Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

  The mere presence of the cameras would solve many of their problems, the CCTV technician was at pains to emphasize. And his words proved true at first, as nothing happened for the next few days.

  But a week later, the woman picked up the phone to receive a summons from the police: someone was pressing charges against her husband.

  That someone turned out to be, of course, the man who lived down the alley. The charge was assault. According to the man, he was on his way home late at night after work and passing by the car that was parked in the contested space, when the woman’s husband leaped out of the car and assaulted him. He had allegedly struck the young man with his car door, picked him up, smashed his face on the hood of the car, and slammed his fingers in the door, inflicting massive injuries. The man did have wounds all over his face along with a bandage around his head, and his right hand was in a cast.

  Such violence was completely out of character for the husband, so the woman knew the accusation was false. At any rate, on the date and hour the man claimed to have been assaulted, her husband had been sleeping at home next to her and they hadn’t gone out that evening. As she and her husband denied all accusations, the man began to scream and hop up and down despite his injuries, but then came the couple’s secret weapon: the CCTV footage.

  Since no incidents had happened in the past few days, the woman and her husband had simply stored the footage without bothering to review it. But the footage, which they all watched with the detective in charge of the case, revealed something very strange.

  The man came up to the car from down the ally. From his direction and manner, he was clearly doing the opposite of what he had claimed earlier—walking past the car on his way home. There was some kind of tool in his hand. The darkness and screen resolution made it impossible to make out what it was exactly.

  The man approached the car. The moment his hands touched the vehicle, the car door sprang open. It really did look like the door had been intentionally opened to slam the man in his face. The man lost his balance and fell on his behind. As he tried to get up again, the door slammed into his face once more. Over and over, it kept doing the same thing as the man attempted to get up multiple times.

  Then his body was upright—not balanced on his own feet, but seemingly hoisted up as if by an invisible assailant. His head crashed onto the hood. The man struggled, kicking the tires as he did so, but his head crashed again and again into the hood of the car until he finally managed to gain his balance. That was when the driver-side door slammed him once again. The man grabbed the edge of the door with his right hand for balance, and the door shut with his hand still in it. He freed his hand and fell on the ground, clutching his right hand. The camera did not have a microphone, but the man’s pain was clear from his silent, wide-open mouth.

  The detective turned to the man. “So where exactly in this videotape did an assault take place?”

  The only person in the footage, from beginning to end, had been the man. No matter how you tried to spin it, all it looked like was the man engaging in self-harm using the car belonging to the woman and her husband.

  The detective spoke again. “And just how did you open someone else’s car? Did you steal their keys?”

  The man began shouting his objections, but a glance at the detective’s suspicion-filled gaze brought him down to a mumble. “But, but I was sure that someone came out of the car and—”

  “What person? What person out of where?” the detective cut in with a rough voice. The man attempted to say something, but the detective didn’t give him a chance.

  “So you thought you’d extort these poor people by pretending they beat you up, is that it? Is pressing charges some kind of game to you?”

  “But I’m positive that someone had—”

  “What someone? Where? You still dare to speak such lies when there’s CCTV proof right in front of you?”

  The detective was having none of it. He mentioned that extortion was a criminal offence. But the woman and her husband, saying they all had to live in the same neighborhood, requested leniency for the man, who continued muttering that he was sure someone had been in the car even as they exited the station. But his mumbling was now shot through with fear.

  A few days later, they learned that the man had been charged for attempted extortion. And when the woman was on her way home from the supermarket, she saw the man’s expensive sedan parked on the street—its interior filled with heavy rocks and its tires slashed to shreds. The sight was so chilling that she rushed into their building without a second glance behind.

  The man never again bothered them about parking in front of their building. Even when they ran into him in the neighborhood, he simply turned his head and went the other way. They could hear him grumble about how they had ruined his day by committing the offence of simply being visible, but neither she nor her husband dignified him with a response.

  The child liked to play in the building. She’d go exploring in the different rooms, and whenever she seemed to have momentarily disappeared, she could always be found in the basement.

  And that was all she liked to do. She didn’t seem to want to go outside much. The woman tried several times to take her to the supermarket or go for a walk around the neighborhood, but the child always shook her head in refusal. The woman didn’t press the issue.

  They had a hard time finding a renter for the third floor.

  Collecting rent was the only way her husband and she could have a steady income. The third floor had been empty since before they had moved in, and as time passed, she began to feel more and more anxious about its vacancy.

  “Why don’t we remodel it,” suggested her husband.

  “Wouldn’t that be expensive? We’d have to get a permit, too. What if no one wants it even after we remodel?”

  Her husband, however, was more confident than she was. “My friend said he would use it as an office. He also said he knows someone who can get us a discount on the remodeling. The interior designer went to our school. She’ll take care of the permits and everything.”

  The woman had met her husband at a student club in college. He was older than her. The friend he mentioned was also someone she knew from the club. The interior decorator who would take charge of the remodeling claimed she too had briefly been a member of the same club. After meeting her and hearing her name, the woman had the feeling that she had, indeed, seen her before. As the construction began and her husband’s friend and the interior designer and their workers made a lot of bustle and noise on the third floor, the heightened energy seemed to infect the woman’s husband as well. He, who had never lifted a finger to help her clean after they moved in, was all excited about remodeling the office his friend was going to use, gushing to her about every little step of their progress. The woman had no idea he’d be so enthused about anything having to do with taking care of the building and welcomed this development.

  The child fervently hated the fact that a new tenant was moving into the third floor. The noise drifting up to the fourth floor must’ve been unbearable as she was now always going down into the basement to hide.

  The woman also found it hard to tolerate having the stairs constantly covered in dust and the sounds of drills and hammers coming from below. Aside from when her husband called for her or the second-floor tenant lodged the occasional complaint, the woman also spent most of her time playing with the child in the basement.

  In addition to the red, ornate robes on the mannequins and the shoes with toes so pointy they seemed impossible to put on, the child was good at finding all sorts of odd metal boxes in the basement. These boxes occasionally had locks or sealing mechanisms with keys attached to them, but even with the keys, it was difficult to figure out how to open them. The child handed over one box. The woman awkwardly played around with it, and when the box double-locked itself in her hands with a loud clunk, she nearly jumped out of her skin. The child laughed brightly. At first, the woman found it unsettling when the cold lump of
iron suddenly went clunk in her hands apparently on its own accord. But watching the child laugh as she locked the odd-looking boxes one by one, she forgot that strange feeling and laughed along with her.

  The seemingly endless remodeling efforts finally came to an end and her husband’s friend moved into the office. Despite the great lengths they’d gone to redo the third floor and how spacious the office was, the friend seemed to have no employees; it all struck the woman as peculiar. Her husband explained that it was because his business was just starting out and he praised the friend for being cautious with his overheads. Her husband, as if he were an employee himself, was always in the office. Whenever she peeped in, he was always sitting across from the friend with a narrow desk between them, both talking urgently into their phones. Occasionally, the husband’s friend would call her down to the office and offer her a dark-colored drink. The drink was so sour and tart that she could only manage two sips the first time in the name of good manners before giving up. Her husband’s friend claimed the drink was made from some government-subsidized crop in Europe and had cancer-fighting, antioxidant, and anti-aging properties, going on a long rant using terms she couldn’t understand. Her husband nodded along to the friend’s spiel until his phone rang and he immediately answered it.

  Before even three months had passed, her husband’s friend vanished with their seed capital. In the office, aside from the small desk and the plush “CEO’s chair,” were crates upon crates of juice containers. She assumed they were the drink the friend had kept pushing on her. Emblazoned on the containers’ packaging was a picture of tiny blue berries. The same berries that were rotting away in a fridge in the corner of a room.

  “We still have his security deposit, so we haven’t lost that much money,” said her husband nonchalantly. “And he left all this product behind. It’s 200,000 won a box … Think of all the money we can make selling them.”

  Vowing to minimize their losses as much as possible, he called up everyone he knew and spewed the same information about the blue fruit’s anti-cancer properties, marketing them as best he could. But the thought of all the boxes stacked on the third floor made the woman despair that he would ever sell them all.

  Then, the phone calls began.

  If only they hadn’t tried to remodel, if only they hadn’t rented it out to her husband’s friend … These regrets crossed her mind again and again.

  She knew there was no use in agonizing over the past. But the regrets revisited her anyway. It would’ve been the same for anyone else in her position.

  He told her he had taken out a loan of twenty million won. At least he had only “invested” it in his friend’s business and did not put his own name on the business or be a guarantor to his friend’s debts.

  She wanted to cry. She wanted to shout. Seven years of her life had been put into repaying her debt, working late into the night and saving her meagre salary, living a humble life—and now, here she was right back where she started. No matter the amount, the word “loan” made her eyes go dark.

  Her husband had pursued an “alternative lifestyle” that was “free of the fetters of capitalism.” The woman herself, when she was in college, had considered the conformist pressures of getting good grades, building a resume, and landing a job in some big corporation to be tedious and distasteful and had thought the life her husband wanted dovetailed with hers. They got married as soon as she graduated, and she got a job right after. She learned quickly that an “alternative lifestyle” meant nothing without a detailed, concrete plan, and living “free of the fetters of capitalism” meant working for places that didn’t pay their workers on time. As she worried about realizing this alternative lifestyle in the real world, she crumbled away under the pressures of working at a company in the non-profit sector that was run not by the normal labor of workers, but through their unrequited sacrifices. Meanwhile, her husband, who was her upperclassman in college but graduated later than she did, fiddled around in search of his ideal “alternative lifestyle” without ever settling down on any particular profession—the result being the twenty-million-won loan he had taken out and used up without her knowledge.

  Saying he would pay it back, her husband promised he would do whatever it took. She knew he was being sincere. But she also knew that the world was not such an easy place as to hand over twenty million won to anyone based on their sincerity alone.

  So she looked into whether her husband could use their mutual assets as collateral to take out any more money without her knowledge. She considered dropping his name from the deed somehow, but the taxes were simply too complicated. Still, it seemed like it was legally impossible for him to put up any shared property as collateral without her consent. But in the worst-case scenario, she would only be able to hold on to half of her property; this frightened her.

  Their livelihoods depended on their home. And to her, home meant something far more than just a monthly source of income. The place was everything she had, the only thing to show for years of smashing herself against the world. And during that entire time she had worked herself to the bone, carrying her husband on her back, he had never so much as lifted a finger to help her. In the midst of her anxiety over the twenty million won of debt he had spent without her knowledge, all of these facts were beginning to seem very clear to her now.

  When he felt like it, her husband would occasionally go hiking at a nearby foothill. He was never away long enough for her to worry about him, but there was no consistent pattern to his hikes. Sometimes he left early in the morning, sometimes he took days off from his habit before setting off abruptly in the evening. Ever since his friend had run away with his money, he would spend hours on the phone in the office before tiring of it and going for a walk in the hills.

  She received the phone call when he was out on one of these hikes. She had gone down to the office to retrieve him for lunch, but there was only his cell phone at his desk. And just as she stepped in the office, it began to ring as if it had been waiting for her.

  Was there finally someone who wanted some of the health drink? There was a spark of hope in her heart as she picked up the phone. At the sound of her voice saying, “Hello,” whoever it was on the other end of the line went silent for a moment. The woman repeated her greeting and added, “Please speak up.”

  —Is it you, bitch?

  The woman was taken aback by the hostility of the female voice on the other end. “Excuse me?”

  —Are you that asshole’s wife?

  “What?”

  The voice on the other end seethed with hate.

  —Isn’t it your bastard husband who tricked my husband into selling that bullshit berry drink, before your husband took our money and cut off my husband?

  Finally, the call was starting to make sense. And who was accusing whom of being in the wrong! “Now look here. About that business, I—

  —You made my husband put the business in his name so he would take all the blame, but you and your despicable man held onto the stock and grabbed the sales money for yourselves, am I right? My husband was the one who brought in all of his connections, but you two just sucked him dry and tossed him over when you were done with him!

  “We were the ones who were ripped off! How dare you—”

  But her raised voice was countered by an even louder attack reinforced by harsh curses. When the woman told her to watch her tone, the caller gave out a contemptuous laugh.

  —Look at her standing by her man. Do you still want to stand by him when he’s screwing some other woman? He hired some whore calling herself an interior designer when he was remodeling. Stealing other people’s money, and having an affair right under your nose. What a pathetic household you run.

  “What!”

  The woman’s agitated tone seemed to bring satisfaction to the caller, who began speaking in a more leisurely tone.

  —I’ve got your husband’s texts and calls as evidence, he’s not going anywhere. Did you think I was going to pretend like nothing h
ad happened?

  The woman wanted to ask her what the evidence was for. But the caller seemed to have gone past the anger and cursing stage and entered the lamenting-her-fate stage.

  —My husband is the real idiot for associating with such filth like you two, quitting his good job so he can go into business with his college buddies … You two were probably fake students, right? Pretending to be college kids? A couple of grifters!

  The moment the caller began to get all riled up again, she heard someone punching in the code to the main door downstairs.

  Her husband. This surprised her so much that, for reasons she couldn’t understand, she quickly hung up the phone.

  She heard him come up the stairs. Swiftly, she put the phone back where it was and went to the fridge. She began rifling through its contents. It had been cleaned after her husband’s friend had disappeared, but the fresher berries they had saved were starting to rot as well.

  More keypad noises. It came from the second floor; it wasn’t her husband but the tenants coming back from lunch.

  She sighed in relief.

  The phone lay mute on the desk.

  The words “texts and calls” refused to leave her mind.

  As did the passcode to her husband’s phone.

  She couldn’t decide whether it was a good or bad thing that the blood-sausage place on the first floor chose that moment to raise the issue of the premium.

  First, the old man came alone. Since it was the woman who mostly dealt with the renters, he had probably thought it would be easy for him, a man who had experienced the world, to get a young woman to do whatever he told her to. But the woman’s husband, unusually for him, decided to lend his masculine presence to this meeting for reasons unknown.

  When the old man mentioned the premium, the woman’s husband countered with his understanding of the relevant legal facts. The old man reminded him that they had signed a modified contract to avoid transaction fees and threatened to report him to the tax offices. Undaunted, her husband continued to call the man “sir” and repeatedly explained the situation to him. “That contract was signed by both parties, and if you follow through with that threat, you will also be prosecuted by the tax offices. Also, your rent is actually not that high, nor have you paid it for a long time, which means whatever money we owe isn’t going to be that high, either. Don’t you think that it would be cheaper for us to just pay the back taxes than pay the thirty million won difference in a premium that has nothing to do with the landlord anyway? Don’t you think so, sir?”