# Chapter 20
Except for the unintentional hurt caused by innocent immaturity in childhood, this was the first time he had spoken harshly to Doha. Unable to easily resolve his knotted feelings, he spoke coldly. He thought it was okay to be this whiny with him.
Right now, he had no time at all to talk with Doha. He had never slept more than three hours a day, and it was difficult to even lie down and just breathe. But surprisingly, the moment he heard Doha’s regretful voice, sleep began to wash over him. As his nerves, which had been standing on end like needles, suddenly stabilized, he drifted off to sleep. It felt like everything would return to its rightful place again.
Jaei, who had fallen into a deep sleep for a short time, woke up with a mild seizure. Outside the window, where the blackout blinds hadn’t been drawn, it was still pitch dark. He checked his phone out of habit. It was two in the morning. Despite the dark dawn, adults were making noisy sounds in the living room.
There was one message from Doha on his phone. The message had arrived right after their phone conversation.
[Don’T folLow me I pPromise I’ll comE back yOu’re my destiNation]
It had many typos and the content was puzzling. Jaei read the sentence Doha had sent repeatedly but couldn’t understand its meaning. One thing was certain: Lee Jaei was a pushover who had completely forgiven Ryu Doha while sleeping. After all, hadn’t he come back to him? That was a birthday gift, just as he had said.
Able to get up in a good mood, Jaei opened the door and went out to punish Doha. But the atmosphere in the living room was not normal. His father was holding car keys in his hand, and his mother was supporting Doha’s mother.
“Aunt, what’s wrong?”
After a while, Jaei was able to meet Doha somewhere other than home. Doha was lying quietly on a hospital bed. He used to fall asleep anywhere he lay down, but now he was sleeping not at home but in a hospital.
“Doha… Ah, Doha…”
Losing his mind and calling Doha’s name, he slowly reached out his hand toward Doha’s cheek. His beloved’s beautiful face…
Jaei fainted as if letting go of life itself.
The previous night, Hong Duyoung had let Doha, a middle school student, leave work early at 9 p.m. Since the distance from the filming location to his home was far, he was given taxi fare, but Doha used that money to buy Jaei’s birthday present. He stopped by a drugstore, spent an hour choosing a gift, and at 10 p.m., boarded a bus heading to Haesung-dong, Seoul.
Around 11:50 p.m., Doha got off the bus and was heading home using a shortcut when he was suddenly hit by a motorcycle that appeared out of nowhere. The motorcycle that hit Doha fled the scene immediately.
Doha, who had collapsed after the accident, used his nearly depleted phone battery to call Jaei. With his bloodstained thumb, he typed out a final message telling Jaei not to follow him. Because it was late at night with almost no pedestrians, he was left there for more than two hours. The cause of death was excessive bleeding. No matter how certain Doha was of his death as he felt his consciousness slipping away in that moment, if someone had been there to immediately take him to the hospital, he could have surely survived.
Hong Duyoung, feeling somewhat responsible for Doha’s accident due to his late return home, reportedly gave a large sum of condolence money to Doha’s parents.
The culprit was caught the very next day. But Jaei thought that he had killed Doha. The real culprit who murdered Ryu Doha was Lee Jaei, who had spoken harsh words to Doha in his final moments and hadn’t heard his pain.
While he was ignoring Doha’s words, Doha was slowly dying near their home. If he had noticed Doha’s pain during their call, he could have certainly saved him. The thought that the last words Doha heard before dying were “I don’t want to hear your voice” made him feel like his blood was flowing backwards.
In Doha’s bag was a fragrant soap set purchased from the drugstore and a card celebrating Lee Jaei’s birthday. It was a gift bought with the taxi fare that Doha had exchanged for his life. Holding the blood-stained birthday gift to his chest, Jaei determined that it would be impossible to live sane from now on. The best choice was to find the courage to die and follow Doha.
Yet, not a single tear flowed, and for that, he felt sorry toward Doha. Despite the pain that cut from head to toe, no tears came. Every nerve cell was sharply awakened, making him feel like his blood vessels would burst at the slightest touch of clothing on his skin. Despite not shedding tears, he constantly fainted. He would come to his senses and sit, only to faint again. It was natural. Doha had been his breath. He had lost his breath.
Ryu Doha had said he loved Lee Jaei more than anyone in the world. Jaei was certain that even if Doha had temporarily immersed himself in acting and changed his heart, he loved him more than his parents. Though he felt sorry for his parents, Jaei too, at some point, had come to love Doha more than his own parents.
But it seemed that the person who loved Ryu Doha most in the world wasn’t Lee Jaei. Unlike Jaei, who regained consciousness intermittently after fainting, Doha’s mother was taken to the hospital after collapsing and not regaining consciousness at all. Doha’s father, whom Jaei met at the funeral home, guarded the place while making sounds like those a beast might make.
Jaei met Seungha there for the first time. Seungha was seven years old this year and attending kindergarten. Though he couldn’t examine his face in detail due to the chaotic situation, at a glance, he had features that resembled young Doha like a twin. His face resembled Doha’s, and so did his crying voice.
Seungha, who had only met his brother a few times, cried heartbreakingly alongside his father without understanding what was happening. Jaei held Seungha, who was like a warm baby bear, in his arms. If he were to hold an eight-year-old Doha now, wouldn’t it feel similar to this? Back then, because his own body was small too, he hadn’t realized how small Doha was.
Every time he heard Doha’s father’s wailing, his nerves reverberated, making his entire body ache as if being hit with a hammer. Jaei, lying collapsed on the floor, soothed Seungha’s crying by stroking his back and put him to sleep. Not long after, he lost consciousness once more while holding Seungha in his arms.
It was Director Hong Duyoung who tapped Jaei’s cheek with his finger to wake him up. The funeral home had become quiet, and Seungha, who had been in his arms, was gone. Jaei struggled to sit up and greeted him with a haggard face, bowing his head.
The young master who had grown up lacking nothing and was judged to not know despair or loss, was now sitting in front of Hong Duyoung, broken with parts of his body and soul cut off. With eyes where all the capillaries had burst, he barely blinked, and was in such pain that even the act of inhaling through his nose caused agony, making him want to give up breathing altogether.
Hong Duyoung scrutinized Jaei’s face for a long time. He comforted the boy who was like a rose with a broken stem, drying up without water under the hot sun.
“Accept all the emotions you’re feeling, don’t avoid them. Fall to the very bottom and then slowly stand up again.”
“I will never be able to stand up.”
“No, that’s not true. Time really solves many things.”
***
Doha’s mother recovered safely but no longer worked at Jaei’s house. She had been collecting and keeping the clothes, shoes, and bags that Doha had worn as he grew up, saying they should be passed down to Seungha. She took Doha’s belongings with her when she left. The black gloves Jaei had given him were among them.
However, Jaei couldn’t give all the memories he shared with Doha to her. He kept hidden the birthday gift Doha had left behind at the end, along with items that contained traces of their secret.
After sending Doha off, Jaei suffered from hallucinations and auditory hallucinations every night in that room filled with guilt. Even after summer vacation ended, he took time off from school and received psychiatric treatment. He couldn’t sleep properly even with the sleeping pills he was prescribed. He didn’t fall asleep; he fainted from not being able to endure.
This space, where he had spoken harshly to Doha who was painfully dying while comfortably lying on the bed, was a rectangular hell. He was trapped in hell while alive. He felt more at ease when receiving the punishment of having his limbs bitten by indistinct apparitions in this space of atonement than when wandering outside, moving his shell like a corpse.
Jaei, who was realizing that living was worse than dying, decided to gather courage that night and follow Doha. As he quietly got up from bed in the dark night to throw himself outside the veranda, the terrifying hallucinations that had been pushing him into fear disappeared, and Doha appeared before him. It was his beautiful face, unbroken.
“Doha appears even though I’m not dead yet.”
Tilting his head, he reached out and caressed Doha. Of course, nothing was caught in his hand because Doha was no longer a person of this world. Doha pleaded in a worried voice:
“I told you not to follow me. I told you I’d come back to you. What if we miss each other, you idiot.”
“Ey, what is this? This is a ghost. It’s fake, fake.”
Jaei muttered in a voice full of disappointment, blinking his eyes slowly. The fake Doha created by his guilt was not welcome at all. He was about to ignore and pass by this non-existent product of consciousness, but the Doha ghost desperately tried to converse and stopped Jaei’s death.
Thus, Jaei’s room gradually changed from hell into a meeting plaza where the living and the dead could meet.
“I’ll come see you like this occasionally. I can’t come often because I’m busy. I received a lot of demerit points, so I need to accumulate that many more merit points. Once I finish that, I can return. I want to come back quickly and see my mom too.”
“Merit points… where do you accumulate them?”
“In the world of the afterlife. Even if I tell you, you wouldn’t understand.”
***
Jaei blinked his large eyes slowly in front of the doctor. He spoke precisely about the information he had received from the ghost resembling Doha yesterday.
“Doha came to my room at night. I can see Doha with my eyes. I can hear his voice too. He lived his whole life righteously and well, but right before dying, instead of thinking about how to survive, he called me, so he received 120 demerit points. He says he has to erase all those demerit points first and then accumulate 200 more merit points on top of that. So he needs to accumulate a total of 320 points. To return to me.”
After the consultation ended, one more type of medication was prescribed.
Jaei frankly acknowledged that his condition had become irreversibly serious. He knew that the identity of Doha, who was diligently erasing demerit points in the afterlife to return to him, was obviously a hallucination created by his guilt. But when actually conversing, it wasn’t bad to be able to meet Doha like that. If he could meet Doha even through insanity, he was more comfortable just staying insane.
