The hand rubbing his neck stopped. Kyung Jiho’s eyes, which had been fixed on the kitchen, darted around—here, there, and then back again.
Read, read to him?
“Well…”
He had already been severely embarrassed once when explaining the story to the bookstore owner. Kyung Jiho didn’t want to experience that kind of feeling again, so he couldn’t easily answer.
“I’m joking.”
But Geun-yeong had just said it on impulse. He also felt that somehow Detective Kyung reading a children’s book would be unbearable.
Kyung Jiho breathed a sigh of relief, careful not to let the young man beside him notice.
Still unable to open the book, Geun-yeong touched the butterfly on the cover with his fingertips and asked:
“Why… don’t you remember anything before age twelve?”
Actually, he had asked the same question before. And the man had said he didn’t remember why he couldn’t remember. He knew that answer had been a lie. Geun-yeong wanted to hear the honest story.
The man’s head, which had been facing the kitchen, turned forward. He looked at the two of them sitting side by side reflected in the black TV screen. After hesitating for quite a long time, the man began speaking as if telling someone else’s story:
“They say my parents died when I was twelve. Murdered, beaten with a blunt object. I was found in the closet of the very room where my parents were killed. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember my parents’ faces, their names, or even my own name. I even forgot how to read and had to learn again. Well.”
Jiho laughed dejectedly as if it were a funny story.
Geun-yeong was now looking not at the book, not at the butterfly inside it, but at the TV. He was looking at the man’s face in the TV.
“Since I can’t remember, I’m not sad, but it’s really embarrassing. I must have been hiding in the closet, watching my parents die.”
“Cowardly bastard.” With a sigh, a low curse directed at himself passed through his lips.
“That bastard, you know. He was so embarrassed by the fact that he was holding his breath because he didn’t want to die while his parents were being beaten to death, he couldn’t bear the fact that he was a cowardly bastard, so he decided to erase those memories completely. Really. How could it be so easy?”
Kyung Jiho viewed the tremendous shock experienced by the boy who had to witness his parents being murdered with a blunt object differently. He twisted and distorted the story of a poor child who lost his parents at a young age, turning it into the story of a cowardly bastard who simply erased unpleasant memories from his mind.
Having lived with such feelings for 18 years. Geun-yeong thought he understood why this man had to glare at the world with eyes full of wounds. After the man finished his story with self-mocking words, Geun-yeong quietly thought while looking at the black TV the man was watching, then asked:
“So… is that why you became a police officer? For revenge?”
Geun-yeong asked thinking that was probably the case, but the man’s answer was different.
“No. I just lived aimlessly and ended up like this.”
It was true. Though he had to live with help from someone who was said to be an old friend of his parents but whom he couldn’t remember, he had barely managed to live without going astray due to guilt about the situation.
Revenge for parents he couldn’t remember, vengeance toward an opponent he didn’t know—he had none of that. He couldn’t remember anything to the point where such thoughts didn’t even occur to him. He was just disgusted with himself for trying not to remember anything.
Geun-yeong looked back at the book. At the butterfly. He had endured 18 years by obsessing over one memory, while the man had endured 18 years by erasing everything. With wounds that couldn’t possibly have disappeared just because he couldn’t remember them, all tightly wrapped up in an invisible place. He wondered if the butterfly that had kept him alive all this time could also heal this man’s wounds.
“Should I… read it to you?”
“No thanks.”
Kyung Jiho, who had hastily refused, rolled his eyes to check Geun-yeong’s expression, wondering if he might have hurt his feelings. Fortunately, it didn’t seem that way, so he collected his gaze again. Toward the TV. And said:
“Before,”
Ahem, clearing his scratchy throat with a fake cough.
“You already read it to me.”
“When…?”
In the middle of asking, Geun-yeong remembered. In the hospital room, pleading for him to remember, he had recited the contents of that children’s book. That’s right.
“Ah… so I did.”
In fact, this wasn’t something to just say “Ah, so I did” about. That night, Kyung Jiho had smirked thinking about the guy who suddenly recited a children’s book with desperate eyes, chuckled under his blanket, kicked away the strangely itchy blanket, and burst into loud laughter. Then he had whimpered because it pulled at his wound.
During that period, Kyung Jiho was living a life he didn’t want to live. He treated his body recklessly. He didn’t care about situations where he had to get irreversible tattoos, and he had so little self-love that he readily offered his stomach to be stabbed by someone wielding a fish knife. He had intense feelings of inferiority, self-reproach, and self-hatred about his own existence. Wounds from things he couldn’t even remember were severely festering inside him, and living that way, before he knew it, he had become the kind of person who didn’t care about his body and treated it roughly.
Then, like a butterfly suddenly flying up from grass that seemed empty, the cheesy fairy tale recited by Jang Saetbyeol, who had unexpectedly flown into his hospital room, made him laugh. It was funny but somehow stayed in his heart, and because he was curious about the puppy-like guy whose afterimage remained along with the story’s content, his self-hatred had faded.
That was also why he called, drove, and brought home the guy who was once Jang Saetbyeol and now Ji Geun-yeong. That was why he wanted to save him, wanted to keep him alive. Because he wanted to save him, and because he also wanted to continue living himself.
All those feelings were curled up in his heart in the shape of a pink pig. Wondering what this cheesy pig was, Jiho scratched his ear with his index finger. Something in his head or heart was terribly itchy but couldn’t be relieved.
Meanwhile, he noticed the guy who had been looking only at the cover without opening the book was now holding the cover. Jiho lowered the hand that had been scratching his ear. The hand holding the cover didn’t move easily. He remained frozen in that position for so long that Jiho wondered why he was acting like that.
What is he doing?
The one who had brought the book was getting a bit impatient. He wanted to quickly confirm if this was the book the guy had seen. He had asked the bookstore employee for a children’s book about butterflies and ladybugs, but damn, there were over dozens of children’s books featuring butterflies or ladybugs. So Kyung Jiho had to recite what he could remember of the content that Ji Geun-yeong, who was Jang Saetbyeol at the time, had recited in the hospital room. All while staring at the ceiling corner to avoid the employee’s gaze. Fortunately, it seemed to be a quite famous children’s book, as the employee clapped his hands with an “Ah!” and found the book for him. He couldn’t help but wonder if the book he had gone through such mental effort to find was the right one.
While the fingers holding the cover fidgeted, a dog barked three or four times per cycle, for a total of three cycles.
Just as he was about to bark like a dog himself to tell him to hurry up and open it, Ji Geun-yeong let go of the hand holding the front page. One corner of Kyung Jiho’s eye twitched.
Why.
“Why aren’t you looking at it?”
Instead of answering, he sighed. After a long silence, the young man said:
“…I can’t look at it.”
Jiho didn’t ask why. If he was going to tell him, he would answer without being asked, and besides, he seemed to know the reason roughly.
And Geun-yeong told the kind man who had gone to the trouble of finding and buying the book the reason he had buried for 18 years.
“I think it might contain a different story from what I remember…”
The butterfly, the ladybug, the ant—they probably didn’t end up happy after all. Because there were probably no wings, no umbrella, no wind, nothing at all. Because they probably crawled in the rain and eventually died.
“…I can’t look at it.”
Even if everything was written exactly as he remembered and they all became happy, he felt he wouldn’t be able to believe that story anymore. No, it seemed he already couldn’t. That’s why he couldn’t look.
What had raised Geun-yeong whenever he wanted to give up and collapse was not the book but the boy who had read it to him. And now, what Geun-yeong needed was not the book on his thigh but the man who had given him this book. It was painful to see himself wanting to reach a man he shouldn’t touch or desire. He didn’t want to read stories where everyone becomes happy.
The sense of loss for the memory of the boy who had lifted him up was great. The emptiness of realizing that the years he thought he had endured by gritting his teeth were actually because he had been dull and stupid was quite painful. Especially, the fact that it ended as soon as he realized he liked the man he had been briefly leaning on instead of the memory of a boy who didn’t exist in the world—that hurt a lot.
He absolutely could not be happy now.
Nevertheless,
“Have you… eaten?”
There was no need to touch the long-standing wounds of this poor man who had lost his memories from the shock of losing his parents. He didn’t want to make things harder for the man who had already lived a difficult life with his wounds bandaged, even if he couldn’t presumptuously touch or heal them.
“I’m hungry…”
Looking back, his behavior in front of the man these past few days had been so selfish. He had made the man who had only saved him feel severe guilt. Knowing this, fully aware of it, he had done it hoping that the man he couldn’t like would also hurt a little because of him. It was an extremely selfish act.
He felt like he should pretend to be okay even though he wasn’t, to keep the man from feeling guilty. He felt like he should pretend to be happy even though he wasn’t happy at all. He felt like he should force down food that wouldn’t go down and at least pretend to be getting healthier. It seemed like he should stay alive, at least while the man with a duty to help poor citizens was watching over him. Holding back his tears, he decided to try smiling.
“…I’ll make dinner.”
After showing a smile that looked like it might crumble any moment, the guy put the book down beside him and was about to stand up to make dinner when Jiho raised his hand. He pressed down on the head of the guy who was halfway up, forcing him to sit back down, then got up himself.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
