by Axie Oh
“My apologies, General,” the colonel says.
I’m surprised at Tsuko’s reaction. Either he’s angry at the colonel for his massive blunder in the north, resulting in the casualties of hundreds of soldiers, or he’s protecting Ama. Maybe both.
There’s an undeniable connection between Ama, Tera, and Tsuko, a shared history. But what, I don’t know. Or when. It’s common knowledge that Tsuko was “found” by the Director at a military orphanage in Taipei. When could he have come into contact with Ama and Tera? Unless it’s true that the “common knowledge” is actually fabricated knowledge, and there’s more to Tsuko’s murky past than what the public was given.
I surface from my thoughts to find Tsuko watching me.
“I was informed that you would conduct this interrogation,” he says. “Is it true you’ve earned high marks in interrogative procedures?”
“It’s true,” I lie.
Tsuko nods. “Good. Interrogate Oh Kangto with any means possible. This man is responsible for the deaths of thousands of NSK soldiers. I will not be denied his full confession and the names and whereabouts of every single traitor beneath his command.” He reaches to pick up his medaled cap lying on a table, then turns to Alex. “After Soldier Lee conducts the interrogation, send the traitor to my facility.” Placing the cap atop his head, he exits the room, trailed by the colonel.
Left alone in silence with Alex and Sela, I sigh. “Let’s not interrogate him and say we did.”
Sela giggles.
Alex frowns. “We’re being monitored,” he says, his eyes moving to the camera in the corner of the room. “And Sela’s here to write up an account of the interrogation. Try not to do anything to get kicked out of the Tower.” He hands me an earpiece, which I plug into my left ear. “I’ll relay to you the questions you’re to ask him.”
I move to the door separating the viewing room from the interrogation room and stop before the threshold, turning to Sela. “Can you release his cuffs?”
Sela widens her eyes, then nods. “I will.”
The door opens, and I walk inside.
The interrogation room is significantly colder than the viewing room. One lone camera at the back tracks my movements. The silver cuffs release with a click.
I wait a minute, but when the old rebel doesn’t make a move to take the black bag from his head, I pull it off him and toss it to the floor. Then I circle the table and sit in the chair opposite him.
Face-to-face, I can see the damage wrought by the days leading up to this meeting. There’s a long, charred scar that runs across his face from his left temple, across one sealed-shut eye, through his flat, reddened nose, and down to his gray-stubbled chin. The other wounds, although fierce in their own right, seem insubstantial compared to this blatant marring.
I swallow and look down, feeling strangely ill at ease.
“Talk to him,” Alex orders in my ear. “Make him feel comfortable with you.”
I take a breath, then blurt, “Tell me the names of the leaders of the UKL.”
Alex groans in my earpiece. “You weren’t kidding when you said you sucked at interrogations.”
The old man stares at me blankly from out of his one working eye.
“Are you thirsty?” I ask, and then say loudly, “Maybe he can’t speak. His mouth is too dry.” I turn my head to look directly at Alex and Sela behind the one-way mirror, going against the idea that you’re not supposed to talk about the criminal while he sits in front of you.
Oh Kangto and I wait in silence for several minutes before Sela enters the room and puts a steaming mug of barley tea in front of the man.
He doesn’t even glance at her. Just stares at me. He doesn’t pick up the mug of tea.
“Nice,” Alex drawls into my earpiece as Sela shuts the door behind her.
Another couple of minutes of silence pass before I work up the will to speak.
“You look more like a harabeoji than an ajeossi.” These are the brilliant words that come out of my mouth — he looks more like a grandfather than a middle-aged man. According to our records, Oh Kangto is a little older than the colonel, somewhere in his mid-sixties. The mountains of the north have not been kind to this man. He looks like he’s much older, his hair completely gray, with drooping bags beneath his eyes. His face is a mask of wrinkles. I’m surprised he endured even one beating, let alone the countless beatings I know he’s suffered.
“My harabeoji was a lot like you,” I continue. “You two would have gotten along. You’d have sat there and said nothing to each other for hours straight, and after you had left our home, my harabeoji would have turned to me and said, ‘He is a good man.’ Of course, my harabeoji died when I was very young, so I didn’t know him too well. Maybe he would have said, ‘He is a boring man.’” I shrug. “I guess we’ll never know, will we?”
When the old man doesn’t answer, I answer for him, my voice quiet in the still room. “We won’t ever know.”
I’m getting tired of this. The old man isn’t going to speak. He’s just going to stare and stare and step on me with the force of his gaze.
“Are you going to tell me where the rest of your rebels are? Are you going to name the agents in your organization who’ve infiltrated this city? The traitors hiding amongst us? Are you going to confess your plans, the ones you have to destroy the NSK?”
The old man doesn’t even blink.
I turn away from him, looking pointedly at the one-way mirror of the interrogation room, and shrug. This was obviously a bad plan.
I’m about to stand when the old man creaks forward in his chair. “Ah,” he breathes huskily, his voice thick with age and pain. “Hyunwoo-yah. I’ve missed you, my comrade.”
I freeze where I sit. My heartbeat doubles in my chest, and my numb hands slide against the metal arms of the chair.
“Hyunwoo-yah, where have you been? We scoured the land for you. We looked everywhere for you. I felt your ghost at my bedside at night, asking me, Why? Why? Oh, Lee Hyunwoo, where have you been? And your lovely wife. And your son. Forgive me. Forgive me.”
The old man begins to cry, tears seeping through both his working right eye and his broken left. “Hyunwoo-yah, forgive me. I did wrong. I made you stay with me when you should have gone with her. She would have kept you warm. She would have healed all your sorrows. She had scarless hands. It meant she was safe.”
He turns from me, looking off into the distance, looking at something only he can see. “The winds are frigid in the north, and the wolves howl for my blood.”
I shake my head. “There aren’t any wolves in the north.”
“Yes, there are. Hungry, cruel predators. They’re nothing like the tigers that used to roam Mount Baekdu in the old days. Those noble creatures protected us from our enemies. We were never afraid, because we knew, we knew we were beloved.
“Hyunwoo-yah, isn’t it strange? I’ve reached this old age, older than my halmeoni was before she died. She was so wise, my halmeoni. I don’t feel wise, Hyunwoo-yah. I feel tired and bitter and cold. I miss the days of my youth, when I was a boy in the city. All my friends and I cared about was how sweet the watermelon was in the spring, and in the summer, how much fun it was to play muk-jji-ppa in the park. And all we shared was everything. They’re all gone now.”
The old man wipes tears from his face, the wetness of them mixing with the dried blood of his wounds. “I never could beat my halmeoni at muk-jji-ppa. She had quicker hands than me.”
He looks down at his hands, gnarled with age and weathered after many winters in the north.
Something snaps inside me, watching him watch his hands. Maybe it’s that he’s mentioned his halmeoni, and I have a weakness for halmeonis. Maybe it’s that he knew my father before my father left, before my father met my mother. Maybe it’s because he’s old, and he’s suffered, and no man deserves such cruelty dealt upon his
body and his mind. There’s an anger bottled up inside me, and I don’t know where it’s come from, or why it’s even come at all. Why it won’t leave.
I stand and place my palms on the metal table, feel the bite of the cold steel. “Why are you doing this?” My voice comes out harsh, cracking. “What makes you hold your tongue, old man?”
Oh Kangto looks up at me, his one eye finding mine. I read pity in his gaze, pity for me. It goes straight to my soul. I pound my fist on the table. “Speak!” I scream. “Just tell them what they need to know, and they won’t hurt you anymore!”
In my ear, Alex finally speaks, his voice muffled. “Ask him where his comrades are.”
“Where are your comrades, Oh Kangto? Where are they hiding?”
Oh Kangto lifts his head, his tears getting caught in the lines of his face. He presses his hands against his heart. “Right here,” he says, his lucid voice now sure and strong. He reaches his gnarled grandfather hands across the wooden table, placing their scarred palms over mine. “Right here.”
He smiles at me, a sad smile. “Who guards the mountain in the north, Lee Hyunwoo?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper, my voice foreign to my ears, weak and tired.
“You know, my son.”
The door of the interrogation room opens. “We’ve got what we need,” Alex says, stepping through. I nod, shakily getting to my feet. I don’t know what they got out of that, but I’m done.
In a moment of suicidal adrenaline, I turn to Oh Kangto and bow at the waist, showing him a deference I actually feel for once.
“Did I mention the whole thing was recorded?” Alex asks once the door closes behind us.
I look away from him and through the interrogation window. The old rebel has his face in his hands. He’s weeping.
“Jaewon, I’m serious. This won’t look good.”
“Why not?” Sela chimes in, patting me on the back. “Lee Jaewon was acting.” She laughs. “Jaewon-ssi, I want you to be in the next drama I star in. You were amazing. And you even got Oh Kangto to talk. No one else has. And he’s revealed something huge. The name of a potential rebel. This Lee Hyunwoo person. True, Lee Hyunwoo is probably dead, seeing as Oh Kangto thought you were his ghost at first. But we know that both he and Lee Hyunwoo used to live in the city, the old city. He’s confirmed there are rebels in the city, or at least, they began there. We thought the UKL had most of its operatives situated abroad, backed by foreign powers, but if they’re across the river, they’ve been working right beneath our noses. We can root them out quick and bring an end to this rebellion once and for all!”
Alex and I both stare at Sela, stupefied expressions on our faces. This is the most I’ve heard her speak.
She laughs. “I can go on and on about subjects I’m passionate about. Do you think they’d let me participate in Oh Kangto’s transport to General Tsuko’s facility?”
I blink, surprised she wants any further part in all of this. Apparently, she’s more bloodthirsty than I thought. Or more ambitious than I thought.
“I don’t see why not,” Alex answers slowly.
“Oh, good,” she sings. “I’ll escort him, then.”
Alex must have signaled to the guards that we’d finished the interrogation, because five of them march through the doors. They remove Oh Kangto from his chair, shackling him with electro-braces.
The old rebel doesn’t make a move to stop them. He doesn’t even look at them. Or me. He passes right by me, unseeing. It’s like his mind has fled, his one eye roving without focus.
Something in me knows he won’t speak again. He had only spoken to me because he had mistaken me for my father. He’ll go to Tsuko’s facility, and they’ll torture him until he’s dead, never learning a thing beyond what he revealed in his strange confession to me, of a cherished boyhood long ago.
“Are you all right?” Alex asks, watching me. “Maybe you should go back to the hospital.”
I shake my head, turning to head out of the room and out of the Tower. Alex’s advice is good, but I have a different idea of what will make me feel better.
29
Forgiveness
I’m wasted by the time Young finds me sitting at one of the rickety plastic tables set up in a hazardous maze next to the bridge ajumma’s food cart. Two bowls, emptied of ramyeon, and a half dozen soju bottles litter the table, one or two tipped over and dripping over the side.
I’m pouring myself another shot when Young takes the glass from between my fingers and swigs it back. He swallows and squints at the taste.
“Jaewon-ah,” Young says, pouring himself the last of the bottle, “what are you doing out here? Drinking all by yourself like an old, buggered ajeossi?”
I flinch at his choice of words, remembering Oh Kangto’s hands atop my hands. I swipe the glass from Young, bringing it up to my lips and tipping in the liquid. I can’t even taste it anymore.
“Jaewon-ah, did something happen at the Tower?”
“No.” I push hair out of my face and rub my eyes.
“You look terrible.”
I grimace, reaching into the pocket of my coat for some painkillers. Like before, Young’s hand comes out to stop me. This time, I push it away. “Don’t,” I growl.
“You have to stop this,” Young says, his voice laced with frustration. “This isn’t like you. Where’s the Lee Jaewon I know? Who’s calm and collected all the time, who’d never be found drinking by himself in the dead of night?”
I shrug. “Not here.”
Young holds my gaze for a moment and then leans back in his chair, his hands crooked behind his head. “Jaewon-ah,” he says, his voice light, “remember the old days, back when we were kids . . .”
I start in my chair. Young’s words closely mirror Oh Kangto’s. “When I was a boy in the city.”
“Remember when you used to listen at the walls between our apartment buildings? They were thin walls. We could have a conversation between them, if we screamed loud enough and the windows were open. And remember how you used to listen through the walls, every night, just in case . . . in case you heard the yelling. And then you’d come, as quick as lightning, jumping off your balcony and onto mine, rushing in to save me, like a goddamn hero in a book. When my old man used to bring out that damn police baton, you’d be there with me, getting hit as well. You’d share the bruises with me. And they’d be less.”
“And all we shared was everything.”
I close my eyes.
“Jaewon-ah, what’s the matter?”
I can tell Young anything. I can tell him about the rebel in the Tower, and how none of what he said makes sense, his love for my father, his devotion to his cause — even if it means he’ll die for it all in the end. I can tell him about Tera and how she makes me feel — helpless and full to the brink of something, longing, maybe — and even though I don’t know what it means, I could tell him anyway. Because he’s Young.
But I’m so drunk. If I open my mouth, I might fall to weeping, and I haven’t cried since I was eight.
“God, you’re wasted.” Young walks over to crook my arm around his shoulder. “I should be happy, I guess. I never get to see you like this.” When my full weight crashes into him, he stumbles to the side.
The food cart ajumma clicks her tongue as we pass, muttering about “boys” and “troublemakers.”
Neither of us speaks until we’re beneath the flickering bulb of the streetlight a block away from my apartment.
“I need to take a break.” Young leans me against the wall of a building.
The position I’m left in has my face angled to the ground, watching the dust motes in the slivers of light that filter over the nearest doorway.
“Jaewon-ah . . . ,” Young says, and I turn to see him standing beneath the streetlamp. He sounds tired, and not from carrying me eight blocks down roads riddled with potho
les. What has he been doing with his time? I used to know everything about him. Just six months ago, he left Red Moon and joined the Seven Kings. It was an unprecedented move to many, as with time, he would have been his father’s second-in-command, and eventually the boss of Red Moon. But truthfully, I wasn’t surprised. Bitter maybe, but not surprised. Young had never been ambitious. Growing up, he cared more about helping kids get off the street than wealth or power.
“Are we going to talk about this?” Young says quietly.
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
He sighs. “Is it nothing that you were almost killed? Is it nothing that the brutal beating you took in the north was televised to the whole city?”
“It doesn’t . . . ,” I say, placing my hand against my aching throat. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Stop lying to yourself!” Young shouts. “If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t be killing you inside.”
“Why do you even care?” I shout back. “None of this has anything to do with you!”
“It has to do with me because it has to do with you,” Young says, his voice dropping. “Jaewon-ah, we’ve been friends longer than we’ve been — ”
“Enemies?” I suggest weakly.
“Than we’ve been lost.”
I close my eyes, knowing exactly what he means — it kills me to know what he means. “You were the only one,” I say, hoping my voice won’t break on my words. “You were my only family after my father left, and then my mother. I needed you, and you left me.”
“Jaewon-ah,” Young says, taking a step closer, “I did it for you! You think my father would just let me leave? You think he’d just let me go? If I’d left with you, we’d have never been able to stay together in that school. My father would have done something, and both of us would have been kicked out. I knew that if I could let you go, if I could only let you go, you could be free of everything — the gang, the streets, my father . . .”
Young trails off, looking away. “Even me,” he whispers. “I thought you’d be better off without me.”
