by Seong-nan Ha
Her husband sat on the ground and fixed the children’s kites for them.
“Let’s take a look. You see this line here? This is called a bowstring. You know what a bow is, don’t you? It’s curved, right? But look at this—this is completely straight. It needs to be curved at least 15 degrees. You think it’ll fly if you just attach a string? Look here, this string is called the bridle, and below that … never mind.”
Once he’d fixed the kite, he ran with it against the wind. When he let out some line from the reel and the kite soared above the playground, the children cheered.
“The kites they sell at the stationery store are junk. All they care about is making money. Just think, people who’ve never made kites before are pumping them out … how does that make any sense? Plus, where can you fly a kite here? You need to be on an open hill. That’s where you get the most wind. And it has to be in the winter, but parents these days don’t want their kids going outside because they might catch a cold …”
Her husband kept muttering to himself in the elevator while they rode up to the 29th floor.
“Quit your complaining,” Eunok snapped, staring at his reflection in the mirror. “Is that your big grievance? There’s no place to fly a kite here, but the subway station is only five minutes away, so what’s the problem?”
Her husband became known as The Kite Man among the children, that is, until they lost interest in flying kites altogether. If there was a kite that soared in the sky, it had no doubt passed through his hands. The kites eventually got caught on the rooftop antennas and the strings broke. Sometimes on her way to and from work, Eunok saw one untangle itself and fly up into the sky.
But was there a kite from last year that still hadn’t flown away? Eunok narrowed her eyes and stared at the stingray kite that was jerking back and forth in the wind, caught in the antenna. Just then, it broke free and rose into the sky. But because it couldn’t catch the wind, it began to nosedive toward the apartment square. She tried to follow it with her eyes, but it plummeted so rapidly that she lost sight of it from about the 15th floor. Its tails got sucked into the darkness.
II
A few years ago, Eunok and her husband had met with four other couples for dinner. After the men had moved the low table strewn with the carnage of fish bones, ribs, and dirty wads of tissue from the living room to the kitchen, they had sat around a small table loaded with beer and nuts. Eunok caught snatches of their conversation whenever she went to put out more cold beer and fruit, but her husband, who had been laughing along without saying much, gazed around at his high school friends and confessed he had always wanted to become a deadbeat.
Because he’d had his back turned to Eunok, she hadn’t been able to see the expression on his face. His friends burst into laughter, and her husband said no more. One friend smacked her husband in the back of the head, and someone else said, “You think you’re the only one who dreams about doing nothing? We all do. But it’s an impossible wish.” They filled each other’s glasses again and toasted: “To deadbeats!”
The women, who’d been in the kitchen, wondered why the men were laughing and glanced out at the living room. Soon after, when her husband’s words were relayed to the women, laughter broke out once more. That night, her husband’s confession ended as nothing more than a joke.
Did he really dream of becoming a deadbeat, who loafed around in ill-fitting pants and dragged along cheap plastic sandals everywhere? Who hung out all the time at the local pool hall and the fried chicken joint? Her husband was a diligent worker, who had never been late or absent during his nine years at the bank. However, his diligence wasn’t enough to save him. Several years ago he’d made everyone laugh at the dinner party with his comment, but this comment became a reality overnight.
One day when Eunok came home from work, the television was left on in the dark living room and her husband was gone. She walked across the living room to switch on the light and accidentally kicked a comic book he’d borrowed across the floor. While she washed the dishes that filled the sink, splattering water onto the kitchen floor, the phone rang. It was the apartment book-lending shop. She was asked to return the overdue books right away. While she walked down to the shop, her arms filled with over twenty books, she felt her spine was going to snap in two. She waited for her husband until midnight, but he didn’t come home.
He was twenty-eight and she twenty-seven when they married. They had dated for about three years, so they hadn’t rushed into it by any means. It would be their eighth wedding anniversary this October. Except for a few business trips they’d each gone on, they’d never been apart from each other this long. In spite of all this, Eunok didn’t feel any real discomfort or regret over the absence of her husband, who had left the house one day with the television on, never to come back.
Eunok had always done things like changing light bulbs or hanging pictures. Not only had she lost her father at an early age, but she was also the oldest in a family of only daughters. It was easier for her to do these things herself, rather than to clean up after her husband, who would drag out the whole toolbox just to hammer a single nail and leave her with the mess. And it wasn’t like she had to worry about the bigger jobs. After all, when the bathroom or kitchen drain had gotten clogged, the apartment handymen were the ones who’d taken care of it, not her husband.
She no longer had to go through the trouble of rewashing certain dishes, all because her husband had noticed a grain of rice or red pepper flake that hadn’t come off. Neither did she have to concern herself with his colored clothes bleeding into her white blouses, because they’d been washed together. And when she came home from work and saw that the things she had put away were still in their proper place, she couldn’t help but feel happy.
He’d wished to do nothing, yet he managed to last only seven months. He picked fights when she came home late from a work event, and when she told him to quit smoking, he flew into a rage, asking her if he no longer had the right to smoke because he wasn’t working. She was tired of walking on eggshells around him and accommodating his sullen moods. But most of all, she hated the bad luck and air of defeat that seemed to ooze out of her husband’s room whenever she stepped into the apartment. She was in danger of catching her husband’s misfortune if she continued to stay with him.
But now, each day was truly peaceful. She wasn’t anxious or upset that he didn’t call. All she did was mutter under her breath when she remembered the dinner from several years ago. Seven months—that’s it? What a quitter. With the act of returning his overdue comic books, she was finally able to cast off the burden she’d been carrying.
Eunok’s eyes snapped open at the sudden chill. She saw her husband’s white dress shirt, which had startled her awake. Hanging on a coat rack by her feet, it hovered like some foreign object, fluttering limply in the draft from the crack of the open balcony window. Until then, she had never thought that a shirt hanging on a coat rack could be mistaken for a person. As her eyes grew accustomed to the dark and every object in the room began to stand out, she realized once more that her husband had been gone a long time.
After that, she pushed his shirts to the back of the closet, but for some reason, she continued to wake in the middle of the night. A chill, a kind of presence, lingered on her forehead. What had grazed her skin? Eunok went out onto the balcony in her flip-flops. The windows in the apartment tower across from her were dark. Everyone was asleep.
It was unclear why the builders had designed the apartment towers to stand at different heights. From her balcony at the top floor of the highest tower, she could see the entire apartment complex. The rooftops looked like terraced fields, or like the tiered seats of an amphitheater. For a long time, she gazed at the night sky and the darkened windows. The rooftop railings washed in soundlessly and wet her feet.
III
In a panicked voice, the security guard confirmed Eunok’s license plate number, saying there had been an accident and that she needed to come down. She h
ung up the interphone and went out onto the balcony. Only when she had slid open the screen and leaned out as far as she could was she able to see down to the parking lot. The lot was completely full, with a car in every single stall. There was a crowd of people huddled around the front of her car.
High up from her apartment, all Eunok could see was the roof of her car, but there seemed to be something on top of it. Was it a white shirt that had fallen from someone’s balcony? She was about to close the window, but she leaned out once more. It wasn’t someone’s laundry. It was a person—a girl in uniform. A girl in a white blouse and dark checkered skirt.
Even more people had gathered by the time she came down. They were all there—the milkman, students on their way to school, an elderly couple returning from their early morning hike, and every security guard from the complex. The guard speaking animatedly seemed to have been the one who had discovered the girl during his early morning patrol. The police came, followed by the ambulance.
Four paramedics moved the girl off the roof of Eunok’s car. She sagged like a gunnysack. The paramedic who had been holding onto her right arm almost dropped her. Someone screamed. A young woman, her face pale with fear, stumbled forward with a hand over her mouth, and bent over the playground flowerbed. Several paper airplanes lay scattered on the flowerbed.
The girl was laid onto a stretcher and covered with a white sheet. Her limp arms dangled out at unnatural angles. Blood had gathered in her hands, making it look as if she were wearing dark purple gloves. Eunok saw the girl’s shoeless feet as she was loaded onto the ambulance. Her white socks were folded down to her ankles. The soles were covered with dirt, and the frayed heels revealed torn, bloodstained flesh, as if she’d been cut with broken glass. The toes of her socks were soaked with blood as well. It looked as if she had walked a long way without shoes.
The apartment complex had five parking lots, and the Elephant lot where Eunok parked had a total of 120 stalls. Because every single stall was always taken, cars were forced to double-park, and so announcements requesting certain cars to be moved were made constantly every morning over the intercom. But out of all these cars, the girl had fallen on Eunok’s.
“It’s the third one already, the third one,” a security guard said, as he spat on the ground near his feet.
The guard standing next to him gave a deep nod. “Yup. How are we supposed to stop them when they break the lock to get to the roof?”
“At this rate, our office is going to be moved up there,” the first one continued, looking up toward the top of the building. “Our job isn’t going to be watching for thieves and solicitors anymore. It’s going to be stopping people from jumping. And we’ll have to patrol the rooftop now instead of the parking lot.”
Once the ambulance left, the people began to disperse. The rest of the guards also returned to their posts, and the only ones left were the police, the security guard who had first discovered the girl, and Eunok. She couldn’t complain about her ruined car when a person had just died. The girl’s plummeting mass, which had increased as she fell twenty-six stories, had crushed the roof of Eunok’s car down to the steering wheel, crumpling it like a piece of paper. The blood had flowed down the windshield and pooled in the middle of the hood. The police and security guard stopped talking and looked up toward the top of Tower 402 once more. They had to tilt their heads all the way back to see the metal railing.
It was the same roof that Eunok had been watching the night before when she had woken from her sleep. From another rooftop behind Tower 402, a stingray kite drifted up. It then caught the wind and did figure eight patterns, the tails whipping wildly through the air. How many kites had gotten tangled in the antennas last year? Just as her husband had said, this was no place for kites. This one seemed to be the last of them.
There it goes. Eunok, who’d been watching the kite fly away, felt a drop of rain on her forehead. All of a sudden, a thought flashed across her mind. The kite that had plummeted to the ground, the one with the broken string she’d seen in the middle of the night—could it have been the girl? Could it actually have been the girl’s white uniform blouse, shimmering in the dark? Could the kite tails, which the darkness had swallowed up, have been her pale legs?
As the rain fell, the blood that had hardened on Eunok’s car started to wash off. The police and security guard jogged over to the security office. The rain flowed along the curb. Eunok’s feet became soaked. The rain began to pull down the kite that had been flying in the air.
In her dream, Eunok was flying a kite. She was standing on a flat, open plain. Her hands holding the reel were raw and stiff, but the cold air was refreshing. The kite kept plunging toward the ground.
Stop being so greedy. It’s falling, because you’re letting too much of the line out at once. Pull in some of the line. You can’t make it go up high right away. Be patient for once …
It was her husband. She tried to do as he said, but she could barely turn the reel, because she was afraid the string would break. Little by little, she managed to pull the line in, but what she found at the end was not a kite, but the high school girl who had fallen on her car. The girl’s blouse was so white it gave off a bluish sheen. There were bamboo spars weaved through her body, and even a hole right below her chest, just like in a shield kite. Through that hole, Eunok saw the dandelions blooming in the field.
Look, the spars are all wrong. That’s why it keeps falling. Look here, her husband muttered, as he attempted to fix the spars on the girl’s body. Eunok tried to stop him and finally woke from her sleep.
IV
Only when Choi Kisu called again did she remember the message he had left on her voicemail a while back. Kisu was one of her husband’s closest friends from high school. She and her husband used to meet him and his wife frequently. Judging by his message, it seemed he hadn’t heard about her husband. If Kisu didn’t know, it meant the rest of their friends didn’t know, either. It also meant her husband and Kisu hadn’t talked to each other in over six months.
“You have to come, Boss. You of all people know how long we’ve been waiting for this child. You have to come.”
Eunok couldn’t help laughing when he called her Boss.
“You’ll be coming by car, right? Then you’ll need to take the Dohwa Interchange.”
They had said her car wouldn’t be ready for another week. “Actually, there’s been an accident, so my car’s in the shop right now.”
“An accident? Are you okay?”
When she had listened to his message, she had wondered whether she should attend without her husband. Eunok had first met Kisu over ten years ago, when she’d been dating her husband. Kisu, who hadn’t had a girlfriend back then, often joined them in the evenings, and the three of them would go to a pub or karaoke joint together. Even after they got married, Kisu would barge into their home with a case of beer, without bothering to call first. When he had been set up with the woman who would become his wife, he had introduced her to Eunok first.
Kisu was the one she confided in whenever she and her husband fought. Somehow he knew when they were having problems, and came bearing fruit and drinks to help patch things up between them. But even to someone like him, she could not mention that her husband had left. Nor could she tell him about the seven months he’d spent at home when he’d first lost his job.
“Fine. Even if I end up dropping everything else, I won’t miss your baby’s birthday.”
Kisu laughed and then grew quiet all of a sudden. “Actually, I heard about Sanghyeon. Bad news travels fast.”
He fell silent once more. It was unusual for him.
“The truth is … someone saw him. On the morning news. You know how they sometimes show all the homeless people camping out at Seoul Station? He didn’t look too good, but it was definitely him … I can’t believe it either. They usually replay the news throughout the day. Why don’t you check? That idiot … Don’t worry, when I see him, I’ll give him a good beating and make him come to hi
s senses.”
When the news camera was aimed at the man with the sunken eyes and greasy, unkempt beard, he grimaced and covered his face with the army jacket he’d been using as a blanket. The camera took in his grimy pants and ankles, and then moved over other bodies sleeping on cardboard boxes that lined the station entrance. It was a familiar scene. While the camera panned around the station, Eunok kept her gaze on the man. It was easy to see how he could have been mistaken for her husband. The sharp nose, especially the slightly crooked bridge, certainly looked like his. Her husband had broken his nose in a group fight in high school. After all, didn’t every boy get in a fight at least once? But the man with the bushy beard wasn’t her husband. Even if he had lost a lot of weight during the past two months, the man’s cheekbones and face shape were different from her husband’s. He simply looked like him. But then, Eunok had never seen him with a beard before. For the past eight years, he had shaved every morning. All she had seen was his hairless chin, as smooth as a pebble.
Because the parking lot was empty during the day, she could see the large elephant painted on the asphalt. After Eunok’s car was towed, a white star was added to the spot right below the elephant’s belly. It marked where the girl had fallen. People avoided the star, making sure to never park there.
The girl had been eighteen years old and had attended a girls’ high school located on the outskirts of Seoul, an hour and a half away by bus and subway. The people in the elevator and at the grocery store, the security guards—everyone was talking about the incident. The guard who had first discovered the girl recognized Eunok and told her that the police were questioning the girl’s family and friends about the injuries discovered on her body. The security tape from the elevator revealed that she had gone up to the roof of Tower 402 at eight o’clock in the evening. He also mentioned that homeowners were concerned that the accident was going to cause their apartment value to drop.
The door that led to the rooftop of Tower 402 wasn’t sealed off. It was probably because of the ongoing police investigation. She pushed open the small metal door and surveyed the spacious rooftop.
