GBH 114

This winter was quite mild. Water vapor that couldn’t form ice crystals fell as rain. Looks like we won’t have a white Christmas this year either. Song Yi-heon thought this as he looked out the window in the hallway. It was close to midnight, so it was dark outside, and raindrops traced long, dotted trails down the outer surface of the window. Yi-heon was there.

The outside was dark and the hallway was bright, so the boy’s figure was reflected in the window with darkness underlying it. The boy in the window looked even paler than Yi-heon standing in the hallway, isolated in the darkness and alone like a lighthouse in a storm. The incessant rain streaks distorted the boy’s mouth.

Yi-heon stared at his reflection in the window, pulling in his chin.

‘Yi-heon?’

“Oh, I’m listening.”

Only when Se-kyung called from the other end of the phone did Yi-heon turn his head and continue walking to his room. He quickly forgot why he had been staring at his reflection in the window.

“They say it’ll rain all day tomorrow too.”

‘We’ll have to stay indoors then. Anything you want to do?’

According to the short pattern that had developed since they started dating, it was still time they should be together. Living in the same neighborhood, they often circled around pretending to walk each other home, but today they parted early due to the heavy rain, promising to meet tomorrow.

Even though they planned to spend all day together tomorrow, they had so much to talk about that they couldn’t wait the short time it took to return from the bathroom to the bedroom.

Closing the door to his room, Yi-heon wedged the phone between his ear and shoulder as he changed into comfortable clothes he used as pajamas. He struggled to maintain balance as he changed into sweatpants, and as soon as he pulled his head through the stretched neckline of his top, he hurriedly reattached the phone that had fallen from his ear. At that time, Se-kyung had been saying something.

“Is pasta tasty? I don’t get why it’s supposed to be good. It just makes me feel greasy.”

When Yi-heon objected to Se-kyung’s suggestion to eat pasta tomorrow, seemingly unable to understand, Se-kyung pointed out an anecdote from a previous visit to a Western restaurant.

‘Don’t say that when you scraped your plate clean last time.’

“I ate it because it was there, should I have left it? The cook put effort into it.”

After their pointless bickering, they decided on spicy pasta for lunch tomorrow and discussed what else to do.

“Do you know how to play pool?”

‘Pool? No. I’ve never tried it.’

“Let’s go play pool then. I’ll teach you.”

‘That’ll be sexy. You are holding a cue stick.’

“There you go again.”

Yi-heon snickered at the soft laughter coming through the phone as he turned off the lights and got under the covers. As they set the time and place to meet tomorrow and chatted about trivial things, sleepiness crept into their voices. Yi-heon’s speech noticeably slowed, and Se-kyung, who had been quietly listening, deliberately asked questions that required long answers.

Though struggling against drowsiness from the ticklish, gentle questioning tone, Yi-heon stubbornly kept answering until he finally realized Se-kyung was teasing him and protested irritably.

“Are you having fun?”

The low laughter spreading from the receiver felt as warm as a vibration that could only be felt through physical contact, and in the end, Yi-heon couldn’t bring himself to be angry. He chuckled along with Se-kyung and burrowed into his blanket. He adjusted the phone to fit snugly against his ear.

‘Good night.’

“You too.”

There was no embarrassing back-and-forth about who should hang up first, but the heated phone device and the blanket warmed by body heat proved how much time they had devoted to each other.

“Yawn.”

As his puffy eyelids grew heavy with fatigue, Yi-heon yawned deeply.

Between constantly going out on dates with Se-kyung and working hard at his academy, lately it had become routine for him to fall asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. After tossing and turning a few times, the room soon filled with the sound of his breathing.

The streetlight faintly pushed back the darkness. The raindrops on the window cast shadows on the side of his face buried in the pillow.

The sound of rain shattering white against the ground made his ears ring. The outside world seemed to be sinking underwater as rainwater flooded over the overflowing sewers, and the wind that brought the rain whirled and scratched, making a fierce noise.

However, Yi-heon’s room was silent, as if cut off from all the commotion of the world.

It was a desk he hadn’t used since taking the college entrance exam. The desk chair, now used only for throwing his bag on, was turned towards the bed. And someone was sitting in it.

Song Yi-heon, wearing white pajamas and hiding his face with disheveled hair, sat on the chair with his legs neatly together. Unlike his physical body, which always sat improperly with his bottom perched on the edge of the chair, the soul’s behavior was careful and cautious.

The room was so quiet that the sound of wind hitting the window frame spread dully.

Song Yi-heon’s soul did nothing. Just as it had done yesterday, the day before, and for nearly a year, it only gazed at its sleeping physical body.

It could be today, or it could be tomorrow. Or it could be 10 years from now. The soul waited for the time when the body would recognize it, not knowing when that day would come. It waited for those who should leave to go, and those who should stay to remain.

Just as the soul residing in the sleeping body had unconsciously tried to spend even one more day with Choi Se-kyung in preparation for that time, the soul also waited. At a distance where it could reach out and touch its own body.

And the time simply came. There was no other reason for the sleeping body to wake up and recognize the soul.

“Uh…”

Eyes that had just woken up and were wandering in the hazy boundary between dream and reality discovered the ghostly soul. The body slowly closed and opened its eyelids. As the hazy gaze cleared, it filled with astonishment.

“You…”

As the awakened body recognized the soul’s existence, the soul smiled softly. It was the brightest smile of a child who had never laughed loudly, always cautious of those around. The brown eyes that had pleaded, buried in the light of the truck’s headlights on the day of falling from the pedestrian overpass, were no longer crying.

“Ah, uh…”

The body’s lips moved. There was much it wanted to ask. But nothing came to mind.

They were essentially strangers, having never had a conversation. Kim Deuk-pal had only inferred what kind of life Song Yi-heon might have lived from the pieces he left behind, and Song Yi-heon had only guessed what beliefs Kim Deuk-pal lived by observing his actions and those of his subordinates. 

They knew nothing about each other.

“…”

The body that had been lying in bed sat up. The identical-looking body and soul faced each other. This face-to-face encounter was awkward, yet familiar, affectionate yet somehow choking.

Song Yi-heon’s soul moved its thin lips, ‘Thank you.’

It seemed to know everything that had happened without needing an explanation.

“You, you know…”

The soul nodded. Worried that the other might be upset, it fidgeted with its interlocked fingers, lowered its gaze to the floor, and then timidly looked up to gauge the reaction.

Song Yi-heon’s soul had stayed near the body since the moment of falling from the pedestrian overpass and getting into the traffic accident. It had shared the hospital room, gone to school together, and watched the back of the body as it studied. Seeing his own body at the center of the class in a classroom with no good memories was an unfamiliar and unbelievable sight, yet one he couldn’t take his eyes off.

Beating up Hong Jae-min’s gang on the first day of the semester, giving Lee Mi-kyung a satisfying blow, and scolding the class president who always barked orders – seeing himself do these things was like watching a cartoon. The revenge of his pathetic self gaining special powers and becoming Superman was just a long-held fantasy. He couldn’t believe it was his ordinary body doing these things.

When Hong Jae-min came to apologize to his body twice, Song Yi-heon’s soul hid behind the body and shook his head violently. He didn’t want an apology from Hong Jae-min. He had heard insincere apologies before, usually after being robbed of money or beaten badly enough to need the emergency room. Those apologies, not at all remorseful, were more insulting than mockery, hiding behind the name of apology.

Song Yi-heon’s soul left the body only once, to watch Hong Jae-min’s trial. Seeing the Hong Jae-min gang that had bullied him receive prison sentences gave him mixed feelings. He didn’t dislike it, but it wasn’t satisfying either. He couldn’t be happy, feeling unsettled by the unfairness of why they were only being punished now.

And then Hong Jae-min, boarding the prison transport vehicle, noticed Song Yi-heon’s soul. With his bleached hair now showing dark roots and his haggard appearance, Hong Jae-min finally found the right person to apologize to. Hong Jae-min, who had calmly received his prison sentence, now begged for forgiveness with a face about to cry. The soul nodded. Rather than forgiveness… It was because he recognized Hong Jae-min who would live with guilt for the rest of his life.

The most grateful thing was, of course, Lee Mi-kyung. “The housekeeper is really scary…” The soul, crouching and trembling behind the sofa to avoid Lee Mi-kyung who had come early in the morning, was wide-eyed with shock when Lee Mi-kyung left in a huff. He was too surprised to be glad that his body had given Lee Mi-kyung a taste of her own medicine.

When the thugs sent by Lee Mi-kyung tried to kidnap his mother, he felt like fainting but still clung to the thug’s waist to help. Although it didn’t help at all, it was a great act of courage for Song Yi-heon’s soul.

He separated Lee Mi-kyung, who looked at him like an insect, from his mother and revealed the evil deeds she had committed. When he overheard his body’s plan to put Lee Mi-kyung in the hospital where Lee Mi-kyung had tried to confine his mother, the soul breathed a sigh of relief.

He didn’t see Lee Mi-kyung being put in a mental hospital, as he was too scared to go to the mountain village in Gangwon-do, but he was there when his body singed the chairman’s ear in the bathroom. While he used to struggle to even breathe when the chairman’s stern orders were given, his body, though the same, locked the tiger-like chairman in a bathroom stall.

What was happening inside the stall? 

The soul was curious but too scared to enter. Frightened by the stream of blood gushing from the chairman’s ear, he crouched near the sink and waited. The chairman’s screams, which he could hear even with his ears covered, suddenly stopped, and then the stall door opened. Curious about what had happened, the soul timidly peeked into the bathroom stall while his body washed its hands.

Like a newborn giraffe, tilting its neck and hesitating whether to look inside or not, the soul was startled when a pair of suit-clad legs suddenly stretched out from the stall. It was just the chairman’s weakened knees giving out, but the surprised soul quickly chased after its body as it left.

The festival, the college entrance exam, the amusement park.

Song Yi-heon’s soul had been watching everything from a step away.