, she paused mid-meal and asked carefully. I nodded.
"If you want to drink, order it. You don't have to watch my face."
"If I do, will you have a glass too?"
"I'll have one."
"Yes!"
So I could at least be the kind of older man who would keep this woman company for a drink. Taking pleasure in something so trivial made me feel a little like a disagreeable middle-aged creep. Even so, with my self-esteem smashed the way it was these days, being treated like this didn't feel bad.
We finished the light dinner. Partway through, Miyoung had dropped a hint about whether I wanted to go for a second round, which threw me a little, but I pleaded age and exhaustion and managed to slip out of it.
That call earlier must have been important. Important enough that she had wanted a drinking companion even in a man nearly old enough to be her uncle. It was trust, though, so I didn't feel bad about it. Having someone from a younger generation I was actually close to was always useful. I had married early, so my hobbies had aged ahead of my peers, and conversations like this were how I learned what was in fashion these days.
The thought turned on me, and it frightened me a little. I was starting to sound exactly like the Young Forty the internet loved to mock—a middle-aged man sidling up to a young woman. Well... if I kept my head on straight, nothing was going to happen. To begin with, she was closer in age to Jia than she was to me. To put it bluntly, Jia was already in her twenties. In a few more years Jia would be just like her. She would be working at a company, humoring her bosses, beginning what people called a life in society. When that time came, I really would be alone.
For now Jia still couldn't let go of the lingering idea of a father, and we were still in touch. The day would come when looking after a nobody like me—a counterfeit father—felt more tiresome with every day that passed. By then I would be a man with nothing, waiting on a grandfather who had no property and nothing else to leave. Was this how I was going to grow old for the rest of my life?
I had spent eighteen years in a house that was always noisy, and one year in a house full of stillness, and I still couldn't get used to it. After the meal with my subordinate, I headed for the studio that had become the place I lived.
The streets were dark, of course, and the hour had passed early evening into night. I had meant to play a game tonight, one way or another. At this hour, though, my fate was the usual one: a careless wash, then lying down to watch videos until I fell asleep. The same evening as always. Nothing strange about it.
A year had gone by, and I still wasn't used to the walk home. I arrived at the little villa of studio apartments. The smaller place was a stress, but being able to walk to work and back was an enormous advantage. I pressed the code into the lock without a thought and stepped inside.
There was the unmistakable sense of another person in the house. It should have been empty, and yet a light was on toward the room, and through the sliding door that divided the entry from the bedroom, a person's shadow was moving. Who was it? For a split second I froze, the thought flashing through me that I ought to call the police.
A familiar voice came from inside the house.