I'll Be Right There (33 page)

A
fter he quit his post at the university, Professor Yoon never returned to his office. We assumed he continued to write poetry, but none of his writings were ever published. He passed the time at his cottage by tending to the trees in the mountains, planting things in the earth, and sharing the fruits of his labor with us whenever we visited. His last request was to be interred “under the tree,” but he had not said which
tree, or even which kind of tree. As a result, what we talked about the most during his three-day wake was, to our own surprise, trees. An oriental oak in Uljin on the east coast was mentioned, as well as a six-hundred-year-old white pine in Hyoja-dong in Seoul. Fallingwater told us that the tree was no longer there. That it had fallen one year in a storm. He said people in the neighborhood tried everything they could to save the tree, but to no avail. After it was removed, other pine trees were planted around the site. People listed off the names of arboretums around the world. Everyone had a tree that was special to them: pine, oak, wild cherry, Japanese torreya, Chinese parasol tree. All throughout the funeral, we whispered names of trees to one another. One person described an enormous silver magnolia growing in a field overlooking the water in a certain small village in Namhae on the southern coast. One day, five hundred years ago, a fisherman from the village had caught the biggest fish anyone had ever seen. He found seeds inside the fish’s stomach and, without knowing what they were, planted them in the earth nearby. That spring, the seeds sprouted and grew into the enormous silver magnolia. The more we talked about trees, the more we found that we knew the same trees by different names, depending on where we were born and where we grew up. When that friend brought up the silver magnolia, Fallingwater said, “Don’t you mean a Japanese magnolia?” He even brought in a book to quibble over it. Silver magnolias were common near the southern city where that friend had grown up. Those who grew trees but had never seen a silver magnolia added to the confusion by continuing to call them Japanese magnolias. We
became so engrossed in it that we forgot we were at a wake. After someone brought up the oriental oak in Uljin, someone else countered with an oriental oak in Andong. They said that if a scops owl flies to the tree in the spring and hoots, there will be a good harvest that year, and someone else said that the oriental oak in Uljin grew from a sword that a Goryeo Dynasty general had stuck in the ground after losing in battle. Professor Yoon’s wake was like a classroom filled with students of trees. The discussion went on and on: ibota privet, guelder rose, Japanese yew, Korean fir. I pictured the crepe-myrtle beside my mother’s grave. The long branches extended well past her grave, and when the bright red blossoms were in bloom, you could see where she was buried even from a great distance.

I
n the end, Professor Yoon was buried in the mountains near his cottage where he had spent his final days. Everyone had a different opinion, but that was the chosen spot. We buried him beneath a pine that was more than two hundred years old. It might have been one of the same pines that Myungsuh and I had cleared of snow until we both collapsed from exhaustion. Back then, it had been too dark to see anything, but when I looked around in the daylight, I saw that the woods overlooked a river that led to the sea. In the back, flanking the site like a folding screen, was a lush stand of Korean pine and Japanese cornel. The urn that held Professor Yoon’s ashes was set in the earth beneath the tree; we took turns scattering handfuls of soil on top. When it was my turn, the moment my hand closed around the cold earth, all of my words deserted
me, leaving only one:
Goodbye
. After the funeral, we sat in a bar until dawn, drinking aimlessly, and started to piece together the words Professor Yoon had left on our palms. We argued late into the night about which parts should come first and which should come later; one person fell asleep right there in the bar with his face pressed against the table. When we put Professor Yoon’s last words in order, they spelled out:
My Christophers, thank you for being a part of my life. Do not grieve for me. All things must come to an end—youth, pain, passion, emptiness, war, violence. Do the flowers not bloom and fade? Just as I came into being, so must I pass out of existence. Look up to the sky. That’s where the stars are. They are always shining there, whether we are gazing up at them, and whether we forget, and long after we die. May each one of you become one of those shining stars
.

W
hen I finished telling the story of Saint Christopher, one of the students raised her hand. Since the time I had been given was short, I had not planned on taking any questions and was getting ready to step down from the podium. But I put my glasses back on and nodded at the student who had her hand up.

“Thank you for sharing the story. So, does that mean that we are Saint Christopher? Or are we the child he carries?”

Long ago, Professor Yoon had asked us the same question. Whenever I find myself in one of those moments where the past seems to be repeating itself in the present, I stop thinking of time as moving in a straight line. Seated next to the girl who asked the question was my cousin’s daughter, Yuseon. While the three of us were having lunch on Sunday, Yuseon
had paused in the middle of picking up a perilla leaf with her chopsticks and said, “There was an announcement at school that you’re going to be the guest speaker at chapel. Is that true?” My cousin said, “If they announced it, then of course it’s true!” Yuseon, who was the spitting image of my cousin, cocked her head to one side. I could tell she didn’t believe that her aunt—the one who went to the public bath with her, the one who always missed her dental appointments because she hated going and would get phone calls from the nurse, the one who was always quick to grab the last piece of fruit left on the plate when they ate together—was the one invited to speak at chapel. Yuseon said, “That’s strange. They usually only invite famous people …” Then she added, “I hate going to chapel. I usually skip it. Is it okay if I don’t go?” So I had assumed she wouldn’t be there. When I saw her sitting there, looking so bright-eyed next to the girl who’d asked me that question, I felt a little awkward. To her, I was just an aunt who combed her hair for her or swapped clothing. The girl who slipped and slid over the linoleum in her haste to help me trim Emily’s claws looked so grown-up seated amongst the other college students. Judging by the way they smiled at each other, I assumed that she and the girl who’d asked the question were friends.

I stood up straighter and prepared to give my answer.

T
he day Myungsuh, Professor Yoon, and I had gone into the mountains to dislodge snow from the trees, it snowed again sometime in the night. Myungsuh and I left the village the next morning to find that the trees in the mountains were
once again covered in snow. On the bus back to the city, Myungsuh said he would move in with me. When I got home, I moved my things around to make room for him. But he never showed. He even stopped calling in the middle of the night from wherever he had collapsed while wandering around the city. When I got tired of waiting for him to call and went to the magazine company where he worked part-time, he came running out to meet me. He showed none of the foot-dragging of someone who did not call and did not keep his promises. The company where he worked was in the first ten-story building to go up in Gangnam, the new district south of the Han River. Nowadays, ten stories doesn’t seem like much, but back then, it was the tallest building around. Nearby was a royal burial ground covered in pine trees; I called him from a phone booth at the entrance. He appeared so quickly that it was hard to tell whether I had hung up the phone and come out of the booth first or he had come out of the building and shouted to me from across the distance first. He threw his arms around me before there was a chance for things to get awkward. We walked around the royal burial grounds three times. I didn’t bring it up, but he promised again to move in. He said he would bring his things over in three days. But three days went by, and he never showed. Four times he said he would move in, only to break his promise. Each time, I went back to his office building, and he ran out and hugged me just like before. The hugs lasted longer and longer. On the night of his final broken promise, he came to my place. That time, he did not hug me. He just stared silently down at his feet. Together, we gazed out at Namsan Tower shining as
always in the distance. I think I asked him what he was afraid of. I was surprised by his answer.

“If we live together, we’ll just hurt each other. It’ll turn ugly.”

I understood what he meant by hurting each other, but I didn’t know what he meant by ugly. I thought maybe I’d misheard him and asked him to repeat what he had said.

“If we start this way, you’ll never get anywhere and you’ll never accomplish anything, because of me.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I’ll isolate you from others. You’ll be like an island, cut off from everyone else. I’ll end up making it so that people can only know you through me. I’ll want you to not have any other relationships, and I’ll try so hard to keep you by my side that it will turn us both ugly.”

“Then why did you agree to move in?”

“Because I want to live with you, too.”

I shivered in the cold and glared at the lights of the tower. Back then I did not understand, and did not want to understand, what he was saying to me.

W
henever I refer to a certain time as
long ago
, I feel like I am walking somewhere. Maybe those things that we realize only after so much time has passed that we can describe them as
long ago
are what we are made of.

O
n that night long ago, the boy I thought I had known better than anyone else seemed like a complete stranger. It was as if he was gone and I stood alone. I bit my lip and realized that
I could no longer fathom his heart. Having thought that he was all I needed, I felt pathetic. He said my name, but I didn’t answer. He reached out his hand, but I didn’t take it. Was he trying to tell me that being with me had turned ugly? A crack ran through my heart, and a thin sheet of ice formed over it.

H
e turned me around as I glared at the tower and tried to say something to me, but I would not hear it. I left him on the cold, windy rooftop and went inside. Which of us was in the right? I could hear him calling my name and knocking on the door, but I did my best to ignore him. I sat at my desk and resisted the urge to go back outside. The book of poems that we had found in the bookstore where we took refuge from the riot police during a demonstration was lying facedown on my desk. I turned it over and flipped through the pages in defiance of the sound of his knocking. Line by line, I read the poems that I had already memorized after countless readings. I read them out loud to drown out the sound of his voice. I have no idea when he finally left. I fell asleep with my head on the desk, the book of poems on the floor.

And him?

When I opened the door and stepped outside, the roof was covered in snow.

He’s gone
, I thought.

When I realized he was gone, my knees nearly buckled. I looked around for any trace of him and found his footprints overlapping one another in front of the door. He must have paced back and forth there as it continued to snow. I placed my feet inside his crushed footprints and followed the tracks.

They led across the roof and down the stairs. At the entrance to the building, his footprints overlapped again, the snow tamped down until it was hard and gleaming, as if he had been pacing back and forth a long time. The footprints continued down the hill below. They led me in the direction of Miru’s old house. Near the house, his footprints crisscrossed again and turned back. Maybe he had stood there lost in thought, or had stared up at the house that was now occupied by other people. I stood in his prints and looked up at the house in the morning light, and then I, too, turned back. I’d thought that if I followed his tracks long enough, I would be able to find him, but they became impossible to follow. They were the only prints at first, but as the morning progressed, other people left their tracks as well, until finally a garbage truck passed by, covering them all with tire marks. I stared for a long time at the spot where the truck had erased his footprints, and then I headed back home. There, I threw some things in a bag and took the train to my father’s house in the country. I spent the rest of the winter at my father’s side.

B
ut it was not yet over between us.

O
n a day when the snow, which had been falling for over a week straight, was piled as high as a grown man, Myungsuh showed up at my father’s house. He had walked all the way from the city. His toes were frostbitten, and his cheeks were blistered. “Why did you do that?” I asked. He took my scolding without a word. “You’ll go to this length, but you won’t move in with me?” He didn’t answer. He stayed in my father’s
house with us for three days. He went into the mountains to clear the snow from the pine trees just as we had at Professor Yoon’s house, played games of
janggi
with my father, and even followed him to my mother’s grave. When he left, I bought him a train ticket and saw him off at the station for fear that he would try to walk back to the city. Myungsuh, who had not said a word the whole time we were sitting in the waiting room, called out my name at the turnstile where his ticket was being checked. I looked over at him, and he said that after I returned to the city, we should finish what we had started at Namsan Tower. I asked what he meant, and he mumbled,
hugging strangers
 …

O
ne day, after winter passed and spring had come, I saw him standing in front of Myeongdong Cathedral. He was holding a sign that said “Free Hugs.” I didn’t think he would go so far as to make a sign. We had arranged to meet each other there, but I couldn’t bring myself to approach him. Our plan was to first hug a hundred strangers and then reconsider what we would do with our lives. We had agreed to start at Myeongdong Cathedral. I had gone there countless times in search of him. I waited and watched him from a distance. To this day, I cannot explain why I hung back instead of hurrying to join him. What should I call the peculiar resistance that spread through me when I first saw the “Free Hugs” sign? People cast sidelong glances at him and his sign as they walked by. Some even stopped and stared. Not only did he not hug anyone, he looked as if he himself felt awkward, like he didn’t quite know what to do with himself. A foreigner walking past went up to
him and gave him a hug. When the person squeezed him, his arms hung awkwardly at his sides. He stood in that spot for three or four hours. No one else approached him, nor did he approach anyone. But he didn’t look like he was waiting for me. When I saw him drop his sign, as if in defeat, I left.