You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

The girl started walking again, her eyes glued to the giant. Her breathing was shallow and uneven, her heels skittered sharply and nervously. I put on the latex gloves and began to move like her shadow, running and stopping when she did. The giant got out of the road at last, trying to avoid a car that had come out of a side street next to the park.

The car pulled over to the kerb, inching forward as though looking for a parking spot. I couldn’t see the make or the licence plate; all I could tell was that it was a white saloon. The giant stumbled towards the other side of the road in his search for the girl in the rain. She stopped, then unexpectedly ran behind the street lamp. The giant continued to follow her. We were about ten metres before the bridge, and the river flowed right next to the footpath on which I stood.

Blood rushed to my face. She was right in front of me. She was so close that if I reached out I could touch her. I heard her breathing. I could even hear her ribs move. I smelled adrenalin, as sour as sweat and as clear as perfume. It was the first time I’d smelled something so provocative so close up. My chest tightened. My stomach hardened. All of my fantasies spun in a loop in my head – following someone, her noticing, catching up with her, her running away, pursuing, hiding, finding, coming face to face…

The razor was open in my right hand.

The car on the other side was headed towards the junction. The giant man arrived at the entrance to the bridge and stopped still. He turned a full three hundred and sixty degrees, perhaps looking for the girl. He gave up and walked onto the bridge. I could hear him singing as he crossed the river. If that was his route home, that meant he wasn’t even a resident of District Two. He’d come up this road only to follow the girl. What a piece of shit.

When he’d gone more than halfway across the bridge, the girl let out a deep sigh. She didn’t detect the piece of shit behind her, maybe because she was exhausted at being followed by the drunk man. She hoisted her bag up on her shoulder. She was still close enough for me to reach out and touch her.

She stood still in the light of the lamp, suddenly stiff. The umbrella held slightly to the side, she hesitantly looked back at me. Her eyes met mine. My eyes were drawn to the pearl earring in her outer cartilage. Everything in this world vanished, one by one – the man singing, the rain, the wind, the river rushing by. It was the kind of quiet that made my fingertips tingle, a silence that made my heart leap.

She turned abruptly, her long ponytail slapping my face, and lurched towards the road with a sharp, ripping scream.

I took a big step out and reached out. My hand grabbed her hair, twisted it roughly, pulled her into the shadows and angled her head to expose her neck. The razor dug into her flesh. The screaming stopped after a short time.

Her eyes were wide open but unseeing. The communication with her brain had been severed. I watched, still holding onto her hair, as blood gushed with force. In her eyes was the desperate look of life trying to cling on.

A thrill ran down through my entire body. I was out of breath and dizzy. It was as if the razor had gripped my hand and pulled it into her, so powerfully that it was impossible to resist. Everything in sight began to shake. My hand holding the razor tingled. Shock crashed over me. Something thudded shut inside my head, the passageway that had been cracked open to this present world. I was at the border of another universe. I had no way of going back, nor did I have the willpower.

I’d imagined this very moment countless times. I was always confident that I’d be able to control myself. Now that it had actually happened, I realised that I’d been deluding myself. I had reacted to the orders of my sympathetic nervous system and crossed over the boundary to fantasy. It had been too easy and too quick. The flames that had been burning me up inside let loose in my lower abdomen, like sexual desire. This was the moment of ignition, the magical moment where the possibility of sensation expanded infinitely. I could read, see and hear everything about her in that moment. I felt omnipotent. Everything was possible.

She slumped onto my chest, and I heard a car braking and skidding. Headlights covered everything in sight. I dragged the woman back a few feet and pushed her over the railing into the water below. I heard the splash. The crimson umbrella bounced and rolled along the dark wet road. I couldn’t hear the giant singing any more. I heard a sharp scream. ‘Yu-jin!’

My heart instantly returned to its regular beat. Still standing in the shadows, I looked out at Mother, who was holding the driver’s door open.

She was shaking in the pouring rain. It was as if she didn’t want to believe that the murderer standing a few metres from her was her son. ‘Yu-jin…’ Her voice was low and pained.

I glanced down. Under the lamplight, rain was washing away the splattered blood into the sewer. I didn’t regret it. I wasn’t afraid, either. I just wanted to get out of this situation. I took my latex gloves off and threw them in the river, then turned and ran as fast as I could towards the interior of the neighbourhood, filled with large-scale construction sites, where Mother couldn’t follow me by car.

I finally stopped at a building that was half finished. A dim light hung on the entrance and the plastic tarpaulin shrouding the site flapped loudly in the wind. I stood there a long time. I was doing the most important task in the cold, quiet, deserted darkness: I was reflecting on that moment where I could sense that girl and her entire being. I fantasised about her body as it passed through the river and was swept out to sea. A cold breeze hit me. I hadn’t realised that I was completely exhausted; I hadn’t even realised I was holding something small and round in my hand. When I came back to myself, I couldn’t feel my fingers and toes. Only my instincts were awake. Get a grip , they whispered. It’s time to go home.

Somehow I got back to the flat. I didn’t bump into Mother. I didn’t see any police cars either. I remembered the giant, but dismissed that thought. He wouldn’t have seen much of anything. I tried to ignore the fact that he could have heard Mother scream. He might have even heard my name. But there had to be tons of people named Yu-jin; I couldn’t possibly be the only one in the entire nation with that name.

And Mother couldn’t have been certain that it was me. The footpath, three metres wide, had been between us. Mother was under the street lamp but I was in the darkness. It wasn’t as if I answered her, and we hadn’t exactly come face to face, either. I didn’t want to think about how she knew it was me; I was too tired to think.

I entered the building, my head ducked. I ran up the main stairwell to the sound of Hello barking and got to the roof door. That was when I realised again that I was holding something in my fist. A small white thing. The pearl earring I’d yanked out of her ear immediately before I pushed her in the water. I didn’t know why I’d done that and I couldn’t begin to guess. It was just something my hand had done. I shoved it in my pocket and reached for the roof door.

The front door opened downstairs. ‘Yu-jin,’ Mother called, as if she had been waiting for that very moment.

Oblivion was the ultimate lie, the complete falsehood. Last night I had done something I couldn’t deal with. As a solution, my mind had selected oblivion, and I’d spent an entire day struggling with fragments of images and sounds that swam around in my consciousness.

Only now did I realise that I’d known I would kill some day. Why else did I keep warning myself to stop the dangerous game along that road? I’d continued it, confident that I would never cross the boundary of fantasy; that was how much I’d believed in the solidity of my socialised ego. I’d had no idea I didn’t have the power to stop myself from exchanging my life for a pleasurable pastime. I had overestimated myself. My reckless belief that I was in control had made me offer myself up to fate last night.