Over the things that kept appearing and then disappearing, a low crying sound accumulated. It was the crying of a woman he had forgotten about for days. A woman submerged in the black river like himself. A woman he wanted to save, and therefore wanted to kill.
* * *
The man who had been sitting in a daze, staring at the crumpled bag, suddenly came to his senses when he noticed the shadow on the floor changing. Dawn was breaking.
Wondering how many hours he had been like this, he roughly calculated the time and couldn’t help but let out a hollow laugh. The sight of himself losing his mind after making such a huge mistake was truly laughable.
He felt sorry for causing what happened, but now he couldn’t even apologize. It seemed he should shake off this hopeless situation and also sort out his current feelings, which he couldn’t even name.
He reached out and grabbed the bag, lifting it up. He raised it to eye level and peered into the opaque bag, then sighed. It was just like his own heart. Faint and opaque. Despite it being his own heart, he couldn’t read what was written there.
He really couldn’t understand why he cared so much about a guy he had only known for a few days. But now even questioning the reason was meaningless. What good would it do to care? He had to let go of those feelings too. He dropped the hand holding the bag.
Thinking how foolish it was to sit there stupidly all night, he sighed and opened the bag. If there were needles or similar items inside, he would need to separate and dispose of them properly.
Inside the bag were a leftover medicine bottle, a tube connected to a syringe, and needles that had been bent to prevent accidental sticks. These were traces of the guy’s efforts to try to live healthily, and seeing them made him sigh again. No matter how much he sighed, his chest remained tight and somewhere in it seemed to ache.
He picked up a syringe whose piston was nearly touching the bottom. Then he smelled it.
While chasing drug offenders, whenever syringes appeared at the scene, he’d developed a habit of smelling them and checking for sediment—a habit that emerged unconsciously now. Considering the guy wasn’t a drug offender, this would be strange behavior if he were in his right mind, but right now he couldn’t even be sure he was sane, so such thoughts didn’t occur to him.
Half in a daze, he moved as his consciousness flowed. He sniffed everything from the needle that had been inserted in the guy’s abdomen to the thin line and the syringe with some medicine left in it. The syringe had no smell at all. It was colorless and odorless.
Just as he was about to let out a hollow laugh, thinking how perverse his actions were, a voice struck his mind:
‘Insulin? Don’t bullshit me.’
It was a guy who worked in the forensic analysis department. When he had handed over a syringe found in a Ukrainian woman’s lodging and explained that the person who left the syringe was diabetic and had taken insulin, the guy had snorted. His words flashed through Kyung Jiho’s mind like lightning:
‘Insulin has a strong medicinal smell.’
Like someone who had been struck by lightning after being in a daze, Kyung Jiho instantly returned to his normal self. He straightened his slouched body and sat up properly. His hands moved quickly to search further in the bag. There was a half-used insulin bottle. He held it to the tip of his nose and smelled it. He grimaced at the strong odor that invaded his nostrils. It was exactly the strong medicinal smell the forensics guy had mentioned.
Hastily gripping the insulin bottle with his other hand, he picked up the syringe and needle that Geun-yeong had been wearing for three days and smelled it again. He separated the tube attached to the front of the syringe and smelled between them too. It was the same when he smelled it again. There was no smell at all.
‘If there’s no smell, it’s meth—methamphetamine. If not that, then plain water.’
There’s no way what this guy had been wearing on his stomach was methamphetamine…
…or was there?
The man who had suddenly stopped smelling also stopped breathing. Even the blinking of his wide-open eyes ceased.
Could it be?
## Track 11. Breaking Free
It was probably morning. But Geun-yeong was lying in bed. Just staring at the ceiling. Listening to the air purifier making fake wind. He had been like this continuously since dawn when he returned to this house.
Last dawn. Shortly after he entered the bathroom, the man followed him in. Passing by Geun-yeong, who stood naked in the middle of the bathroom, the man went to fill the bathtub. When the warm water had risen about a hand span high, he told Geun-yeong to get in.
Come to think of it, there were no devices attached to his body now. Freedom after 72 hours. A bath in the tub had been his top priority at that time. But now, it wasn’t welcome at all. He didn’t want to do it.
But Geun-yeong had to get into the bathtub.
Despite trying his best not to, his hand inevitably trembled as he grabbed the bathtub rail. As he lifted one leg, his body lost balance and staggered. The watching man put his hand under Geun-yeong’s armpit to support him. After seating him in the bathtub in a position like handling a patient with paralyzed legs, the man undressed.
The man, naked like Geun-yeong, entered the bathtub. Sitting behind Geun-yeong and making him lean back, the man started applying oil-type body wash that didn’t foam well from his head to his toes.
He touched his chest, his nipples, his genitals. Was it an act of washing or of defiling? It was simply unpleasant. Various parts of his body ached from the tension of enduring the disgusting feelings. He wanted to shout that he had collapsed just a few hours ago, that he was tired, that the man should stop. But he endured. He couldn’t do that.
Soon after, he felt the man’s penis hardening against his back. Geun-yeong was scared, wondering if he had to do this in his current condition. However, the man had no intention of relieving his erect penis. He lifted Geun-yeong up and rinsed off the body wash oil that had been meticulously applied all over his body with clean water. Without any thought of hiding his penis that nodded stiffly with each movement, he washed, dried, and dressed Geun-yeong in a robe in that state.
Even until he supported his arm up the stairs, laid him on the bed, told him to rest, and turned to leave, the man’s penis remained erect. He deliberately hadn’t put on a robe. He deliberately didn’t cover it, and deliberately showed it. What the man wasn’t covering, what he was deliberately showing, was both sexual desire and anger.
Look at my patience for you.
Though Geun-yeong understood the meaning, it didn’t particularly move him. After all, it was something he would have to endure once his body recovered somewhat, and the restrained and accumulated anger and sexual desire would be more persistent and violent in proportion to how long they had been held back.
‘Violence isn’t a bad habit, it’s a disease. A chronic illness with no medicine. You can’t fix it until both hands are broken or you breathe your last. So choose and decide carefully. If you’re going to go back, you’ll need to become stronger yourself so he can’t treat you recklessly.’
He remembered what the man, whom he had only known as a gangster until then, had once said. After learning the man was a detective, reflecting on those words again, they resonated more deeply.
The man who seemed to be leaving after laying him on the bed returned with a gray box. A 24-hour glucose monitor was attached to his forearm. A different pump was attached to his abdomen. It was the pump he had used before the device he had left at Detective Kyung’s house.
Everything had returned to the beginning. It was back to square one. No, it had gotten worse.
After checking his blood sugar level, the man reactivated the pump. It was just machines attached to his forearm and abdomen, but his entire body felt as if it was tightly bound, unable to move.
From then until now, Geun-yeong had been lying motionless like a corpse, just looking at the ceiling. Through the sound of fake wind created by the air purifier, words exchanged between him and the man floated.
‘If you want to go back, you’ll have to become stronger.’
‘I’m not that weak…’
‘I mean mentally, man. Not physically.’
When he heard the man’s words, he had intended to do so. He wanted to do so. He wanted to fly. Even if not, he wanted to live even if he had to crawl. He wanted to become stronger as the man had said. But before he could become stronger, he had returned.
He felt like he was going crazy. Before going crazy, he just wanted to end it all.
During the time he endured and persevered because he wanted to live, his longing for death had also deepened. The black river frightened him, but on the other hand, he also wanted to jump in. He had such an impulse. He wondered if perhaps there was rest inside it.
Geun-yeong felt that his mental health was not good. Life and death stood at opposite ends, engaged in a tense tug-of-war. He had tried to pull hard once, saying he wanted to live, but ultimately failed. His body, exhausted after using great strength, was being dragged in the opposite direction. He knew what was firmly gripping the end of that rope and pulling with a heavy force. He knew, but didn’t want to confront it. He knew he wasn’t that strong.
Though he wasn’t sleeping, Geun-yeong was dreaming now. They say dreams have no color, but for Geun-yeong, they were always blood-colored dreams. Dreams of killing the man, killing the woman, and then himself dying. He wanted to enter those dreams.
* * *
From early morning, more accurately described as dawn, Kyung Jiho paced in front of the National Forensic Service building in Sinwol-dong. As soon as a close colleague from the drug analysis team arrived at work, he grabbed him and requested an analysis. He said one seems to be insulin, but find out what the other one is.
“Do you think I get paid to dig dirt? Use an SR.”
To his colleague who told him to submit an official service request form so the work record would remain, Kyung Jiho made a gesture of tipping a drink glass with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
The man, who was one of the slickest people Kyung Jiho knew, glared at him while pushing up his glasses by the side. As he took what Kyung Jiho offered, he said:
“Get me a drink, and meat for the side dish.”
“I know all I need to do is slip it in when running the centrifuge, but this bastard’s being difficult. Fine. Meat it is.”
“For someone asking for a favor, keeping your head up high with that attitude doesn’t make me want to help. Lower your head a bit, kid. Not just any meat—Grade 1 Korean beef. Upjin-sal.”
While talking non-stop, the man opened a plastic bag, took out a syringe, held it up to his eyes, and shook it to check for precipitates before asking:
“So what is it? Meth?”
“Don’t know. If I knew what it was, why would I be requesting analysis?”
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
