The consultant, p.11
The Consultant, page 11
I felt as though we had been dating for ages. Aside from the standard questions, we talked about the weather, Magritte’s paintings and the best music to listen to on rainy days. At our second meeting, we exchanged CDs we had prepared of the music we’d talked about previously, and discussed a colleague of hers who had made her angry recently. She was five years younger than I was and, unable to overcome her mother’s insistence, she had registered with the marriage bureau for the same reason I had. She was working on illustrations and had a white three-year-old cat named Azrael.
Once she called me late at night just to say, ‘Flowers fall, but surely there are still phones.’
And once we talked about a painter and argued about whether art is more important than life.
She answered the question by saying: ‘Though flowers bloom easily, to be beautiful is not easy.’
I reckoned I could talk about her in more detail than anyone I’d ever met, including the people I’d met and the people I’d killed. There was something mysterious about her, which constantly excited me every time we met. As if something was being hidden. Is there any other way of explaining that, apart from the word ‘love’? Listening to the music she gave me, I remembered the names of the first and second children I had thought up in the military. I leaned against the window in the back of the bus and laughed foolishly.
The next day I went and chose a car. I hadn’t needed a car before, because I hardly had to go out of the house. But I decided to buy a car so I could drive her home. I wanted to buy a car that she would love, so I found a brand that everyone admired. I’d already learned from Hyeon-gyeong that all tastes can be explained by brand names.
The interior of the store was cold, simple and colourful at the same time. Hyeon-gyeong had also told me that being able to unite two contradictory tendencies meant that a brand was high-end.
The dealer said, ‘You know what? It’s not just a car.’
He caressed the smooth body with one hand.
‘When you ride this and get out somewhere, the air around you feels wrong.’
He said this in a proud voice. And it really was so. I could understand why the class president had accepted the burden of instalments and chosen a luxury car. If I wanted to change lanes, I could see the car behind me braking in the wing mirror the moment I turned on the blinker. Every time I stepped on the accelerator, the car lightly sped past all others. I was the king of the road. Buying a new car with a smooth European origin that, to borrow the dealer’s expression, ‘would make women wet their panties the moment you step on the brake’ cost exactly the money I received from restructuring three people. But it didn’t matter. There were plenty of people left to kill.
I sat in the new car and listened to the music she had given me. That alone seemed to fill my heart with warm light. Thanks to the rain not too long before, the leaves were all falling and we were entering winter. But everything looked green when I left the house.
There were days when we went together everywhere by car. Still now, on snowy days, I remember stopping the car on the banks of the Han River, where we listened to music and watched the water vanish under white snow. Her lips were so warm, and her skin was tender enough to make me want to cry. Her body shone white and everything else grew dim in the endless snow. And at some point she and I also faded from view as the windows steamed over.
Every moment we spent together was precious. It’s still easy for me to think of her when I see rain falling, dark clouds clearing and the waning moon emerging. The music we listened to, the paths we walked along together, the smell of her flesh and her soft skin. They remain stamped inside me and come to mind almost as if I could touch them when I close my eyes. I was so happy that I was afraid. On my way home alone, I would park the car, smoke a cigarette and feel scared that it might all be a dream. Such were those precious days when I inevitably felt sad. Just remembering those moments now makes my fingertips tremble. Sometimes I have a deep regret, a wish that things could be reversed somehow. But I couldn’t help myself, nor everything that followed.
It was only a few days before the start of spring that I decided to propose to her. One day, after a few early showers, the last cold snap came, and we spent the Sunday together. Naked apart from an apron, she made me bean paste stew. The small window in the kitchen was reflecting a mixture of the white snow that had fallen the day before and her white flesh. Looking at the bright sunlight, I thought, I’m going to buy a ring just as bright tomorrow.
* * *
The snow that had fallen two days before had melted and the streets were muddy. The white trainers I wore were a mess. In the past, I never left the house, so the weather didn’t matter. Now, even a hundred years of cold weather couldn’t stop me.
I spoke to the clerk. ‘I’m thinking of proposing, so I want to see some rings.’
But what I was looking for wasn’t a ring. It was the seed of the dreams I was nourishing. After a long thought, I bought a ring with a big diamond. Even at that moment, I hated myself for thinking that it was worth the same as one death. But every choice comes with a price.
The shape of the ring was a design in which diamonds stuck in the middle of two neat bands bloomed like flowers. When and how should I tell her? How could I make it an unforgettable proposal? I had a lot on my mind. Suddenly the ring felt heavy. What if she refused?
On the way home, I violated two traffic signals and took a wrong turning. When I managed to get home, there was a pair of black high heels on the porch. A visitor. I must have left the door unlocked when I went out. I entered, calling Yerin’s name. She was the only person who could have come in. In the living room sat the Manager, wearing a black coat.
‘There’s a new job,’ she said.
Something about this was odd. She had never before brought work to my house herself. For the first time I wasn’t happy to see the face of the goddess of my wet dreams. I put on a bright voice to hide my feelings.
‘Hey, I’ll be rich. I’ve just come back from spending money, and now it’s more work.’
She put an envelope down on the table.
‘I know you’re busy dating, but do it right.’
I replied, looking down at the envelope, ‘Have I ever neglected anything? Why, is there a problem?’
‘It’s, it’s not . . . This one’s kind of a test.’
The Manager got up from her seat.
‘A test? But I’ve already passed the test.’
I raised my voice without realising it. The Manager clicked her tongue as if I was being pathetic.
‘Even the driver’s licence that the state scatters around has to be renewed, so surely it’s natural?’
‘But you don’t take the test again every time.’
‘There are so many accidents for exactly that reason, because people don’t take the test again every time. You know what the Company is like.’
She snorted and turned her eyes back to the envelope.
‘Maybe it’s hard, killing someone you know. But this person is in a bit of trouble.’
The Manager smiled. Suddenly, my mind went blank. An acquaintance? An acquaintance. The word was circulating in my head, destroying everything. The ring, the happiness of the last few months, the excitement, the bright times, all had been shattered by just a few words. I stood frozen, forgetting to take off my coat. When I came to my senses, the Manager had already left and only the envelope remained. It was neatly and clearly placed on the table.
Who might it be? Who might this person be, whom she said I knew? Which of the people I knew would I find difficult to kill? I tried to guess who might be indicated in the envelope. But I already knew. There was no need to worry. Because there was only one person who had been in and out of my house. The computer was full of documents that should not have been seen, and the locked closet still contained records of the last person killed.
I cleaned the whole house, washed the laundry and reorganised the drawers. I also tidied up all the records in the closet. But the envelope was still there.
I washed the dishes, threw away the food scraps left in the drain of the sink, washed the car and sorted the trash. Still, the envelope was there.
I sorted out the receipts I’d collected over the past four years, dismantled the computer, scrubbed the sink and drain hole. All the messy rubbish stimulated my diaphragm. I kept throwing stuff away. Still, the envelope was there.
If anyone asks me about despair, I’ll answer that it’s shaped like a light beige envelope. At least it was for me. It took me three days to open the envelope. Then it was not because I found the courage but because I was so afraid and distressed that I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t make any rash decisions. Save her and I myself would die. I would not have been afraid if I had had such a wonderful conviction. But even if I risked my life to spare hers, if she really knew something she wasn’t supposed to know, it would be no different than breaking a rock with an egg. I didn’t think I could stop the Company just by trying. After all, I didn’t even know the real identity of the Company.
I opened the envelope. There were papers. I stood them up and tapped them on the edge of the table. The weight of the neatly arranged documents felt too heavy. I turned over the first page. A picture. A familiar face. I stared into the eyes of the person who was to embrace death.
Original Sin
I once went to church when I was young. It was Christmas. If you think I went to church for the Christmas snacks, you must be a generation older than me. Having grown up in the early eighties, we were not interested in snacks or bread from the church unless we were very poor. If I had asked my friends to go to church because they were giving away snacks, I would have been told, ‘No, let’s go to an arcade and play Galaga.’
But I decided to go to church on a friend’s suggestion. The reason Christmas was special to me was not because of the snacks or bread, but because that day was an exception.
Back then there used to be an announcement just before the news at 9 p.m.: against a backdrop of pictures of the moon and a sleeping child an announcer would say that good children should go to Dreamland – something that is not particularly funny, remembered now. As the social atmosphere reflected strictly such broadcasts, if and when children were outside beyond that time, adults would urge them to go home and sleep. They were in a similar situation because they couldn’t go out after the curfew siren at midnight. A soldier, who would later claim to have only 290,000, won in assets, was running the country, so the whole population was run like an army.
One of the riddles I most wanted to know the answer to at that time was, what happened after midnight? And why did ghosts only come out at midnight? The reason why I had never seen any ghosts was because I had to go to bed at nine. Maybe the door to a four-dimensional world would open at midnight, as in the cartoon series Paul’s Miraculous Adventure. I used to imagine that sometimes just before I fell asleep in a room with the lights turned off.
What makes adults prevent children from staying up late at night? I turned it over in my mind. What was the great secret that demanded that all children must go to sleep? I couldn’t wait to become an adult. But time was hardly on my side. If someone talked about time, ten days were like a month, a year sounded like a decade. Ten years ahead, I felt it would never come.
But then I found out that I didn’t have to wait that long. There was always an exception, and in this instance, it was Christmas. I got permission from my parents to stay up until the church service ended.
The church I went to for the first time was strange. I think there were various activities, such as playing, singing and celebrating Christmas. However, habit is a scary thing, so after nine o’clock, my eyelids were heavy and I couldn’t stay awake. The chair was hard, but the church’s uniquely boring and cosy atmosphere led me to Dreamland. Having dozed off, I was able to sleep soundly until just before midnight.
When midnight was around the corner, I opened my eyes to a booming voice. It was a pastor. The pastor was preaching in a loud voice that Jesus was crucified for our sins. He stressed that we cannot go to Heaven, therefore, unless we go to Jesus.
I wiped away the saliva around my mouth and asked the Sunday School teacher beside me in a low voice:
‘Then someone who has never sinned goes to Heaven regardless of Jesus?’
The teacher looked around and replied in a similarly low voice:
‘There’s no one who hasn’t sinned.’
‘There’s a lot of newborn babies and very nice people . . . What did they do to deserve it?’
The teacher explained that Adam, the first ancestor of mankind, had sinned, so everyone who is a descendant of his has sinned from birth, and that is the original sin. It followed at the same time that existence itself was a sin. It sounded a little ridiculous to me. I tried to argue, but the teacher told me to be quiet and stop talking when the pastor was preaching. I stood up after muttering, ‘You’ve talked more than I have.’ I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. But I went out of the church, leaving those eyes behind. Because that was not what I wanted to know.
The streets were quiet, and the night air was very cold. The remains of my drowsiness blew away in the cold winter wind. From somewhere I could hear the loud voices of drunkards and the barking of dogs. And I heard a bell ring from a church. It was ringing midnight. I stopped in my tracks. My heart was pounding. I smiled.
But that was all. There was nothing mysterious about it. The street was quiet again once the bell stopped. The barking of dogs died down and people’s footsteps faded away, but that was it. Time did not stop, as in the cartoon, there were no large bats filling the sky, no maiden ghosts, no werewolves and no ghosts of unmarried men in white robes. Then why did adults force us to go to bed early? I suddenly became angry. Midnight was special because it was a forbidden time. That was all.
Christmas quickly became boring once I realised that the world was no different after midnight. If there were no ghosts, no doors to the four-dimensional world, no magic time, then it was clear that there would be no Santa. My feelings were complex, and I couldn’t explain it well at the time. It was only when I was much older that I realised I’d felt like I was being made a fool of.
My mother asked me if church was boring, and I just said yes. And I fell asleep after drinking some warm cocoa. When I woke up, there was a gift from Santa Claus at my bedside.
Inwardly I snorted – humph – exclaiming, ‘Wow! Has Santa Claus really paid a visit?’
Everything grew boringly serious after that. In the New Year, the curfew disappeared and the stupid Dreamland broadcasts ended. Galaga was also replaced by Xevious. In the new semester, buying collections of books spread like a fever, and for middle-class people, a collection of world literature and an encyclopaedia were essential. My family bought the complete Sherlock Holmes stories. Crime and detectives occupied the world of magic and adventure and the place where Santa had gone.
So everything changed, but the concept of original sin sometimes came to my mind. Existence itself as sin. Why is existence itself a sin? Why do mature adults believe such nonsense? The words came to my mind on cold nights as I grew older, passed puberty and edged past thirty.
It was only after the trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo that I found out. And I went to the DRC entirely because of the beige envelope of my despair. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know that I would go to the DRC or discover the answer to my questions.
* * *
The person in the document was not the illustrator. Thankfully, my prediction had been wrong. But I didn’t shed tears of joy. Because the Manager hadn’t lied. The target was Hyeon-gyeong. At first I felt something like relief. I think I was even a little bit pleased. Then came a moment of confusion. I didn’t know if I could call it a relationship, but she was a girl I had dated. So I felt uncomfortable. We did see the gorillas at the zoo together. There were many things I learned while meeting with her. Things like the style and symbolism of the brands that create so-called luxury goods. They looked the same to me, but they had incredibly different meanings. It was a new world of allusions, metaphors and show-offs. But that wasn’t reason enough not to kill her. The sex between us was really good, but it wasn’t great enough to make me want to risk my life. What’s more, I was not even in a position to decide whether she should live or die.
I thought I’d look on the bright side. Yerin was at least alive, and I could propose. It would be regrettable if an unlucky ex-lover was in an accident, but it would be better for Hyeon-gyeong than ending up in pain at the hands of others. Anyway, our relationship had not been close enough to call ourselves lovers.
I spread out the papers and reconstructed Hyeon-gyeong’s daily life. Most of the things I knew about her daily life only applied to one day a week, so this felt a little weird. I got to know her family better than when I was seeing her for all that time.
Her family was very poor. Her father was out of work and her brother was working in a factory. Probably her mother, who worked at a market, had raised the children. Poverty must surely have been worse than having a terribly ordinary name. Just looking at the documents gave me the picture. For Hyeon-gyeong, brands must have been a way to prove that she was a much cooler person than she really was. Suddenly, I wondered what it was the Manager thought I didn’t need to know.
It was not hard to guess. Hyeon-gyeong was an accountant and must have found something odd while examining the office’s cash flow. I felt a little sad that sincerity was the cause of her death. Perhaps only the gifts I gave her and the bag she carried from the beginning were real luxury goods. Imagine her doing all that footwork and getting paid to buy imitations, knowing they were fakes. It reminded me of the closet in her small semi-basement room with such things hanging in it. It was quite a sad sight. But what was sadder in her closet were the things I had bought her. What on earth could Louis Vuitton prove in a semi-basement rented room?
