Only then did Haeshin realize something was off about this conversation. However prickly Hwichan was, he hadn’t seemed like someone with an anger management problem — something wasn’t adding up.
Just then, a single thought flickered on in Haeshin’s mind like a light. The words Hwichan had said when Haeshin had pulled him out of the water came back to him all at once.
— Someone getting in the water at this hour is one of two things. Either a water ghost, or someone who’s about to become one.
“Are you, by any chance——”
At the same moment, Hwichan grabbed him roughly by the collar.
“If you’re going to die, die alone. I can’t figure you out. You seem completely normal one second, then you’re a total lunatic the next.”
The moment the taller person grabbed him by the collar, Haeshin’s slight frame was completely caught in his grip, left choking and helpless.
“Ugh, wait, let go——!”
Hwichan’s hand, fisted in his collar, was trembling.
I’m the one being grabbed by the throat, so why are you the one shaking? I should be the angry one here — why are you the one so furious? The words he couldn’t get out, strangled as he was, piled up layer by layer beneath Haeshin’s straining tiptoes.
Shin Hwichan was strange. What he was so angry about, what had made him so heartbroken that he was holding back dry, tearless eyes — Haeshin couldn’t make any of it out.
“If you say something like that — like come with me — one more time, I swear I won’t let it go. Understand? If you want to die, don’t let me see it. Keep your mouth shut and die quietly on your own.”
A moment later, Hwichan shook his hand free, shoved Haeshin roughly aside, and stormed off. He couldn’t swim to save his life, but his strength was brutish — Haeshin was sent flying like a kite caught in a fierce sea wind and crashed to the ground hard.
“I went in the water to pull you out, and all you do is spout nonsense about coming along. Can’t even recycle that. Hopeless.”
What? Who saved who. You can’t even swim.
“Don’t acknowledge me from now on. I have no interest in associating with someone who habitually tries to drown himself.”
Habitually? What does that even mean.
“Those island people have it rough too. Must be on edge wondering when they’ll have to deal with a body.”
Why would there be a body to deal with!
Haeshin blinked with startled eyes and grabbed firmly at the shoulder of Hwichan, who was about to walk away. His breath came in gasps. He cleared his badly strangled throat, then grabbed the other’s sleeve and hung on.
“You — I think you’re misunderstanding something…… and I think I know what the misunderstanding is? Say it properly!”
The words that then tumbled out of Hwichan’s mouth were nothing short of shocking.
“You went into that water to die, didn’t you!”
Bad feelings are always right.
***
A dark night sea. Rain that was a little too long and rough to be just a shower, yet too mild to call a downpour. He had spotted a slight figure standing at the shore.
Just barely over 175 centimeters tall, with a body as lean as a boy’s. Light, washed-out hair — the same vacant-looking guy he’d run into near a clothesline strung with drying fish.
The young man ran out toward the water as if welcoming the most beloved guest. And ahead of that running young man, there was nothing but the night sea that Hwichan feared so deeply.
— Dad! Dad!
Ironically, seeing that precarious figure, Hwichan was reminded of the happiest time of his life. A voice that laughed out loud while holding him close. A wide embrace that came warmly and wrapped around him.
That memory had thrown Hwichan off — for a moment he froze, and he couldn’t reach the person in time before they went too far. In that brief hesitation, the dark blue death that swelled and surged opened its maw and swallowed the young man whole.
By the time he came back to his senses, he had already thrown himself into the grave-like water, all to save that person.
It was only after feeling cold enough to shatter every bone in his body that he remembered he was wearing nothing but a thin shirt and jeans. His shoes had already been swept away by the rough current, and though he’d tried hard to swim and find his footing, all he kept getting were new cuts from something he couldn’t even see.
Had Lee Haeshin — the young man who had jumped in first — not been a good swimmer, the people of Samsam Island might have had to find two bodies that night. Or perhaps they would have found nothing at all.
That night, Hwichan couldn’t sleep a wink, gripped by the feeling that if he took his eyes off Haeshin for even a moment, he would disappear.
Like his father, who had left while he slept — slipping quietly away to rest in the deep of the sea. Like his mother, who had tried to follow him into the water a year later.
To Hwichan, the sea was an unrefined grave.
Every person he had ever loved most had gone away into that damp, deep grave. That was why Hwichan had hated this island from the very beginning. This isolated land, surrounded on all sides by death, was a place where no person could live — not for him.
He despised his uncle with a fury that could kill, the uncle who had forced him onto this island insisting it’s my hometown, it’ll take you in. Despite claiming everything was for Hwichan’s sake, he had never once tried to look inside him.
“Fine. I’ll say it one more time. I didn’t go into that water to die! You’re misunderstanding!”
“You sure do love that word, misunderstanding……”
Hwichan ground his teeth, barely holding down the emotions surging up inside him. At that, Haeshin made a deeply troubled expression and fidgeted, completely at a loss. The sight of him practically stamping his feet was almost comical.
“I’m serious. You’ve genuinely got the wrong idea.”
His expression looked sincere. But Hwichan couldn’t easily let go of his suspicion.
That’s just how people who keep death close are. They always want to live — and yet the moment their will breaks, they’re gone in an instant. He’d seen it with his own eyes. He knew it well.
While Haeshin had gone outside the community hall to calm Hwichan down, the village elders had apparently all headed over to Grandma Sooni’s place to play cards. Now the only one left in the community hall was Yujin, the neighborhood’s one and only preschooler, watching TV.
And the two of them sat across from each other at the kitchen table in the community hall, which the elders had only half-tidied up, locked in a standoff.
Haeshin had dragged Hwichan back to the community hall in a panic after his declaration, but couldn’t easily bring himself to open his mouth.
It might have had something to do with the fact that the TV program Yujin was watching happened to be Disney Classics Theater. And to make things worse, the cartoon currently airing was The Little Mermaid.
Haeshin had the gut feeling — closer to certainty — that no excuse in the world was going to work here.
“That’s a misunderstanding? Guess every misunderstanding in the world must be dead by now.”
Regrettably, it really is a misunderstanding.
The other person growled low. It had exactly the tone of someone interrogating a criminal who’d done something unforgivable, and Haeshin flinched without meaning to. He wanted to explain himself somehow, but his mouth simply wouldn’t open. It was as if someone had glued it shut.
Soon Hwichan crossed his legs, then raised an eyebrow as if to say go ahead and try.
“Explain to me, one by one, how this is a misunderstanding.”
He’d never been to an interrogation room, but this felt exactly like one. The merfolks’ long and troubled history of disastrous love made it all the more so. I already feel like this is doomed.
He despised relationships that started from misunderstanding — and of all people, he was now tangled up with Hwichan in a knot of misunderstanding. And over something he was almost too afraid to even bring up.
He swallowed a scream inside himself. Frustrated as he was, there was also a lightness in his head now that he could finally attach reasons to all of Hwichan’s strange and baffling behavior.
The way he’d lashed out and struck him the moment he’d been pulled from the water. The way he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off him, hovering anxiously. The way he’d been hostile to the islanders yet quietly given in whenever Haeshin pushed — as if he hadn’t really had the strength to resist.
You thought I was going to die.
It hit Haeshin anew, and his conscience ached. While I was sorting out my feelings and grumbling about a small flutter I had for you, you were scared I was going to die.
“Hwichan.”
He said the other’s name out loud, gently.
“Okay. Let me start from the beginning. I wasn’t trying to die.”
I still have pollock to dry, and come spring I’m going to pick mountain greens and make a soup with snails and the doenjang Grandma Sooni gave me. There’s a mountain of things to do. So I’m going to live to a hundred.
The softest, most unhurried excuse in the world followed. The one response Haeshin had hoped for was simple: Hwichan would quietly say oh, I see, I misunderstood, sorry.
But the other person showed not the faintest intention of giving him what he’d hoped for. Hwichan blinked vacantly for a long moment — then let out a sound like air slowly leaking from something, and laughed.
“Why are you such a good actor? You should’ve just become a performer.”
