Picture Perfect E-Book

Ithaka O.

• Herausgeber: Imaginarium Kim
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The camera: the neutral eye. Always fair, always just…
…when in the right hands.

Ever since her parents died, Mina Park wishes for one thing and one thing only: the safety and happiness of her younger sister.
Once the sisters reach adulthood and they move away from their unkind relatives, the situation improves.

They have their own place.
They save money.
They stand by each other.

But a terrible revelation ruins the budding possibilities of a happy future.
A blackmailer threatens Mina’s sister.
Someone recorded what never should have been recorded.
The upload must be stopped.

Leseprobe

PICTURE PERFECT

THE CASE OF MINA

ITHAKA O.

IMAGINARIUM KIM

© 2022 Ithaka O.

All rights reserved.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this story may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author.

CONTENTS

I. Days Before That Day In Beforeworld

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

II. In Limbo

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

III. That Day In Beforeworld

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

IV. Today in Afterworld

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

V. Clouds

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

VI. Liquid

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

VII. Network

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

VIII. The Could Have Beens, the Should Have Beens

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

IX. New Day in Afterworld

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Also by Ithaka O.

Thank you for reading

PARTI

DAYS BEFORE THAT DAY IN BEFOREWORLD

1

Seoul—a city that never sleeps.

At the time I was born, thirty years ago, that phrase was just a metaphor for how vibrant the city’s markets and clubs were in the deepest of the nights. At three a.m., many bars remained open in the crowded pockets of the metropolis and overflowed with “salarymen” and students who partied like there was no tomorrow. Also at three a.m., the day began for the wholesale and retail workers, starting with the fish markets. From there, vitality gradually spread through the roads that functioned like veins, carrying the city’s lifeblood: the energy, the purpose, the livelihood of a fourth of the population of the entire country of South Korea.

Are there bigger cities in the world?

Yes, of course. Tokyo, Jakarta, and Delhi have more people. Beijing, Moscow, and Bangkok are larger in terms of area.

But are there any other cities in which the spirit of a country is so extremely concentrated? I don’t know for sure, since there is no objective way to measure the amount of “spirit” and how “extremely concentrated” it is—but I’d wager that it’s rare. For hundreds of years, since the age of kings, Seoul has been the center of culture. And it has been special for thousands of years before that, when multiple dynasties reigned this part of the world, and Seoul (with a different name back then) wasn’t the capital of the nation, yet.

Mountains in the back. A long, wide river in the front. No earthquakes. No disastrous direct hits by hurricanes. Rich animal and plant life. Rich ocean life with coasts to the South, West, and East. Clear four seasons. (Though nowadays, that’s changing dramatically, and people argue that there are no spring and autumn anymore, just a really long summer and a really long winter.)

No wonder people crowd the place. And no wonder there’s so much spirit.

Over the decades, the city’s perpetual insomnia has become quite literal. First, it began with the lights. The glow, the shine, the blinding force didn’t just stay underground in the pubs or in the large halls displaying the day’s freshest catch. The light took over the entire city:

On display boards that glowed in red, blue, yellow, and green, showing the estimated time of arrival as well as the level of crowdedness within every single color-coded bus that stopped at a particular station.

On the store signs that crammed the external walls of the buildings, sometimes from top to bottom, in every imaginable neon color in existence.

And through the street lamps in the alleys. In the core regions, alleys without a single street lamp have become rare.

But it isn’t just the light that makes the city so wakeful. Its sleeplessness stems from its eyes. You see, you can add a ridiculous amount of light to a place and still it wouldn’t be called “awake” if no one were there to use that light to see something.

That is why I am so proud of my job. I am one of the many eyes. I observe the activities that most people assume the night veils with its dark blanket.

I am a security camera watcher. Not part of the police, no. I’m employed by a privately-owned company that occasionally works with the government, though. I stay awake while many sleep. I look after those who, on a particular night, choose to roam the streets at odd hours.

Some people work the night shift, just like me, and must walk home after all bus and subway drivers are already in bed. Some others work the early morning shift, in which case the bus and subway drivers haven’t arrived at work for the day yet. Others have completely normal work hours, but today is a remarkably great day or a remarkably terrible day, and they admired or cursed their boss until they couldn’t remember who they were or who their bosses were, and now it’s time to get home—or right back to work.

Whatever the case may be, it is my job to watch them, unbeknownst to them, which would be creepy, did I not mean well. I report the drunk assholes who try to do mean things to passersby. I report the occasional fistfights. And unfortunately, I have so far reported a not insignificant number of hit-and-runs.

The drivers of those cars always think they can get away with a crime, but they never do when I’m involved. As long as they stay within the city, I pull every string I can in order to access the necessary footage to prove their crime. I have friends in the police. And I make friends with convenience store owners. These days, there are—literally—convenience stores on every block. It is a mystery how all of them make a profit. I guess many don’t, which is why old stores close and new ones sprout up. In which case, I make friends with the new owners.

At that point, I have to go through the usual questions:

What’s your name? Mina Park? Pretty name.

Thirty years old? Not married yet? I cannot understand how a charming young lady like you couldn’t find a suitable man yet. Your skin tone is gorgeous. And your hair, this is how the young ones should keep their hair, instead of dyeing it in every which color. It was fine when ten years ago, kids were going with brown or wine. But nowadays? I’ve seen blue and green hair! Can you believe it? Blue and green! Look how beautiful your black hair is, just as it is. And short. Very neat. Do you ever grow it out? Not since your school years?

Look, my brother’s son is just around your age. Just coffee, maybe?

Which university did you go to? Oh, no university… How are your parents? Oh, no parents… Well, in that case…

And I smile and nod, because there’s no use explaining to them that I have no interest in marriage or finding a “suitable man,” whatever that means. Many people, no matter how “nice” they think they are, are incapable of imagining a life beyond their own. So, they assume you’ll be lonely because they would be lonely if they didn’t have their big family. And because they hate their jobs, they think others hate them, too, and would quit anytime there was enough money.

Such isn’t the case with me.

I am great at being almost-alone.

And I love my job.

Also, I know: as long as I smile and nod now, later, when needed, they’ll get me that key footage with a clear view of the face of the man who killed someone in a hit-and-run.

So, I smile and nod and wait for them, yearn for them to ask me which university I went to, so that I can tell them that I didn’t go to any, that I’d had to work so that I could support my sister, five years younger. And when I add the part that our parents are dead, usually the owners don’t try to match me up with their nephew or their friend’s nephew or their friend’s friend’s nephew. It’s quite nice, really, because their sudden change of heart makes them feel bad. Then they notice that I’m still nodding and smiling. And the next time I visit, they offer me a free soda, in addition to the footage.

One of the things about me that delights some of the more conservative convenience store owners is this: I never drink. It isn’t because I don’t agree that some drinks taste good. (Soju, I think most people will agree, tastes horrible. It’s pure alcohol, like vodka, only less strong, so you have to drink more of it to get the same effect, which makes things worse. But the more flavorful drinks, well, I can see why some enjoy drinking those. There are as many flavored drinks as there are types of teas, so I understand the appeal of the collector’s mentality: Try this one, try that one, third time’s the charm. If not, just try more until you land on the flavor you like.)

The main reason I don’t drink is that we couldn’t afford to, for the longest time. Sena (my sister) and I were orphaned when I was fifteen and she was ten. Our parents died in a car accident. One day, they were there; the next day, not anymore. Our family hadn’t been rich, just reasonably well off—and not enough for our parents to leave behind sufficient money for us to survive for three years until I could work.

So, the relatives who ended up taking care of us didn’t hesitate to mention that they weren’t profiting from raising us; that they were wasting money on children who weren’t their own; that they didn’t have the time and energy to look after us, so will you two please make yourselves useful? Please? And the next time, we won’t say please.

The valuables among our parents’ belongings were sold off. Jewelry, antique furniture, the likes. The other things—the objects that were truly valuable to us, but had no monetary worth to anyone else in the world—were stowed away. For example, cups and plates. You might think that our relatives would have liked to get free cups and plates, but it wasn’t so; it was bad luck to eat from the dishes that used to belong to people who ended up dying such unlucky deaths.

So, along with the family photographs and souvenirs from tourist destinations, the cups and plates were sent to damp warehouses of relatives who were more distant to us than the distant relatives who were forced to take care of us. Then, from there, those things were sent off to yet more distant, very distant relatives and their warehouses.

We especially missed the photographs. Right after our parents’ passing, before those things were taken away from us, we had often gazed into our family photographs, willing Mother and Father to take us away from this living nightmare. Sometimes, that seemed to “work.” On such nights, we felt like they were gazing back at us, past the layers of manipulated chemicals. They were there, in the photographs. And we dreamed of our parents. There had even been some cases where Sena and I dreamed of exactly the same things. The same weekend getaway spot where we’d been to, years before the accident, only much cozier, warmer, filled with love, so much love…

Now the photographs are lost. Never officially thrown away, but practically so. To this day, in my sleeping nightmares, I see my parents haunting this world, unable to leave it behind. They’re afraid for their daughters. Worried… Concerned… Ever, forever…

As soon as I turned eighteen, we left the house of the most recent relative who had deigned to provide a tiny side room for us. We had to stay in the city, where jobs were plentiful. We didn’t mind. In the city, people didn’t care that we were orphans—two sisters, too, without a proper “man of the household.” Their polite indifference didn’t stem from being naturally less nosy and less unhelpful compared to any other people from any other part of the world. It was simply because many Seoulites lacked one crucial resource: time.

We liked the busy activity, that preoccupation of the Seoulites with themselves. The city folks minded their own business. It was an ideal place for two sisters who were sick of the fake sympathy of distant relatives. And in the city, the only place we could afford was a small rooftop place attached to a four-story apartment.

When I say “rooftop place,” don’t imagine a fancy, luxurious home that’s designed to be inhabited by the rich and famous who like a stellar view. Think more like, a container box placed on top of a flat roof. The only element that differentiated our “apartment” from an actual container box was that we had plumbing, albeit mediocre. Through the pipes, cockroaches climbed up in winter because the top floor was the warmest. And may I point out that winters in Korea are freezing. “Warmest” still doesn’t mean “warm,” necessarily. Many a night, Sena and I ended up hugging each other, trembling, and letting the cockroaches crawl over us because neither of us had the energy to chase them away.

So, of course, I don’t drink. These days, I save everything that I earn. Sena does the same, mostly, unless she buys work clothes. (Those, we think, are investments. Dress for success.) We have to save most of what we earn, because we only recently started saving. All income used to go to rent and Sena’s education.

She went to a university, unlike me, qualifying her to teach math at a high school in a nice neighborhood. There’d been times when I had thought that raising Sena to be a teacher was going to be impossible. These had been times when she had allowed bullies and juvenile delinquents to influence her. This, to the point that she almost became one of them. But when one of her friends got shot dead in a gang fight, Sena awoke from foolishness. This had happened in a country where casual, private ownership of firearms was strictly prohibited. Not even the police were allowed to use guns in most situations. So, death by gunshot was serious business. There was an extensive investigation as to how the gun had gotten in the hands of the murderer. People went to prison. Sena was scared.

May that boy rest in peace. At least, it wasn’t too late for Sena to change her path. She stopped hanging out with the kids who’d been “given up on” by all adults around them. She came back to me. She studied. Became a teacher. And I am very proud of my sister, even though she still keeps in touch with her old friends. I say, she’s simply a warm person. And we stick together. In a world where all those who should’ve been responsible for us—the relatives, the teachers, those adults—have let us down, we only have each other.

By the way, don’t get me wrong. I am thankful to those relatives who prevented us from dying on the streets. Having been on my own since I turned eighteen, I can imagine what it must be like to passive-aggressively want to avoid spending money on some random kids who ended up on your doorstep because your brother or sister wasn’t careful enough with the steering wheel. (That’s what I imagine those people thought to themselves.)

But also don’t get me wrong the other way around: my being thankful doesn’t mean that I forgive those relatives. I mean, come on. Me now being thirty, I can imagine a million ways in which a grown-up might have treated a fifteen-year-old and a ten-year-old differently. It didn’t have to involve lots of money or fancy clothes, just…

Something other than obvious contempt would have been nice.

But, enough about the way, way past.

The point: things are fine.

Were fine.

We had each other. And although no one saw me, and I spent most of my work night under the pale lights of an office filled with blueish screens, I was proud of my job. From the sheltered safety of my desk, I made a difference. I was one of the eyes—doing what people call surveillance, and what I call protection. I was one of the invisible guardians of the Seoulites.

So, then, imagine my utter horror when Sena, in tears, told me that an eye that shouldn’t have watched her had watched her at a moment when it most definitely shouldn’t have.

The blackmailer said that he had her sex tape. He wanted 100,000. Not in Korean won. He wanted dollars. And not any dollars, but United States dollars. In nine days, by next Sunday. Location to be determined.

Do not contact the police, he had told Sena on the phone. Or I will upload the video.

2

From high up in the air, close to the slow-cooking sun, Koe gazed down at noontime Seoul and wondered why it was that cities tended to look more beautiful at night than at day. Granted, today was a particularly depressing day; quite literally so. The storm clouds were getting heavy with rain. Low-pressure weather. Vapors condensed and unsettled the air. Soon, the clouds of this world were going to pour everything they’d been holding, down on the masses. Until that point in time, the day would stay an ambivalent yellowish gray.

But it wasn’t just because of this indeterminate color that Koe thought cities were more beautiful at night. Even the sunniest, most gorgeous spring days filled with new blossoms couldn’t beat the charm of the nocturnal cityscape, in his opinion.

Maybe it was because night was night. Day could be anything: sunny, shadowy, yellowish-gray like right now—but night, oh, night, its dark, its depth, and the total clarity of oblivion was something indisputable. No amount of artificial light could nullify the nature of night itself.

And thus, at night, there was no room for ambiguity. At night, Koe wouldn’t be seeing these blood clouds among the storm ones; something supernatural, something brilliantly crimson, mixed with something utterly mundane.

He also wouldn’t be thinking about the target or targets of the blood clouds. They were potentially soon to die and also, potentially walking right amidst the unsuspecting populace. The thought of the targets worrying about their grocery list or utility bills, when they could be dead in a week or in an hour, just killed Koe.

Figuratively, of course. Koe couldn’t die again.

There, a herd of people crossed the street. The pedestrian light had changed from red to green. And Koe could tell from their busy glances at the sky and their rummaging through their bags: some of them had forgotten to bring their umbrellas today. Other Seoulites had been more prepared: they carried umbrellas of every design and color. Travel-sized or straight and huge like the ones doormen held for hotel guests; red, yellow, blue, green, rainbow, pink, neon, pastel, striped, checkered, dotted…

But mostly black or navy or gray. Those were the undeniably inoffensive, absolutely essential colors. Those were the indisputable ones—like the color of the night.

And the soon-to-die target could be thinking about umbrellas at this very moment. Koe felt sick.

He looked away. He didn’t want to be here. He wished there were an excuse he could make up. Extenuating circumstances. An allergy against bad weather. Something ridiculous like that. But the plain black suit he wore wasn’t like the Beforeworld suits that sucked moisture. His clothes lacked a set shape and only looked like they had one because Koe had become a master of holding himself together—literally.

Koe also couldn’t use old age as an excuse. He looked like he was in his late thirties, but at the same time, he was eternities old. Therefore, a few additional years or one bad day didn’t matter. Add twenty to eternity, add two hundred to eternity, it was still eternity, just slightly smaller or larger.

Ah, all those fuzzy definitions. Age, what did it matter? The shape of a suit, that mattered even less! Someone was going to be murdered, yet again.

“Cheer up, my friend,” Joe said gently. “You know we’ll take them to Afterworld as safely as we can.”

This compelled Koe to glance at the one place he specifically wanted to avoid looking at:

His partner, Joe.

Joe wore the same plain black suit that Koe wore. But Joe, unlike Koe, didn’t seem to be wearing it to reflect his gloomy mood. On the contrary, Joe broadly grinned. He wore the black suit because he wasn’t swayed by the likes of color choice or low-pressure weather or people dying. It probably also helped that Joe looked ten years younger than Koe. Young people tended to look more cheerful by default. It was one of the outrageous unfairnesses of nature, as well as supernature.

Joe, the Joyful. Koe, the Kaput.

They were a reaper pair. And although Koe very much appreciated Joe for being the more practical and capable of the two, sometimes, Koe just didn’t want to look at Joe. On a day like this, especially. A day when Koe kept ruminating about the injustices of the juxtapositions between blood clouds and regular storm clouds; the soon-to-die and the will-keep-on-living-for-a-while-at-least; and in general, situations in which questions of life and death were crammed together with the banalities of life.

Such was the human condition, Koe knew. He also knew: what Joe had said was exactly right. Koe and Joe, a very capable pair, were going to take the deceased—dead by natural causes or murdered, it didn’t matter—to some version of Afterworld, safely and soundly.

Koe merely nodded in response to Joe’s comment. Joe didn’t take it personally; Joe took nothing personally. Koe had never seen Joe truly angry or shaken or worried. Sometimes, it seemed as if no scene of blood and gore and pain could touch Joe’s deepest core. He had a shield, which was the reason Joe could remain so calm and cheerful at all times.

“We could come back later,” Joe said. “If we’re to be the ones to reap the murdered, we’ll be summoned anyway.”

“Yeah,” Koe said vaguely.

He was sounding like this weather—indeterminate and cowardly. He didn’t like it.

“It’s just something about big cities,” he said more clearly. “Their pretending to be awake but never fully being so.”

Not that he wanted to fault the Beforeworlders. Not at all. Beforeworlders could do nothing about their lack of knowledge of the other-worlds.

Koe opened his mouth, then closed it. He beckoned at Joe.

“Alrighty,” Joe said.

Together, they vanished—just like that.

No trace, no witnesses.

Koe had wanted to say, I feel needed. Because Beforeworlders think they’re awake, but in fact, cannot see. And I am one of those who know.

Not that he could do anything with what he knew. By the time the reapers entered the picture, everything was too late. The soon-to-die were done dying and there was no bringing the dead back to life in Beforeworld.

Reapers didn’t exist to undo deaths. They were there to accompany the dead to Afterworld. They were there to hold the hand of the dead, if need be.

So much pressure, so much futility. He disliked that, but he loved it.

Ah, he was so much like daytime Seoul. Too busy, too multi-faceted, overthinking everything, self-important, self-judgmental…

Maybe all that could be summed up to this: he simply loved the night. And to an eternal night, he could take the dead. When the time was right, he would return to do just that.

3

Sena and I needed to save up if we ever wanted to make something out of ourselves. If we ever wanted to buy our own place, for instance. So, we were still living together when Sena told me the horrible news about the blackmailer.

“Mina,” Sena said, her face a grimace of pain and panic framed by long, dark, beautiful hair, “what should I do? What am I supposed to do?”

We were sitting on the pathetically yellowed but spotlessly clean linoleum floor of our living room. It had taken us years to move from that rooftop place to here, a rented two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. The whole-wall window between the living room and the veranda stood open to circulate the heavy summer air. And another layer of a whole-wall window, which also stood open, marked the external boundary of the veranda—the boundary of what was ours, on the condition that we successfully paid the rent, versus what was the rest of the world’s.

Even with the double layers of glass open, our apartment had a stuffy feel, visually speaking. There were steel bars on the outside window. On less hot days, we kept the windows closed and pulled the curtains over them. We didn’t like the bars. We didn’t like to be reminded that we lived in a neighborhood where people didn’t have the luxury to believe they were one hundred percent safe. (Though, of course, given my job, I knew that no one was ever one hundred percent safe.)

But today was a hot day—late August, that time when the entire city was exhausted by the heat and yearned for the winter. This, even though it knew that in winter, it was going to yearn for summer.

Outside, there was an alley, and beyond that, another, similar four-story building like ours. It was around noon, but gray clouds hung in the sky, dumping the day in that sickly bright-but-dark ambivalence.

We were both barefoot and wearing sleeveless white shirts and shorts. Nevertheless, we perspired heavily. The living room air would have congealed if we hadn’t recently purchased the fan that turned incessantly and aggressively in one corner. It still smelled plasticky. And though it prevented the air from turning into something thicker than gas, the fan wasn’t enough to undo anything fully—not the effect of torridity, not the effect of living in a neighborhood that required window bars, and definitely not the effect of hearing about your sister’s sex tape.

“Who did you sleep with?” I asked.

“What?” Sena said.

“Who—”

“I heard what you said. How can that be your first question? How⁠—”

“I’m not blaming you.”

I really wasn’t. Sena was twenty-five. She could do whatever she wanted to do. Besides, even if she had done something wrong, that couldn’t be the point right now. The point right now was that an unauthorized eye had recorded audiovisuals of her having sex with someone.

“I’m asking because whoever you slept with in that video is the one who’s most likely to have recorded you,” I said.

She stared at me. Tears glistened in her eyes, reflecting the little outside light there was. It was getting darker and darker. Soon, the clouds would pour the rain on the dirty alleys, sweeping away what didn’t belong, making them look almost like the alleys in richer neighborhoods. But neither Sena nor I bothered to turn the lights on.

“He would never,” she said. “He would never do such a thing. I don’t think he even knows. What am I supposed to tell him?”

“Are you sure he⁠—”

“It can’t be him.”

She told me that she worked with this man who she had slept with.

“So, he is a high school teacher.”

She said yes.

“Boyfriend?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said. But after that, there was a pause, a reluctant moment of hesitation.

“You never mentioned him,” I said.

“I was going to tell you. Would have told you…”

She stopped there.

“Since when did you see him?” I asked.

“Since last spring.”

“So, it’s been a little over a year?”

“No. The thing is… We broke up, this spring.”

“Okay,” I said.

There was nothing unusual about young people breaking up—especially for young people like Sena, who didn’t plan on getting married any time soon. What bothered me was that Sena seemed so reluctant to talk about it, and also that the blackmailer had gone through the trouble of threatening her with a video that was recorded three to five months ago.

Now, it was even more likely that the blackmailer was her ex-boyfriend.

“How did the blackmailer contact you?” I asked.

“He had a burner phone delivered to my desk in the teachers’ room.”

“Do you still have it?”

“I have the envelope.”

“Show it to me.”

It was one of those regular brown envelopes meant for A4-sized documents. The middle part had become especially crumpled in the shape of a small phone.

“So, you don’t think it was your then-boyfriend,” I said. “But you’re sure it’s a ‘he’?”

“Yes. He called me within seconds of me opening the envelope. He changed his voice, maybe with an app. It sounded distorted and too deep to be natural.”

“Wouldn’t a woman be able to speak in a distorted, deep voice using the same voice changer?”

“I don’t know.”

We sat in silence for a moment, staring at the brown envelope.

“What exactly did he say?” I asked. “Tell me everything.”

“He told me about the 100,000 dollars, mentioned next Sunday, said that it was my fault I didn’t get the full nine days. Said he was gonna give me early morning to early morning, exactly nine 24-hour periods, instead of from late morning to early morning. He wanted me to admit that it wasn’t him being unfair.”

Then, she blanched and said:

“He did mention that he figured I would want to make the calculations as precise as possible.”

I frowned. What was that supposed to mean? Was it because she taught math? Or did he mean she was a calculating, scheming person?

Sena continued. “He said that if I had returned to my desk instead of grabbing coffee with the other teachers during the first break, he could have called me earlier. Location to be determined, he said. Then…” She heaved in the thick air, trying to stop herself from crying. “He told me to throw away the phone in the trash can next to the soccer field. He was really specific about which trash can too. He didn’t let me hang up until I got up and walked out of the office to do as I was told. Once I got back, the vice-principal saw me and thought someone died in our family, so she asked after you, and…”

“Okay, okay,” I said.

I patted her on the shoulder. At my touch, she began sobbing, as if it had given her the permission to break down.

It was times like these in which I wished I were more motherly. Sure, I had the characteristics of a fierce parent who would kill the person who tortured her child to this extent. But what I would have wanted was to be motherly, in the stereotypical sense, in the tainted-by-the-media sense, in that all-forgiving, warm, velvety and cushiony sense.

I vaguely remembered a time when I used to be more like that. I also vaguely remembered mother and father, who both used to have “motherly” characteristics as well as “fatherly” characteristics. All in all, we’d been a happy family, and would have continued to be one, had they not died…

No use thinking about that. For fifteen years of my life, I’d had parents. For fifteen years thereafter, I didn’t have them—unless you counted those times when I had reunited with them in my dreams. I had lost my smiling, warm, happy side in my waking life. To keep it with me had been too painful. So, I chose to stick with my cold facade.

Even when my sister was crying in front of me, it was difficult for me to break my protective shell and tell her, It’s all right. Everything’s fine. We’ll get through this. If I were to say such things, I would be lying. I simply didn’t know if it was going to be all right. Everything wasn’t fine. It was highly possible that we weren’t going to “get through this,” whatever that meant.

From experiencing the fallouts of many broken promises—made by our relatives and our dead parents who had often said that they would always be there for us—I knew that the worst thing to do in an already bad situation was to delude yourself and your loved one.

“What day is today?” I asked.

“Friday,” Sena said, voice teary.

“He said next Sunday, for sure?”

“For sure.”

“How did you know the people in the video were you and your ex-boyfriend?” I asked. “Did you see it?”

“Yes. The blackmailer sent a USB drive along with the phone. He told me not to hang up. Before he instructed me to go to the soccer field, he told me to put on my earphones, then to plug in the drive. It started playing automatically.”

“Can I…” I hesitated. “Can I see it?”

Sena took a moment to reply. “The file self-destructed,” she said.

She wasn’t lying, I could tell. And she wasn’t crying anymore. She was considering me with wonder.

We had fought about this aspect of me multiple times in the past decade. She had accused me of being insensitive and indifferent. When I reacted with composure, that vindicated her. But I didn’t know how else to react. By now, she knew this. She was old enough—ten years older than I was when Mother and Father had died.

Still, my calm never failed to shock Sena. Her rational understanding didn’t preclude the feelings she went through when she sat across from me during a time of hardship.

Once, she had told me that at our parents’ funeral, I hadn’t cried at all. I couldn’t remember. That whole day, the most horrible day of my life, was a blur. Maybe I had buried those memories. Maybe my default defense mechanism was to shield myself from the terrible; to deny its existence. So, in a state of extreme sorrow, Sena had cried; I hadn’t.

“But I still have the USB drive,” Sena said eventually.

She got up, stirring the air. I inhaled. That—proof that Sena was still capable of rising and moving—had given me the permission to consciously breathe. My chest felt tight. It was the tension, the impending storm. I glanced out. The clouds hung low. There was barely any light outside anymore. The steel bars didn’t glisten. There was nothing left to reflect.

Sena emerged from her room with a palm-sized cosmetics pouch.

“My fingerprints are there, but I figured, maybe his fingerprints are there too,” she said, rubbing her red eyes. She sat down on the floor across from me again. “I was lucky Miss Kim could step in for me. Once she agreed to take care of my last two classes today, the vice-principal was only glad to let me leave early.”

This topic of her coworkers, which had nothing to do with her current predicament, seemed to make her feel a bit more in control. So, she continued eagerly:

“Remember I told you, the vice-principal is always going on about how we shouldn’t run the air-conditioners so much in the teachers’ room? She thinks I’m coming down with the summer flu. I think she was sort of glad that finally, there was proof of her summer flu theory. Because, in her mind, my being sick right after summer vacation, after so much rest, is proof that the sickness undeniably exists. She wanted me to rest. Rest only, no hard work, not even housework, just rest from the time I arrive at home today to next Monday morning.”

I half-understood Sena for going on and on about her regular work life, but half didn’t. This was not the time to avoid the problem. So, I didn’t answer—which never discouraged Sena.

“That way, on Monday,” she said, “after making sure that I’m feeling better, the teachers can discuss when to have that Back to School Get-together. The vice-principal is so adamant about everyone participating in those get-togethers. Drives everyone mad, but of course, no one says anything. And pork belly—always pork belly, at that place two blocks down. We live so close to that place, I can never make up an excuse to get out of dinner. Always during the week too. On the weekends, her husband comes back to Seoul from work, you see? So no weekend dinners with us. I mean, I guess weekday get-togethers are better than being dragged around for work stuff on weekends, but… I think these get-togethers are her only social outlets during the week, when her husband isn’t in the city.”

She suddenly stopped.

“But what am I supposed to do next Monday? All I’ll be thinking about will be the recording. Should I pretend that I have the summer flu again? It’ll be impossible!”

I nodded.

That left Sena no other choice but to hand me the pouch, which she’d been clutching.

“There’s nothing in the drive anymore,” she said. “I tried playing it again after I came back from the soccer field. It doesn’t work anymore. I guess that’s why he didn’t have me throw it away along with the phone. He wanted me to have a reminder of what he was capable of doing. Make me remember that he can make a million copies of the file that used to be in that drive, if he wants to. But I know the video was taken in the week before I broke up with Jun. That’s his name. Jun Lee.”

“A one-syllable name,” I said, gazing into the pouch, turning my head to examine the USB drive from every angle. It was as long as my index finger, flat, and black.

Sena nodded and smiled faintly. “The female teachers tease him about having a prince name.”

She was referring to the names of the princes in the House of Yi that used to rule the country until the Japanese had invaded. The princes, especially the ones who eventually became kings, used to have many names, both during their lifetimes and after their deaths. Some of the names were never supposed to be said out loud. The single-syllable names, if I remembered my history class lessons correctly, were examples of such unusable names.

If this ex-boyfriend of Sena’s had been from that era, he would’ve been arrested for adopting the name format reserved for the royals. How dare he, a mere commoner? He could have pled ignorance or some technical triviality, such as the rules of Romanization.

Of course, depending on when exactly during the Yi dynasty this hypothetical arrest had happened, the kings would have had no idea what he was talking about when he referred to “Roman” or “English” or any other language or country from the Western world. So, Jun Lee saying that he had adopted the letters L-e-e instead of Y-i would’ve been no use at all.

The royals would’ve beheaded him. Or torn his head and limbs apart. Or hung him, if they had felt particularly benevolent that day.

I didn’t feel particularly benevolent today. Also, the Yi dynasty times suddenly didn’t seem like that bad of an era to live in, if it meant that criminals were beheaded. This, because I was sure Jun Lee had to be the blackmailer. My sister might be in denial, but not me. Not Mina Park, the colder one of the sisters. The realistic one. No amount of math-teaching could make Sena consider the possibility (or probability) that her ex-boyfriend was the blackmailer. But I needed no college to educate me on the cruel odds of life.

Sena seemed to have noticed the hatred in my expression, because she tried to smile. This was one problem with my dear sister: she tried to smile away her troubles.

“I’m sure there’s something we can do,” she said. “If I were to go to the police now, would you come with me?”

The police department was one possibility.

“Were you able to recognize where the video was taken?” I asked.

“At a hotel by the East Sea.”

“You said you broke up with him a week later. Were you planning on breaking up with him when you were at the hotel?”

Sena sighed. “I was. But I missed the chance to talk about it. I didn’t know we were going on a trip that day. He liked to surprise me. We used to go on ‘surprise’ trips on weekends all the time—I just didn’t know that that week was gonna be, you know, that week. So I talked to him about it the next week.”

“Why did you break up with him?”

Sena quickly said, “I wasn’t going to marry him. Never. Ever.”

“Why not? I mean, you did date him.”

“His family has a lot of debt.”

“How much?”

“So much that 100,000 US dollars wouldn’t be enough to pay off half of it.”

I gasped.

“Yeah,” Sena said. “He is a really nice man. He really is. But”—Sena grabbed my hands—“I can’t marry him. We cannot be a family with him.”

I gazed at her. I was surprised that Sena, my warmhearted sister with the patience and devotion that allowed her to grow her hair up to her chest and longer, had learned to apply the principles of addition and subtraction to life. Add our situation to the Lee family’s burden: double the agony. Subtract their debt from the little we have: divide the possibility of future happiness into something infinitesimal and almost nonexistent.

My heart sank. Maybe I had secretly hoped that she would never think of such things, even while I’d been painfully conscious of our differences.

“Please don’t think poorly of me,” she said.

“I don’t.”

She didn’t seem to believe me. “It’s just too much,” she said. “I mean, I knew that his family wasn’t well off. He mentioned that he never got to join the baseball team during his school years because he couldn’t afford the gear. But that’s not too uncommon, you know? A lot of kids don’t get to do everything they want to do because their parents can’t afford it. And with something like sports, which also requires a lot of time commitment, well, it happens. It’s a luxury, such risk-taking. And I knew he tends to wear the same clothes over and over again, but didn’t think much of it. I just figured he was frugal.”

What I found unbelievable was that she was worried about my opinion about her, when nothing could be as bad as blackmailing. That was Sena.

“And then I went to his parents’ restaurant once,” she said. “It was supposed to be the day I met them for the first time. Except, when Jun and I got there, there were half a dozen gangsters trashing the whole place. A tiny, tiny restaurant it was. Just large enough for five tiny round tables and ten seats, if people were willing to sit side by side and exit the place in the reverse order in which they had entered. It was obvious that the parents had no money. Very obvious that no one was coming to the restaurant. And yet those gangsters wouldn’t leave until his parents paid them something. The parents have been in debt for years. Decades. Jun told me to go home, to talk later. He had to help his parents.”

“Did you tell him that was why you’re breaking up with him?”

“Of course not. It’s not his fault. But the fact is that if we get married, those gangsters will come after me, and after you too.”

“Do the other teachers know about his family’s situation?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

That explained the prince name talk. Otherwise, jokes like that would just have been cruel.

“Do the teachers know about you and him?”

“No.”

“Absolutely not?”

“I’m not sure. But I don’t see how they could’ve guessed, and how the vice-principal could’ve kept quiet about it, if they had guessed.”

“Okay. Sena, what I want you to do now is to stay home.”

“What?”

“We’re not going to the police yet. Not officially.”

“Why not?”

“Because, best-case scenario, they’ll express their willingness to help us, based on a sex tape which may or may not exist and a burner phone which they may or may not be able to retrieve. Then they’ll make us maneuver around their silly red tapes. And worst-case scenario, they’ll ‘ignore’ us, but magically, your coworkers could still find out about it. And I’m worried the blackmailer might be watching you.”

“Okay,” Sena said, worriedly glancing outside.

The first droplets were falling—tentatively, like terrified soldiers at the forefront in a battlefield. These were the first to die.

“Close the window,” I said, getting up. “Stay home. I don’t think it’s that suspicious for you to stay home. You’re surprised, angry, scared. You don’t know what to do. You need some time to think. Maybe the blackmailer will think that you’re busy making calls to conjure up the money. But don’t actually call anyone.”

Sena half nodded, half rose. “Where are you going?”

“Checking some things. I think it’s better if I go instead of you, since the blackmailer might not know my face. And even if he does know me from a photograph, he wouldn’t really know me.”

I didn’t explain this theory in detail. What I meant was that if the blackmailer was Jun Lee, he knew Sena from months or years of working together and dating. He could spot her in a crowd. But me? Probably not. It wasn’t just the face that people recognized. The voice, the attitude, the gait, all those things mattered. And in terms of those non-facial attributes, I hoped I was an unknown.

I went to my room with the USB drive pouch. As I opened my closet to get dressed for the rainy outside, I heard Sena pull the window closed. That was when the droplets started really pouring. They madly hit the glass. Silly, suicidal little things. They burst the second they struck the hard, slippery surface. Along with the other fallen comrades, they glided down, forming a slightly bigger lump of misery, only to be split in a dozen directions when the next suicidal droplet hit the center of their alliance.

Fools. We were prepared. I wasn’t going to let some pathetic blackmailer ruin my sister’s life. And I had one clear advantage over him: I was used to being the watcher. I was sure that no matter who the blackmailer was—whether the ex-boyfriend with the princely name and gangster debt, or a total stranger—I had more experience behind the cameras than him.

I got out of the shorts and sleeveless shirt, then into the jeans, T-shirt, and socks. As I did so, I realized that this was the main reason I didn’t drink: not merely because I didn’t have the money, but because I’d been working as one of the eyes of the city for ten years. It had gotten ingrained in me that something or someone might be watching me at all times. More than the average person, I knew that you could do absolutely nothing wrong, and still be captured on camera, which allowed others to interpret your behavior every which way. And if you were drinking, that worked against you.

Because, what that “every which way” entailed depended on the watcher, entirely. The watcher might be benevolent; the watcher might be atrocious. Or he, she, they might be neither—willing to make a deal. No matter what the watcher was like, statistically speaking, people didn’t approve of others drinking late into the night and getting into trouble. On top of that, imagine that the person failing to recall exactly what she did, where she was, with whom, when, why, and how is an orphaned single woman. In such a situation, she would be helplessly exposed to the cruel opinions of others. The horror!

I wore a black windbreaker, my favorite during the rainy season. It was lightweight, foldable without getting overly wrinkly, and most importantly, had been purchased at the bargain price of two for one. Sena also liked wearing hers on the weekends, when she went out for a jog, didn’t want to carry an umbrella, but wanted to be prepared for a sudden shower and the inevitable drop in temperature.

In the pocket, I put the USB drive pouch along with my smartphone.

“Text me the address of Jun’s parents’ store,” I said, as I picked up the sturdy navy umbrella by the front door. “And his picture. And the address of where he lives. And, what else?”

“Nothing ‘what else.’ It’s not him,” Sena said from the kitchen.

She appeared with a glass of water. She was holding it so tightly, the tips of her fingers had turned white. I was afraid she would break it.

“Where exactly are you going?” she asked. “When are you coming back? Are you going straight to work?”

“I’m going to call in sick today. Will be back late. I’ll call on a friend who might be able to help.”

Sena blushed. “Are you… Will they have to know…?”

“I promise, he’s a good person.”

A frown wrinkled her forehead. I faced the door and slipped into the only battered sneakers in a sea of pretty, well-kept shoes that we had arranged in neat rows by the front door.

Only the sneakers were mine. They were red. Sena had gifted them for my birthday two years ago.

“Wait, that’s it?” Sena said, unsure, approaching.

“Yes,” I said.

“You want me to literally sit and do nothing?”

I pulled down the door handle. The automatic lock clicked open. “Just until tonight. Okay?”

“You don’t have to call in sick for me,” Sena said, turning this and that way, unsure where to put the glass. She wanted to follow me out.

I hurriedly walked outside. Sena eventually put the glass on the floor and tried to slip into one of the ballet flats.

I stopped and held up a hand to keep her away from the door. “You’re not coming with me.”

“Just tell me what I can do. I could contact some of my friends⁠—”

“Your old friends? No. Absolutely not.”

“I’m not going to tell them to go after the blackmailer. They don’t do such things anymore. But I could ask them what I could do to, you know, convince him…”

“Don’t tell them. Don’t tell anyone.”

“I trust them. They are my friends.”

“Someone recorded you while you were having sex, Sena. Clearly, someone you knew could be the perpetrator. And even if it was a stranger’s doing, your trust should be placed with more care.”

I said this, even though I knew this would hurt her. And it did. She glared at me.

“Stay home. Call no one. Especially not that ex-boyfriend.”

“But—”

“No buts,” I whispered, in that low, I am your mother, I know what’s best tonethat I’d had to use since I was fifteen. The dark staircase behind me didn’t echo my voice. “Stay home,” I said again. Then I left.

4

The storm clouds began pouring the water droplets that they’d been holding. The Beforeworlders who’d been prepared enough to leave their homes with an umbrella unfolded theirs simultaneously. Within seconds, a dark flower garden boasting occasional bright spots of red, yellow, and blue blossomed at the ground level. If Koe ignored the gray and black umbrellas, which were by far more prevalent, the scene looked quite beautiful.

No, actually, he had to be aware of the black and gray. In the end, the achromatic colors were what made the chromatic ones stand out.

“Huh, so, time did pass,” Joe said, looking around as soon as he appeared on a storm cloud. “I thought we came back way too early.”

Koe stood right next to Joe. Together, they watched the suffocating pre-storm limbo from earlier transform into a downpour. The sound of the raindrops hitting the umbrellas and the streets was deafening.

And refreshing. It was a beautiful moment when the release, which nature had worked toward, finally materialized. The atmosphere was wetter yet felt strangely less damp. This was the process of taking moist air down in the form of rain, and bringing it to the rivers and oceans so that one day, it could rise again and become damp air, and then rain again.

Koe could smell the rocks and asphalt and dirt and grass and trees and cotton and polyester. The scents made him feel alive, even though he wasn’t, technically, in Beforeworld terms.

“How much time passed, exactly?” Joe asked.

“About ten minutes, I’m guessing,” Koe said, considering the position of the sun.

Joe the Joyful whistled cheerfully. “We reaped ten people in the other worlds, and that took only ten minutes here? I never knew a world could move so slowly.”

Indeed. Koe the Kaput hadn’t known either. The comparative tempo at which each of the worlds flowed was always unknown until they went away from it, and then came back. But still, from longtime experience, Koe and Joe had learned what to expect. The usual range of their expectation was called “normal.” This world was outside of that normal range.

Of course, you had to consider that none of the ten people whom Koe and Joe had just reaped had been murdered. Those who died of old age, disease, or an accident were by far less confused than those who were murdered. The reapers didn’t need to answer a lot of questions. There were some old people who, in fact, were glad to see Koe and Joe. Such deceased just wanted to get over with the process of death already. They’d been waiting for the reapers forever. What took them so long?

Another note of emphasis: this world was only slow in comparison to the other worlds. To all the Beforeworlders here, who presently had no clue about the existence of other worlds, saying that this world was “slow” was utterly ludicrous. The world flowed at whatever tempo they were used to. It was neither slow nor fast to them.

“The blood clouds got thicker,” Joe said, “and they are moving.”

Indeed. “Do you think it’s one person’s murder intent or multiple people’s?” Koe asked.

“There’s no way to guess.” Joe shrugged. “Come back later?”

At that moment, a woman wearing red sneakers walked out of a shabby apartment building. The dome-shaped surveillance camera at the entrance captured her movement. Also, its glass reflected her so that Koe could see two of her: the original and the double.

She didn’t come to a halt when she unfolded the navy umbrella. In one smooth choreographic movement, she combined the act of unfolding with the act of walking. The umbrella was the heavy and straight kind. The kind that bodyguards use to shield a president from the rain. Or the kind where assassins conceal weapons to make their kills unpredictable and untraceable.

Within seconds, the woman’s short black hair disappeared from view. She quickly walked down the alley, to a bigger street, which connected to an even bigger street. Her navy umbrella became indistinguishable from the other dark-colored counterparts. Koe tried to find the red dots that were her sneakers, but amidst the distracting wide blooms of the occasional bright-colored umbrellas, it was impossible.

“Koe?” Joe said.

“Yeah.” Koe reluctantly looked away from the field of umbrellas. “Come back after reaping a hundred more?”

“More like after a thousand more,” Joe said.

5

The middle-aged man who was sprawled on the wooden bench next to mine kept muttering indistinct phrases in his sleep. He didn’t seem to mind the bright lights that shone on him from the ceiling. Neither did he mind that three uniformed police officers behind the information desks rolled their eyes, pointed at him, and shook their heads.

No wonder. The man was too drunk to notice a thing. If the bench were to catch fire, he would burn with it, in blissful oblivion.

So, this was what it was like to sit in the waiting area of a modern police station. The floor was ten times cleaner than the clothes of the drunk man. The police officers were too polite (or too lazy) to bother to kick him out from the station.

Maybe it was because it was located in a nice neighborhood. The officers here didn’t face many challenges on the day-to-day criminal-law-offense front. No petty fistfights; no juvenile delinquents; no thieves. They could avoid unpleasant experiences entirely, if they could leave this one man on the bench. And that was exactly what they did, in the most passive-aggressive way possible. Knowing that, this man had made a trip all the way here. He knew that this station was ironically hospitable.

By the way, I was sure that he had taken a trip, a real one that required a subway or a bus ride, from several districts away. He positively screamed “Not from around here.” Even more than me.

Five minutes ago, when I had entered the station, the three police officers had glanced at me up and down, curious, but not hostile. They had seemed surprised that someone who wasn’t bleeding to death had bothered to fight through the downpour to come here. Water was dripping from my sturdy umbrella as if it were its own little sky, with its very own clouds and desire to flood its surroundings. I quickly folded it. Before fully closing the glass door shut, I shook the umbrella outside. Only then did I tie it, hold it by the middle, and step in.

That had earned me the approving nod of the oldest officer. When I asked if I could talk to Detective Hong, he glanced at the youngest officer, who made an internal call, then told me to please sit down and wait, he’ll be out shortly.

The officers exchanged glances. You could read so many things into these unspoken exchanges among people in a culture that discouraged open commenting.

Who is she? the middle one (in terms of age) seemed to say.

Detective Hong’s girlfriend, the youngest seemed to say, judging by the meaningful wriggling of his eyebrows.

I blushed. But he smiled at me kindly. Now I recognized his face. We hadn’t been formally introduced, but I remembered that he’d been here the last time I visited.

I nodded at him to signal: Yes, I remember you, and smiled back awkwardly.

Hong never dates, the middle officer signaled, frowning in strong disagreement.

Not casually, the youngest one implied, eyes large to indicate his defiance.

How do you know this? Why hasn’t he told us before?

Because, sir, young people don’t like old people nosing around their business.

Ah, baloney!

The oldest officer sighed softly, sipping on his vending machine coffee in a paper cup.

Young people these days, he seemed to say. What does it matter if she’s Hong’s girl or not? She knows that she must shake a wet umbrella before she enters a building. That is all that matters.