You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

My heart settled down, beating regularly as it always did. I watched the ocean as it swelled. The tide would be rising at about seven to fifteen kilometres an hour, two to three times faster than my pace. If I rode along with the tide, it wouldn’t take me more than half an hour.

Right before I took off, I looked at the darkened car, sinking below in the depths. Hae-jin was already underwater. I could see thick fog and snow above the surface. I didn’t have time to wait for the searchlight to loop back. The cold air felt like an axe. I pushed off and began my strokes. There was a long way to go, and my entire body felt like ice. I felt a sharp pain in my side, but I tried to breathe normally. Getting tense now would mean death. If I pushed myself too hard, I would sink before getting halfway to shore. I had to keep calm, not rush, and ride with the water. The searchlight approached me gradually and went past me. Then it became even darker. The blackness was so thick that I wondered if I could scoop a mound of it out of the air. The fog grew denser. I couldn’t see. The ocean sloshed heavily over me. I felt myself growing weak. I went under the surface often. I was having a hard time breathing. Cold salty water rushed in every time I opened my mouth, and my limbs stiffened. I wasn’t swimming; I was just splashing. My mind skipped through time and space, rushing towards the past.

I was back at the cliff on that island, playing Survival with Yu-min. I was on the ground after being hit. I heard his laughter ringing out behind me as I held my head in my hands. And his voice: You’re still not dead?

Just you wait , the voice inside me answered. I think I’m going to die soon.

I could hear the bell ringing from far away.

Stop there! he yelled. I said stop! A pebble flew past. Everything was disorientating. The bell was crashing in my ears. Stop, I said!

My body rose and crested over a black wave. My head dipped underwater and managed to resurface. Yu-min’s voice disappeared. As did the cliff, the pine trees, the sound of the bell. Lights were moving quickly in the fog. I thought I could hear a faint motor. That must be the police boat, going out for rescue.

Darkness pressed in on me. The ocean rushed over my body. The last breath of air leaked out of my lungs. My body was depleted, and I felt my will to live subside. Was this what it felt like for Yu-min and Father? Was this how they gave up? The waves turned me over. I let go and lay back in the shifting water. It had stopped snowing. The sky opened, and light from the stars poured down on me. As it touched my forehead, a voice whispered, Mother was right.

That night is still as vivid as though it was yesterday. Only the moments when death seemed imminent remain foggy. I’m not sure if I lost consciousness. What I do know is that I smacked my head on something and lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was draped on a mooring cable at the dock, like the girl with the earring. The sea was covered in white, the fog so thick that you couldn’t tell which way was up. I could hear the sirens in the park and boats criss-crossing out on the water. Patrol cars rushed back and forth along the road by the sea wall. The dock, though, was deserted. I had managed to return to the cold, dark banks of life.

I didn’t have time to congratulate myself for coming back from the brink of death. I felt heavy, as though I was wearing cast-iron armour. It was hard to pick myself up out of the water. Everything was dark, and I couldn’t feel anything. My teeth were chattering and my joints creaked. Cold air slashed the inside of my throat. The same words were still ringing in my ears. Mother was right .

Dozens of fragments floated by: me running determinedly towards the bell tower, Yu-min yelling at me to stop as he rang the bell, me leaping over the railing and throwing a punch, Yu-min staggering, one hand still on the cord, me kicking him in the chest, him arcing below the cliff, the cord fluttering in his grip. The ocean that opened its mouth to swallow him whole, how I felt as I watched him disappear. I remember what I was thinking: Don’t kid yourself. The person who stays alive is the winner.

The street lamp by the dock was glowing yellow. I gripped the metal railing of the steps and forced my legs to climb them, breathing heavily. It was as if I were climbing the Himalayas while battling altitude sickness. Yongi’s, just above me, might as well have been Pluto. I kept going. It wasn’t a matter of will, and it certainly wasn’t a miracle. It was the power of simplicity; I concentrated solely on where to place my foot next. When I got up to the sea wall, the dark shack greeted me. I was grateful that Mr Yongi had gone home. I was moved by my luck: no cars or people were on the road when I emerged. I broke into the shack. It was easier to breathe in here. I was overwhelmed with relief. I was going to make it.

I searched and found a thin lighter shaped like a gun. I clicked the trigger and a flame sprang up. Now I could see. I spotted Mr Yongi’s uniform hanging up as usual. I dried my hair and body with a rag and put on his trousers, jacket, cap, disposable mask, thick hiking socks and rubber boots. The trousers were too short, but now was not the time to worry about style. I was just grateful I managed to fit into the clothes at all.

I dragged myself onto the intercity bus to Ansan, where I spent the night in a twenty-four-hour bathhouse, washing off the salt, sweating it out, and taking a deep nap in a room with a heated floor. The next day, at dawn, I caught the train to Mokpo. Twelve hours later, I boarded a shrimp boat as an apprentice. For the next year, I roamed the sea, sleeping in the belly of the boat, cooking, cleaning and helping with the nets.

All I knew about what had happened to Hae-jin was what I’d seen on YTN News on the train. The police had recovered the car and his body. It appeared that he had tried to escape from his seat belt. So in that last moment when I looked back before swimming for shore, he had been struggling in the dark by himself. I took this in more calmly than I’d expected, though a lump remained lodged in my throat for a long time. What were we to each other? Were we brothers? I still didn’t know. What I did know was that if I had left just a little earlier, or Hae-jin had figured it all out just a little later, we could have kept our relationship intact.

Beyond that, I was in the dark about the investigation. The boat had a radio, of course, but I didn’t have time to listen to the news. For the very first time in my life, I was scraping by, focused only on surviving.

Early this morning, I stepped on shore with the little money I’d earned in my pocket. First I went to a public bath for the first time in a year. I washed, shaved and moisturised. Then I bought new clothes and a hat and trainers, ate something and drank a coffee. Hae-jin loved coffee. I went to a nearby internet café. Sitting among pathetic gamers, I scrolled through the news from a year ago.

They’d called it ‘the Razor Killings’. Hae-jin had been pegged as the killer. The police concluded that he’d killed a stranger, his adoptive mother and her sister before trying to flee overseas. When he failed at that, he killed himself. All the evidence supported that conclusion, including the razor in his jeans pocket, the Private Lesson jacket discovered in the table on the roof of the flat, and the ticket to Rio he’d reserved with his mother’s card. A neighbour had reported seeing Hae-jin forcing his adoptive brother, who’d clearly been beaten up, into a car and driving him to the park. The brother was deemed missing. They searched for three days but couldn’t find anything other than his clothes. They thought it was possible he’d survived, since he’d once been a competitive swimmer, but no clues or witnesses had turned up to give credence to that theory. Reflecting the shocking nature of the crime, several hundred headlines had been posted over a couple of days, and each article had thousands of comments. The substance of many of them was the same: What do you expect when you bring someone else’s child into your family?