4
4 ### Resignation
A few days later, the atmosphere inside the store turned cold.
Even when the store employees saw Jeon Je-cheol, the person in charge, they often pretended not to notice him and walked past. The tasks he assigned weren't progressing at all.
“Excuse me, Department Head.”
The manager in charge of outdoor products handed him a vending-machine coffee and suggested they have a cigarette together.
As they lit their cigarettes in the passage connecting the store and the parking lot, the manager cautiously brought up the subject.
“Department Head. Are you really going to resign?”
So this was it?
Was this why the employees had been looking at him as if he were a stranger?
“Who says I’m resigning?”
“It’s just a rumor. There’s no way of knowing where rumors start.”
“Looks like there’s someone in this company who can read minds. Haha.”
“What?”
“I only decided that I was going to submit my resignation, and the rumor has already spread everywhere. I haven’t told anyone yet.”
Leaving the manager behind with a bewildered expression, he went looking for Department Head Song from Human Resources.
“Oh? Department Head Jeon. What brings you here?”
Jeon Je-cheol pulled an envelope from inside his coat.
The moment Song saw the envelope Jeon had taken out, he knew what it was.
“Hey! Why are you doing this? Put it away. Just hold on a little longer and wait.”
“Department Head Song. Stop the act. I know everything, you bastard. You and that Managing Director Choi... No. Forget it. Just get my severance pay deposited quickly.”
It was a face he didn't even want to look at anymore.
Without even saying goodbye to the executive director, Jeon Je-cheol left and went straight home.
As of today, he was no longer Department Head Jeon.
He was Jeon Je-cheol again.
---
Even though it was morning, sunlight couldn't reach the dark officetel.
He finished two bottles of soju and picked up the phone.
“Yeah. Honey, it's me.”
“Why are you calling at this hour? Isn't it working hours?”
“It is working hours. Heh heh.”
“What? Are you still drunk from last night? Why does your voice sound like that?”
“It's not last night's drinking. I'm drinking right now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Honey. I quit.”
“What?”
“I quit my company! I submitted my resignation today.”
His wife said nothing when she heard that he had resigned.
He had expected her to go crazy and scream at him.
He had expected her to curse him for quitting without a plan when there were mountains of expenses waiting for them.
But she was silent.
“What’s this reaction? Why aren’t you saying anything? Heh heh.”
“It’s your life. You handle it yourself. It’s the middle of the night here, so I’ll call you later.”
She spoke in a calm, emotionless voice and simply hung up.
She must have been extremely angry.
He called several more times, but she didn't answer.
Je-cheol threw the phone aside and passed out under the influence of alcohol.
When he opened his eyes again, it was already evening.
He hurriedly checked his phone.
Zero notifications.
No one had called.
Was his wife still angry?
He called her again, but this time her phone was completely turned off.
Should he have talked to her before submitting his resignation?
In any case, it didn't matter to his wife how he was treated at work.
As long as his monthly salary kept coming in, that was all that mattered to her.
With that desperate reason alone, there was no way his wife would agree to her husband quitting his job.
Talking it over with her had been impossible from the beginning.
Three days passed.
Not a single person contacted him.
A month passed.
Only spam calls kept coming.
He still couldn't reach his wife.
He would probably have to go to America and make up with her in person.
But he didn't even have enough money to buy a plane ticket.
“What the hell is Department Head Song doing? Why hasn't he deposited my severance pay yet?”
He was too embarrassed to call and ask for his severance pay.
That was the last bit of pride he had left.
As he agonized over whether to swallow that pride and make the call, someone knocked on the door.
Ding-dong~
Who could it be?
For an entire month, the only person who had knocked on his door was a food deliveryman.
“Are you Mr. Jeon Je-cheol?”
“Yes.”
“I have a registered letter. Please sign here.”
The man handed him a large envelope.
What could it be?
When he tore open the envelope, several documents fell out.
One document at the very front immediately caught Je-cheol's eye and left him unable to move.
Application for Confirmation of Intention to Divorce by Mutual Agreement
---
“Hello? You still can't reach Department Head Song? Hey, Manager Kim! Isn't this going too far? Even so, how many hours has he been away from his desk? Why on earth is he avoiding me? He's just supposed to pay my severance pay. Is that really so difficult?”
“Department Head, I really don't know anything about this either. Department Head Song said he would handle it himself, so... I thought it had already been paid.”
“Anyway, please process it quickly. I suddenly have something I need to spend money on.”
After hanging up, he began pacing around the room.
A divorce?
Why would she suddenly want a divorce?
If a Korean man in his fifties got divorced just because he quit his job, then every Korean man in his fifties would be divorced.
Something had to be going on.
But even the lawyer who had sent the divorce documents simply said that he was only handling the paperwork.
“So, Mr. Jeon, your wife only contacted us through email and phone. Lee Hye-sook. Her resident registration number is 700921, correct? She asked us to handle the divorce proceedings, so that's all we're doing. She isn't asking for alimony or child support either. She simply wants to get divorced under the current circumstances.”
“Listen. My assets are under my in-laws' names. If we get divorced, I'm the one who'll have to recover my money!”
“That’s a matter between the two of you. As for the property, if you don't want a divorce by mutual agreement, you can file for divorce litigation and request a division of property as well.”
“This is driving me crazy. Listen! I have no intention of getting divorced!”
“Mr. Jeon, getting angry at me won't help. You should also find a lawyer and consult with them. That would be faster. Your wife wants a divorce, and she isn't even appearing in person because she's in America. Finding a lawyer would be the quickest option. I'll leave it at that.”
Jeon Je-cheol could no longer afford to wait for his severance pay.
He decided that he would use his credit card for the time being and go to America.
Jeon Je-cheol didn't do something as crazy as wandering around the residential neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, with a dazed expression and asking around for the address of his wife, who had moved away.
No neighbor would have paid attention to an Asian family moving away.
A Black couple was living in the house where his wife had lived.
His wife had completely disappeared with their son.
She hadn't started preparing only a month ago after hearing that her husband had quit his job.
She must have been carefully preparing for this much earlier.
The news of his resignation had merely given her the opportunity to put her plan into action.
What concerned him even more than his missing wife was the money.
They had been married for nearly twenty years, yet the moment his wife disappeared, his first thought was that he needed to recover his money.
They said husband and wife were the closest possible relationship.
Did that mean they were actually still strangers in the end?
What happened in Korea after the shocking events in America was even worse.
When he went to his in-laws' house to find out where his wife had gone, he couldn't even see his father-in-law or mother-in-law.
The apartment security guard chased him away.
How could the people who had once welcomed him so warmly as the elite son-in-law from S University and a major corporation change so completely?
They had clearly already discussed everything with his wife.
The lawyer he visited to recover his assets gave him devastating news.
If there were no assets under his wife's name, recovering the money would be nearly impossible.
The money he had hidden in America had been placed under the name of his sister-in-law, who had immigrated to America.
The lawyer told him that uncovering the source of the money under his sister-in-law's name would cost an enormous amount of money, and even then, recovering it would be extremely difficult.
They say bad things always come all at once.
After desperately struggling to get his hands on nearly two hundred million won in severance pay, what came back to him was despair so overwhelming that it felt like the sky had collapsed.
The improper land purchase.
His terrible attendance record at the outlet store.
Using these as excuses, the company didn't merely make him resign.
They fired him.
The Human Resources team even presented him with a contract stating that if he was fired for misconduct, he would receive no severance pay.
That too could only be resolved through a tedious lawsuit.
And to make matters worse, they threatened him with the possibility of criminal charges for the improper purchase of the land.
A successful life that had once seemed unstoppable had been completely destroyed in just two months.
He had graduated from S University, become an executive at a major corporation with an annual salary of more than one hundred million won, and stood on the verge of becoming a corporate executive.
Now all he had left was a forty-million-won officetel deposit.
He had become a complete loser.
While Jeon Je-cheol was still in a dazed state, two more knockout punches came flying at him.
The first came from Manager Kim of Human Resources, who told him about it during a drinking session.
The executive director had intended from the very beginning to make Department Head Jeon the scapegoat for the logistics center matter.
Department Head Song had been the one stirring things up.
They had never intended to overturn the improper land purchase.
The audit team hadn't even been concerned about it.
It had all been a joint scheme between the executive director and Department Head Song to force Department Head Jeon to resign.
“We thought you'd write your resignation when you were sent down to the store, but you held out. That's why those two bastards pulled that shit. Fucking assholes.”
Manager Kim slurred his words as he rambled drunkenly.
“Hey! Then did those two get me fired so they wouldn't have to pay my severance?”
“No. That was Managing Director Choi's order.”
“Ah, fuck! Why is Managing Director Choi so obsessed with screwing me over?”
“Remember the time two years ago when the factory processed perfectly good products as defective and sold them?”
They had finally secured a contract with a British furniture company after working on it for more than a year.
The initial order alone was worth one million dollars.
Because the leather seats required a delicate finishing process, the final dyeing and drying were handled at their own factory.
But there had been a defect in the dyeing process.
They had worked themselves to the bone, even eating and sleeping at the factory to make up for the delayed delivery schedule.
Then the supposedly defective leather was sold off at clearance prices.
Something about it had seemed suspicious because it had been sold off far too early.
When they investigated, they discovered that the products were actually perfectly fine.
They had been sold easily at high prices.
The factory manager and production manager had filled their pockets with the difference between the book value and the actual selling price.
There were even rumors that Managing Director Choi had taken more than half of it.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“The factory manager and production manager who got fired back then were Managing Director Choi's juniors and his right-hand men. This was his revenge.”
The factory manager and production manager had begged him to quietly overlook the matter.
But Je-cheol had refused and submitted a formal report.
Managing Director Choi had been badly shaken at the time.
But he had survived by stepping over the corpses of the factory manager and production manager.
His father's old advice about working life now cut deep into his bones.
You don't necessarily need allies, but you should never make enemies.
He had been far too arrogant, thinking he was better than everyone else.
The second punch came from his son.
“Dad. Mom has a man she's dating. He says he's going to become my new dad.”
The second punch was a devastating blow that crushed even his will to live.
For another month, he survived on soju and fried chicken in the dark officetel.
First, his heart collapsed.
Then his body collapsed.
Finally, his will to endure the suffering and his deteriorating mind collapsed as well.
Je-cheol wrapped a leather belt around his neck.
The pain of hanging himself to death was very different from what he had imagined.
It was somewhat like the moment after taking a handful of strong cold medicine and falling into a deep sleep that seemed to plunge you into an abyss.
Once this moment passed, his life would finally end.
There wasn't even a single person who would be deeply saddened.
I was the only one who worked hard.
And no one ever acknowledged it.
Damn it.
---
His father had been an optimistic man who always lived with a positive outlook.
He ran a small publishing company with two employees, and one of those two employees was Je-cheol's mother.
His mother handled the accounting, while his father mainly handled sales and translated foreign books.
The reason his father entered the publishing business was because he was a writer who wrote science fiction and fantasy literature, genres that were barren in Korea.
His father knew better than anyone that no publisher would publish his writing, so he ran his own publishing company and maintained relationships with foreign publishers.
Even world-renowned writers of the time, such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Roger Zelazny, and Ursula Le Guin, repeatedly failed to gain a foothold in Korea.
There was no way a writer working in such a non-mainstream genre could succeed.
Because he understood the situation in Korea so well, his father harbored the seemingly foolish dream of succeeding in America.
He wrote novels in English and continuously sent his manuscripts to American publishing groups.
They repeatedly gave him no response, but he never became disappointed.
His English was good enough to write novels, so he mainly worked as a translator.
Occasionally, some of the foreign novels he translated became hits, so although his family wasn't living luxuriously, they were able to get by without major difficulties.
His father was a romanticist.
He never once nagged his only son, Jeon Je-cheol, to study.
Instead, he insisted that music and literature were more important than studying, making him listen to classical music and read classic literature.
Thanks to his father, Jeon Je-cheol became familiar with Bach, Mahler, Bartók, Ligeti, and Stravinsky.
He also read almost all of Dostoevsky's works, whose writing had a reputation for being unbearably tedious.
To middle-aged Jeon Je-cheol, his father was both a cherished memory and a mysterious figure.
Even though people now lived in an era where a hundred-year lifespan was possible, his father had died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-seven.
Je-cheol had always felt guilty that he hadn't been able to spend his father's final days with him.
And whenever he remembered the will-like, novel-like story his father had told him just before his death, a quiet smile would spread across his face.