You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

Everything turned dark. I felt sick. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Hot sand had filled my lungs. All I could do was wait for the light to turn on in my dark brain. I wanted it all to be a dream; I wanted my internal clock to ring its alarm and pull me out of this nightmare.

Time crawled by. Everything was chillingly quiet. The grandfather clock began to chime – six o’clock. Thirty minutes had passed since I’d woken up. This was when Mother would finish clattering in the kitchen and head up to my room with a smoothie made of milk, banana, pine nuts and walnuts.

The clock stopped chiming, but Mother was still lying next to me. Was this not a dream after all? Had Mother really called out to me last night? Was she calling for help? Or begging for her life?

My knees began knocking. My lower abdomen suddenly grew heavy. A sharp pain stabbed below my belly button. My bladder swelled, and I felt an urgent, intense need to pee. It was the same pressure I’d felt as a boy when I dreamed I couldn’t move and the freight train was bearing down on me. I sat on my knees, pressed my thighs together and leant on them with both hands. Cold sweat trickled down my back.

Cold sweat trickled down my back. I felt stupid. My blankets and sheets were soaked through, my pyjamas were plastered to my bottom. Everything pulsated with the stench of urine. I’d made the same mistake three nights in a row. Mother would be annoyed. What are you, a baby, wetting your bed all of a sudden? She might sit us down and interrogate us. Tell me honestly. Where did you go after school two days ago? What happened?

My older brother, Yu-min, and I were in the first grade at a private elementary school near Sinchon. Mother drove us to school every morning on her way to work as an editor at a publishing house, which was nearby, behind Yonsei University. After school, we went to an art studio near her office, which was more of a day-care facility. It was close enough to school that we always walked. We often stopped to buy snacks and got distracted on our way there. Mother always worried about us. ‘Don’t go near the train tracks,’ she would admonish. ‘Stick to the main roads, okay?’

‘Okay,’ we said, but we didn’t. Sometimes – no, often – we walked along the Seoul–Uijeongbu Line rails, our ankles sinking into the weeds. Of course, we didn’t just walk. We came up with games and competed to see who would win. We played Scarecrow, where you spread your arms out and walked along the rail as you looked up at the sky; we did long jumps, where the person who leapt over the most cross-ties won. The best was Survival. We always tied, since we had the same weapons: Mother-approved toy sub-machine guns that made loud rat-tat-tat sounds without doing much else.

But three days ago, we had packed our backpacks with goggles and BB guns with plastic pellets that Father had brought for us from a business trip to America. Mother didn’t like them, but the pellets didn’t leave marks on our bodies, and she was more relaxed in the days when Yu-min was around. We were thrilled. We didn’t pay any attention in class that day, as we were both thinking of Sinchon station.

As soon as school finished for the day, we put our goggles on and roamed the tracks and the adjacent wasteland that overlooked the station, shooting at each other; the one who was hit the most would lose. Mother and the art studio receded in our minds and we didn’t realise how much time had passed. We’d used up all the bullets and the game was a draw but we weren’t ready to call it quits, so we came up with a tiebreaker: a race to the station; the first one there would win.

One, two, three, we counted, and I shot ahead. I was a little ahead of Yu-min to begin with, but soon we were side by side. Near the end, I was behind him by a few strides. By the time I got to the last hurdle, the tracks, he was already running down the slope on the other side. A train was barrelling towards us from a distance. I knew I’d already lost, but I didn’t give up. I leapt over the tracks. My backpack hit my elbow as I jumped, making the gun slip out of my sweaty hand. On the other side, I rolled to a stop, shot up and looked behind me. The train was still rushing forward, steam curling upwards from the engine. It was going to grind my gun to dust. Without thinking, I bolted back onto the tracks. By now, the train was close enough that I could see it was a freight train. But I couldn’t give up and lose my gun.

‘Yu-jin!’ Yu-min screamed.

The horn blasted, but I didn’t look at the train. I threw myself forward, my eyes only on the gun. As the train clattered and whooshed by, I rolled back down the slope, my gun in my hand.

I heard Yu-min shouting, ‘Run!’

I took off at speed, in case the conductor stopped the train to come back and catch me, or a station agent watching from somewhere called the police. I felt electrified, fully expecting someone to grab me by the scruff of my neck.

I caught up with Yu-min in front of the art studio. My uniform was torn, my face was covered in dirt, and my hair was standing on end. The art teacher mended my trousers and washed my face. We insisted that we’d fallen in the yard while we were racing each other; we didn’t tell anyone what had really happened.

The problem started that night. The moment I fell asleep, I found myself on the empty waste ground next to the tracks. I grabbed my gun as the train rushed towards me. When I opened my eyes, my bed and my body were drenched. The same thing happened the next night too. On the third night, I took off my wet pyjamas and threw them on my bed, then went into Yu-min’s room, hugging my pillow. I slipped under the blankets and sidled next to my brother. I could smell the grassy scent of that afternoon. The stench of urine clinging to me vanished. I closed my eyes. I had the same dream, but this time, Yu-min appeared beside me and yelled, ‘Train! Train’s coming!’ right before I was about to run onto the tracks.

I slept in his room for the rest of that year and continued until the spring I turned nine, the year he died.

Now, I wished I could crawl into Yu-min’s bed again. He would help me deal with this nightmare, if only I could just lie down next to him.

He died a long time ago , a voice inside my head reminded me. You have to handle it yourself.

Outside, the wind howled, its reverberations burrowing into my ears. I could feel my pulse behind my eyes. I swallowed the spit that had pooled in my mouth. Yu-min was gone. I pressed my knees together to suppress the urge to pee, and sat up straight. I lifted my hand to bring it to Mother’s face, but the world spun and I felt as though I might vomit. My shoulders were so stiff that my elbows would not move. The tips of my fingers trembled in the air. My body was frozen. The distance between my hand and her face seemed to stretch; it would be a million years later by the time I touched her.

It’s not as if you are going to rip into her and eat her , the voice in my mind snapped again. It’s just to check if she’s really not breathing, if her heart has really stopped, if her body is cold. Just put your hand out and touch her.

I exhaled. I placed my middle finger under her nose and waited. I didn’t detect anything. Her cheek, coated with dark purple blood, felt cold, dry and hard, like touching a stiffening mound of clay. I felt the middle of her chest, then moved my hand to the left and then to the right. I couldn’t feel her heartbeat anywhere among her twelve pairs of ribs. I didn’t feel any warmth. She really must be dead.

My shoulders drooped as despondency settled over me. What was it that I was hoping for? That she might still be alive? That this might all be a dream? It wasn’t. I was in the middle of a murder scene.