1

About twelve years ago, one wise student of mine asked me, out of the blue, “Professor, do you have some money to spare?”

“Money to spare?”

“Thirteen million won . . . the more the better, if you have it.”

I looked at him, impassive. He avoided my gaze, tracing the wood grain on the hardwood surface of my office table.

This kid is real trouble. I’d already decided even before he finished talking.

“What for?” I asked.

“I want to set you free.”

Ha—

The loud sigh escaped from between my lips before I even realized. Only then did he look up at me. Maybe it was his heavy eyebrows, but the whites of his eyes seemed unusually deep.

Sung Woojung.

That was his name. A third-year student who had skipped the regular high school route, passed the High School Equivalency Exam, and enrolled at the university at twentyone. His registered address was in Mok-dong, Seoul, but he was living alone in a studio apartment near campus in Jinwol-dong, Gwangju. When he was a first-year, he’d shown up to department events now and then and seemed to take part in study groups and the writing club, but by the following year, he’d all but vanished. He didn’t come to class, let alone finals, and ended up receiving academic warnings at the end of the first semester as well as the second.

The Terminally-Online Recluse Supreme.

That was the nickname his friends in the department gave Woojung. TORS for short. The classmate you seldom saw in school but always found online; the guy who occasionally surfaced in online communities for first-years to drop game items or share e-books and films from dubious sources, then vanished like smoke; the TA’s silent savior who, in the comfort of his studio, single-handedly debugged the cross-platform glitches between the mobile and PC versions of the department’s website. 

But those quirks alone weren’t enough for the title of “Recluse Supreme.” What clinched the nickname TORS was the police raid that took place in the second semester of his sophomore year. 

“Professor, did you hear about Woojung getting raided?” 

I first heard about it over coffee with some students between classes. 

“Raided?” I asked. “Is that some kind of internet slang?” 

“No, no. A real police raid. With a search warrant and everything.” 

The students seemed unfazed, as it was old news to them, but, to be frank, I was stunned. It was something I’d never encountered before. Suddenly it felt like I was the student and they were the ones with lessons to teach. 

“What happened?” 

At my question, chaos erupted. One student said it must be for distributing illegal videos; another guessed it was related to quick-cash loan scams. Quick-cash loan scams? You know, those places that send out emails and upload posts advertising easy loans? He must have been working for one of those scammers. But do they raid people’s apartments for that kind of stuff? They’d have indisputable proof without even having to search his place, no? That brought on a brief silence, then one student—who had a Business Administration major friend living in the same building as Woojung (it was the one with the priciest rent in the area, being a new construction with Renaissance-style pilotis; as such, no other student in our department lived there, or could afford to)—spoke up: 

“Apparently everyone in the building came out to watch when the raid happened. You know those boxes? The ones they use for all the seized property. My friend said they had the NIS logo on them.” 

“Holy shit, then it has to be—” 

And the chaos resumed: It’s got to be something North Korea-related. I knew something was off when he was sharing all those e-book and film files. That must’ve been a manifestation of his proletarian comradeship for us. It could’ve been part of the proletarian revolutionary tactic to destabilize South Korea’s free market. Dude, then what, are torrents supposed to be Lenin’s invention now? Why are you suddenly bringing up Lenin? That film we watched with the professor, it was The Torrent Horse, wasn’t it? That was The Turin Horse, you moron . . . Wasn’t that about Lenin? It was Nietzsche! 

“But, professor, my friend said Woojung had seven computers in his apartment.” 

“Seven? Seven computers for a guy majoring in a field that only needs a word processor?” 

“I study Excel sometimes,” one student offered. 

The conversation veered again. You can’t write novels if you mess around with sciency programs like Excel. I heard Professor Lee draws tables with an actual ruler because he doesn’t know how to make one in MS Word. 

“Gotta hand it to you, Professor!” The students gave me a thumbs-up. 

Without a word, I stepped back into the lecture hall. 

Later, I heard about the raid from Woojung himself. 

“It was nothing.” 

“I heard it was the National Intelligence Service . . . that can’t be right, can it?” 

“It was. It was the NIS.” 

I stared at him. He wasn’t fazed at all—he might as well have been naming his favorite kimbap. 

“The NIS really raided your studio apartment? Why would they do that?” 

I was sure he was lying. 

“They were just putting on a show,” he replied, then added it was because of a defamation charge. 

“That just . . . doesn’t make any sense. I mean, the NIS conducting a raid for defamation?” 

“Because the director of the NIS was the one I defamed,” Woojung said and even let out a soft snort. 

That year was the final year of the Lee Myung-bak administration. The presidential election was scheduled for December, and starting that spring, or actually even from the year before, the internet had become a cesspool of criticisms, hate speech, and insults. People consumed it like entertainment, like some new online game had just dropped. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal. 

“Funny thing is, those people can’t take criticism.” 

At the time, Woojung had been repeatedly posting the same message on an online sports forum, referring to the director of the NIS as the director of “NDS”—National Durian Service. This was in reference to the scandal where the director had tried to smuggle three boxes of durians as a gift for his wife on his way back from a business trip to Vietnam and got caught at customs. The NIS issued a statement explaining that he’d disposed of the fruit at the airport upon learning it was prohibited. 

“Is this . . . what is . . . ” 

I still couldn’t believe it. The director of the National Intelligence Service smuggling in durians—not schematics for new weapons but durians—and filing a defamation suit against a twenty-something college student over jokes? It made no sense. 

“He’s just harassing me,” Woojung said, as if comforting me. “He knows full well it’ll never stick.” 

Twelve years later, I would hear something similar from him, standing outside the main entrance to the Gwangju Nambu Police Station. 

“How can you set me free with thirteen million won?” I asked, settling back into the sofa. 

“There’s this thing called Bitcoin.” 

“Bit . . . what is that, some kind of laundry detergent?” 

I was completely serious, thinking of a similar-sounding laundry detergent brand, which was actually Beat. I wondered, Did he join some pyramid scheme hawking laundry detergent? 

“No. It’s called cryptocurrency, and it’s—” 

Woojung then gave me a lengthy explanation involving blockchain, P2P networks, and mining. He mentioned nodes and algorithms, but none of it made any sense to me. I only kept thinking, Was he always this talkative? 

“If you buy Bitcoin now, it’ll pay off in the future.” 

Just five hundred coins for now. He said they’d cost about thirteen million won. 

I nodded like I understood. “So you’re telling me that I should buy some kind of cyber money, right? Like credits, similar to acorns for Cyworld?” 

“No, it’s not . . . ” Woojung started, but gave up. 

“Have you eaten?” 

“Yes. Well, no.” 

“Let’s grab something,” I said, getting up. “I’ve got a night class.” 

He stared at me, puzzled, for a moment, but stood up as well. I was startled to notice he was shorter than I’d thought. 

Over stone-pot bibimbap at a hole-in-the-wall near campus, I asked, “What gave you the idea?” 

“Pardon?” 

“Why did you want to set me free?” 

Woojung picked up some seasoned bean sprouts with his chopsticks, then put them back down. He downed his water and said, “Because. You’re a writer.” 

“You want me to quit teaching and just write?” 

“Yeah,” he answered in a low voice. 

“Hey, am I that terrible a professor?” 

He only smiled at my remark. 

It must have been because of what he’d said. That evening, we finished eating in near silence and grabbed coffee from the coffee shop next door before parting in a hurry. At the time, I was teaching five days a week, with two night classes running until 10 p.m. The small private university outside of Seoul where I worked didn’t have the budget to hire faculty when needed, which meant I carried a heavy load. By the time I got home after class and finished all the household chores, I’d sit at my desk to write, and a dull ache would wrap around my temples, like elastic bands cinched too tight around my ears. Even in that condition, I wrote anyway, but . . . when I opened the file the next day, there they were: sentences I couldn’t possibly read without cringing remained on the page, their words like malaria pathogens, staring back at me with blank faces. I should’ve deleted them on the spot, but instead, I kept trying to salvage them, until finally I took out my frustration on the poor delete key—and then it was back to square one. Day after day after day. 

I tried not to show any of this to my students. One of them worked part-time loading and unloading trucks when he wasn’t in class, and I’d heard about another student, who’d come to study late in life, working weekends, carrying a double-door refrigerator on his back up stairwells for a moving company. How could I possibly grumble in front of them? There were people with actual grounds for complaint. So I’d walk into class and, like a middle-school student trying to look cool by bragging that he’d watched all the TV he wanted and slept all he wanted before an exam, I’d say things like: “Everyone has their own circumstances, their own life. That’s where the aesthetics of fiction comes from.” Empty words. 

And yet. 

This kid saw something. I kept thinking this as I drank my Americano with him. He must have seen something.

And naturally I found myself drawn to him. 

“Do you have some of that yourself? That Bit-whatever?” 

To my question, Woojung answered quietly that he’d managed to get about two hundred so far. 

Geez, this kid. 

As we walked out of the coffee shop, I said to him in a serious voice, “Don’t get mixed up in stuff like that.” 

He just looked at me. 

“Setting yourself free doesn’t happen with that kind of thing, how can it? Even if you hoard a mountain of acorns, a squirrel is still just a squirrel.” 

After saying that, I gave him a quick wave. I had ten minutes before the night class began. 

That had been twelve years ago. 

2

Fast forward to this year, the third Friday of June 2024, around 2 p.m. I stood under the awning outside the Civil Service Office of the Gwangju Nambu Police Station, constantly opening and closing the contacts on my smartphone. 

I should give him one last chance, shouldn’t I? 

I hesitated. 

A hot, muggy breeze kept pushing into the shade, carrying with it a smell of something metallic. At the guard post by the parking lot entrance, a young conscript cop—one of those kids doing their mandatory military service with the police instead of the army—kept glancing my way. It seemed he was looking for a chance to leave his post for a moment once I headed inside. 

If he asks for forgiveness, if he admits what he did. 

Then I’d call the whole thing off, turn around, get in my car, and drive away. Going to the police station, over something between a student and his professor . . . 

But if I’m being honest, I was also imagining other scenarios. Filing a lawsuit, being interviewed by detectives, taking the witness stand in court. He insulted me and harassed me constantly. My days have been shattered, and I’m even receiving medical treatment due to extreme stress—no, no, I’d better scratch that last part since I haven’t actually seen a doctor. This was the kind of routine I’d fallen into around that time whenever I thought about the incident. Moments when I kept driving myself into an even more miserable state, when what had never happened mingled with what I shouldn’t say.

Ha—

  Out of old habit, I let out a long sigh and returned to my original resolution. Then I tapped the call button as if I were being extremely generous. 

“Hello?” 

After a few rings, a voice drifted through the phone. We’d exchanged texts now and then, but it had been ages since I’d heard his voice. Calm and composed, neither high nor low— it was Sung Woojung. Maybe it was his tone, but I found myself flustered and tongue-tied. Perhaps that was when the storm started brewing in my heart. How can he be this calm at a time like this? Isn’t this a bit brazen? Isn’t this, in itself, another kind of insult? 

Quietly, making sure not to make a sound, I tapped the call-record button. 

*

The strange happenings began in early March of this year. 

I woke up late in the morning and checked my phone to see that I’d received more than two hundred messages on the messaging app KakaoTalk. (Around that time, I’d been putting my phone on silent after work.) Over forty missed calls from restricted numbers. I sat on the edge of my bed and pressed one hand to my forehead. 

What the hell is this? 

Did Father . . . again? 

That’s where my mind went, naturally. 

Some debt I didn’t yet know about. 

What happened was, starting the previous year, I’d been barely scraping by because of a debt that had appeared out of nowhere. It was a debt incurred from my father’s failed real estate investment, and the total came to 430 million won. Monthly interest alone was 2.6 million; principal and interest together came to nearly 4.8 million won. When I went to the bank counter and received the slip with that number written on it, I walked back to the waiting area and sat down on the sofa. Strangely, I felt calm. I thought of the date tree in the garden of the old house where I grew up. Not the lush summer tree but the thin, bare one with its reddish branches in the dead stretch between late autumn and early winter. When I was in elementary school and middle school, I was too scared of that tree to walk past it or even look at it. I kept imagining someone was hanging from the top. On blustery days, the rattling of branches crept through the window into my room, and the sound was like — well, like someone desperately clutching a hand over their mouth to stifle their crying, their breath leaking out. In those days, I tried so hard not to listen, and yet I kept putting my ear to the window. On the slip the bank teller had given me, the one with the numbers, I carefully sketched branches of the date tree. With 430,000,000 written in the background, I drew the long, arching limbs that resembled the strands of someone’s hair. My heart kept sinking. But I never grew afraid. 

Ten years earlier, my father had taken out a loan of nearly 200 million won, using the apartment where he lived as collateral. With the money, he purchased some wooded hills in the town of Jucheon in Yeongwol County, Gangwon Province, apparently planning to open a camping ground. Of course there was a real estate broker involved. A man called Mr. Lee, who claimed to be a distant relative— someone my father had met for the first time at a family clan gathering. While Mr. Lee was shuttling my seventy-three-year-old father around Yeongwol, in and out of banks and credit unions and a judicial scrivener’s office, I was completely clueless as to what was going on. Because my father was in Wonju, Gangwon Province, and I was in Gwangju, but that was no excuse. I knew about the property. My father had bought it in my name. After you retire, you can go there and write as much as you want. Writers need a place like that, don’t they? That’s what he said when he called asking for copies of my ID, my registered seal certificate, a letter of attorney. Hills? Why are you suddenly buying hills? Only people who want to be close to nature live in places like that. Writers all live in cities these days. And yet, I sent him all the documents he requested. Apparently this is how people pass on their assets to their children. That way, you can avoid inheritance tax or gift tax. I learned later that Mr. Lee had coached my father to say exactly this. 

Those hills, purchased for a little over 200 million won, came back to me a decade later as a debt of 430 million. 

So naturally, I assumed those two hundred messages and forty missed calls were related to that. Like some other loan or unpaid taxes, some private lender who hasn’t surfaced yet. 

But that wasn’t it. 

hey gorgeous, what u wearing rn? 

u said call u so why tf aren’t u picking up?? 

u frigging bitch! it’s me, oppa! send a pic rn

Most of the messages were like this. (Actually, much worse.) Trash talk and insults sent to me, mistaking me for a young woman. And yet also informing me that they’d come see me right away. All the phone calls from restricted numbers seemed to be more of the same. Messages and calls from not one person but dozens, all arriving around the same time. 

With a sullen face, I scrolled through all of them, one by one. Some contained insults I’d never even heard before, and there was plenty of slang I couldn’t decipher (though they were clearly profanities, from context), but the more I read, the more relaxed I became. It was obvious that these were misdirected. They’d arrived at my number, but I clearly wasn’t the intended recipient, and they had nothing to do with some other debt I didn’t know about. Hate speech like this was everywhere these days. I hurried to get ready for work and soon forgot about the whole thing—dismissed it as a fluke, a misunderstanding, a prank at most. Geesh, kids these days . . . I thought, blaming the hollow world. 

Of course, I didn’t know that was only the beginning. 

*

“Hey, it’s me. How have you been?” 

I tried my best to keep my voice cool. But doing that made me feel like something was tickling at my throat. 

“Good,” Woojung answered, his voice flat. “And you, Professor?” 

“Well, you know, same as always.” 

Neither of us spoke for a moment. The brief silence made me uncomfortable, but I decided to endure it. He would be the one more on edge, anyway. That thought gave me strength. 

“What’s going on?” Woojung was the first to break. 

Instead of answering him right away, I waited. Then I said, “Don’t you have something to say to me?” 

This time, he stayed quiet. It felt like cowardice. About two weeks earlier, I’d sent him the same message by text. Don’t you have something to say to me? He hadn’t replied then, either. That gave me conviction. 

“I’m at the police station right now. I wanted to confirm with you one last time.” 

“Okay. What is it?” 

“No, no, I’m not the one to talk. You’re the one who should be telling me.” 

I pulled the phone away from my ear for a second to make sure the audio recorder was running. By then, “one last chance” and “forgiveness” had begun to sound useless. What I need now is evidence, or a confession. Maybe that’s what I’d wanted from the very beginning. 

“Professor.” 

“Yes?” 

“You don’t have to talk to me, just do what you want to do.” 

I said nothing. 

Woojung continued, “This is just to harass me, isn’t it? If you’re going to do that anyway—” 

“So you have nothing to say to me?” I cut him off, my voice sharper, insistent. 

“No.” 

“Okay, I got it.” 

That was the end of our conversation. 

I glared at the conscript officer in the guard post for a moment, then took one short breath. Then I opened the door to the police station and walked in. This was the real beginning of Scenario B. I did my best to keep my cool and braced myself to be—to maintain the attitude of—the professor who had struggled to be as magnanimous as possible but could no longer take it and so, reluctantly, had come to the police. 

I believed I was in the right. 

*

The flood of nightly messages and calls from restricted numbers that began in early March continued every day for an entire month. Some days, there were fewer than twenty, but most days, there were over a hundred. They usually began with “cutie” or “hey babe,” but ended with “fuck it, bitch!” and “imma keep calling u til the end, just watch!” They came between 2 and 5 a.m., without fail. Once, I stayed up during those hours to answer every single call. When I said, “Hello,” nearly all of them muttered, “Fuck, it’s a guy. Fell for it again!” and hung up. But, regardless of my voice, a few stayed on the line for at least five minutes, making strange moaning sounds. (In those cases, I was the one who had to hang up.) Still, it didn’t bother me much. I figured I could just ignore them. Sure, sure, you pathetic idiots. Call and text all you want. That was the extent of my feelings. My information must have leaked from somewhere. Oh no, was it the bank, maybe? Father had mentioned looking into private lenders and payday loans . . . 

Then, starting in April, the calls came not only during the middle of the night but also during the day. While I sat in a strategy meeting about job placement for graduates in our department, while I led a writing workshop for grad students, while I had a late lunch with colleagues, my phone rang without a pause, like an old window rattling in the wind and rain. 

“Professor, shouldn’t you take that? It sounds urgent.” 

Whenever my students said this, I’d hand them my phone. “Take a look. It’s driving me insane.” 

They gathered around it in a circle. 

“Why . . . are they calling you ‘babe’?” 

“Looks like you’ve been hacked.” 

“Professor, have you been going on those . . . websites?” 

All eyes turned to me. I closed my eyes and shook my head without a word. 

Then one of my graduate students offered practical advice. 

“Professor, try changing your KakaoTalk profile picture.” 

“My profile picture?” 

Until then, I’d never uploaded a photo on my profile. I hadn’t even filled in my name; a question mark graced the empty space where the name should have been. 

“Post your picture and your name. That way people won’t mistake you for a woman.” 

Aha. Then my students began pouring out more suggestions. Post a picture of you in hiking clothes; I think the one where you’re getting an IV would be best (that was a picture I’d sent them, explaining why I couldn’t make a study session); we could take one right now; just stand over there by that orchid pot, it’ll do wonders, and so on. I sat quietly, listened, and uploaded a picture that looked the least embarrassing. 

“In any case, what could possibly have caused this?” I muttered in a dejected voice, and suddenly the room fell silent. 

“Sure, my information could’ve leaked, but this is just . . . ” 

One grad student raised her voice with righteous anger. “Frigging Korean men are the problem. It’s like hatred is their default setting!” 

She said this staring straight at me, and I couldn’t help but close my eyes again. 

Perhaps thanks to my students’ advice, I did receive fewer messages from that day on. The hundred-plus texts I used to receive day and night dropped to three or four. (Mostly questions like “You’re not actually a man, right?” “Is that a pic of your dad?”) That was encouraging. But the calls from restricted numbers were another problem. Those kept coming. If anything, there seemed to be more of them. 

Once, I was driving to a resort in Sinan, South Jeolla Province, for a faculty workshop, accompanied by my colleague Professor C. The whole ride, my phone was ringing off the hook. My car’s GPS had been broken for ages, so I used an app on my phone, but the calls kept interrupting . . . Eventually, it got to the point where Professor C handed me his own phone and said, cautiously: 

“Professor Lee, these calls—they’re because of that problem, aren’t they?” 

That problem C mentioned was my debt. Last February, before the semester started, I happened to mention it over drinks at a pub near campus. There are fixed costs bleeding me every month, but then 4.8 million on top of that? It’s suffocating. Loans on top of loans . . . 

He’d listened quietly, then said in a soft voice, “But you’re a writer, Professor Lee, so you should keep writing, given the situation.” 

I knew full well what C meant. And yet there was such a thing as a heart that couldn’t bear his sincerity. 

“Professor C. The thing about anxiety . . . when it gets thick enough . . . it turns into hate, and . . . ” 

What I mean is that I can’t write anything in this state, everything I write is garbage. I said more, but that’s about all I remember. But, what I do remember—what stayed with me for a long time—was something C said, almost to himself, right before we left the pub: 

“But Professor Lee, hate sometimes comes when you don’t know yourself very well.” 

That day in the car, I said nothing to him about the calls. I just smiled and left it at that. Because a thought had suddenly crossed my mind: This might not be a simple data breach; someone might be leaking my number on purpose, out of spite, because of “that problem.” For instance, someone like Mr. Lee, who had coaxed my father to purchase the hills. (Two years earlier, my father had sued him for fraud, as it turned out he’d been in cahoots with the previous landowner and the judicial scrivener, and was tangled up in several other lawsuits involving real estate scams.) Why hadn’t I thought of that before? I was nearly convinced it was that. 

The calls kept coming. I thought about changing my number, but I couldn’t. I, again, had reasons I couldn’t change it . . . So I kept suspecting Mr. Lee and his associates, waiting to get my hands on proof. 

Then I actually stumbled onto something. 

The phone call that came around 1 a.m. on Children’s Day, May 5, was from a guy who must have been in a hurry, or maybe he didn’t know how to hide his number because he called me with his caller ID fully visible. Instinctively, I hit the call-record button and answered. 

“Huh? Huh? Goddamn it . . . ” 

The moment he heard my voice, he was about to hang up. 

“Hey, wait, wait. I can see your number. The last four digits are 2832, right? If you hang up now, I’m going to keep calling you the same way you’ve been calling me.” 

He didn’t hang up. Instead, he kept muttering in a low voice, “Man, this is bad.” 

“Okay, so what I want is simple,” I did my best to keep my voice calm. “How did you get this number?” 

“I don’t know anything. I didn’t do anything, I just happened to get it.” 

He seemed to be a boy freshly out of puberty, his voice only recently dropped. A kid who thought speaking tough was a way to protect himself. 

“So, how did you get this num—” 

Even before I finished speaking, 2832 said, “It’s not my fault. She was the one who said she wanted to see me and gave me her number and told me to call . . . but then you answered . . . ”

“Where? Who gave it to you?” 

“In a video game. She sent me a note.” 

“A video game?” 

StarCraft, he said. 

People still play that? 

“That’s it then, right? I told you the truth.” 

The boy was about to hang up again. 

“No, no, wait, wait,” I was almost pleading. “Can you tell me her username? Please. It’s really important.” 

He hesitated for a moment, then told me to hold on a second. I knew I was close. 

“The username is . . . how do you even say this? Turn . . . turning horse? It’s spelled T-U-R-I-N H-O-R-S-E.” 

“Turin Horse? You’re sure?” 

“Yeah.” 

That was the end of our conversation. 

Turin Horse. 

From The Turin Horse. 

I knew exactly who that username belonged to. 

The guy who had watched that film over twenty times after I first told him about it. 

It was Sung Woojung’s username.

3

“Gee, all kinds of stuff happens these days, don’t they?” 

The detective’s name was Park Doyoung. Of the Phishing Investigation Team in the Detective Division. 

That was what he said while scrolling through the messages on my phone. 

“Bereavement scams are on the rise these days. You’d be surprised how many people fall for them.”

He swiveled his computer monitor around to show me. On the screen was a text message: I am deeply saddened to share the news of the passing of my beloved mother. A simple funeral service will be held at—followed by a clickable link. 

“Once you click that link, your phone gets hacked and becomes a ‘zombie’ phone. Sixteen people fell for it in our jurisdiction this month alone.” 

I nodded half-heartedly. 

Detective Park Doyoung, the man I’d been told to speak with, looked about ten years younger than me. Wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and a white slim-fit dress shirt, he looked more like a church lay leader or a sales rep than a detective. 

“If people abuse others’ good intentions, eventually there won’t be any good intentions left anywhere.” 

He handed my smartphone back to me. 

“And you suspect your student is behind all this?” 

I stared at him without answering. I’d already told him all about what had been happening to me, the username I’d discovered, the story about my student who used the username. I was the one who laid everything out, and yet hearing those words come out of his mouth, I felt like I was the one with issues. A heartless teacher accusing his own student. That phrase wouldn’t leave my head. 

“I’m not certain,” I said. “But I’d like to find out.” 

Two days after my call with 2832, I dialed the customer service number for the Korean branch of Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind StarCraft. (Even while I was on the phone, calls from restricted numbers kept coming.) After navigating through several layers, I finally connected with the Manager and launched into a long, slightly exaggerated explanation of my situation. I can’t even think straight because of the calls—they’re coming in even now, as we speak—and all I want to know is simple: the identity of the user behind the username “Turin Horse.”

After listening patiently, the Manager said, “Oh, sir, I’m terribly sorry for all the trouble caused by one of our users. Please allow me to apologize on their behalf.” 

Then, she continued in a voice more exaggerated than mine, “But I’m afraid we cannot provide that information.” 

Under no circumstances could they disclose personal information about their users. 

I raised my voice at her pointlessly. “Did you hear what I said? I literally can’t live a normal life right now.” 

“Of course, sir, I understand completely. But providing that information would mean breaking the law.” 

“There’s really no way?” 

“I’m very sorry, sir. Please understand that we value your opinion as a customer—” 

She was immovable. I had no choice but to hang up with nothing solved. Before I did, I snapped hysterically, “I’m not your valued customer! I’ve never even played your stupid game!” 

“Is there some kind of bad blood between you and this student?” Detective Park asked, hands poised over his keyboard. 

Bad blood. Bad blood . . . 

I wasn’t sure. That question had plagued me ever since I heard the username “Turin Horse” from 2832. But no matter how I dug through my memories, nothing came to mind. I believed I’d been on good terms with Sung Woojung and assumed he’d feel the same. Other than reading, writing, eating, and talking together, what more could there be between a professor and his student? It was frustrating. 

Could it be . . . that? 

After racking my brain for days, an image came to my mind out of nowhere, like a page from a picture book you’d randomly picked up in a bookstore. Perhaps it was a memory I’d invented in an effort to find a possible explanation, and perhaps it had been distorted and exaggerated, but for some reason, once the thought entered my mind, Woojung’s expression that day grew sharper and clearer. That moment, I had realized that his back was rather hunched, as if something about him were twisted. 

But even if my memory were accurate, that had been nearly a decade ago. It was far more plausible that he had no memory of it at all, had not even thought of it in years. And above all . . . there was no context, none whatsoever.

It was beyond my comprehension. I could forgive him, if only I could understand what was going on . . . 

*

After we had bibimbap together at the hole-in-the-wall near campus, Woojung started coming by my office now and then. I’d return from class to find him sitting at the table with his hands on his laptop keyboard and a serious look on his face. (I never locked my office door when I was on campus.)

“What is it? What’s with the serious face? Did someone sue you again?” 

That was my standard joke every time I saw him, and he’d scratch his temple and quietly chuckle. We shared the same space but didn’t talk much. Him at the table, me at my desk (separated by a partition), we worked on our own things. After hours of going through paperwork and student assignments, I’d look up and realize he’d packed up and left. He didn’t even say goodbye, I’d mutter sometimes, but I was never disappointed. I believed it was his way of being considerate. 

Once, he asked me with a look of genuine disgust, “Professor. Why is this supposed to be a good movie?” 

He’d been watching The Turin Horse on his laptop. 

I answered in jest as always, “It’s black and white. All black-and-white films are good films.” Then I added, “Isn’t it terrifying?” 

In all honesty, that film—the story of a horse, a man, and his daughter, all awaiting death in the house without moving as a storm raged outside—frightened and terrified me. I didn’t want to be afraid alone, so I often recommended it to my students. 

“Is it good because it’s terrifying?” he asked. 

I answered in a voice full of uncertainty, “Well, in art . . . it’s not easy to arouse that kind of emotion, is it?” 

“I . . . think the daughter in this film is just foolish,” he remarked and went back to watching. 

But even after that, I saw him watching the same film again and again. (I asked him later and he told me he’d seen it at least twenty times.) He even changed his username to the film title, and revised his position on the daughter. 

“Now that I’ve watched it more, it’s not that the daughter is foolish . . . she was trapped. She was the horse itself.” 

I didn’t take his words very seriously. 

In December, I went on an overnight retreat to a vacation lodge near Metasequoia Road in Damyang with my students from the department writing club. It was something of an annual tradition, a consolation trip for those who dropped like autumn leaves from the Spring Literary Contests, the newspaper-sponsored competitions that served as springboards for new authors, and that year, Sung Woojung, who hadn’t partaken much in club activities, came along as well. There were eight of us in total. 

We strolled loosely through Gwanbangjerim Forest where the leaves had all turned rusty red, stopped for a late lunch on Damyang Noodle Street, then returned to the lodge and got right into grilling pork belly and drinking soju. Guys, I keep turning down offers to judge the Spring Literary Contests because one of you might win, but, huh? How many years has it been now? I cracked joke after joke, trying to lighten the mood that kept growing heavy, but that wasn’t enough to shake the look on their faces, so I kept downing shots. In the end, I got drunk first and headed up to a room (on the loft level, and I vaguely remembered climbing the stairs on all fours), and fell asleep immediately. 

I was deep in sleep when someone shook me awake. 

“Professor, I think you need to come down for a sec.” 

He was a second-year student, one of the youngest in the writing club. 

“What’s going on?” I asked, unable to even open my eyes. 

“It’s . . . I think something’s about to go wrong.” 

What does he mean, something’s about to go wrong? Did these kids get into a fight? 

I put on my glasses and ran my fingers through my hair. 

When I went downstairs, the students were still drinking, looking the same as before. It was around three in the morning. Soju bottles and paper cups were strewn across the coffee table. Christmas carols were drifting from a Bluetooth speaker someone had brought, and the kids were talking in twos and threes, occasionally bursting into laughter. Bloodshot eyes, a faint smell of mint wafting from somewhere, street lights growing brighter as the night deepened, warmth and coldness, relaxed minds, and anxiety hidden within . . . 

And there, in the corner near the decorative fireplace, I caught sight of Sung Woojung’s back as he sat hunched over, clutching a backpack and crying. As well as the white pellets scattered around him. 

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked the second-year student standing next to me. 

“He’s been like that for an hour.” 

He said he’d come to wake me because Woojung was making him nervous, because he felt like something might go wrong. 

Upon closer look, I realized the white pellets were popcorn. Someone, or perhaps several people, had been throwing them. As I watched, one of the fourth-year students threw popped kernels in Woojung’s direction. 

“Damn it. Give me back my fucking backpack! What the hell are you doing clutching my backpack?” 

I made the conscious decision to approach Woojung first. He didn’t stop crying even when I sat down beside him. 

“What’s going on? What happened?” 

At my question, he lifted his head for a moment and stared at me. He must have been crying a while—his eyes were red and puffy, his forehead was pale. Then he buried his face in the backpack again and cried even harder. 

“Professor . . . they’re all fools,” he sobbed. 

The fourth-year got to his feet. “Just fucking stop!” 

Woojung continued, still sobbing, “They don’t even know they’re fools . . . and they keep doing foolish things . . . ” 

“Goddamn it, for real!” 

I don’t know why, but everything felt annoying in that moment. The immaturity of being unable to hide his feelings, the mindlessness, the self-absorption. Those judgments solidified inside me. 

I spoke in a hard, cold voice. “Stop.” 

That was what I said—not to the fourth-year student but to Sung Woojung. 

“You’re the one being foolish right now. So stop.” 

He looked up at me. His eyes showed embarrassment, but soon turned to resentment. For a long time afterward, I didn’t forget his gaze. I didn’t look away. 

*

“Professor, I’m sorry to say this, but . . . ” Detective Park trailed off. “It looks . . . it might be a little difficult to press charges.” 

“Why’s that?” I asked, leaning forward. 

“You didn’t incur any financial damage, and . . . the problem, if there is one, is that he gave your number to other people, but that’s not enough to . . . ” 

“Even though I’m suffering this much?” 

Detective Park nodded as though he sympathized with my situation. But his words said otherwise: “The problem is really the people who made the calls, not the person who gave them your number, so . . . ”

He added that it’d be better to press charges against those who made the calls, but even that was tricky. Because all they did was make calls. 

That was the precise moment when a strange hostility began to envelop me. What’s tricky about it? All they did was make calls? Does he really not understand their disgusting intent? I stifled my anger, flexing my calf muscles. The humiliation and helplessness I felt every time my phone rang—and yet, the reasons I couldn’t change my number. Could this man even fathom what was going on inside me? What kind of circumstances surrounded him? Could he also have debt beyond his ability to pay off? 

Last autumn, my father, having been diagnosed with hydrocephalus, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s all together, had begun calling me at all hours. Nine, ten times a day. Every time we connected, he asked the same question: “How come you don’t call these days?” 

At first, I tried to take it matter-of-factly. This isn’t my father talking, it’s his disease. But it only lasted a few days. He kept bringing up the wooded hills. I got fifty-three points on the land transaction permit score. Fifty is passing, so it was all good from the start. You have no idea how hard Mr. Lee worked. It wasn’t the Yeongwol County Office he had to visit, but the Provincial Office’s Forest Management Department and the National Forestry Cooperative Federation. And every trip cost money, so what could I do? He didn’t want to burden you, so he even looked into loans with the land as collateral . . . Say, I heard, you’d have to register legally as a person engaged in forestry. Want me to look into it for you? 

It was unbearable to listen to those words. So on days when I couldn’t bring myself to answer his calls, I set my phone on silent after work. Then my mother would call immediately. 

“Hon, can’t you call him to save your poor old mother?” 

That was exactly what she said. She said my father trembled with anxiety when he couldn’t reach me by phone. He would strip off his diaper and urinate on the bed as if it were normal. My mother, who refused to send him to a nursing home, saying, “I can’t do that to your poor father,” was desperate as she pleaded with me. 

And once—just once—I’d yelled at my senile father. 

“Father! Please just stop!” 

At my words, he stopped talking and went silent for a moment. 

Then he said, “I just . . . since you’re a writer . . . I really like that you’re a writer, you see.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying!” 

And then I burst out crying. 

After listening to me sob in silence, he spoke with sadness in his voice: “Why are you crying? You miss your mother? Oh you poor thing . . . ” 

It was his disease speaking to me. 

“Then what can you do for me here?” I lowered my voice and asked Detective Park. 

“Well, even if you do decide to press charges . . . it’ll be processed by priority.” 

His face showed some annoyance. Perhaps, out of his seasoned experience, he’d sensed my hostility in that moment. It was a defense mechanism against hostility. That was how it felt. 

“You mean you’re not interested in things like this.” 

He gave no response. 

I got to my feet. “Seeing as you’re just sitting there talking about ‘good intentions.’” 

He looked at me with an impassive face. 

Without glancing back, I left the station. 

4

Sung Woojung finished all four years of college but didn’t graduate on time and ended up registering for his mandatory military service while still in school. About three days before he shipped out, he came to see me in my office. 

“How’s it going? It’s going to be rough, serving at your age.” 

I offered a rather perfunctory greeting. Since the retreat, something between us had evaporated, but I didn’t think much of it, nor did I care to. 

“Professor,” he said, looking me in the eye. “You said before that everyone has their own circumstances and their own life, right? That the aesthetics of fiction comes from that.” 

I sat quietly, listening. 

“But . . . is that really true? Is that really the aesthetics of fiction?” 

Around that time, I’d heard that Woojung had moved out of his studio apartment near campus and into a cheap, cramped room at a goshiwon . All kinds of rumors were circulating among his classmates in the department— someone said his father’s business had flopped; another said he’d simply moved because his lease was up, that he was only staying at the goshiwon for a few days before registering for the military service. But the most credible account came from the second-year student, who’d grown close to Woojung since the retreat. That’s not it. He said he was the one paying his own way the whole time. The studio apartment, he paid for with the money he earned himself, and now that he’s not making money, he’s cutting costs wherever he can. 

“Hey, what’s all this about fiction when you’re about to ship out?” I said, trying to change the subject. Or actually, he was making me uncomfortable. 

“Then . . . why do we write fiction?” Woojung muttered, almost to himself. “Is emotion really all there is?” 

That day, sitting in my car in the Nambu Police Station parking lot, I called Woojung again. He didn’t answer, and yet I kept tapping the call button, more and more obsessively. Fine, don’t answer. Please don’t answer. That was part of what I felt. Cold sweat ran down my back, and my hands shook. I was that furious. Woojung still didn’t pick up. 

Unable to stop myself, I started typing a text. Pick up the phone. I was about to hit send when . . . when . . . when my eyes drifted to the messages we’d exchanged around last Christmas. They were texts from those days when the strange calls hadn’t yet started, when I was consumed by interest payments on the debt that had appeared out of nowhere. 

Did you sell it all back then? The Bitcoin? 

Yes. 

Really? All of it? 

You told me to sell it, so . . . 

Hey, how could you actually go and sell it just because your professor told you to? LOL 

He hadn’t replied to that one. 

I stared at the last message I’d sent. 

LOL. 

I finally understood that there was a certain truth buried in those three thoughtless letters. 

*

Until recently, I’d spent a lot of time thinking about emotions, mostly feelings like anger, shame, hatred, guilt. I believed it was difficult, exhausting work, this task of listening to someone’s heart, and I’ve tried to channel it through my writing. 

But is that true? 

Many times, I’ve wondered if those feelings were only ever resolved inside me. Just understanding and fathoming someone else’s discomfort and humiliation. 

What changes after you fathom?  

What comes after your heart overflows? 

I couldn’t shake the thought that the answer was a bigger lie.

I’m still on edge, paying off the bank interest every month. I couldn’t just be on edge, so I put the apartment I’d been living in for years on the market. Hardly anyone comes to look, but I’m hoping that it sells soon. That’s my main emotion these days. 

My father ended up moving into a nursing home early last month, and he doesn’t call anymore. Or rather, he can’t. As for those strange calls and messages, they stopped like magic the day after I went to the police station. I can only guess how that came about. 

Some nights, late, I read through the texts Woojung and I exchanged, and every time, I think of a horse trapped in the stable. A horse that was mercilessly whipped. A horse that is no longer moving. 

That was what I saw, in the place where a certain feeling had passed.