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  Then the elderly couple disappeared after a sudden immigration inspection, sending Gon to one foster home after another before he settled at a children’s shelter. Because everyone in the town had thought Gon was the elderly couple’s grandchild, and there was no official record of the couple leaving for China, they were not able to make further investigations or find his biological parents.

  After staying at the shelter for some time, Gon was sent to live with a childless couple. The couple called him Donggu. They weren’t well-off and in two years, when their own baby came along, they quickly gave Gon up for adoption. He went back to the shelter, where he got mixed up in some trouble that led him in and out of a youth detention center. It was at the Hope Center shelter that he fashioned the name Gon for himself.

  “Do you have hanja letters for it?” I asked.

  “No, I’m not into that complex shit. I just came up with it.” He smiled.

  Classic Gon. Out of his many names—Zhēyáng, Donggu, and Leesu—I thought Gon was the most “Gon-like” name too.

  * * *

  The incinerator incident resulted in a weeklong suspension for Gon. Who knows what would’ve happened if the teacher hadn’t arrived just in time. Professor Yun was called in to school to meet with Dr. Shim. Dr. Shim got extremely angry in his low but fervent voice and regretted letting Professor Yun reach out to me in the first place. The school board warned Professor Yun that if Gon’s behavior remained the same after the suspension, they would have to transfer him to another school. Professor Yun hung his head.

  * * *

  A few days after, I found myself sitting in front of Gon at a pizzeria. Gon’s eyes were no longer glaring. Maybe because Professor Yun sat next to him. I later learned that Professor Yun beat Gon for the first time after hearing about the incinerator incident. Professor Yun was a gentleman, so all he did was hurl a cup he’d been holding at the wall and whip Gon on the calves a few times. But this left a mark on his long-standing self-image as an intellectual, driving him farther apart from his son.

  I wonder what it means to get beaten by a father you’re reunited with for the first time in a dozen years. Before even having the chance to get to know each other.

  According to Dr. Shim, Professor Yun was a man of principle. A man who absolutely hated causing others any trouble, so much so that he couldn’t bear his own flesh and blood completely going against his steadfast philosophy. Rather than feeling sorry for his son, he was more angry that the son he’d waited so long for had turned out to be such a mess. That was why Professor Yun chose to beat Gon and apologize to others time after time. He apologized to the teachers, to Gon’s classmates, and to me.

  It was by way of apology that he had arranged this meal with Gon and me at the pizzeria, ordering its most expensive dish. Professor Yun, with his arms stretched, each hand on his knees, said the same thing over and over out loud. As if he wanted Gon to hear it to the core, his voice trembling, his eyes hardly meeting mine.

  “I am very sorry to have caused you this. It’s all my fault . . .”

  I sipped my Coke from a straw, little by little. It didn’t seem like he was going to finish talking anytime soon. The longer he talked, the harder Gon’s face became. My stomach was growling, and the pizza on the table was getting cold and stale.

  “You can stop now. I’m not here for your apology. It’s Gon’s job to apologize, so maybe you should leave us alone for him to do so.”

  Professor Yun’s eyes widened as if he was surprised. Gon raised his eyes too.

  Professor Yun hesitated. “If I take a walk around the corner, are you going to be okay?”

  “Yes. I’ll call you if anything happens.”

  Hmf. Gon smirked.

  Professor Yun let out a couple of dry coughs and slowly stood up to leave. “I’m sure Leesu feels sorry, Yunjae.”

  “I’m sure he can speak for himself.”

  “Very well. Please enjoy the meal. Do call me if something happens.”

  “I will.”

  Professor Yun put his hand firmly on Gon’s shoulder before leaving the restaurant. Gon didn’t react at the moment, but as soon as his father left, he dusted off his shoulder.

  35

  The Coke bubbled. Gon was blowing into it with his straw, his face turned toward the windowsill. There was nothing much about the view outside, just cars passing by. Then I saw a silver metal pepper shaker in front of the window frame. Its round shape reflected the surroundings like a wide-angle lens. And there I was, in the center. Covered in welts and bruises, my face looked like a boxer who’d just lost a match. Gon was staring at my reflection in the pepper shaker. There, our eyes met.

  “You look like shit,” he said.

  “Thanks to you.”

  “Do you really think I’d apologize?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Then why did you ask him to leave us alone?”

  “Your father talks too much. I just wanted some silence.”

  Gon snorted as if he were trying to cover his laugh with coughs.

  “So, your father beat you?” I didn’t have much to say, so I blurted out what had been on my mind. It must’ve been an inappropriate ice breaker, because Gon’s eyes flashed.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Your father said it himself.”

  “Shut up, son of a bitch. I don’t have a father.”

  “You can’t change the fact that he’s your father.”

  “You want more trouble? I said, shut the fuck up.” Gon snatched the pepper shaker. He gripped it so tightly that his fingertips turned white.

  “Why, you want to go another round?” I asked.

  “Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

  “No, I just wanted to ask. Let me know so I can prepare.”

  Gon seemed to give in, pulling his glass of Coke closer to him. He blew more bubbles into his Coke. I copied him, blowing bubbles into mine. Gon took a bite of pizza, chewed it four times, and swallowed. Then he let out a short, raspy cough. I copied that, too. Chewing on pizza four times, and a cough.

  Gon glared at me. He finally noticed me copying him.

  “Asshole,” he muttered.

  “Asshole,” I followed.

  Gon twitched his lips left and right and saw me do the same. He made a weird face and spat out words like “pizza,” “poop,” “toilet,” “go to hell.” I followed him exactly like a clown or parrot. I even matched the number of breaths he took.

  As our weird mirror play went on, Gon seemed to be worn out. He stopped laughing, and it took longer for him to come up with difficult expressions or motions. I didn’t care and kept copying him, down to the pfpfpf sound he made and his subtle eyebrow twitches. My steadfast mimicking seemed to get in the way of his “creative” ideas.

  “That’s enough.”

  But I didn’t stop. I repeated after him, “That’s enough.”

  “I said, quit it, you asshole.”

  “I said, quit it, you asshole.”

  “You think this is funny, bitch?”

  “You think this is funny, bitch?”

  Gon stopped and started drumming his fingers on the table. When I followed suit, he stopped immediately. Silence, followed by a scowl. Ten. Twenty seconds. A minute. Then he straightened up, and I did too.

  “You know what . . .”

  “You know what . . .”

  “Would you still copy me if I flipped the table and threw all the plates?”

  “Would you still copy me if I flipped the table and threw all the plates?”

  “I said, would you still copy me if I took a broken plate and stabbed everyone here to death, you motherfucker.”

  “I said, would you still copy me if I took a broken plate and stabbed everyone here to death, you motherfucker.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s get this straight. You started this.”

  “Let’s get this straight. You started this.”

  “If you stop midway,
you’re a piece of shit, you hear me?”

  “If you stop midway, you’re a piece of—” But before I could finish the sentence, he swept all the food off the table. He yelled at the crowd, pounding on the table.

  “What are you lookin’ at, you crazy bitches. Enjoying the meal, are you? Stuff your faces, dipshits!”

  He hurled the pizza and all the sauce bottles he could get his hands on in every direction. The pizza landed on the shoe of the woman sitting across our table; sauce splashed over a child’s head.

  “Why aren’t you following me now, you piece of shit! Why you not followin’ me!” he yelled at me, fuming. “You started it, what’s stopping you now, huh!”

  A waiter rushed to stop him, but it was no use. Gon raised his arm as if to hit the waiter. Some customers began taking pictures with their cell phones while another waiter urgently made a call somewhere.

  “I said, follow me, you son of a bitch,” Gon yelled again, but I was already heading out of the restaurant. I called Professor Yun just like I’d promised. He appeared before the phone rang. He must’ve been standing by on the nearby street corner in case of any emergency. Professor Yun headed straight in. I watched the mess in the restaurant through the window. Professor Yun’s trembling shoulders from the back, his big hand slapping Gon’s cheek, over and over and over. His hands gripping Gon’s head, shaking it hard. I turned to leave. It wasn’t that interesting to keep watching.

  * * *

  I was hungry, hardly having eaten the pizza. I stopped by a small snack bar near a subway station and had a bowl of udon. Then I headed over to see Mom. She was asleep as always. Her urine tube was dangling out of the bottle from below her bed. Yellow drops of urine were dripping down one by one. I called a nurse to handle it. Mom’s face was oily. She would’ve been shocked to see herself in the mirror. I cleaned her face with a cotton pad soaked with toner and dabbed it with moisturizer.

  I walked home. It was a quiet evening. I took out a book with a typical story of a high school dropout returning home. He says he wants to be a catcher and protect children in a rye field. The story ends with him looking at his younger sister, Phoebe, in a blue coat, ride a merry-go-round. I kind of liked the ending that was out of the blue. It was what got me to read it over and over.

  Gon’s face would sometimes overlap the pages I was reading. His expression when his father grabbed his head. But I couldn’t make out what that expression meant.

  Just before I fell asleep, I got a call from Professor Yun. He kept pausing, giving way to deep sighs and silence. His point was that he would cover all my medical bills from the incident and that he would make sure Gon would never come near me again.

  36

  There is no such person who can’t be saved. There are only people who give up on trying to save others. It’s a quote by the American accused-murderer-turned-writer P. J. Nolan. He was sentenced to death for murdering his stepdaughter. He pleaded his innocence throughout his prison term, during which he wrote a memoir. It later became a bestseller, but he never witnessed it himself—he was executed as planned.

  Seventeen years after his execution, the real murderer came forward, and P. J. Nolan was officially proven innocent. The person who had committed the terrible crime against his daughter was his next-door neighbor.

  The death of P. J. Nolan was controversial on many levels. While he was innocent of his stepdaughter’s murder, he did have a serious criminal history of violence, robbery, and an attempted murder. Many said he was a time bomb, and that even if he’d been acquitted, he would’ve caused other trouble sooner or later. In any case, while the world judged the now-dead man as they pleased, P. J. Nolan’s book sold like hotcakes.

  Most of his memoir was an explicit account of his deprived childhood and rage-filled early adulthood. He wrote about what it felt like to stab a person with a knife or rape a woman, and the descriptions were so graphic that some states actually banned the book. He described it as if he were explaining how to organize the groceries in the fridge or put paper neatly into an envelope. There is no such person who can’t be saved. There are only people who give up on trying to save others. I wondered what might’ve been in his mind when he wrote these words. Did he mean to reach out for help? Or was it out of deep resentment?

  Was the man who had stabbed Mom and Granny a type like P. J. Nolan? Was Gon? Or rather, was I?

  I wanted to understand the world a little better. To do that, I needed Gon.

  37

  Dr. Shim was always calm no matter what I said, even when I said things other people would find shocking. He remained composed when I told him what had happened with Gon too. That was the first day I told him about myself in detail. About my naturally small amygdalae, the low reaction levels of my cerebral cortex, and the training Mom had given me. He thanked me for sharing.

  “So you must not have been scared when Gon hit you. But you do know that doesn’t mean you were brave, right? Let me be clear—I won’t stand any more of this from now on. It’s also my responsibility. Put plainly, you should have removed yourself from the situation.”

  I agreed. That was actually all Mom had wanted me to learn. But when there is no coach present, the player slacks off. My brain had simply gone about its business as usual.

  “Of course, it’s a good thing to be curious about others. I just don’t like the fact that the object of your curiosity is Gon.”

  “Normally, you would tell me not to hang out with Gon, right?”

  “Probably. Your mom would have said so. That’s for sure.”

  “I want to know more about Gon. Is that bad?”

  “You mean you want to be friends with him?”

  “How does friendship work, usually?”

  “It means to talk face-to-face, like you and me now. To eat together and share your thoughts. To spend time together with no strings attached. That’s what it means to be friends.”

  “I didn’t know I was being friends with you.”

  “Don’t say you’re not.” He chuckled. “Anyway, this sounds like cliché but you’ll eventually meet the people who you’re meant to meet, no matter what happens. Time will tell if your relationship with him is meant to be.”

  “Can I ask why you’re not stopping me?”

  “I try to stay away from judging people easily. Everyone is different. Even more so at your age.”

  * * *

  Dr. Shim used to be a heart surgeon at a big university hospital. He performed many surgeries, and the results were great. But while he was busy looking at other people’s hearts, his wife’s heart started to ache. She went speechless, but he still had no time to look after her. One day, they finally went on a trip they’d always longed for. It was a deep island overlooking the blue ocean. Dr. Shim watched the sunset, sipping a glass of white wine. But all he could think about were the things he needed to do when he returned to work. Just before the sun sank into the ocean, he fell asleep. In the middle of the night, he was jolted awake by the sound of a sudden gasp. He saw his wife clutching her chest, her eyes wide. Her heart’s electrical signals were going haywire. Without warning, her heart had begun beating five hundred times a minute. Everything happened so fast that all he could do for his wife was to stay by her side, crying, holding her hands tight, telling her to hold on and that everything was going to be okay.

  Then her wild, beating heart stopped altogether. There were no electrodes, and no one to rush to his aid when he yelled “Code Blue.” Dr. Shim frantically continued pumping her already-still heart like an amateur surgeon. By the time an ambulance came an hour later, her body was cold and stiff. That was how his wife left him forever, and Dr. Shim hadn’t held a scalpel since. All he could do now was reflect on how much he had loved her and how little he had showed it to her. He couldn’t bear to tear open a person to see a heart beat.

  They hadn’t had any children, and so Dr. Shim was left alone. When he thought of his wife, he was reminded of the savory aroma of bread. She would always bake for him,
and to him the taste of bread was nostalgic. It aroused in him his long-forgotten childhood and brought back faint little snippets of memories. When his wife was alive, there would always be freshly baked bread on the table in the morning. Dr. Shim decided to learn how to bake. He felt that was the least he could do to honor her. Logically, it didn’t make much sense. What was the point when his wife was no longer there to eat his bread?

  I hadn’t known, but Dr. Shim and Mom apparently used to talk quite a lot back then. Mom started out as his tenant and became a regular at his bakery, and they’d strike up random conversations. What Mom had told him most was to take good care of me until I become an adult, should something happen to her. She rarely opened up to others about me—so much so that she went out of her way to keep my condition a secret. The Mom who shared the details of my life and hers with somebody was not the Mom I knew. It was a relief to hear that she had that somebody.

  38

  To borrow Granny’s description, a bookstore is a place densely populated with tens of thousands of authors, dead or living, residing side by side. But books are quiet. They remain dead silent until somebody flips open a page. Only then do they spill out their stories, calmly and thoroughly, just enough at a time for me to handle.

  I heard a rustling among the stacks and looked up to find a skinny boy with a popped shirt collar, hanging back awkwardly before disappearing behind a bookshelf. A star-shaped scab on his head caught my eye. After a while, an adult magazine was tossed onto the counter. A woman with a curly blond mane, big breasts and a black leather jacket that barely contained them, sat on a motorcycle with her back arched and her mouth slightly agape.

  “This is such old shit. I’ll take this for my antiques collection. How much?”