She’d had hope, at least until her husband made up his mind. His resolution concerned what they called “conscious emas-culation.” More specifically, the effects upon the wife of her husband’s voluntary shrinking of his ego. 

Unju and Gyeongsu, wife and husband, were forty-three years of age—an age as significant as the age of twenty-seven. Forty-three, a time when old age leapt early upon them. At twenty-seven, Unju had told people she was thirty. Today, at forty-three, Gyeongsu sat among the fifty- and sixty-somethings at the urology clinic telling people he was “coming up on fifty.” So afraid of old age, Unju and Gyeongsu attempted to age early to forget the terror of aging. No different from the trembling children who lined up first to get their lashes over with.

Though they seemed indifferent to aging—at least compared to their peers, who were the picture of fortysomethings trying to look younger—the midlife crisis descended on Unju and Gyeongsu as well. But their responses were rather unusual. Attending the reunion concerts of their favorite bands from the Hongdae live clubs twenty years ago and diving into the slam zone only to stagger back with a broken wrist or two in a bid to resurrect the past like their friends was not their chosen way, however. To relive their youths, Gyeongsu went to the future and Unju to the past. That is to say, they traveled into the past, each using a different passage: change and memory. 

The previous year, Gyeongsu had signed up for a public lecture and seminar curation service. Unlike private lectures, these events were either free of charge or no more than five thousand won per session, but it was always the same familiar faces filling the seats. At the independent bookstores, at the local co-ops, and at the National Assembly’s rented lecture halls, it was only the last empty row of chairs that ever filled with newcomers, and the result was not the democratization of knowledge and the expansion of forums of discourse, but commercialization. It would be clichéd to call it ironic, but this was the means by which many dreams came true.

Yes—the curation service discovered a way to generate profits from these lectures and seminars. They charged users a monthly fee to organize events catered to their interests into a monthly schedule. The schedule boasted a deliberately tacky design modeled on old elementary school timetables. Its title read—instead of “Afterschool Programs”— “Afterwork Programs.” A marriage of culture and nostalgia. The service offered the real benefit of cultural refinement along with memories of a younger age, when everyone walked alone across the dimming schoolyard at twilight. The very recipe that for a time had delighted Kumon’s sales department as adults returned to the old workbook programs, which proved itself a fad quickly replaced by the rising star that was the public lecture and seminar.

Hey, dancn_histrynrd! Here’s your afterwork program schedule for the week! Stay radical! 

1. · Monday, 20:00: John Ross and the Development of the Early Modern Korean Language Textbook (Offline only; No charge) 
2. · Wednesday, 19:30: Solidarity Meeting for the Condemnation of the Genocide in Gaza (Online and offline; Free to members, non-members pay 5,000 won) 
3. · Saturday, 14:00: Cars in Movies – the Classic Cars in Once Upon a Time in America (1984) (Online and offline; No charge)

Acutely aware of the final destination of capitalism, the curation company collected not only money, but people. Subscribers who attended the same lectures were bundled together into afterparties. As a result, the people who went to the Gaza genocide seminar on Wednesday, instead of attending the Free Palestine rally on Saturday, would gather at a wine bar in Namyeong-dong slurping lemon cheese pasta (22,000 won) to debate Netanyahu and the Nakba. Yet even among those gray crowds, some blossomed into color—like Gyeongsu. Following his subscription, he became a changed man.

Gyeongsu never called himself a feminist, but as far as Unju could tell, he became one, which made life together uncomfortable. She was fine with him sitting down to pee, but when he apologized for every droplet of piss he’d splashed and offered to repent by going out to buy her pads, opening up the bathroom cupboards to take accurate stock of her usual brands, she felt a surge of irritation. But later, as her husband remembered to regularly fill the compartment next to the towels with period panties, she came to be grateful.

“Don’t feel grateful,” Gyeongsu advised. “You need to practice entitlement. Don’t thank me for every little thing.” A little before the holidays, he called his parents and yelled into the phone, saying they couldn’t—wouldn’t—go visit, that Unju had no reason to answer their summons and that Mother and Father had to wake up and get with the times. One day, when a friend asked over drinks what buying period products for his wife had to do with feminism, Gyeongsu nearly blushed and replied, “Well, I’m still new to this whole ‘good spouse’ thing.”

Then who the hell does he think he’s been living with these past ten years? Unju wondered.

When she watched her husband prostrate himself at her feet, she felt as if she’d spent their entire marriage making concessions to him. The life of an open palm, which allowed itself to suffer as it exalted the husband seated upon it. A life of sacrifice and obedience. Me? Unju had been a rough-and-tumble child. She hadn’t sniffed glue like some of the other kids, but she was almost sure she’d been an alcoholic in her teens. She had started drinking in junior high school, and downed two bottles of Toad Jinro every other day. She had opened up the fridge and pissed in the produce drawer. She had gone all the way with a girl in fifth grade, and with a boy in her third year of junior high school. And now her naive little husband was apologizing? To her? If anything, Unju was the one who needed to make apologies. She didn’t want to be apologized to. And that meant society had indoctrinated her to feel that way, her husband would say, humbly making use of the new vocabulary he’d learned at his lectures.

Every night, Gyeongsu attended online self-flagellation sessions with his lecture buddies from his room. They were mocked from every which way—Losers chopped off their own balls, They’re just doing this to fellate themselves—but persecution only made them stronger. Determined to transform themselves, they exuded a grave but sweet energy. Pointed as the beak of a pelican, there was something moving about their efforts. Gyeongsu drank nonalcoholic beer in his room as he engaged in a deep heart-to-heart with his allies, laughing and crying out loud until the meeting ended and he burst from the room to declare that his family did not need honorifics. They should no longer be called “sidaek,” but simply “siga,” he insisted with such determination that Unju found something squeezing at her heart, the contraction traveling lower and lower until it was down below.

“Okay, what is it this time?” she asked.

Gyeongsu knelt. “I have this friend in South Chungcheong Province called Uje. He’s a civil servant there.”

“I know Uje.”

“You don’t know him, because he’s a changed person. Uje’s a vegetarian now. He saw them slaughter farm animals during the big foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, and now he can’t eat meat. Physically. Some things just change you forever. Like, you think in your head that you can do it, but your body refuses. It’s happened to me, too.”

Unju remembered Uje. Every summer, he insisted on eating boiling-hot goat soup and raw, wriggling octopus chop, all in the name of health.

“I was watching this drama the other day, and I threw up at the kiss scene. The guy thrust his tongue into the girl’s mouth, and I felt sick to my stomach. He didn’t do it against her will, but hear me out. This whole . . . penetration thing, putting something of mine into someone else, it’s disgusting. I can’t watch another kiss scene again. And I’m swearing off penetrative sex, too. For good.”

“This is getting out of hand,” Unju said through gritted teeth.

“The more I talk to the others, the more I’m aware of how much I’m asserting myself into you. You’d be reading, and I’d order you to get me a glass of water—and you’d put down your book and get me that water. I can see as clear as an X-ray all the awful things I said to you, the looks I gave you, the passive-aggressive commands, all festering inside you like parasites. And all those parasites broke your will, made you give up your dreams, and made you subservient to me. And it drives me crazy, thinking about that. But I don’t have time to mope around feeling guilty, do I? I need to make amends, starting right this second. From now on, I’m going to assert no influence on you whatsoever. I won’t assert myself on you, starting with the easiest thing—I won’t penetrate you anymore.”

Unju didn’t recall Gyeongsu ever making her get him water. Who was this mystery woman he’d been exploiting like a slave? This created wife sculpted by each act of desired exploitation? Definitely not herself, Unju thought.

“Are you seeing some other woman?”

“I can still massage you. Just on the surface,” Gyeongsu said, opening a jar of spicy massage oil.

At three o’clock that morning, Unju contacted Seonsuk, her friend from junior high, and asked if she could crash at her place for a few days to get away from her husband. They hadn’t spoken in five years. She wanted to throw off this mantle of the exploited woman Gyeongsu had thrown atop her. She was being rude, and impulsive. And youthful, she thought.

She wouldn’t still hit people, would she? Not now that they were over forty, she thought only after she’d sent the SOS. Seonsuk had beaten her once, over winter break in their third year of junior high school—an unusual privilege, considering how much she beat up everyone else. A token of affection for her best friend. Almost immediately, a speech bubble appeared in the chat window, indicating that a reply was in progress. Then Unju regretted reaching out, because this was going to be a bother, and was about to block her—

OMW to work. Come to my place.

*

Back in graduate school, Unju came across a map of Seoul in the school library that used dots to indicate neighborhood population density. It was in one of the western neighborhoods, especially packed with dots, that Unju and Seonsuk went to junior high school together. The dots had nearly blocked out the map in that area because of all the public housing apartments, where families of three or four stuffed themselves into three hundred square-foot units. But as far as Unju remembered—Unju, who often skipped class and spent her afternoons romping from one classmate’s tiny apartment unit to another—the neighborhood was dense with foliage, but not people.

They ended up going to different high schools: Unju to a standard school, and Seonsuk to a vocational school. They were still joined at the hip. Everyone said that Seonsuk dragged Unju around after Unju’s parents overextended themselves to move into a more “decent” neighborhood, but that wasn’t really true.

In 1989, the Roh administration announced plans for lifetime public rental housing. Half a decade later, those large public rental apartment complexes were completed and allocated. New junior high schools were built to accommodate the flood of teenagers who now filled the blocks. They started school as soon as construction was finished, taking up only half the classrooms with the rest furnished but left empty for the students to come. And they would come, moving into the many private-sector condo complexes that would be ready in a few months. Six months later, the school saw half a dozen transfer students a day, until by the end of the term, the school was composed half of students from public housing and half of students from private-sector condos.

Unju’s school, constructed last-minute for the influx of newcomers, wasn’t even completed until she moved out of the neighborhood, with the left side of the building still only skin over a skeleton, cloth feebly covering the bones. Students showed up in the morning alongside the construction workers. They arrived at school to the rhythm of the hammer and witnessed clouds of dust rising from the building. 

The incompleteness was only more evident when she stepped inside. A thick, translucent plastic cover took the place of a wall at the end of the hallway, showing only the silhouettes of the laborers slowly passing by. There was something magical about the half-obscured construction site behind that veil, and she sometimes imagined it was a portal in space-time to another age . . .

But everyone said that if you went back there, you’d get beaten up. That was where the “old locals” like Seonsuk took the transfer students who pissed them off and beat them to a pulp. It almost never happened, really. It had in the other neighborhood. A transfer kid had mumbled under his breath about people making noise in the classroom, and the old locals tortured him with a pair of pliers. Pliers. Instead of smacking him in the face, they stuffed his fingertips between the pliers and pressed. The transfer student was traumatized, and wandered the school in shock with his hands held up like a surgeon prepared for an operation, and still haunted the halls to this day . . . 

The other neighborhood probably said it happened in our neighborhood, Unju thought. Later, when she learned the term “social mix,” she considered why the tool of torture happened to be pliers, of all things. The transfer students who kept their heads down, pressed low to their desks, especially the high achievers, dreamed of—no, prayed for—the moment when they graduated and were liberated from those old locals forever. For the moment the old locals would spill away in droves to fill the technical schools, or if they ended up in regular high schools, be quarantined in the vocational streams to be constantly away from school at workshops and practicums. The moment they would split off from each other forever. The pliers, of course, symbolized the technical school. The myth of the pliers crushing the boy’s fingers represented the real fear of bullying, and served as secret preemptive practice for the violent oppression of physical laborers. When these transfer students grew up, they would call it “menial labor,” without considering where in that phrase might be room for the intellectual work required for blue-collar jobs.

Favorite celebrities, most hated teachers, personalities, blood types—those were the topics that were supposed to establish friend groups among teenagers, but reality was much simpler and clearer: teens hung out with teens who lived in the same complex as themselves. It was as if there were two schools in one. Sure, there were exceptions. Take K, who lived in public housing complex 4 and was the top student at school. K, who’d stolen Unju’s new running shoes and run away from home, only to come back on midterm day—K, who had gotten perfect grades at that midterm, transferred to a foreign language high school from which she was expelled after getting caught going to school on a motorbike she got from her boyfriend, and was now a dermatologist—was one of these exceptions. Public housing was mostly where what adults called the “wild kids” lived, and as anyone who’d ever been a teenager could attest, it was the cliques of wild kids who reigned at the top of the food chain. Unju wanted to join Seonsuk’s clique.

Her grandiose dreams: sitting cross-legged on three or four desks pushed together at the back of the classroom. Riding on the back of one of those cheap motorcycles the oppas who delivered Chinese food always drove. Burning her calves on the muffler. Showing off the scar the next day and ordering the gang to bring her wet towels. Unju wanted to be a hooligan and wear jori flip-flops. When jori came into vogue, all the news outlets decried the trend, saying the jori was a variant of the Japanese geta sandal and that young people were mindlessly adopting remnants of the colonial oppressors, but Unju dreamed of going out in jori flip-flops, hoped to have snow fall and melt between her toes. She could picture all the wonderful things that would happen below the waist—the burned calves, the snowflakes between her toes—if only she could catch Seonsuk’s eye and join her clique, and thought of all the unimaginable and exciting things that would happen above the waist! If she wished to make those dreams come true, she had to become Scheherazade. She must be that one character in every Korean war movie who died first in the bombing, the tragic clown who could never wipe that stupid grin off his face because how else were they going to maximize pathos when he inevitably put on a brave front for once just to lose his life? That was her role. So she told them her uncle was a manager for some big-name celebrity and fed Seonsuk’s gang all the fake gossip she could invent. About how so-and-so got some other celeb pregnant and she had an abortion at that-clinic-over-there, how this one celeb raped that one so that one got the manager to kill the rapist. Unju was putting herself at risk, of course, telling stories like that. She made herself a target. She made herself vulnerable, scoring herself like a fish to help the spices sink in better.

They grew close. Not even the high schoolers could touch Seonsuk because everyone knew her two older brothers. “Sure, they beat me up sometimes, but at least they won’t let anybody else touch me. They’re probably better assholes than the ones who beat up their little sisters and let the sisters get pushed around outside,” she mused, pulling out a wad of tissue from between the cushions of the karaoke booth sofa and telling Unju to take a sniff. “Then again, those assholes probably can’t hit as hard as the assholes back home.” It wasn’t clear why Seonsuk brought Unju into the fold, but it was clear that their friendship was a net positive for Unju’s self-esteem. Once they’d started hanging out, Unju was both wealthy and wild.

In class, Unju’s teacher would call her out, saying she was zoning out all the time. Unju had been looking at herself from someone else’s eyes. And she was so magnificent she’d stunned herself. She’d even almost managed to forget the things that happened at her old junior high school, the one she’d attended for a little while before she transferred here. How the day after she got beaten up, she went up to the kids who did the beating and bowed low. She’d have felt less ashamed if they’d made her do it. It wasn’t even a calculated move. Groveling before those classmates was a reflex, involuntary and natural.

That wasn’t all. Unju now lived in a big condo unit, more than forty pyeong wide, and the produce drawer actually contained produce. When they went to drink in the mountains, the others told Unju to bring fruit and whiskey from her dad’s stash. Unju sneered at the girls who didn’t shorten their uniform skirts, and took off her jori to slap a girl who lived in the same building and with whom she’d walked to school together before. Seonsuk reminded her of the produce drawer. The girl downstairs reminded her of the sole of her jori. Both filled her with a sense of superiority.

Unju’s parents wept daily. They should have moved to the other neighborhood, in the famously high-achieving school district. Back when they still had a choice, the cost of a forty-two-pyeong unit in this neighborhood was the same as a twenty-seven-pyeong unit in the other neighborhood, and their daughter was never one for academics anyway, so they chose to live in a spacious home instead of letting their pride suffer in that other area where all the parents were devoted to their children’s education, but little did they know the cultural price they would pay for fifteen pyeong of floor space, her mother and father would lament over the phone with their friends.

“Driving at ten kilometers an hour through the alleys every night trying to find this girl, I don’t care if the neighbors are honking at me from behind, I’m just scanning the streets, trying to see if I can find her. I dragged her out of a karaoke booth the other day, and I was glad it wasn’t a video parlor instead. The night before, she brought a friend over to stay the night, and I was so glad I’d get some proper sleep in bed this time instead of going out looking for her again. Her friend can’t go home because her dad beats her badly, apparently, and I wish I’d learned from him, because we never beat our girl when she was younger, so we can’t start now.”

Unju still hadn’t finished junior high school when they moved out of the neighborhood. Her parents had taken the leap. Even Unju could tell it was the end of an era. Seonsuk had begun to look a little less cool than before, and now Unju clearly saw the state of Seonsuk’s public housing unit, which had seemed like an adult-free palace on those lazy afternoons of skipping classes. Seonsuk had pointed at the furniture and the utensils, describing them as the relics of one family’s unemployment and downfall. The mungap cabinet resurrected as a TV stand had come from the old-timey bar in Cheonho-dong; the stainless-steel cups and ttukbaegi stone bowls from the sundaeguk stew place in Hwagok-dong; and the paper wraps Seonsuk put over the spoons for fun whenever they had red bean shaved ice from the kongnamulguk soup place in Daeheung-dong. Seonsuk’s mother had decorated the house with these and other odds and ends from the restaurants where she made banchan sides, items she received in lieu of pay when the businesses went bankrupt. The design philosophy: job loss in the food industry. Seonsuk tugged on a ring hanging from the mungap cabinet, as though pulling an ox by the nose-block, and nicked karaoke money. The rice paper panels on the cabinet doors had been reinforced by acrylic panes so the papers couldn’t be torn through. For the longest time, Unju had thought that Seonsuk meant her mother had owned those restaurants, not worked at them.

Unju had drunk more than her fill of alcohol, too. She and the gang would put the futons away and sit in a circle playing 3-6-9 drinking games, downing Toad Jinro, they’d have girls-only nights, stripping games while boys rapped madly at the window opening into the hallway, older boys they’d never met before. They were one step away from danger, even Unju knew that much. The mythical girl who downed 50% bbaegal liquor and got raped could soon be her. But above all, Unju never once pictured herself going to a vocational school. She partied at karaoke booths and came home at midnight for tutoring. She dragged herself across the academic threshold and made it into a standard, university-bound high school. Her friends mocked her, saying she was pretty smart if she could achieve that after all their partying. Unju hung a shiny “pretty smart” ornament on the Christmas tree of self-esteem in her mind and stared transfixed into her reflection, radiant and distorted.

At her first test in high school, Unju came dead last. In this new neighborhood, she wasn’t even considered average, let alone well-off. How was her wounded self-esteem supposed to survive? With a produce drawer filled with fruits? The produce drawers of her new friends were filled with packs of expensive traditional medicine. Unju invited her old friends over to her new neighborhood. She rode motorcycles and burned her calves on the mufflers. Unju needed Seonsuk. Each time she felt pathetic, it was through Seonsuk that Unju uplifted herself.

I want to ask you a favor too.

Unju thought about Seonsuk’s text message as she climbed the hill up to Seonsuk’s low-rise apartment. It was thirty-eight past four in the morning. The sky turned black as pitch, as though ready to end the day before it began, and unleashed a deluge on the world. Torrents of water cascaded down the slope, fiercely resisting Unju’s steps, pressing against the tops of her sandal-clad feet as she made her way upwards. Unju knew exactly why she sought her old friend. To talk about old times. About how they’d been fearless, impulsive, violent, how they’d made their parents cry. About how they’d chugged spoiled milk and thought, Huh, it stinks, but swallowed it all anyway. She would share memories with a friend who’d been through the bad times with her, to build a roaring campfire of nostalgia—like those adults who still lived in dreams of the past, boasting about the glory days.

Pushing open the fingerprint-smeared glass door that led into the building, Unju looked forward to her Deviation Day. The phrase had come into vogue a few years ago, originally used to refer to camping as a way of deviating from daily life. Then to skipping work without giving notice. One mountainous county famous for its camping scene even turned it into a slogan: Take a Deviation Day at J County and rediscover the real you—You, modern man—find liberty from the rat race and deviate from society today! Return to a time before civilization, cook meat on a grill and dare to place a pine caterpillar upon the bridge of your nose!

Unju climbed the stairs of the building—it had no elevators—as if ascending a mountain and pictured herself pitching an imaginary tent in her old friend’s living room. Inside the tent, they would talk about old times. As if the outside world, warm with children blowing bubbles and adults pulling carts full of canned food, were instead a danger zone crawling with brown bears, and Unju and Seonsuk would feast on their memories hygienically, enjoying the thrills at no risk whatsoever. By doing so, she would correct the image her husband had wounded. She would erase that image of frailty, which had compelled Unju to shriek, “Are you calling me a victim? Some sacrifice to marriage? Are you saying I’m beneath you?”

*

Focus with Kim Jongbae was followed by Kim Young-chul’s PowerFM, which was followed by Shin Yunju and Household Music, which was followed by a regularly-scheduled broadcast on a famous YouTube politics channel, which had just begun when Seonsuk came home from work. A member of the logistics team for a Northern European furniture company, she worked from four in the morning to one in the afternoon. When she first started working early morning hours eight years ago, Seonsuk had worn two watches on her wrist, the one on the top set to regular hours and the one on the bottom running five hours fast—the time zone mandated by her job. She sometimes ran into younger people working night shifts, and they complained that their breakups were caused not by differences in personality but in time.

It was two in the afternoon—that is, seven in the evening for Seonsuk. And for Unju, the perfect time for day drinking. She’d brought a Ballantine’s 21, a parody of the years when she’d steal whiskey from home to offer the other girls whenever they had a party in the mountains. Before Seonsuk came home, Unju had looked around for ways to brighten up the house for a party. But the tiny and cheap ten-pyeong apartment was a Northern European furniture showroom, as white and sterile and quiet as an empty hospital ward. The sort of place where you lowered your voice because of the sheer tension of the place. I came here to get away, Unju thought with disappointment, staring at the living room centerpiece: a hardworking dehumidifier.

“Couldn’t you have emptied the water before I got home?” Seonsuk said snidely, tilting back her head to massage her neck. With a dismissive foot, she pushed the dehumidifier towards Unju, instantly resurrecting a power dynamic from three decades ago. As she emptied the water tank in the bathroom, Unju told herself that she was only doing this because Seonsuk was letting her crash for a while. Her old self-defense mechanisms were stirring to life, too, and she wondered—Why’d I even come here? She regretted her decision already. There was nothing shocking about her husband’s resolution. Their interest in each other was only one of the many elements of daily life they had grown indifferent to. Some people responded to their mid-life crisis by expelling their frustrations, while others shrank inward, with most tragedies occurring in the mismatch between the reactions of each party, but in Unju and Gyeongsu’s case, they were walking towards apathy in perfect time.

Sometimes, they missed the passionate old days. Where Unju had her burned calves, Gyeongsu had memories of going around the neighborhood lowering circuit breakers. But they had extinguished those sparks as soon as they came back to life, crushing each under their heels—I can’t be bothered, I can’t be bothered either—before the flames could return. They had watched each other kill the fire before it started, and sighed in relief. They were on a stroll one day when they spotted a statue of the Virgin Mary outside a church, surrounded by lit candles. Then a man emerged and used a bell-shaped object to extinguish the little flames. Smoke wafted from the dead wicks, but so wispy it was almost invisible. That was what they had wanted—for their passions to die a quiet death by extinguishment underneath those little bells. Because it was better to not have at all than to have only part of the whole.

In Unju’s imagination, Gyeongsu went around the neighborhood with his self-flagellation friends like a gang of little troublemakers. He was full of energy. He burst into an Olive Young store and demanded, “Hey, are the Natracare Ultra Pads on sale yet?” His exuberance had come back to life, but he pretended it hadn’t. He was deceiving her. With his lips he swore to punish himself by abstinence, by forgoing the desires he’d never even had. And that was a double betrayal. They’d promised to be disappointed in life together, but he was leaping alone from the Mariana Trench to the sun with his barely-concealed zest. All the while, he claimed that he was making sacrifices for her. Denying his own desires. Gyeongsu was running away. Running away from the stagnation of their relationship, from the monotony, from the deadness. From the wet, sagging sense of subsumption. So please pull me out of here too, Unju thought, watching as Seonsuk scrolled through a food delivery app. She recalled going to a friend’s house for Toad Jinro. She would stop mid-run and bend down to grab the elastic ankle bands of her pant legs and tighten them. It was a different age, when the world was so fucking awesome that she barely had time to pee.

“Remember the Japanese lady who sold tangsuyuk outside the school?” Unju asked, picking out whiskey glasses from the cupboard. Cook-it-yourself tangsuyuk places had been a huge fad in the mid-nineties, when the classic sweet-and-sour pork was divorced from the Korean-style Chinese restaurants and went independent like the cook-it-yourself tteokbokki places. One of those was right outside their junior high school. It was owned by a woman in her thirties who had once lived in Japan. Always covering her arms with plastic wrap for fear of burns, she used to smoke as she fried the pork and also sold alcohol to minors. “Don’t forget the fun money,” Seonsuk’s gang used to say, when they wanted to talk about getting drinks at the tangsuyuk place without mentioning alcohol. The woman, who had lived with a man who ran a yakiniku restaurant, thrived on sharing her wisdom with the junior high students. “Never do anything by halves,” she’d say, or “Nip it in the bud,” and reenact the events that had happened in Japan. Though her husband had never hit her, he had broken everything in sight when he got drunk, and she boasted that she had fixed that little problem of his. One day, when the mirrors and windows had both been broken, the woman claimed to have walked barefoot across the broken glass as if she were Jesus on the water. She wanted to avoid getting cut as much as she could, but also knew that if she tensed, the glass would only dig further, so she took a deep breath and willed herself to walk across that minefield with her full weight on every step. The floor was a bloody mess, and she was taken to the emergency room. The woman who recreated that moment, widening her stance like a sumo wrestler, each step heavy with her weight, was the one who taught Unju and Seonsuk to drink with their meal. They had tangsuyuk with liquor sold by the glass. The tangsuyuk was low on the pork, the canned pineapple pieces scantly dotted the sauce, which tasted too much of ketchup, and the liquor was way too pricey. But it wasn’t such a bad memory for reigniting lost passions. A memory of violence, blood, liquor, and meat, and even the exhausted Seonsuk would not refuse the campfire of nostalgia.

“Spill the tea. Your husband bothering you? Something wrong?” Seonsuk said, getting out of the dining chair.

But Unju changed the subject. “Remember the tangsuyuk lady’s irezumi tattoo? What was it, roses? A dragon?” Talking about the present was tiresome, she thought. And she couldn’t really figure out how to describe Gyeongsu’s behavior.

Seonsuk stared for a long time. Then she said, “Sorry, but I’m going to take a few winks. Order whatever you want, this one’s on me,” and disappeared into her room.

Because there was no air conditioning in the bedroom, they had to keep the door open. Seonsuk fell asleep quickly. Unju, who had waited ten hours for her, listened to the sound of her snoring, slowly sipped her whiskey, strained to hear the politics broadcast at minimum volume, and fell asleep. She opened her eyes at five in the afternoon.

The rain had stopped, and the sun flooded the house with yellow light. The golden hour was ten in the evening for Seonsuk, but Unju didn’t take that into account. They’d both slept and woken up, but the day was still young, young enough for them to enjoy themselves.

“Sorry, I ate while you were sleeping,” Seonsuk said, holding out the remnants of the delivered jokbal. “No, I set these aside before I started eating,” she clarified. The pork had been piled nicely into a corner of the packaging. Now, what hardcore stories from their past would they resurrect? What ordinary memory would they transform into epic drama? Even Unju knew that the tangsuyuk lady didn’t have a tattoo on her back. She asked anyway. Damn, that was a freaky tattoo! she hoped Seonsuk would say, joining her in her distortion of history.

But Seonsuk only gave her a tired look, without even a hint of interest in the train to the past. She even refused the Ballantine’s. “No, I’m good.”

Should I just go home? Unju wondered. In the meantime, Seonsuk came back to the table and held out a scrap of paper. It contained an unfamiliar name, a phone number, and a Resident Registration Number.

“Said I had a favor to ask, didn’t I? All the other doctors just ask for your DOB, but this one wants your registration number, too.”

Seonsuk wanted Unju to help her get an appointment with a certain doctor of neurology at a big-name general hospital. The doctor was one of the leading names in the treatment of spinal conditions, and Seonsuk needed Unju to call that number at every opportunity so the former could schedule surgery for a herniated disc. The name on the note was the doctor’s, the phone number the hospital’s, and the registration number Seonsuk’s.

“Some people cancel appointments with him because they’re so desperate they go to another hospital with shorter waiting times,” she explained. “And you need to keep calling if you want to catch one of those slots. And people on spinal problem communities online are saying that he’s finally opening up appointments—they’ve been closed since September, you know. Apparently some people wait a whole year to see him, but I’m fine with that. And don’t you dare slot in your parents instead of me if you get an appointment. I’m in a lot of pain, okay? You don’t have to do it all the time, just whenever you can. Like you’re waiting for the subway or your coffee or something. I can’t use the phone when I’m working, you know? I’m starting off with a huge disadvantage.”

“Are you really busy at work?”

“We have a no-phones policy. I couldn’t call the fire department even if I had to.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to drink?”

“I have a good feeling about this one. It’s destiny, you know? Me and this doctor. Some places tell me I need surgery, and some places say I’ll be fine with nerve block injections. But something tells me when I see this doctor, it’s all going to work out. Like, the timing will be perfect and everything. What time is it?”

“Seven.”

“Let’s go to sleep.”

“It’s seven.”

“It’s midnight.”

The apartment was bustling now, with neighbors returning from cram schools and offices. Seonsuk stuffed a pair of American-made neon orange earplugs swimmers apparently loved to use, and set out a futon for Unju in the living room. Then she sat cross-legged on the fresh, fragrant blankets and took a deep breath, as if to drive away the energy of the evening and summon serenity into her. As if to bend society’s clock to match her own. But what about the campfire of nostalgia?

“I’m going home,” Unju said, pouting.

“No you’re not. Let’s chat until my meds kick in,” Seonsuk retorted, knocking back a sleeping pill.

They lay side by side on Seonsuk’s bed. It felt like old times. The sparks hadn’t died yet.

“Do you still talk to Yeongju?” asked Unju. “What’s she doing these days?”

Until Unju came into the picture, Yeongju had been Seonsuk’s best friend. She dropped out of high school and found work as an assistant at Blue Club, a barbershop chain, and often paid for drinks because she started working before anyone else.

“Oh shit, I can’t sleep when I tell this one,” Seonsuk said. Rising slowly, she began.

*

One day, Seonsuk got an SOS from Yeongju, who was working as a nurse assistant. The clinic she worked at was moving into a new building, but they hadn’t hired a moving service that also packed things for them—as a result, Yeongju was left to box all the patient files by hand. The numbers on the patient files went far past ten thousand. “I’m going to throw out my back again if I try that,” Yeongju said, asking Seonsuk to do it for her.

“Am I getting paid for that?”

“No, we’d have hired the premium movers if we had the budget to spare.”

Thousands of files plucked, moved, and shelved later, Seonsuk took in the new clinic and its freshly-renovated walls. Yeongju’s new desk was ready, installed in an empty alcove. There was a chair, so Seonsuk tried sitting in it. Her knees hit the desktop. Yeongju would spend eight hours of each day in that chair. She would twist and turn her legs in every direction, looking for a comfortable position, until she inevitably sat cross-legged on the chair, where she would labor on towards yet more back surgery.

Seonsuk prided herself on her Northern European furniture company job. She’d been hired as a “multi-skill worker” at first, which the company advertised as an equivalent to a medical internship that would take her across many departments, helping her develop as an all-rounder—but it really meant she was assigned odd jobs without being affiliated with any department at all, loading packages at the logistics team before being summoned to do dishes with the food team, before being ordered to the sales team to stock their shelves.

Two years later, she settled in the logistics team. At first she moved boxes by hand or pallet jack only, but she practiced with the forklift until she could drive it with ease. Back when she’d just started, though, still not used to operating the forklift, colleagues would impatiently pull boxes off her load with angry glares, which had discouraged—but not defeated—her. She had to learn at some point, so she might as well learn now, she told herself. “Sorry that took so long,” she apologized, and when the colleague responded, “Wait, that was you?” without recognizing her, she felt her chest ache. The same happened when she got the prongs of the forklift smoothly into the gap in the thin paper pallets without a hint of anxiety for the very first time. Eventually, she was stocking products on distant overhead shelves with the reach truck, crossing dock levelers to receive freight from shipping containers, and even got to ride the order picker they nicknamed the “Flying Nimbus.”

That wasn’t to say it was all smooth sailing. Once, she’d been driving under a low ceiling with the mast raised, and struck a sprinkler pipe. Water exploded over the workers and the products like an unexpected waterfall, and Seonsuk sat in her forklift, frozen, with head hung low until the pipe finally ran out of water, telling herself that she was on a movie set, and they were shooting an exaggerated storm sequence that couldn’t possibly fool the audiences. The deluge only stopped once water splashed up to their ankles in the gigantic warehouse. “People always screw up just as they’re getting confident,” her colleagues said as she remained glued to her seat. “It’s all insured, don’t worry,” they said. It was those very people who, when more forklift operators joined the team and they had to take turns operating the few machines they had, forcing them to carry more boxes by hand, conspired to shove her back down to the hand-loading role. But Seonsuk held her head high. She was a born tactician who knew how to distribute and display inventory just right, a virtuoso on the controls, a master of spatial awareness, and a mediator who knew how to resolve disputes. Those intellectual exercises gave her joy. At least, until her musculoskeletal system began to act up.

“Most people say it’s kind of like a stabbing pain, but for me it’s like I’m getting sliced up. It’s like a hydraulic press with hundreds of needles poisoned with pure agony pressing right on my shoulders and scapulae and arms until the pain’s been literally injected to every last cell, all the way to the toppity-top layer of skin. You know what Yeongju’s up to now? She’s calling my doctor—not my doctor, but that doctor—between work so she can get him to see her boss’s parents. And their backs are fine, but they’re just so old they’re bound to hurt something by the time they get their turn. And I’m supposed to lose out there, too? We’re supposed to lose out?”

Seonsuk fell asleep at nine in the evening, that is, two in the morning. Unju stepped out into the living room and lay sleepless on the floor. She remembered the farewell party her friends had thrown for her during winter break, in their final year of junior high school. This was before the big pub fire in Incheon, back when struggling bars treated the law as a recommendation and let minors in without a fuss. They’d let the minors sneak in Toad Jinro too, knowing they couldn’t afford much, but only up to three bottles. It was snowing that night, and they were all piss-drunk when they staggered out of the bar, when the boys got into a fight with three men. The men were in those pale brown lace-up boots that were all the rage back then.

Seonsuk’s gang outnumbered the adults, but they were just too drunk to put up a decent fight. One got caught and slammed to the floor, and one of the boots kicked him in the gut. Another of the boys fell on top of him, and the boot moved up to the newer, easier target, and kicked again and again. Kicked at the one below, and then the one on top. Then another boy fell, and as bellies one, two, and three felt the sting of the lace-up boot, Unju fled across the six-lane street. So did the other girls. Not Seonsuk.

Across the street, in the narrow alleyway between the bar and a gimbap eatery, they could see the back of a lurching drunk. And though he made it hard to see what was happening beyond, Unju knew Seonsuk was being touched. They could not call the police. They were in junior high school, they had drunk alcohol, and Unju must not be suspended from school. She must not be expelled to attend the same high school as Seonsuk.

Next she remembered knocking madly with Seonsuk on Yeongju’s front door. Yeongju opened it, and Unju and Seonsuk made a beeline for the bedroom. Yeongju’s father lay on his side just beyond the sliding door watching TV, but because he was hard of hearing, they had no reason to hush, as long as he saw nothing. Seonsuk and Unju crawled under a blanket and lay facing each other. Seonsuk reached over and touched Unju’s breast. A light hold at first, as if checking the ripeness of a fruit, but then she twisted as though to tear it off. She shoved Unju against the wall and punched and kicked at her stomach. Unju screamed, but Yeongju’s father heard nothing. Standing guard outside the door, Yeongju thought, About time she got a beating too. The next day, Unju was black and blue all over, but only from the neck down, a technique Seonsuk learned firsthand and often from her own older brothers. And because she had taken her fair share of that beating on that day, Unju felt that she deserved to use the Seonsuk of today—their friendship—as a path back to deviation.

When she returned home, Gyeongsu fussed that she must be exhausted from the night out and gave her a massage. The blackout curtains were drawn shut, the lighting was dimmed, and the singing bowl music was started as he went on about muscle tissue, which told her that Gyeongsu had come back from a seminar about massages.

Gyeongsu slid his thumb down Unju’s oil-slicked neck. “You think I look stupid, trying to be better.” He released her shoulder from his grip, saying it was too knotted, and switched to press with his elbow. “Knots—more like rocks!” He had become a more earnest person. So had Seonsuk. He was still massaging her when Unju fell asleep again.

She dreamed they were in bed together, all three of them. Gyeongju and Unju took turns squeezing Seonsuk. Her aching neck and back, the one side that was always twisted from looking backwards—

“I’m on that little machine for eight hours a day, which means I’m basically driving from Seoul to Busan and back, but half the time I’m driving with my neck turned back and my back twisted to the side. The vibration’s killer, too, gets all the way to the top of my head. Wanna see something funny?” Seonsuk, who lay in the bed next to Unju, took her hand. Unju thought Seonsuk fell asleep at that very moment, because—“See? No grip strength.” Her eyes slid shut. Like in the movies, where someone dropped a wine glass as they nodded off. As they died. Her old friend’s grip was just that frail.

Back to the dream—the pungent scent of oil enveloped their naked bodies, and as if wrestling in mud, entangled, they rubbed the knots out of one another’s muscles. Hands ran down spines in a wake of flesh that had never known hard labor. Seonsuk guffawed and said out loud, “What are you, Thumbelina and the fairy prince? You’re both so good. That hits the spot. That really hits the spot.” Was this a new kind of threesome for middle-aged people? Unju laughed. She opened her eyes, however, and though excited, Unju was not even smiling.

Before leaving Seonsuk’s house, Unju remembered to take the little note with Seonsuk’s registration ID. Next to that one was a piece of scrap paper, its edges cut perfectly straight and the front side marked only with the instruction for Unju to leave her own Resident Registration Number. It would take, what, three years? For Seonsuk to get that surgery with that doctor and for Unju to finally get her turn? Unju’s pen hovered over the paper, but never made contact. Seonsuk might do anything with her registration number. Not now, perhaps. But someday.