Drifting House (11 page)

“I’ve been lonely,” he said, and shuddered, when the woman’s arms, the goose’s good, stiff feathers, circled over them. “I’ve been lonely all my life.”

W
HEN YOU ARRIVE
at seven in the morning, your ex­­hausted colleagues are already at their cubicles. Once again you stride past, trying to appear necessary. You are wearing the only suit you allowed your wife to buy at full price beyond your means, a navy wool blend with a red silk tie from Hyundai Department Store that disguises your stomach’s pouch and your rural upbringing in Iksan of street markets and communal toilets.

On the way to your cubicle, you bow to Manager Han, who stares back with glazed eyes in what has become his only expression. He lost his savings in the plummeting company stocks, then lost his wife, and may be contemplating suicide. You, too, lost your savings, but thankfully didn’t have much to lose. Ms. Min, the only woman in marketing with you, has divorced her husband, employed in the strategy planning department. You suspect this shameful state of her affairs is a paper divorce only, for companies like to fire married women who can rely on their husbands. Just
last month, after his company released him, an acquaintance of yours drowned off Seongsu Bridge in the Han River. The truth of his suicide was muzzled so his wife and children could subsist on the life insurance money. Nightly the nine o’clock news parades such stories. These clips, rare to Korea before the 1997 IMF crisis destroyed the ­job-for-life policy, are suddenly so ordinary that when you attended your acquaintance’s funeral, your mourning felt like a forgery.

As she does each morning Ms. Min delivers newspapers and memos across the floor. Perhaps because you have the kind of face that people easily forget, she smiles as if you two have just been introduced. This doesn’t perturb you; being singled out is what flusters you. You turn the computer on, scan the memos, and admire your immaculate desk: documents arranged in ­color-coded files, books stacked on a ­two-tier shelf, pencils honed to fine points, all which accurately reflect the desk of a person who takes care in the work done. You have never pocketed a single office supply. Unlike your wife this morning, colleagues express pleasure in your company.

Your wife, Jayeong, began your day with kisses that traveled your neck before the children were awake and crawling into your double bed, but by breakfast she launched into you with talk of money. Children are expensive. Rent is expensive. She said if your parents had planned for their future, you wouldn’t have to send a monthly allowance to them in Iksan. But they live off of what little money their alleyway eatery brings in and you are their only son, the one whom they worked hard to send to college, and they depend on you. You made the mistake of adding, well, what about her new scarf, the one designed by some Frenchman, that cost as
much as your parents’ monthly grocery bill? You suggested that she had unreasonable shopping habits.

Jayeong’s eyebrows peaked. She said, “At least we don’t have to support my family.”

When necessary, she will remind you of this.

You wanted desperately to make her happy.

“I’m just a stingy
ajeoshi,
” you said. “The scarf is perfect on you.”

Yoona and Jeongmin interrupted to pin a parents’ day pink chrysanthemum to your suit lapel. Jeongmin’s feral eyes were milky with sleep as he balanced expertly on your feet. Yoona called out to him in a plummy voice, but the next moment, she pushed her brother aside and stood in his place. Even if she is a girl, she is your secret favorite, a scrappy beauty who once cried because she would never be able to personally meet Marie Curie.

They are five and seven and heavy, your burdens that you hoisted in your arms. You were smelling the garlic and ginger of their skin when Yoona said, “Appa, are you a drunkard?”

She has been listening too closely to the family’s arguments.

The day is like any other day until Deputy Manager Kang calls you into his office.

When you open his door, Mr. Kang’s squat fingers are spread out equidistant from one another. He is as pale as rice, and so short that his feet dangle from the ergonomic leather chair. More than once you have been tempted to push him off. When you apologize for your tardiness that day, he looks through you. He normally greets you with confidences, for you are capable, conscientious, and maintain a Swiss neutrality in the labyrinth of office
politics. Though the company, like countless others, has declared bankruptcy and is restructuring, you had never imagined it would be you called to the office.

Still not looking at you, he says, “Assistant Manager Seo, once, our company was family for life. But with the IMF…now there are no guarantees.”

You pick your ear with a ballpoint pen, as is your habit. You say, “I appreciate the warning.”

“It’s headquarters’ orders.” He squints over your shoulder. “You know I’m like an older brother to you, but your job…no longer exists.”

Using his official work title, you say, “­Bujang-nim, there must be an alternative.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Seo. It’s a terrible time to live in.”

He grips your hand and shakes it hard. He says something about trying to help you in any way he can, which embarrasses both of you. You bow mechanically. The entire time, his eyes lock on the clock, as if he no longer has time for a man whose future he has just erased.

You steal to Yeoido Park a few blocks from the office. On the benches men in suits are reading newspapers. You sit and, before you’re asked, fabulate to the man next to you until the story of this prosperous company you own doesn’t sound plausible even to you. It makes you angry, how each man in the park and in the libraries will come home to his family and say, Yeobo, work was fine, until there’s no money left in the bank account. You feel the mandible crush in the endless lies they must tell, and swear not to be like
them, though you, too, are ­thirty-five with two kids and a wife to support, little savings, a rental apartment, and now unemployed in the middle of an unprecedented financial crisis. Your company has abandoned you, but you are not finished.

At night you descend the bus and pass dozens of matchbox apartment blocks identical to yours, gaping commercial buildings, a playground. In the six years devoted to your company, you worked, ate, worked, ate. You drank because Mr. Kang, like most deputy managers, expects it; two reluctant drinks, a less reluctant third, then a fourth, and a fifth, on the corporate expense account. Late at night after you arrived home to the suburbs of Gunsan, near kilometers of apartments built so close to one another that you can see neighbors at night changing their clothes, you stopped at the playground and imagined yourself ten years later with the same company, returning to your wife and two ­college-age kids. You dreamed modestly.

In one hand you clutch a sable briefcase, and in the other, pink delphiniums. You make it as far as the stairs and stand there until the security guard asks, “Is something wrong, Mr. Seo?” You smile and wave at him.

In front of your door you listen for the sounds of your children. Yoona, the spirited, earnest one, is loudly arguing for Bach over Mozart. Your wife disagrees; she enjoys a good quarrel. And Jeongmin? He is too affable to care about right or wrong. As they debate, he may be rolling his rice into balls and feeding the complacent cat. You leave the flowers on the mat. You are a salaryman who ­works—worked—for a respectable company, so how can you confess that you can no longer support your family? You find a pay phone by the playground, and call home.

You’ve turned fragile in the last few hours; your wife’s forceful greeting is enough to crack the porcelain veneer of calm you have maintained. Still, you tell her to take the substantial apartment deposit, the bankbook, and the children to her mother’s house near the hills of Andong.

“Forget me,” you say, but the underbrush of your voice thickens. You snap the cord against the phone box. “I’ll be fine. I can come get you when prospects improve.”

“Yeobo, don’t be ridiculous. Come home,” she says, her voice tender but querulous.

You allow that you specialize in the ridiculous: remember the bicycle ride you attempted drunk across the steep Kangwondo Mountains?

She hiccups, a sound you love.

But as she drills you on whether or not the company will release your pension, for new bankruptcy laws exempt it from its responsibilities, you imagine her anxiously tracking you as you skim newspaper ads. You remember the one year you were un­­employed, and how the bitter potions of ground deer antlers and the heart of the rare Jirisan black bear (at least that’s what the
hanuisa
told you as she mixed the medicinal herbs), the fortifying dog meat stews, and other
­heem
-producing foods could not bring back the heat and light you normally shared with your wife. You can combat the long work hours, the company drinking, the children’s demands for attention. You can bear anything but witness your incompetence, so you decide you would rather sleep in the park. You try to sound confident, but your voice breaks at the end of the conversation, and even to you, you seem pitiful.

At sunrise you queue behind hundreds of other men at an employment center. When you finally meet a public servant, he informs you that over two thousand people have applied for the advertised sanitation job. It’s still a government job, he explains; the economy’s paralyzed. The convenience stores and restaurants hire only young people for minimum wage. Other jobs require specialized knowledge such as interpretation skills or orthography. You do not have a fancy degree from overseas or parents who can support you. You do not speak three foreign languages. Still, you tell him that you are a college graduate, and have job experience. As a proud Daehan Minguk citizen you have mastered Korean and have competence in English. You fill out all available applications, though you are told not to be too hopeful.

Seoul Station may stink of urine and flesh and futility, the police may hound these subterranean arcade residents, the other city, but it keeps you warm, and this matters, for last night you woke up outside shivering with dew on your lashes. Now your back hugs the cold wall and drunk voices boom as you fish for your wallet with its family photos. But it has already been stolen. That’s when you realize you are no longer needed.

You avoid conversation. When heading toward the bathroom, you arc away from the other men as if they are contagious. One man lies on his wasted face. Another must be at least sixty. Tiny indentations, like flecks of sea lice, discolor his neck and cheeks. A crust of mold growing between his toes smells of pickled radish; one black toenail is rotting off. He is old enough to be your father
and in a sane society would have been cared for by his children. But Korea is no longer sane; you no longer feel sane.

The fluorescent arcade lights puncture your eyes; the subway bathroom line is unbearably long. You stand behind men who have lost their homes, or are fleeing the homes they have. Some hide tiny bars of soap and razors in their hands, and a few grip toothbrushes. Most laugh when you scrub your hair with paper towels. Over the months you will get used to standing in such long, senseless lines.

You get used to many things. For instance, queuing for a free meal at Tapgol Park before noon. Clearing out of the chilly arcade each morning when the police hustle you. Estimating time by studying the sun after your watch battery gives up. Trudging to the job center. Digging in the scree of the city dump for edibles and clothing. Finding an occasional bed in a shelter. Begging. When you have money, drinking the alcohol that during your regimented corporate years has become necessary to you. Waking up underground to the bitter bouquet of your comrades’ bodies in monsoon season. For you have found a few comrades by now.

It is sometime in late July or August. When you wake up, Yeongsuk offers you and Daehoon
soju
. The cheap rice wine burns and you sip only enough to take the edge off of waking slick in your own sweat. Yeongsuk has pale, aristocratic skin, a portly, graceful carriage, and lynx’s eyes disguised behind thick glasses. He won’t return home out of shame, for just before the crisis, he had taken the bulk of his parents’ retirement fund and traded and lost his savings, as well as theirs, in futures. He is alarmingly generous
with his food and alcohol, a habit you have found rare in those who come from plentitude. Even now he urges you to accept half a stick of gum.

Daehoon takes a long swig from the bottle, then flexes his considerable biceps before beginning his exercises. He is a ­twenty-seven-year-old nonunionized worker who punched you in the nose the one time you asked about his family. In between sets of ­push-ups and a half dozen different exotic ­sit-ups, he struts around in bleached jeans that hug his testicles. His barrel chest protrudes over a ­girl-size waist; he often scratches himself generously while you’re looking. When you’ve had a few drinks, you allow that he is “entertaining,” and though you would rather not wake up each morning to his trucker’s mouth, you do feel safer with him. In their company, you do not feel as lonely.

After Daehoon completes a third set of fifty ­push-ups, he bounds up and spits a wad of thick jelly, which vaults onto your shoe. You are secretly pleased that you cut off too much from his hair yesterday, which now tufts up at the top.

He says, “They say if you get yourself in debt to a gang and can’t pay, they chop off your legs and make you beg for a living. Pick you up, drop you off, give you food and a bed. Not a bad life.”

“Without legs?” you say. “You can’t do ­push-ups with no legs.”

You fear those men, some of them debtors and industrial accident casualties, and still others neglected Vietnam veterans from back in the seventies who, with their stumps wrapped in thick industrial rubber, propel their torsos by skateboard. You dread their clawing hands, their truculent faces. In dreams, they suffocate you with their gutted legs.

Daehoon slaps his heavy thighs. “These two stumps, are they doing anything for me right now?”

“I’d rather go to America and do hard work,” says Yeongsuk. “Perhaps drive trucks or labor on a chicken farm. Perhaps even get another finance job.”