Everything Belongs to Us Page 11

  “Ready for a walk?”

  He smiled.

  She moved the rock out from under his wheel and pushed him toward the gate. They headed toward the stream.

  Years ago, their grandfather had fitted his chair with wheels meant for an oxcart, better for these dirt roads. He had also devised a reversible handle so they could pull him like a rickshaw. They moved him less frequently now since they were weaker, but Namin knew that when he was younger and lighter, they had taken him everywhere with them. To the fields, where they worked all day. To the market. To visit neighbors. Out here, where everyone kept animals and killed calves and piglets born with deformities, Hyun’s disability was no less accepted than it was in the city, but Namin’s grandparents had raised Hyun with their own program of practical defiance. Because he could not be left alone, they took him with them, strapped in an A-frame or pulled in a rickshaw. They touched him and talked to him as they did their animals, their tools and pots and daily implements. All the things they loved, which over decades had become dearer to them than their closest neighbors.

  In retrospect, Namin saw that a healthy child would have fared worse in their care. They would have fretted about how to raise him. How to navigate schooling when neither had completed high school. How to speak so their rural accents would not imprint and mark him as a provincial. They would have suffered doubts, believing themselves unequal to the task.

  But Hyun existed firmly in their world now. He hadn’t seen a city since leaving Seoul as a toddler. Did he remember tall buildings? He had never seen a traffic jam or a commuter crowd. He had hardly seen anything other than their grandparents’ little home, their patch of farm, and these surrounding hills and streams.

  Namin pushed hard over the uneven road, her body light and tense after the hours on the bus. Always, the speed of the chair seemed exhilarating and unreal on the first ride. The weeks—now months—of anticipating the visit, of worrying, flew away on the first ride when they were both so glad to see each other and neither had fully integrated the other’s reality.

  When they arrived at the stream, she slid her brother out of his chair and laid him carefully on the grass. She removed his shoes and socks, balled them up, and deposited them on his chair. Then she half carried, half dragged him to the water, to a spot where he could sit with his back against an embankment, his feet in the icy pool.

  She left him for just a moment to take off her own shoes and socks. Then she ran back, the spring grass not yet soft under her feet. She walked into the cold stream, careful on the slippery rocks, wading back and forth in front of him, splashing him with her feet, raising up arcs of water in the sun.

  She splashed Hyun until his wet pants clung to his thighs, until she could see his teeth chattering. “Time to roast awhile,” she said. And this was the hardest part, bringing him back up the bank, moving against gravity. She would try not to drag him as if he were a too-big log, but she wasn’t strong enough to lift him otherwise.

  By degrees she pulled him out of the water, then brought the chair down to the pebbly mud. After wedging the chair between two boulders, she wrapped her arms around his chest, holding him from behind in a tight hug. In this way, she crab-walked the two of them to the chair, where she tried to side-launch him into the seat, slipping herself out from behind in the process. There was no graceful way to do it, and by the time he was finally situated, they were both smeared with mud and breathing hard. But he was laughing, teeth no longer chattering.

  “Good job,” he said.

  “Don’t congratulate me yet.” She still had to roll him up the bank.

  She sat on the stones next to him, piling a handful of pebbles in his lap. She threw them lazily into the water, barely watching where they landed. She began to talk.

  She told him about the house they would live in together after she graduated and became a successful physician. Each visit, they designed another room or wing of their house. Today, she told him about the gardens. The wide paved paths that would be easy for his chair to roll on. The fruit trees that would bear cherries and pears and persimmons.

  “We can build our own stream. We’ll work out a design to make it easier to get in and out. Maybe an elevator. An open one, like a diving platform that goes up and down over the water.” But that didn’t seem right, it wouldn’t be like wading in a stream if he was still sitting in the chair. “Maybe we should have a kind of float. You can ride it all the way around.”

  “We better have fish,” he said.

  Over the years, they had built an enormous house in their minds, with rooms for every function: for eating, for sleeping. For storing fishnets and cowbells, for listening to stories and music, for looking at pictures of birds. Rooms that smelled like roasting corn, rooms that eliminated stomachaches. Rooms lined with linen, with rubber, with grass. Anger rooms, with pictures of ancestors. A room that was a perfect sphere, built purely for novelty’s sake.

  Sometimes Namin lay awake in her bedroom calculating the number of years until she graduated and could earn enough money to take care of Hyun. Three more years of college. Then medical school? Seven more years until she could earn enough to bring him to Seoul. Could her grandparents keep him seven more years? And who would take care of him while she was at work? At night, these questions swung over her like a pendulum, marking the sleepless minutes. Time with their grandparents was running out for Hyun, yet she could not accelerate her progress to keep up. The minutes of her life marched on in slow, uncaring sequence, semester by semester, year by year.

  “What do you think is the first thing you’ll do when you come to Seoul?” she asked. This was a departure for them. Although they often spoke about the future, it was always tied to the fantasy house, which existed outside of geography in the realm of dreams. In the real world, he and Namin never existed in the same place at the same time, except for these brief visits she managed a handful of times a year. The question had surfaced without her thinking about it, but now that it was spoken, the image of Hyun in the city, navigating her narrow, hilly neighborhood, his chair parked in a sunny spot in their cramped and dusty courtyard, came to her like a physical shock, as thrilling as it was frightening.

  He let his head fall back against his chair and looked at the sky without speaking. The muscles of his mouth and throat twitched under his skin, ferrying his thoughts. As she waited for his answer, her mind flooded with guesses. Ride the bus. Visit your campus. Use an elevator. Look at the river.

  “Take a tour of our house, of course.” His voice, low and warbling, conveyed affection more directly, more intensely, than that of anyone she had ever known. His smile made her feel invincible.

  “You’d better see the city first. So we can decide where to have our house. You want it in just the right place, don’t you?”

  “I don’t care about the city,” he said.

  “Just the house?”

  “Just the house.”

  Even though they both knew it was a game, Namin ached to make it true.

  —

  IT WAS ONLY on the ride back to the city that Namin realized Hyun hadn’t asked about their parents or Kyungmin this time. In the seven years she’d been visiting, he always asked. Of course she knew it was a matter of formality, like children who automatically greeted any adult they saw, but he had never forgotten before. Actually the omission was a relief, and she hoped it marked a new phase in their relationship. It was better if they considered themselves their own little family, just the two of them, separate from the others. She hoped he thought so, too, because that was their future, what she was working so hard to achieve.

  It was late when she let herself in at home. Her mother, wearing nightclothes but clearly still awake, slid open her bedroom door to check which daughter it was. When she saw it was Namin, her face resolved from faint hope back to worry. “How are your grandparents?” she asked without interest. “Anything new?”

  “Fine. Nothing new.”

  “Was the bus crowded?”

&
nbsp; “Not too much.”

  “Get some rest, then, you’ll be tired tomorrow.”

  Namin washed up quickly and prepared her quilts for bed. They had always avoided talking about Hyun, so that was no surprise, but now there was a second sibling they did not talk about. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, Kyungmin was becoming someone they did not know. Another ghost.

  Sunam and his friends chose the northern exposure beside the elms lining the main university quad, the first of many strategic decisions. They could sit there playing cards all day—the record so far was nine and a half hours—and be sheltered from the sun, if not the condescending glances of passing professors. They could also keep an eye on the pretty coeds who swished by on the way to class, the long straps of a handbag carving that alluring valley between their breasts, the compact weight of a leather pouch thumping against a thigh. They could pretend, seeing as how they were within sight of lecture halls, that they might actually attend a class or two this time. After this game. Or that point. If not today, then certainly tomorrow. The vague obligation to heed responsibility at some point, to make some concessionary gesture—after all, they could not spend the entirety of their college careers playing Mighty—made the game that much more exciting, necessary, delicious. This seemed the primary pleasure of life: to sit in the soft shadow of these accommodating trees and call out bids, tossing cards on the wrinkled cotton of somebody’s shirt, whoever had sacrificed it for the day as the makeshift playing surface.

  They always played five to a game—not always the same five, but a predictable cohort. Kihun, Daesung, Chang: guys who played every day and understood one another’s mannerisms, foibles, and strengths, like a tripartite brain. Wonu, a memory champion who played cards the way other people chewed gum, happily enough at first, but becoming bored and mechanical after a few minutes. Youngwoo, who was so taciturn that he spoke only the words associated with the game. Tae, clever at jokes and a willing scapegoat for mistakes.

  Sunam might play every day for a week and not show up again for a month. As a result, he was always welcome and slightly overcelebrated, as if his presence each time were a fluke.

  Tae was dealing when Sunam arrived, but he handed over the deck with an excessively dramatic bow. “Hyung-nim,” he said, proffering the cards with both hands. Tae called everyone hyung-nim, honorific older brother, whether or not they were actually his senior. He had failed the entrance exams twice, making him two years older than his class, and he enjoyed tripping people with this hierarchical quandary. If they accepted his calling them hyung, then he would act offended and demand to know how old they were. If—as they should—they gave him the proper respect due his age, he would enact an obsequious attitude of lowering himself (“No, you’re the hyung-nim. No, you!”), taking perverse pleasure in embarrassing everyone. It all depended on his mood, which was slippery and mercurial.

  They played smoothly for several rounds, with Wonu picking up the most points. It was early in the day and he was still interested.

  13 with spades.

  14 with no-trump.

  Pass.

  17 with hearts.

  Full score with diamonds.

  Friend: queen of diamonds.

  During a lull, Tae lay on his back with an arm flung over his eyes. He wasn’t saying a word, but there was a silent buzz coming off him, as if he were plugged into an electric outlet, gathering charge.

  “You’re quiet today,” Sunam said. “Did you forget to take your vitamins or something?”

  Tae changed positions, propping himself up on his side. His eyes were bright. “You guys ever go to Itaewon?”

  There was a brief but significant pause in the game as everyone registered the question.

  “Where in Itaewon?” Sunam said casually, as if the specific location would change his answer. People he knew didn’t go to Itaewon, a neighborhood around the U.S. Army base infamous for prostitutes. These women worked in bars, nightclubs, and brothels, selling sex and overpriced liquor, which kept the soldiers’ dollars circulating in the local economy. The minister of education had once praised the women as “dollar-earning patriots” owing to their role in attracting much-needed foreign currency.

  On campus, the minister’s inflammatory comments had caused an uproar among the coeds. Immediately, signs went up defaming the government as “the Gross National Pimp.” They put out leaflets, too, exposing how city clinics forced mandatory health testing and tagged women like livestock to guarantee they were free of disease, whereas GIs and local men underwent no testing. It seemed half the city officials were busy regulating the illegal sex trade for their own profit while the other half gave lip service to the moral high ground, pushing for more arrests and police raids. Sunam had read these leaflets with interest, but the information seemed biased and too outrageous to be true.

  “You know what you can get in Itaewon, don’t you?” Tae asked.

  “Play,” Chang said. But everyone had closed up their cards. They watched as Tae flamboyantly unzipped his backpack to reveal the top few centimeters of a glossy magazine. Block lettering spelled out PLAYBOY. “Well, for starters—” Tae tossed the magazine into the circle. “This.”

  It was rare enough to get foreign magazines of any kind, but to get a Playboy, which Sunam had heard about but partly discounted as a Western myth, was genuinely shocking. The game was instantly forgotten as everyone zeroed in on the contraband in Tae’s hands.

  On the cover was a woman photographed in a hazy morning light as if she had just been pulled out of bed. She had soft brown hair, luscious pink lips, and enormous eyes that stared directly at the camera. There was an expression on her face Sunam could not quite name. Wistfulness? Longing? Boredom? Her lace top was loose and coming untied around her breasts. The crescent of a tawny nipple peeked over the edge of the white translucent fabric.

  Tae picked up the magazine, ostentatiously flipping the shiny pages with his thumb. A gesture like fanning a roll of money. They could see foreign shades of flesh flick by. Bare breasts and yellow hair and bits of underwear like fancy gift-wrapping ribbon.

  “Put it away,” said Chang. “Do you want to get us expelled?”

  “Over this?” Tae scoffed. “It’s just a bunch of pictures.”

  “Put it away.” Chang was only twenty or twenty-one, but he looked like an old man. His face was square and puffy. His chest seemed to sink into his belly, which protruded like a cartoon drawing. He’d developed the unfortunate habit of yanking up his belt with a severe twisting motion, as if screwing his pants on over his abdomen. Despite these characteristics, no one dared ridicule him. He was so serious and steady, he could make you feel infantile for even considering it. Compared with Chang, Tae seemed like an overgrown child, even though he was actually older.

  Tae put away the magazine. Under Chang’s insistence they resumed the game, but the attention had irrevocably shifted. The closed bag was like a bomb or venomous reptile, something requiring high vigilance.

  Wonu said finally, “Why are you hanging around Itaewon, anyway?”

  Tae took his time answering, pretending he hadn’t been waiting for someone to ask. “No sense getting an education if you don’t learn anything really useful. This is the sort of thing a man should know.”

  Sunam stiffened at the words, which echoed the taunts of the men in the crowd from the Mun-A strike. He assumed most of the guys who had managed to land at SNU had been too busy studying, like him, to know anything about women or sex. Even if they had the time, dating before college was considered taboo, forbidden by both parents and school administrators, who made it their duty to rout out any inkling of romance. High school was strictly a time for books and equations, not hormones. The boys were required to wear their hair in military buzz cuts, the girls blunt bobs cut at the ear.

  Everything changed in college. Boys and girls grew out their hair and became men and women. They experimented with individualized clothes, finally able to abandon the black-and-white military-style s
chool uniforms they’d lived in for the six long years of middle and high school. For most people—if they were not die-hard bookworms—study loads were relatively light. The educational aspect of college was almost a formality, overshadowed by the general and long deferred enjoyment of leisure. Students were suddenly encouraged to date, not just for fun but for the purpose of finding a marriage partner. They were expected, as if overnight, to become full-fledged people. Adults.

  With their newfound freedom, some of his classmates seemed to have rocketed forward in experience, while others—like Sunam—continued in their well-worn, precollegiate ways. As other guys bragged about bedding girls and becoming “real men,” Sunam worried he was being left behind.

  “Any of you boys have a girlfriend?” Tae said. “Of course not, you wouldn’t know what to do with a girl even if you had one. Now—” He threw down his cards and brought the bag into his lap. “What do you think college is for? Men, we need to get some experience. We need to live, for a change. What are we waiting for? This is the time!” He looked at Sunam. “You ever see girls like this?”

  Sunam thought of the women he’d seen at the factory protest. Of course, not close up and perfect like this cover model. Not dressed up with lace and makeup. But he had seen them, and he wanted to fling them like so many pictures in Tae’s smug face. I’ve seen them. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. If it had been Tae on the roof, Sunam knew he would have cataloged every detail. He would have filed, for future telling and retelling, every breast in size and shape. Every girl who threw herself, kicking, on the ground. Girls who had lost every bit of clothing, their heavy trousers sliding easily over their hips. Tae would have trotted out the image of those girls, stark naked and furious, to titillate anyone who would listen.

  But Sunam felt squeamish about admitting that he’d thought of those workers sexually. That he had stared at their bodies, memorizing their shapes and sizes. Of course he’d thought of them in the days since. The shame of it was still clammy on his skin.