You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

My eyes stung. I leant back against my chair. I pressed my palms into my eyes and thought about the heads of little girls. I couldn’t remember drawing anything like that. But that wasn’t why I was taken to Auntie; Mother had become afraid of me only three years after I had supposedly killed her in my artistic imagination. What was That Day she kept referring to?

I realised I had skipped an entry. I flipped forward, wondering if she had written about That Day.

Friday 19 May

The last week has been an eternity. I thought I was going to suffocate to death. This morning, when I saw myself in the mirror near the front door on my way out, I thought I looked like a corpse. My skin was sallow, and the circles under my eyes made me look like I had been punched. I looked insane. I wondered briefly if I should put some make-up on but went straight to the clinic. I didn’t have the energy to care.

When I arrived, Hye-won glanced at me and shook her head. She looked at her chart. As I sat in front of her, she dragged out the inevitable, flipping through the test results. I felt like I was waiting for my own execution. I didn’t know what exactly I wanted, but I kept talking to the Virgin Mary in my head.

Hye-won said the results weren’t what she’d expected, not because she was wrong, but because they were so extreme. I balled my hands into fists then spread them out and put them in my lap. I was starting to sweat. This was the first time she and the specialists at the university had encountered a case like this. That might have been why the results were late; she said they’d talked it over and over, in case they’d misjudged or missed something.

Yu-jin didn’t have any congenital brain deformities. He was stunningly intelligent and he was more self-possessed than other kids his age. He’d failed the tests that had been set to display emotional empathy and understanding of morality, and they had found it hard to get him engaged or excited about things – much more so than the average child. That meant that it would take something special to make his pulse quicken.

Hye-won said she was afraid because she didn’t know what that might be. At first she thought he had a juvenile form of conduct disorder and ordered some tests for that, but that wasn’t it. After discussing it with her colleagues, and doing some MRI scans, they’d determined a potential dysfunction to his amygdala, the core fear system in the human brain. I asked her what this meant in language I could understand.

She said this was off the record, and she wouldn’t speak to an ordinary client like this, but he was essentially a danger to others. I couldn’t believe it, but she repeated it again. ‘Yu-jin is a danger to others. The worst kind of psychopath.’

Psychopath? This silly word was what had made my life what it had been over the last sixteen years? This was the absurd diagnosis that had been affecting me all these years? I felt frozen. All the thoughts that had been circling had stopped. I took my eyes off the journal. The entry continued but I didn’t want to read any more of it. I felt as removed from it as though I was meeting a whole different set of characters, in a completely different world from my own. It was almost as if this was a serious problem only for another person and it had nothing to do with me.

‘Do you really think so?’ I heard Mother say from behind me. I stood and moved over to the sliding door. She was swaying back and forth on the swing. The sky was darkening over the pergola roof. ‘Why don’t you read the rest?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not interested.’

‘You must be curious about That Day.’

I wasn’t. I was curious about something else. Why had she continued to stand by me, even going to her estranged sister and begging her for help? If she was so afraid of me, why didn’t she just tie a leash around my neck and lock me in a basement? Then I wouldn’t have become a killer and she would still be alive.

‘Yu-jin.’ It wasn’t Mother this time. This time it was coming from the hallway. I turned around. ‘Are you in there?’ Someone was knocking on my door. The handle turned. I glanced at the clock. 1.48 p.m. The journal was open on my desk. Of course the door wasn’t locked. Why would I lock it when I was home alone? I realised I was naked when the door swung open to reveal Auntie standing there. ‘What are you doing?’ she said, almost smiling.

This was unexpected. I’d thought she would come over at some point, but I hadn’t realised it would be now. I hadn’t thought she’d burst into my room without being asked. Even Mother never came charging in like this. I looked down at my naked body. The skin across my stomach tightened and my thigh muscles hardened. All of my focus was on Auntie. My enemy was here.

‘This is a surprise,’ I said, stepping in front of the desk. I pressed my thigh against the edge of the desk and stood with my legs open.

Auntie’s smile vanished. She spun around, making a guttural noise. The layers of necklaces around her neck spun with her, clattering. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked. She didn’t sound panicked, but she didn’t sound ecstatic either. I wanted to tell her not to be embarrassed, as she’d held me and watched me since my dick was the size of a thumb. What could be so scary now that I’d grown a little and so had my manhood?

I looked at Auntie’s round behind, clad in jeans. It was the only soft part on her bony body. It reminded me of a soccer ball in the middle of a field. I always wanted to kick it. How had she got in here anyway? I didn’t have to think for very long. Hae-jin. When he left the house yesterday, he must have stopped at the clinic to give her the key card for the front door and the combination for the flat.

‘That’s what I’d like to ask you,’ I retorted. ‘What are you doing standing there like that?’

Auntie, still facing away, crossed her arms, relaxing her shoulders. ‘Put on your clothes, would you? I can’t talk to you when you’re naked.’ She sounded like she could wait a thousand years until I put my clothes on.

‘That’ll be a bit difficult, Auntie. You’re standing in front of my wardrobe.’

She lifted her chin and glanced back, her eyes flicking over me. She seemed to decide that the current situation put her at a disadvantage, and so she uncrossed her arms and turned towards the door. ‘Will you come downstairs, then?’

‘Sure.’

She seemed to want to show me that she wasn’t cowed, maintaining her dignity as my aunt. She lifted her chin and, with a ramrod-straight back, left my room and closed the door behind her. I was sure she hadn’t seen the journal.

Yu-jin is a danger to others. The worst kind of psychopath.

I turned towards Mother. ‘Mum, Auntie came here to devour me. What should I do? Do you think I should let her, or should I devour her first?’

Mother didn’t answer. Do what you want, I thought she was saying. She grinned with her red Joker mouth.

I turned round and closed the journal. Even if I had been dying to know what That Day was, right now wasn’t the time. I slid it into the drawer and put on some underwear, black sweatpants and a black T-shirt. I closed the blinds and padded downstairs.

Auntie wasn’t in the living room or out on the balcony or in the kitchen. Mother’s room was still locked. She didn’t have any reason to enter Hae-jin’s room. I wondered if she was in the bathroom, but I didn’t hear a thing. Her grey coat and her blue handbag were on the island.

I remembered something I’d once read. Something about seeing into a woman’s soul if you looked into her handbag. I’d never been curious about Auntie’s soul the way I was now. What kind of soul saw an omen of matricide in a six-year-old’s picture? What kind of soul sentenced her nine-year-old nephew to life as a psychopath? What kind of soul fucked up another person’s life in the name of treatment? What kind of soul burst into the home of a so-called ‘danger to others’ all alone? Next to her bag was a cake box. The cake, which I could see through the clear plastic, said ‘CONGRATULATIONS’ across it. I went through the kitchen toward the laundry room, not making a sound, not even breathing. My mind was chatting away: Don’t do anything rash; say nice things and send her on her way.