A voice rings out.
“I’ll, I’ll protect you.”
A familiar voice. The child who had, before I knew it, grown bigger than me.
It was only then that I understood why I’d disliked them. Because when everyone else became puppies, that child alone never did. While even I had been submitting, the child had been cunningly waiting for their chance.
When I lowered my eyes, I saw the person in the white coat lying collapsed, covered in blood. He’d been slashed to ribbons, as if by something tearing into him, and showed no sign of getting up.
The child was a beast.
A savage, terrifying beast who’d never become a puppy. But their eyes alone were still so beautiful.
The young beast’s body was smeared with blood, and they held a knife in one hand.
The child strode somewhere, then slashed apart a rubber hose connected to a gas line set off to one side with the knife. Gas began leaking through the cut, and without hesitation they lifted me off the steel bed and held me in their arms.
The child’s embrace smelled faintly of blood, soaked through and sticky. And yet, somehow, it was warm, and drowsiness kept washing over me.
The moment the child carried me out of the room, there was a sudden boom — an explosion.
Flames spread through the building in an instant, and as they carried me outside, the child tore the burning fabric off my body with their bare hands.
We barely made it outside the building when a second explosion went off, and the inferno swallowed the entire building whole. If we’d come out even a little later, I would have burned alive in there.
“Cough, cough.“
Maybe it was from breathing in too much smoke, or maybe it was from whatever unpleasant thing was still left in my body.
I coughed, blinking as my mind grew hazier and hazier. Nausea kept rising up, and I was fighting to hold it down, when the child suddenly pulled me into a tight embrace.
“I’ll protect you. I’ll protect you.”
Something surged up inside me at those words.
I raised my trembling hand and gripped the child’s clothes. And to the child who still insisted on protecting me, I said,
“…Okay. I’ll believe you.”
“…….”
For the first and last time, I wanted to try believing in something.
The child said nothing more.
Instead, they just tightened their arms around me even further.
⁞
When I came to, I was in a hospital, and the young beast who had saved me from that place was nowhere to be found. That was a fairly heavy shock to me. I must have spent a long while in a daze, stunned that the child I’d assumed would naturally have followed me had vanished without a trace.
The adults asked me question after question. They said many children had been found in the building and asked what had happened there. And how I alone had managed to escape that inferno.
“He’s not speaking at all.”
“Must be from the shock… Did they identify the adult?”
“His fingerprints were completely worn away, can’t run an ID check.”
“Damn it.”
“Looks like they were deliberately filed down. And the autopsy results show cause of death as stab wounds…”
The two men, who’d been glancing my way, exchanged a look with each other and seemed to step outside to keep talking.
After that, whenever they had time, people came and asked me similar questions again and again, but every time, I gave no answer at all. So eventually, people decided I’d developed a speech impairment from psychological shock. But the truth was I simply chose not to speak — not that I couldn’t.
I spent a long while with hollow, empty eyes. Various psychiatric treatments brought no real improvement, and after I was discharged, I was sent straight to a facility run by a priest.
This time, entering the facility again, I drifted on the outside of things, unlike before.
The other children quietly avoided me too, probably because I’d been a Sewer puppy. The children sensed it before any of the adults did.
As had happened before, arriving somewhere new always meant gaining something.
This time, I was given a new name.
Seo Haegil.
It was given to me because I couldn’t remember what name I’d had before.
Three years at that facility, then two years after being transferred to another, then two more years at yet another. I dropped out of high school and left the facility system for good right after.
So my final level of education: middle school graduate.
I think I’ve done just about every kind of work there is.
I worked on a deep-sea fishing vessel, did day-labor construction work, but even someone like me found a couple of jobs too much to bear — one was cleaning up after lonely deaths, and the other was scraping up bodies hit by trains and clearing the area afterward. I held on, telling myself someone had to do it, but in the end, I quit around the time a plastic bag tumbling in the wind started looking like a human head to me.
And that’s how I ended up settling here.
Past the slope, beneath the sunken stone steps, there was a green gate. Beyond that gate was a three-pyeong house heated with coal briquettes, with a pit toilet outside.
A place where you couldn’t breathe in summer, and couldn’t catch your breath in winter.
At night, you could hear the rustling of bugs crawling along the walls, and during the day, the shabby, rotting wooden floor creaked. Not a breath of wind came in properly, so when you opened the door, a musty smell greeted you, and mold could be seen everywhere in the room.
A three-hundred deposit, three hundred thousand won a month. That was the one-room flat I lived in.
It was similar to the place I’d lived with my father as a child. In the end, it seemed I’d only ever chased after the smell of that Sewer — but still, at least my father wasn’t here.
I tossed my bags down carelessly and lay my body on the cold, freezing floor, the coal briquettes left unlit. About eleven years had passed since I left the facility and started living on my own. I was twenty-nine. With so little schooling, I worked five part-time jobs at once — down from seven, after my body started giving out.
The money I’d saved up that way came to three hundred seventy-seven million won.
Roughly a hundred million more than the debt my father’s original principal of twenty million had ballooned into.
With that kind of money, I could’ve gotten a proper jeonse lease instead of this shabby one-room flat — could’ve bought myself a perfectly good apartment if I moved out to the provinces. And yet, here I still was, pressing my body into the freezing floor of a one-room flat.
It’s easier to understand if you think of it like fish that can’t survive in purified water.
Someone once asked me why I was working myself to the bone like this. I told them I had a debt. My father’s debt, the one his organs had been sold across the country to pay off — and the price of my own life.
A debt to a creditor who no longer existed.
— Rrr
The alarm went off.
I reached into my pocket and flipped open my old clamshell phone. The aging phone, good for nothing but simple calls, texts, and serving as an alarm clock, was nagging at me again today that it was time for my next part-time job.
I felt like I’d only just lain down, but checking the time, thirty minutes had passed.
I must have fallen asleep in that time. I hauled my heavy body up, gathered the bags I’d thrown down carelessly, and headed back out of the one-room flat. Up the stairs, down the slope, and an alley appeared. Only after passing through that alley did the old downtown of Seoul come into view. Tall buildings and apartments rising up as if competing in size with one another… a sight that made you feel small just looking at it.
1 a.m.
The dazzling neon signs sparkled bright enough to hurt the eyes, and the streets were lively for once, but Seoul was a city where the dark places couldn’t be seen even a step ahead.
In the middle of those Seoul streets, I worked a part-time job in a mascot costume. From 1 to 3 a.m., my job was what people call ppikki — touting for customers. I handed out flyers wearing a fat calico cat mascot head with an oddly aggrieved-looking expression.
Inside the mascot head, spit and sweat mixed together into a rotten stench, and anyone without a fairly strong stomach would start gagging before they even put it on. As for me, I’d seen so much in my life that it didn’t bother me at all. But other people suffered through more than just the smell — every time they put the head on, hives would break out across their whole body, including their face, and new hires tended to bolt the moment that happened.
Fortunately, I never broke out in hives like that, but the bastard owner had absolutely no intention of ever washing or replacing the costume, even though everyone else had quit and it was just me wearing it now.
Even in the dead of winter, putting that head on left you struggling to breathe, turning you into something like well-fermented kimchi. Taking the head off, I probably smelled about the same.
Still, winter was the easier season. Doing this in summer made even someone like me want to fling the head straight off.
If my next job hadn’t been cleaning at a sauna, I doubt I could have lasted even a year at this.
Anyway, today too, I swayed along to whatever recent pop song happened to be playing and handed out flyers. My usual targets were clean-cut men walking alone, or well-dressed men who looked like they were part of a couple.
Every so often, some kind-hearted woman would reach out to take a flyer from me, but I’d deliberately turn away and hold it out instead to the decent-looking man coming up behind her. It wasn’t because I discriminate by gender. It was simply that the place I was touting for only allowed entry to gay men, specifically.
West Hollywood
This place was fairly famous among gay men, as a bar.
It couldn’t not be. The bastard owner wouldn’t spend a cent on the mascot costume job, but right from the entrance, he filtered people like a sieve. Unless you were dressed well enough or had the face for it, you couldn’t even get in the door. With a fierce-looking heavy standing guard at the entrance, turning people away never once caused much of a scene.
So apparently, that’s what made the “crowd” there so good, or so they said.
Once inside, the discrimination only got worse — divided between general customers and members, splitting the scene even further. Plenty of well-known celebrities came through this place often, too.
The higher you went up in floors, the higher the tier got, and I’d heard it was a favorite haunt of famous politicians and public figures recognizable just by name. Run in a tightly closed, exclusive way, completely separated from the outside world — which was exactly why the big shots felt safe coming here on their own.
It brought back the memory of my first interview here.
