Diary of a Murderer E-Book

Kim Young-ha

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 265

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'Kim Young-Ha is exceedingly good' New York Journal of Books 'Sublime, galvanizing' Nylon 'Compelling' Atlantic ___________________________ It's been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six? In his prime, Kim Byeongsu was one of the best murderers around. But he gave it all up to become a dedicated father. Now, despite suffering from dementia, he decides to come out of retirement for one final target: his daughter's boyfriend, who he suspects is a killer too. In other dark, glittering tales, an affair between childhood friends questions the limits of loyalty and love; a family disintegrates after a baby son is kidnapped and recovered years later; and the pursuit of creative fulfilment may come at the expense of all reason. _____________________________ Readers are loving Diary of a Murderer 'A masterclass in storytelling' 'A page-turner' 'Haunting and unique' 'Reminds me why I love reading' 'Sharp, dark and edgy'

Leseprobe

Kim Young-ha is the author of seven novels, including the acclaimed I Have the Right to Destroy Myself and Black Flower – and five short story collections. He has won every major Korean literature award, and his works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Seoul, South Korea.

Krys Lee is the award-winning author of Drifting House and How I Became a North Korean. She teaches creative writing at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College in Seoul.

First published in the United States in 2019 by Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Published in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd. This edition published 2026.

Copyright © Kim Young-ha, 2013

English translation copyright © Krys Lee, 2019

The moral right of Kim Young-ha to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The moral right of Krys Lee to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 527 0

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 003 3

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CONTENTS

Diary of a Murderer

The Origin of Life

Missing Child

The Writer

DIARY OF A MURDERER

It’s been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six? Anyway, it’s about that long ago. What drove me back then wasn’t, as people usually assume, the urge to kill or some sexual perversion. It was disappointment. It was hope for a more perfect pleasure. Each time I buried a victim, I repeated to myself: I can do better next time.

The very reason I stopped killing was because that hope vanished.

•

I kept a journal. An objective report. Maybe I needed something like that at the time. What I’d done wrong, how that made me feel. I had to write it down so I wouldn’t repeat the same gut-wrenching mistakes. Just like students keep a notebook with all their test mistakes, I also kept meticulous records of every step of my murders and what I felt about them.

It was a stupid thing to do.

Coming up with sentences was grueling. I wasn’t trying to be literary and it was just a daily log, so why was it so difficult? Not being able to fully express the ecstasy and pity I’d felt made me feel lousy. Most of the fiction I’d read was from Korean-language textbooks. They didn’t have any of the sentences I needed. So I started reading poetry.

That was a mistake.

The poetry teacher at the community center was a male poet around my age. On the first day of class he made me laugh when he said solemnly, “Like a skillful killer, a poet is someone who seizes language and ultimately kills it.”

This was after I’d already “seized and ultimately killed” dozens of prey and buried them. But I didn’t think what I did was poetry. Murder’s less like poetry and more like prose. Anyone who tries it knows that much. Murdering someone is even more troublesome and filthy than you think.

Anyway, thanks to the teacher I got interested in poetry. I was born the type who can’t feel sadness, but I respond to humor.

•

I’m reading the Diamond Sutra: “Abiding nowhere, give rise to the mind.”

•

I took the poetry classes for a long stretch. I’d decided that if the class was lame I would kill the instructor, but thankfully, it was interesting. The instructor made me laugh several times, and he even praised my poems twice. So I let him live. He probably still doesn’t know that he’s living on borrowed time. I recently read his latest poetry collection, which was disappointing. Should I have put him in his grave back then?

To think that he keeps writing poems with such limited talent when even a gifted murderer like me has given up killing. How brazen of him.

•

I keep stumbling these days. I fall off my bicycle or trip on a stone. I’ve forgotten a lot of things. I burned the bottoms of three teapots. Eunhui called and told me she made me an appointment at the doctor’s. While I yelled and roared with anger, she stayed silent until she said, “Something is definitely not normal. Something definitely happened to your head. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen you get angry, Dad.”

Had I really never gotten angry before? I was still feeling dazed when Eunhui hung up. I grabbed the cell phone to finish our conversation, but suddenly I couldn’t remember how to make a phone call. Did I first have to press the Call button? Or did I dial the number first? And what was Eunhui’s phone number? I remember there being a simpler way to do this.

I was frustrated. And annoyed. I threw the cell phone across the room.

•

I didn’t know what poetry was, so I wrote honestly about the process of murder. My first poem, was it called “Knife and Bones”? The instructor remarked that my use of language was fresh. He said that its raw quality and the perceptive way I imagined death depicted the futility of life. He repeatedly praised my use of metaphors.

I asked, “What’s a metaphor?”

The instructor grinned — I didn’t like that smile — and explained “metaphor” to me. So a metaphor was a figure of speech.

Ah-ha.

Listen, sorry to let you down, but that wasn’t a figure of speech.

•

I grabbed a copy of the Heart Sutra and began reading:

So, in the emptiness, no form,

No feeling, thought, or choice,

Nor is there consciousness.

No eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind.

No color, sound, smell, taste, touch,

Or what the mind takes hold of,

Nor even act of sensing.

No ignorance or end of it,

Nor all that comes of ignorance.

No withering, no death,

No end of them.

Nor is there pain, or cause of pain,

Or cease in pain, or noble path

To lead from pain.

Not even wisdom to attain!

Attainment, too, is emptiness.

The instructor asked me, “So you really haven’t studied poetry before?” When I responded, “Is it something one has to learn?” he said, “No. Rather, if you have a bad teacher, it’ll ruin your lines.” I said, “That so? That’s a relief.” Then again, there are at least a few things in life you can’t learn from others.

•

They took an MRI. I lay down on a medical table that resembled a white coffin and went into the light; it felt like a kind of near-death experience. I floated in the air and looked down at my body. Death is standing by my side. I understand. I am going to die soon.

A week later, I had some sort of cognitive abilities test. The doctor asked questions and I answered. The questions were easy, but answering them was hard. It felt like putting your hand in a fish tank and trying to catch a fish just out of reach. Who is the current president of Korea? What year is it right now? Please repeat the last three words you just heard. What is seventeen plus five? I was sure I knew the answers, but I couldn’t remember them. How could I know but not know? How was this possible?

After the exam, I sat down with the doctor. He looked grim.

“The hippocampus has atrophied,” he said, pointing at the MRI scan of my brain.

“It’s unmistakably Alzheimer’s. We can’t be certain at this point how far it’s progressed. We’ll need to keep watch over time.”

Next to me, Eunhui sat quietly, her mouth firmly shut.

The doctor said, “Your memories will gradually disappear. Your short-term memory and your recent memories will go first. It can be slowed but it can’t be stopped. For now, take the prescribed medication regularly. And write everything down, and keep those notes on your person. In time you may not be able to find your own house.”

•

I’m rereading a yellowed paperback copy of Montaigne’s Essays. Reading it as an old man is surprisingly enjoyable: “We trouble life by the care of death, and death by the care of life.”

•

On the way back from the hospital, we were stopped at a checkpoint. The policeman looked at Eunhui and me like he knew us, then sent us off. He was the youngest son of the village association leader.

He said, “We’re running a checkpoint because there’s been a murder. Working day and night with no end in sight is killing us. What do people think, that murderers wander around in broad daylight saying, ‘Please catch me’?”

He then told us that three women had been murdered between our district and the neighboring one. The cops had deduced that it was the work of a serial killer. The women were all in their twenties and had been killed late at night on their way home. They had rope burns on their wrists and ankles. The third victim was found soon after my Alzheimer’s verdict, so naturally I asked myself: Am I the murderer?

At home I flipped through my wall calendar and checked the suspected dates. I had foolproof alibis. I was relieved it wasn’t me, but I didn’t like knowing that someone was kidnapping and killing in my territory. I warned Eunhui that the murderer could be lurking among us. I told her what precautions to take and never to be out alone late at night. It would be over for her as soon as she got into a man’s car. And it was dangerous to walk with headphones on.

“Please don’t worry so much,” she said.

At the front door, she added, “It’s not as if murders happen every day.”

•

These days I write everything down. There are times when I find myself somewhere unfamiliar and stay confused until I get back home, thanks to the name-and-address tag hanging from my neck. Last week someone took me back to the local precinct.

The policeman greeted me with a smile. He said, “Sir, it’s you again.”

“You know me?”

“Of course. I probably know you better than you know yourself.”

Really?

“Your daughter is on her way. We’ve already contacted her.”

•

Eunhui graduated from an agricultural college and was hired by a local research center. She works on improving crop varieties. Sometimes she takes two different varieties and grafts them to create a new species. She practically lives at the research center, in her lab coat, and occasionally pulls all-nighters. Plants aren’t interested in what time humans arrive at and leave work. Sometimes the pollination has to take place in the middle of the night. They grow this way, brazen and fierce.

People think that Eunhui is my granddaughter and act surprised when I say she’s my daughter. That’s because though I turned seventy this year, Eunhui is barely twenty-eight. The one most curious about this is none other than Eunhui. When Eunhui was sixteen, she learned about blood types at school. I’m type AB, but Eunhui is type O. For parents and their kids, that’s an impossible combination.

“Dad,” she asked, “how can I be your daughter?”

In general, I try to be as truthful as possible.

I said, “I adopted you.”

That was around the time Eunhui and I started growing apart. She wasn’t sure how to act around me anymore, and in the end we couldn’t bridge the distance between us. After that day, we were no longer as close.

There’s a condition called Capgras syndrome, which is caused by an abnormality in the part of the brain that controls intimacy. If you suffer from it, you’re able to recognize the faces of people close to you, but you no longer feel you know them. For example, a husband will suddenly start to distrust his wife, saying, “You look just like my wife and act exactly like her — who are you really? Who put you up to this?” No matter the evidence, he’ll think she’s a stranger. She looks like a stranger to him. Before long, the patient will be forced to live with the feeling that he has been exiled to an unknown world. He will believe that these people with similar-looking faces are lying to him.

After that day, it was as if Eunhui began feeling that the small world surrounding her, the family that was made up of the two of us, was an unfamiliar one. Still, we continued to live together.

•

When the wind blows, the bamboo forest behind the house makes a clamor. I become tangled up in thoughts when that happens. On these windy days, even the birds go quiet.

I bought the tract of bamboo forest long ago. I never regretted it — I’d always wanted my very own forest. In the mornings I head out behind my house for a walk. You can’t run in a bamboo forest. If you accidentally trip on something, you might even die. If you cut down a bamboo tree, its sharp, firm roots remain. That’s why you have to constantly watch your feet when you’re surrounded by bamboo trees. On my way back to the house I listen to the crackling of bamboo leaves underfoot and think about the people I’ve buried below. Those dead bodies become bamboo and shoot up toward the heavens.

•

When Eunhui was younger she once asked me, “Where do my birth parents live? Are they still alive?”

“They’re dead,” I said. “I brought you home from an orphanage.”

Eunhui didn’t want to believe me. She seemed to have searched the internet for information, even sought out the relevant government building, before locking herself in her room and crying for days. Then finally she accepted it.

She asked, “Did you know my parents?”

“We’d met before, but we weren’t close.”

“What kind of people were they? Were they good people?”

“They were wonderful. You were their main concern till the very end.”

•

I pan-fry some tofu. I have tofu for breakfast, tofu for lunch, tofu for dinner. I drizzle the pan with oil and add the tofu. Once one side is cooked, I turn it over to the other side. I take out some kimchi, then have my meal. No matter how bad the Alzheimer’s gets, I hope I can manage at least this much alone. A basic rice with tofu.

•

I was in a minor car accident. It happened at a three-way intersection, and the bastard’s jeep was in front of me. These days, bad vision is part of my everyday life. It’s probably the Alzheimer’s. I didn’t see the guy’s car at a standstill, and before I knew it, I ran right into him. It was one of those jeeps custom-designed for hunting. As if searchlights on the roof weren’t enough, he’d also mounted three sets of fog lights on the bumper. Such cars are remodeled so the trunk can be rinsed down with water. He’d also added about two extra batteries. When hunting season starts, guys like him flock to the mountains behind the village.

I got out of the car and walked over to the jeep. The driver didn’t get out. He had his windows rolled up, so I knocked on the glass.

“Look here,” I said. “Let’s talk face-to-face.”

He nodded and gestured as if to say, Just go on your way. That was odd. Didn’t he at least want to check his rear bumper? When I didn’t budge, he finally got out of the jeep. A short, stocky man in his early thirties. He quickly scanned the bumper and said it looked fine.

It wasn’t fine. The bumper was dented.

He said, “Don’t worry about it, sir. It was already dinged. It’s really fine.”

I said, “Just in case, let’s exchange numbers. So there won’t be trouble later.”

I handed him my number, but he wouldn’t take it.

“There’s no need.” His voice was low-toned, expressionless.

I said, “Do you live in the neighborhood?”

The guy didn’t say anything. But for the first time he did look me straight in the eyes. He had the eyes of a snake. They were cold and cruel. I was positive: in that moment we recognized each other.

He neatly printed his name and number on a piece of paper. It was a kid’s handwriting. His name was Pak Jutae. I returned to the rear of the jeep and checked the damage one more time. That’s when I saw it: the blood dripping from the trunk. I also felt his gaze. That gaze studying me as I listened to the dripping blood.

If blood drips out of a jeep made for hunting, people tend to think it’s carrying something like a roe deer. But I begin by assuming there’s a dead person inside. It’s safer to think this way.

•

Who was it again? A Spanish writer, or was it an Argentinian? I don’t remember stuff like a writer’s name anymore. Anyway, in some writer’s novel, an elderly man walks by a river and ends up sitting on a bench, talking to a young person he’s just met. Only later does he realize what’s happened: the young person he met by the river is actually himself. If I had the chance to meet my younger self, would I recognize him?

•

Eunhui’s mother was my last offering. On the way back from burying her, my car crashed into a tree and flipped over. The police said that I was speeding and had lost control around a curve. I had to have brain surgery twice. Lying in the hospital bed, I felt so completely at peace. It wasn’t like me. At first I thought it was because of the pills they gave me. Before, I became uncontrollably irritated if I even heard someone being loud. Noise had been almost unbearable. The sound of people ordering food, the sound of kids laughing, the sound of women gabbing — I hated it all. But now this sudden peace. I’d always thought my constantly seething mind was normal. It wasn’t. Like a person who has gone deaf, I was forced to get used to this sudden stillness and peace. Whether it was from the impact of the crash or the surgeon cutting me up, something had happened to my brain.

•

Words are slowly escaping me. My head is turning into a sea cucumber. A hole is opening up. It’s slimy and everything escapes through it. In the morning, I read the newspaper from beginning to end. After I finish reading, I feel as if I’ve forgotten more than I’ve learned. Still, I read. Each time I read a sentence, it feels like I’m forcibly assembling a machine that’s missing a few crucial parts.

•

I’d had my eye on Eunhui’s mom for a long time. She was an administrative assistant at my community center. She had lovely calves. Maybe it was the poems and the writing, but I felt I was getting soft. It was as if all this reflection and thinking were stifling my impulses. I didn’t want to get soft or suppress the feelings boiling inside me. It was as if I were being shoved into a deep, dark cave. I just needed to know if I was who I knew myself to be back then. When I opened my eyes, I saw Eunhui’s mother directly in front of me — chance is often the beginning of bad luck.

So I killed her.

But it wasn’t easy.

It was disappointing.

A murder without any pleasure. Maybe whatever change was happening inside me had already started by then. The second brain surgery merely made it irreversible.

•

In the paper this morning, I read about another serial killing that shocked the local community. When were they saying the killing took place? Something was off, so I went through my notes and found I had jotted down information on the three earlier murders. Recently my memory’s been more erratic than usual. Whatever I don’t write down slips through my hands like sand. I jotted down the details of this fourth murder in my notebook.

A twenty-five-year-old female student was found dead on a country road. Her arms and legs were bruised with rope marks, and she was naked. Just like the others, she had been kidnapped, beaten, and left for dead by the roadside.

•

That jerk Pak Jutae hasn’t called me. But I’ve seen him around a few times. Too frequent to call it a coincidence. And there must have been times when I saw but didn’t recognize him. He’s prowling around my house like a wolf, watching my every move. If I approach him to talk, he quickly disappears.

•

Is he after Eunhui?

•

I’ve let more people live than I’ve killed. My father always used to say, “How many people in the world get to do whatever they want?” I agree.

•

It seems I didn’t recognize Eunhui this morning. Right now I do recognize her. That’s a relief. The doctor says that soon Eunhui will also disappear from my memory.

He said, “The only thing you’ll remember is the way she looked as a child.”

You can’t protect someone you can’t recognize, so I put Eunhui’s photo in a pendant and hung it around my neck.

The doctor merely said, “No matter what you try, nothing will help. The recent memories go first.”

•

Crying, Eunhui’s mother begged me, “Please, at least spare my daughter.”

I said, “Okay, then, don’t worry about that.”

I’ve faithfully upheld that promise until now. I hated people who made empty promises, so I tried hard not to become that kind of person. But the issue is now. I’m writing this down again so I won’t forget: I can’t abandon Eunhui to her death.

•

At the community center, the teacher taught a class using a poem by Midang. The poem was called “The Bride.” In it, a groom is heading to the bathroom on his wedding night when his clothes get caught on the door latch. He flees, assuming his new bride is the lewd type and has grabbed at him. About forty years later he happens to pass by the same place and sees that his bride is still waiting there for him, so he nudges her, and she turns into a pile of ash.

The teacher and students alike went on and on about how beautiful the poem was.

I read it as a poem about a groom who kills his bride on their wedding night, then runs away. A young man and a young woman. And a dead body. How could you read it any other way?

•

My name is Kim Byeongsu. I turned seventy this year.

•

I’m not afraid of death. And I can’t stop from forgetting. If I forget everything, I would no longer be the person I am now. If I can’t remember who I am now, if there turned out to be an afterlife, how would that still be me? So it doesn’t matter. These days only one thing occupies me: keeping Eunhui from getting killed before I completely lose my memory.

The karma, and the pratyaya, of this life.

•

My house is at the foot of a mountain, with its back turned from the main road, so passing hikers easily overlook it. Those on their way down are more likely to discover the house than those going up. A large temple stands at the summit, and some people assume my house is a hermitage or temple lodging. There’s the occasional dwelling a few hundred feet down the road. A couple with dementia lived in what the neighbors called the Apricot Tree House. At first it was just the husband who had dementia, but not long after, his wife received the same diagnosis. I don’t know what others thought, but the couple did fine. Whenever I ran into them on the street, they would put their hands together respectfully and greet me. I used to wonder, Who did they think I was?

At first they thought they were living in the 1990s, but in their final years they traveled back to the ’70s. Meaning, they returned to a time when one wrong word could get you imprisoned, a period of emergency measures and the so-called Makkoli Security Law. So when the two ran into strangers, they became guarded and cautious. To them, all the villagers were now strangers, and they found it bizarre that these unfamiliar people were constantly coming and going around them. Then it got to the point where the couple stopped recognizing each other. That was when their son showed up to put the old couple in a nursing home. One day I happened to pass by their house and witness the couple on their knees in front of their son, begging him to spare their lives, saying, “Please don’t kill us! We’re not Commies, we swear!” They seemed to have confused their son, who’d shown up wearing a suit, with a National Intelligence Service agent. The couple who could no longer recognize each other united in front of their son. The son alternated between being furious and tearful, until the neighbors stepped in and forced the old couple into the car that drove them away.

That could be my future.

•

Eunhui keeps asking me, “Why? Why are you like this? Why can’t you remember? Why aren’t you trying?” To Eunhui, I must be the very definition of strange. Sometimes she thinks I’m purposely making things difficult for her. She says I’m pretending not to know things, just to see how she will react. She says that I seem far too calm.

I know Eunhui cries alone when she shuts the door behind her. Yesterday I overheard her speaking on the phone with a friend. She said she was losing her mind.

She said, “He’s not the same person. He’s a different person today and different tomorrow. And he was different just now than from a moment ago, then a second later he’s different again. Sometimes he’s obviously got Alzheimer’s, unable to remember what just happened, then other times he seems absolutely normal.

“He’s not the father I used to know,” she said. “I can’t bear this. I can’t stand it anymore.”

•

My father was my genesis. My father, who beat my mother and my sister, Yeongsuk, whenever he drank: I smothered him to death with a pillow. My mother pressed down on his body and Yeongsuk on his legs. She was only thirteen. Rice husks burst from the sides of the pillow. Afterward, Yeongsuk refilled the pillow with the swept-up rice husks and my mother numbly stitched it up. I was sixteen when it happened. Sudden deaths were common after the Korean War. No one paid attention to a man who had died in his sleep at home. Not even a constable came by. We set up a makeshift tent in the front yard and received mourners.

When I was fifteen I could carry a sack of rice on my back. In my hometown when a boy was strong enough to do that, not even his father could lay a hand on him. But my father still beat my mother and younger sister. He’d strip off their clothes and chase them out of the house in the freezing cold. Killing him was the best solution. The only regret I had was getting my mother and sister involved when I could have done it alone.

My father, who’d lived through the war, always suffered from nightmares. He also talked a lot in his sleep. Even as he died, he probably thought he was having another bad dream.

•

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit. It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers.”

That’s from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

•

I began killing when I was sixteen, and I continued until I was forty-five. I lived through the April Revolution and the May Massacre. President Park Chung-hee proclaimed the Yushin Reforms as he dreamed of making himself dictator for life. First Lady Yuk Young-soo was shot to death. President Jimmy Carter visited, told Park Chung-hee to abandon his dictatorial ways, then went jogging, wearing only underwear. Park Chung-hee was assassinated. Kim Dae-jung was kidnapped in Japan and narrowly escaped with his life. Kim Young-sam was expelled from the National Assembly. Martial law was declared in Gwangju, and the army laid siege to the city and beat and shot people to death.

Through it all I thought only about killing. I carried on a one-man war against the world. I killed, I fled, I lay low. I killed again, fled, and lay low. Back then there was no such thing as DNA testing or surveillance cameras. Even the term “serial killer” was little known. Dozens of suspicious-looking persons and the mentally ill were considered suspects, and were dragged off to the police station and tortured. A few even made false confessions. The precincts didn’t cooperate with each other, so when a similar crime occurred in a different precinct, they didn’t make the connection. Thousands of cops wielding batons climbed up the wrong mountains to investigate.

Those were good times.

•

I was forty-five at the time of my last murder. Looking back, it dawns on me that my father was also forty-five the year he suffocated under the pillow. What a strange coincidence. I’m writing this down, too.

•

Am I a devil, or a superhuman? Or both?

•

Seventy years of a life. When I look back, it seems that I’m standing in front of a gaping black cave. I feel little about my approaching death, but when I think about the past, my heart feels dark and vast. My heart was like a desert; nothing grew inside me. There was no moisture to be found anywhere. When I was younger, I tried to understand others, but it was too difficult a task for me. I always avoided eye contact so people assumed I was the shy and docile type.

I used to practice making faces in the mirror. A sad look, a happy look, a worried look, a dejected look. Eventually I developed a simple technique. I just imitated the person in front of me. If someone frowned, I frowned, and if someone laughed, I laughed.

In the old days, people thought the devil lived inside a mirror. The devil they saw in the mirror, he was probably me.

•

I had a sudden urge to see my sister. When I said this to Eunhui, she told me that my sister had passed away long ago.

“How did she die?”

“You know — she died after a long struggle with pernicious anemia.”

It sounded oddly familiar, as if I’d heard this before.

•

I was a veterinarian. It’s a good job for a murderer. You can use all kinds of powerful anesthetics. You can bring an elephant immediately to its knees. In the country, vets make a lot of house calls. While our city counterparts sit in clinics treating pet dogs and cats, in the country you travel around treating livestock, from cows and pigs to chickens. In the past, you even encountered the occasional horse. Outside of chickens, they were all mammals. There’s not much of a difference between the human anatomy and theirs.

•

Once again, I found myself somewhere unfamiliar. A neighborhood I’d never been before. Some local kids surrounded me and put me in a storeroom, keeping me from going wherever it was I kept trying to go. They claimed I had been scared and caused a racket. A cop came, and after radioing in on his walkie-talkie, he took me away in his patrol car. I continue to forget and end up in strange neighborhoods, surrounded by locals, until the cops arrive.

The cycle repeats: the crowds, the encircling, the hauling off to the police station.

To an elderly serial killer, Alzheimer’s is life’s practical joke. No, it’s a hidden-camera prank show. Surprised you, right? Sorry. It’s only a joke.

•

I’ve decided to memorize a poem a day. It’s not as easy as I’d thought.

•