Son Bo-mi
TRANS. BY Janet Hong
Blanket
I remember the last time I saw Han. It was shortly after I’m Leaving Liz was published. Years later, if anyone ever looks back on my life as a writer, they would no doubt count that book as the turning point of my career. Though I’d made my debut a while back, I’m Leaving Liz brought me, an unknown writer, both money and fame. It brought me another thing as well—the end of my friendship with Han. After reading my book, he became furious and vowed never to see me again. Why? Because I’d disclosed private information about his boss Jang, which Han claimed would surely upset him.
Han talked about Jang often, but it wasn’t the usual badmouthing people did of their bosses; in fact, it was the opposite. With a face full of faith and affection, he spoke of Jang more than a dozen times to me, often about such trivial matters that I wondered why he bothered to mention them. Not that I was paying close attention. To be honest, I don’t think I even believed Jang was an actual person. He was someone who existed only in stories, someone who popped in on our conversations, sat in our midst, and then disappeared when his job was done. So, imagine my bewilderment when Han cried, “You stole his life! How could you stoop so low? What you did was absolutely disgusting!” His anger didn’t seem justified. He stopped answering my calls after that, and I made no real effort to patch things up, since I didn’t think my actions had been so wrong. Plus, I was completely intoxicated by my success at the time. I never saw Han again, and when he died two years later, it was Jang I saw at his funeral. Though no one pointed him out to me, I could tell at once it was him.
Then a year later, around the end of winter, I found myself in a run-down bar, sitting across from Jang.
* * *
Jang was the chief of the police station where Han had worked. According to Han, luck had been on Jang’s side from the day he came into the world. Born into a wealthy family, he wasn’t exactly handsome, but he was charming and made a good impression on everyone he met. Having received high marks in school, he was able to enter the police academy without much difficulty. After graduating at the top of the class and completing his mandatory service at the national guard, he was appointed immediately to the National Intelligence Service’s headquarters. However, if his parents had ever taken him to see a fortuneteller, they would have been told: “In his mid-thirties, this adorable little boy is going to have his life turned upside down.”
Since Jang was hardworking and extremely competent, he earned the praise and affection of his superiors, but around the time he was to be promoted to inspector, he became tangled up in a series of scandals, and was ultimately transferred to a small police station on the city outskirts. After that he forever lost the opportunity for promotion or to return to headquarters and was forced to wander the police stations on the fringes. The scandals received widespread coverage and many high-ranking officers were forced to resign. Jang’s acquaintances said it was a good thing his wife hadn’t lived to see him get caught up in the mess. She had died a year before he was demoted.
Jang’s son had been six then. His wife had been ill for some time, even when she’d been pregnant with their son. To have a baby in her condition seemed risky. Those around her, including Jang, urged her to terminate the pregnancy, but she refused. Everyone thought she was being unreasonable, even suicidal. The doctor warned if she carried on with the pregnancy, the chances of both mother and baby surviving were extremely low, but, in reality, women almost never died in childbirth. And while she looked like a walking corpse and her life was never free from pain, she ended up living for several more years after giving birth to their son. Still, some felt those several years were too taxing. Much later when I met Jang at the bar, he said: “When my wife died, everyone accepted her death easily. No one questioned it, no one was surprised.” And to quote Jang, he and his six-year-old son were left “utterly alone.”
The death of his wife, getting caught up in the scandals, his demotion to the fringe precincts—these events left a significant mark on Jang’s life, and each time he sensed he’d undergone some major change. But they didn’t change his life in a tangible way, or in a way one could observe from the outside. Even after his wife died, he arrived at work ten minutes early as usual. He didn’t drink or show signs of despair or depression. A man of principle, he continued to be strong and steady, never showing weakness. He was the same after transferring to Han’s police station. He worked hard, not once complaining about his situation, or venting his frustrations. This won everyone’s sympathy. The officers under Jang’s command liked and respected him and treated him well. “Still, the chief didn’t have anyone,” Han had said, and I agreed. It wasn’t a metaphor. People say this to mean that someone’s alone, that ultimately, we’re all alone. People like to talk this way. I once did, too. We go through life alone, that’s just the way life is. But those left without a soul in the world—those who’ve experienced this firsthand—don’t dare spout such sentiments. Instead, it’s the ones who haven’t who’re always blurting these things.
Jang, however, had every right to say such a thing.
* * *
His son started listening to rock music from the time he was eleven or twelve years old. He was a big fan of the band Parcel. On the day he turned fourteen, Jang took him to a Parcel concert. “Wasn’t it the biggest coincidence that a Parcel concert was held on his birthday?” Jang would say much later. People claimed Jang changed after that. According to Han, “something broke inside the chief.”
That day, Jang lost his son.
The concert began at 7:45. Though it was early winter, the concert was held outdoors, and so Jang brought along a blanket, a navy blue one that was thick but not too heavy. He draped it over his son, who was bundled up in a coat. “If you catch a cold, there’s no one to look after you,” he told him. What he said was true. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that Jang’s son raised himself. He made his own meals and ate them on his own, he did his homework by himself, and he put himself to bed. Even if something happened, he never came to the police station, looking for his father. He’d been this way from the time that he was seven. The police officers at the station, including Han, had no idea what the boy looked like. Since Jang refused to have a funeral, they weren’t able to view the boy’s funeral photo, and so forever lost the chance to see him.
The fog machine under the stage came on and the lights bordering the LED screen at the back of the stage began to flash. A crane lowered the members of Parcel from the ceiling. When the crane swung over the audience, the audience hopped up and down, eager to get closer to the band. Jang had gone through a lot of trouble to purchase front-row seats, paying three times the normal amount. They were sitting only a few meters from the stage.
“I thought about it for a long time,” Jang said to me later. “If I hadn’t gone through the pain of getting those tickets, my son would still be alive.”
When the members of Parcel stepped off the crane and onto the stage, Jang turned to look at his son.
“I’d never seen him look so excited before,” he said, recalling that moment. “His face shone with joy. I guess it’s a blessing that’s the last expression I saw on his face.”
That happy expression didn’t last long.
“I always thought I was to blame for his death. I know you’ll say it isn’t true. Many people told me it wasn’t my fault. Whose fault was it then? Six people lost their lives that night, including my son and the vocalist from Parcel. That’s a high number, but there were more than two thousand people at the concert. Why did these six people have to die out of all those people? Whose fault was it then?”
Parcel chose “I Kissed You” as their opening song. As soon as they played the first few seconds of the song, the audience started screaming louder, their heads bobbing and bodies gyrating.
It was then. A man of slight build wearing a green coat jumped onto the stage. People heard gunshots. Bang, bang, bang. The vocalist fell to the stage floor and blood spread across the surface. A security guard rushed onto the stage. Soon after, four more shots rang out. Even those sitting far away were able to catch what happened through the LED screen. After a split-second silence—the silence lasted not even a second, but everyone would remember it—people began to scream in terror as they scrambled through the emergency exits. In the confusion, many were injured.
“My son couldn’t listen to one song live. You know why? Because that fucker started shooting before the first song finished.”
This is what a drunk Jang had said to Han. It had been the first and last time Han had seen Jang drunk. I tweaked these words and used them in my book. This was probably one of the scenes that had made Han furious.
Though Jang had gone through police academy training, handled real guns numerous times, and even fired at people, at that moment he was just a helpless father. He was unable to keep his son from running up onto the stage. All he could do was watch the blanket fall from around his son’s shoulders. After that, it became a very special object to Jang. He carried the blanket with him wherever he went. He went to work with it and draped it over his lap when he sat at his desk, even during the summer. It stayed by his side as he ate, and he brought it back home after work. He even carried it to the bathroom with him, and he covered himself with it at night.
Some time later, a documentary was made about the incident. “After the vocalist was shot, several people rushed onto the stage. Why did they do that?” a girl asked, weeping.
That day the vocalist, security guard, and two people from the audience (one was Jang’s son) died on the spot, and twenty-seven people sustained both serious and minor injuries. Out of the twenty-seven people, two people died at the hospital a few hours later. When Jang’s wife had first gotten pregnant with their son, the doctor had warned that both mother and baby would surely die if she carried on with the pregnancy. So, wasn’t the doctor right after all? Likewise, Jang had this to say about the two people who later died at the hospital: “Why did God grant them a few more hours, if they were going to die anyway?”
* * *
“Fatal Shooting at City Center Concert.”
Such was the headline in the papers then. The incident was on the news and in the paper every day. When I was writing I’m Leaving Liz, I’d gone to the library many times to collect and photocopy articles about the incident. The day of Han’s funeral, that is, the day I saw Jang for the first time, I came home and went through my research materials again—something I hadn’t done since completing the book.
I pulled the file folder from the corner of my shelf and brushed off the dust. I was flipping through the plastic sleeve pages, one by one, when I came across a photo, I couldn’t tear my gaze from. It was as if I were seeing it for the first time, even though there was no way I’d missed it, since I’d pored over every article more than twenty, no, thirty times. All of this had become the backdrop to I’m Leaving Liz.
The truth was, I’d felt nothing before. That day, though, I bawled uncontrollably. Soon after, I ran to the bathroom and gripped the toilet seat and started vomiting into the bowl.
In the newspaper picture, many police cars are at the scene and the injured are being carried out on stretchers. The despair on people’s faces. Women covering their faces with their hands. Men sitting sprawled in the middle of the street. Yet, the focal point of the scene are the bright lights of the squad cars. The lights appear to be flashing blue and red, though it’s a black-The truth was, I’d felt nothing before. That day, though, I bawled uncontrollably. Soon after, I ran to the bathroom and gripped the toilet seat and started vomiting into the bowl.
In the newspaper picture, many police cars are at the scene and the injured are being carried out on stretchers. The despair on people’s faces. Women covering their faces with their hands. Men sitting sprawled in the middle of the street. Yet, the focal point of the scene are the bright lights of the squad cars. The lights appear to be flashing blue and red, though it’s a black-and-white image. I could almost hear the sirens, too. And yet, the police failed to protect those who had been there. As always, people were helpless. No help came to the downtown pavilion, and nearly everyone in attendance witnessed the killings. Everything had happened much too quickly. People felt as if they’d been electrocuted and turned to ash. The sight would burn in their minds for a very long time.
“Our seats were all the way in the back,” said another survivor, who’d also appeared in the previously mentioned documentary. “I was angry at my boyfriend for getting such crappy seats, but if I think about it, that’s why we were able to get out so quickly without getting hurt. When we made it out of the building, someone burst into tears. We all started crying. We cried for a long time. That’s all we could do.”
* * *
In I’m Leaving Liz, the narrator of tells a very long story about a police detective to the seventeen-year-old Liz. A shooting incident takes place at a concert that the detective attends with his wife, and he loses her there, while the gunman commits suicide after carrying out the attack. The detective spends the rest of his life searching for the reason why the shooter opened fire and ends up losing everything. Later on, still unable to find the answer he’s been looking for, he commits suicide. After telling this long tale to Liz, the narrator leaves her. One critic praised the book, saying it offers “an extraordinary examination of life and death while never losing a sense of humor.” However, Han had attacked it, calling it “shallow, cheap, and full of lies.”
Han had come to my place, looking for me. He’d stood in the middle of the apartment complex playground, in front of the slide to be exact, and hurled a book at me. There we stood, facing each other at two in the morning. At first, I didn’t realize it was my book he’d flung. As I picked it up and was brushing off the sand, Han said, “So this is your book? Laughing and sneering at someone—that’s your idea of a book?”
I’d never meant to turn anyone into a laughingstock. I’d never meant to mock anyone. But had I done that to Jang? Had I believed he was a fool for carrying around a blanket that had belonged to his dead son? I don’t know. Until that point, at least, I’d believed I was offering a unique perspective on life and death. After Han died, however, I realized my “unique perspective” had been nothing but despicable.
I was told Han quit the police force soon after he came to see me. In fact, he seemed to have completely changed the course of his life. Had something happened? If he hadn’t died, would we have resolved our differences eventually?
After I saw Jang at Han’s funeral, I left right away. Jang hadn’t been some magic trick that suddenly materialized and vanished. He was a real person living his life. A strange sensation seized me that day, as if a part of my body were evaporating. I took a few deep breaths, but the sensation only grew stronger, and my whole body seemed to be vanishing, leaving behind my brain. This went on for almost a year. That year, I could not write. If I lay in bed at night, I felt as though my body were fading away, while what remained swelled up like a balloon. And it seemed it would keep swelling until it would burst.
Of course, I tried to live a normal life. I stayed with my parents for a while, met with friends, and even tried dating. No one could tell I had a problem—not my parents, my friends, or even the women I dated. The only ones who sensed something was wrong were those in publishing and my fans. They said I was done. Finito.
Often, I sat spaced out on a park bench. I thought about the newspaper picture I had seen on the day of Han’s funeral. That image would be stuck in my mind for a long time. No one was prepared. By the time you realized what was happening, it was too late. There was nothing we could have done. Who could possibly save anyone? Sometimes I thought about my parents, the women I’d loved, my friends. I thought about Han and even about Jang. When I thought about Han, even the good memories were painful. But luckily, those memories were few and scattered. If my life had carried on that way, what would have become of me?
One Sunday morning, I received a phone call from Jang. Despite having taken sleeping pills, I hadn’t been able to sleep properly and found myself listening to Jang’s voice, still groggy and dazed. After politely introducing himself, he said he’d gotten my contact information from my publisher and apologized for his intrusion. “But I really want to meet you,” he added. “You see, I’d like to tell you my story.”
* * *
After his son died, Jang never talked about his son again. He never talked about the shooting incident either, except the one time he’d gotten extremely drunk at a work dinner. After he lost his son, two changes took place. The first, as I already mentioned, was that he was never without the blanket. The second change was that he started to obsess over night patrols. Jang added three more points to his beat area for a total of seven fixed points, and also opted to go on more. When policing his beats, Jang liked to do the driving himself from start to finish, which confounded his subordinates to no end. But this was a trivial matter. The Jang on night patrols was completely different from the Jang on daytime patrols. At night in the car, he didn’t say a word. No one knew what he thought about, not even Jang himself. And while he drove, he kept touching the blanket on his lap.
Sometimes when he had to go on patrols alone, he would start his route like any other day and then park on a levee, gazing down at the small neighborhood. He couldn’t stay for long, though, since he had the rest of his patrol to finish. Apartment buildings stood in a line across the way, but in the late hours of the night, lights burned only in a few windows. Jang stared blankly at these homes. There were times he witnessed a light go out. Every time this happened, he felt an inexplicable emotion, as though something were disappearing from the world forever. His heart would start to hammer, and he’d feel as if he couldn’t breathe. If all the lights went out, he felt as if he were splintering into pieces. Then he would bury his face in the blanket.
Jang spent six years this way.
He didn’t like winter. He finally accepted the fact that it was because he’d lost his son in winter. However, there was a more practical reason. It was because of the frost that would cover his windshield. His squad car was very old, so he had to stop often to scrape the frost off the glass.
On the coldest night of that winter, Jang was wiping the frost on the inside of his windshield when he saw a young couple in the neighborhood playground through the now-clear glass. They were sitting on the swings. The girl had on a brown woolen coat and black miniskirt, with flesh-colored stockings. The boy was wearing a black pea coat, but it didn’t seem very thick. Holding the fronts of their coats closed, they were drinking beer from cans. They whispered with their faces close together, but they stopped as soon as Jang approached. When he saw their faces up close, he was surprised; they looked much too young, eighteen, perhaps nineteen at most. Babies, really. Empty beer cans and cigarette butts lay scattered at their feet. He could tell they were drunk. Pretending to look at his watch, he asked if they had any idea what time it was. The boy didn’t bother to answer, but the girl shook her head.
“Who knows?” she said. “But since everything’s dark and no one’s around, I’m guessing it’s bedtime?” She slurred, moving her small lips.
“That’s right, it’s two in the morning, so what are you kids doing out here?”
“Who do you think you are to talk to us that way?” she said, her teeth chattering. “You can’t tell us what to do. You a cop or something?”
Jang nodded. “I am a cop, but that’s not why I’m telling you what to do. It’s because it’s so cold out. Do you want to freeze to death?”
“Are you gonna interrogate us?”
Jang glanced at the boy who was silently drinking his beer. “No, I’m trying to send you and your boyfriend home,” he finally said. “I just heard on the radio it’s minus 20 degrees. It seems you’ve had a lot to drink, so it’s dangerous if you stay out here any longer. I’m sure your parents are worried about you.”
The temperature being minus 20 was a lie. Jang never listened to the radio when making his rounds. He drove in complete silence.
The girl gave a laugh and said facetiously, “We’re actually married.”
“Is that right?”
“Yup, we’re adults and we’re married. We might not have had a proper ceremony, but in the eyes of the law, we’re legally married. Our marriage is official. And since this is a free country, freezing to death out here is up to us. Don’t you agree, hon?”
The girl placed her hand on the boy’s shoulder. Her hand was chapped red with the cold. Neither she nor the boy was wearing gloves. Each time a gust of wind blew, she hunched over, making herself small, while the boy looked as if he didn’t want to think about anything.
Jang gazed at them for a long time before finally opening his mouth. “I’m sure both of you matter a lot to your parents.” For a brief moment, he fell into thought about his son.
The boy licked his lips and folded his arms across his chest. “Hey, you got any kids?” he asked. He seemed less drunk than the girl.
“I have a son,” Jang said, gazing at the boy’s nose that had turned red from the cold. “He turned twenty this year. His mom died when he was just a child, and though I couldn’t look after him properly, he turned out well.” He even added, “I barely spent time with him. The only place we’ve ever gone to together was a Parcel concert. I feel terrible about that.”
Later on, Jang told me he’ll probably never understand why he’d said something like that. At the mention of Parcel, the girl gave a small shout.
“Oh, I know them! The vocalist died, didn’t he? I remember he was really good-looking.”
She took out a cigarette and put it in her mouth, but the wind kept putting out the lighter flame. In the end, she gave up trying to light the cigarette.
“It happened six years ago, didn’t it?” the boy said showing off, as he put his arm around her shoulders. “They were one of the few legit rock bands in this country, but their last concert was a total gong show.”
Jang let out a sigh. “To be precise, there was no concert that day. Because they couldn’t finish even one song. My son and I were there.”
The couple looked at Jang at the same time.
“Other people died that night, too,” the boy said, sounding a little unsure.
“Yeah, other people died, too,” the girl said.
“That’s right. Many people died that night. A wife, a parent, a son.”
The couple nodded wordlessly.
“So, are you two planning on staying out here?”
The couple said nothing, and Jang stopped urging them to go home. The three merely stared at one another in silence. The harsh winter wind whipped past them.
“We’ll head home soon,” the boy said after a while, holding the front of his coat closed. “It’s freezing. To be honest, my ears are killing me. We’ll go home soon.”
He reached out and grasped the girl’s hand. With hands locked tightly together, the young couple gazed up at Jang.
“Good.” With that, Jang headed back to his car.
The moment he got back in the driver’s seat, he realized he hadn’t had the blanket with him the entire time he’d been talking to the couple. He looked at the passenger seat where the blanket lay. He raised his face and gazed out the windshield at the apartment buildings. Not a single light was on in any of the windows. He looked at the young couple in the playground once more. For about a minute, he couldn’t move. His heart was beating too fast. Shortly after, he wiped away his tears.
* * *
“I climbed out of the car and walked back to the couple. Then I gave them the blanket.”
“You gave it to them?”
“That’s right, I wanted to. I don’t know why I had that thought. I just wanted to cover them with the blanket. How could they sit out there on such a cold night? I mean, she had on just a thin pair of stockings. This happened a few months ago.”
Jang and I were sitting in a run-down bar.
“Okay, I’m done,” Jang said, looking at me.
I was confused. I’d been expecting him to blame me or get angry at me at least, but all he’d done was tell me his story.
“I don’t understand. Why did you tell me this? Aren’t you angry with me?”
Jang picked up his shot glass and shook his head. “This was about the death of a blanket. I just wanted you to hear the story.
“The death of a blanket?”
“That’s right.”
Was he being sarcastic? As soon as I tried to speak, he cut in. “I’m Leaving Liz was very interesting.”
“I’m so sorry…”
“About what? I don’t know anything about novels. Literature, art—don’t know the first thing about them. But I’m Leaving Liz was fun. The only part I didn’t like was when the narrator leaves Liz. Everything was great except for that.”
I fiddled with my shot glass. To be honest, I felt like crying right then.
“I don’t know why I lied to that young couple,” Jang continued. “I guess I’ll never know until I die. There are so many things we’ll never understand. I don’t even know why I told you all this. I just felt like I should. But we’ll know the reason when it’s our time, won’t we? One day we’ll finally know the reason for everything, don’t you think?”
“Do you really think so?” I asked, choking up. “Do you really believe we’ll know the reason one day?”
Flushed with drink, Jang snickered. “Of course not,” he said. “It was just a joke.”
* * *
I started writing again. One critic said: “With his latest work, his writing has reached even greater heights.”
But has it really? There are still nights I have trouble sleeping—nights when I’m seized by a strange feeling, as if I’m swelling up. On those nights, just as Jang had done when making his rounds, I gaze at the buildings outside my window.
“You asked me why I gave the blanket to that couple,” Jang said that night, shortly before we said goodbye. “When I was about to head back to my car, the girl said drunkenly to me, ‘Take your son to a different concert. A concert where people don’t die, where people sing and dance and are happy. Where happy songs fill the air, because people don’t have to die. I want to go to a place like that, too.’ I got in my car and cried a little and went back out. Do you know what the girl said to me then? She said, ‘You see, Mister, we’re nothing. We’re human trash.’ I couldn’t say anything. I just stood there and stroked their heads. All I could do was stroke their small frozen baby heads.”
Son Bo-mi is a writer based in Seoul, South Korea. Since making her debut in 2009, she has written numerous novels and short story collections, including Dear Ralph Lauren, Little Village, Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, and The Fireflies of Manhattan. She has won a number of prestigious literary prizes, such as the Dong Ilbo Short Story Award, the Munhakdongne New Author Award, the Daesan Literary Award, and most recently, the Yi Sang Literary Award.
Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the 2018 TA First Translation Prize and the 2018 LTI Korea Translation Award for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale, which was also a finalist for the 2018 PEN Translation Prize and the 2018 National Translation Award. She is a two-time winner of the Harvey Award for Best International Book.