Archive of Our Own

1.

The bespectacled clerk eyes him with marked curiosity, and that’s when he remembers that of course: He is still wearing his clericals, God forgive him.

“Do you have anything,” he begins, and trails into an awkward silence as he tries to think of a way of asking this that will not make him look bad. Stymied, he just tries to look as innocent and sober as he can as he finishes the sentence: “Do you have anything that helps with a hangover?”

And, mentally tallying this indignity as yet one more thing Yun Hwa Pyung owes him for that Yoon will never collect on: “For very bad hangovers, I mean.”

The clerk does. The clerk puts a little box of tablets into the plastic bag, along with the bottles of water, the instant ramen, the microwaveable rice, the envelope of curry. On second thought, Yoon also adds a cheap toothbrush and a travel sized tube of toothpaste. It costs more than he should be spending, but he hands over the money anyway, and carries the plastic shopping bag back to Hwa Pyung’s apartment, up the narrow staircase, back to the psychic’s peeling door. He fishes in his pocket for Hwa Pyung’s doorkeys, fumbles one-handed for the lock, and lets himself inside.

Weeks later, Gil Young will be the one letting Yoon into Hwa Pyung’s empty apartment, standing aside at the doorway to allow him to enter first. Officially, Yoon Hwa Pyung will by this time be classified as a missing person, but the investigation has never been intense. The police know Hwa Pyung as the strange taxi driver who seemed obsessed with death, who had sudden bursts of violence and confusion, who had just suffered the trauma of watching his father die, who had been hounding them, distraught, about his shaman friend’s disappearance so shortly before his own. Gil Young will tell him the rest of the department is convinced this is a case of suicide, and Yoon will just nod because what else can he say? What can either of them say? He knows Gil Young saw what he saw: Yoon Hwa Pyung, white as a ghost but resolute, staggering into the sea.

Yoon will step into the empty apartment and notice anew how barren it is, but he will notice this, too: an empty water bottle, on the floor beside the sofa. Empty packages of rice in the single trash bin. On the edge of the sink, a cheap plastic toothbrush.

Hwa Pyung never thanked him, not once. And yet here they are: all that is left of all Yoon’s attempts at saving him.

That: that is when the tears come.

Gil Young stands silent and just lets him cry.

It is the first time he thinks of her as kind.

*

Gil Young calls him Choi Yoon; Hwa Pyung called him Mateo. Mateo’s life is a rosary strung with self-doubt and self-harm, with decades of prayers for deliverance.

His prayer was, after all, answered. Choi Yoon, nine years old, rigid beneath his bed, had not wanted to die.

He has thought, in the years since, that perhaps he had prayed too hard.

*

“Are you hurt?” Gil Young asks him anxiously, her hands shaking as she grips his collar, tries to pull him to face her. His clothes are still damp and gritty with seawater; they are both shivering. “I saw—there was blood, there was—“

He knows by her sudden silence that she is startled by how thin he has become. To Yoon this is the least alarming change he has suffered these past weeks, but he knows he has lost enough weight to worry others. Even Father Jung, who had sat on Yoon’s disciplinary committee, stopped to shake his hand and urge him to sleep better, once he was removed from probation.

Still, he runs his trembling fingers over the narrow rails of his ribs, pressing the heel of his palm into his breastbone, taking a calming, shuddering breath. How many times now has he in his weakness made mockery of Saint Thomas, and felt with shaking fingers the bleeding holes a demon left in his flesh, and believed?

He can still taste blood between his teeth, but there is no bruising under his rib cage, no spidering map of blood vessels burst and bleeding beneath his skin. Yoon stares, until he remembers Gil Young is also staring, and he blushes hot up to his ears, pulling his collar closed.

“Yah, Choi Yoon,” Gil Young says, sharp with concern that would have sounded like anger to him, mere weeks earlier.

“I’m not hurt,” he tells her softly.

“You are a poor liar, for a priest,” Gil Young snorts. But she lets him alone after that.

*

Choi Yoon’s life has been one long line of priests, and all of them liars.

His brother, smiling the day he was ordained. Father Han, telling him he was strong enough. Father Yang, telling him everything else.

You are a poor liar, for a priest, Gil Young said.

Maybe Gil Young was right after all; Yoon is the only one he can think of who was not believed.

*

(“A priest and a detective walk into a bar,” Kang Gil Young mutters as they do, together, three months after the beach. “Look at us, the joke we make.”

“Not a joke,” Yoon corrects her mildly: “a comedy.”

She scoffs, and turns to scan the other half of the room. That is what she is like, Gil Young; semantics have never mattered to her.)

2.

The demons in the girl’s mouth had promised him he was cursed. Yoon believes in blessings; so too, then, does he believe in curses. He tries not to dwell on this one: the awful, secret pain, which pursues him even into the daylight. The way he begins to mistrust his own eyes, and his own mind.

As he grows more afraid, he grows closer to these two he is most afraid for and afraid of: the failed shaman, the hungry detective. There is an irony there; he cannot yet decide if it is a cruel one.

(The ghosts in the girl’s throat, in her lungs, behind her teeth: they promised him death. This fear, at least, is nothing new.)

“You ought to get more sleep,” Hwa Pyung scolds, blinking his own bleary eyes.

“You need to eat, priest; you’re naught but bones as it is,” Gil Young frowns, and fishes in her trouser pocket for a half-crushed cereal bar that she shoves into his hand.

(If Yoon does sometimes fancy he can hear a sound like voices, winnowing through the breeze—what of it? Angels, too, have been known to speak.)

(He does not like to think that he is haunted, but Yoon of all people knows you don’t get to choose your ghosts.)

*

“God did not save your brother,” Yang warns him.

No, Yoon thinks: but he saved me.

He has lived past, somehow, wanting to know why. That answer, he thinks, is one he must give to his God, not the other way around.

*

The knife went deep; Yoon had seen the blood spurt from his mouth, coughed up from his rapidly filling lungs. Hwa Pyung had been drowning before his head ever sank beneath the waves.

Yoon has been drowning, too.

This is his secret: It had been the easiest choice in the world, to follow Hwa Pyung down into the dark.

*

(This: he will tell his God, when he walks through death at last and does not have to be afraid, any more. This is what I have done, with the life you left me. Was it enough?)

3.

Yoon is a priest, and knows everything there is to know about confession. He makes his to Gil Young almost five months after they lost Hwa Pyung, as they sit on a park bench together. They are eating cheap sandwiches and drinking expensive coffee, both of which Gil Young paid for. She still insists he needs to eat more.

Gil Young is always eating. Even so, nothing softens the knife-edge sharpness at her bloodless edges.

Yoon cradles the cardboard cup in his hands, concentrating on the way the warmth bleeds up through his fingers, his palms. He knows Gil Young is watching him, her eyes narrowed as she measures the hollows of his face against the sandwich still mostly uneaten in its paper on his lap.

“Eat the damn sandwich, Choi Yoon,” Gil Young grouses. “Show some gratitude.”

Yoon opens his mouth to apologize, but instead of I am sorry what comes out is: “I wanted to die.”

Gil Young’s dark brows lift. “Wanted?” She repeats, drily. There is warmth in Yoon’s hands, and there is warmth in his face now, too, blushing bright.

“Yes. No. Listen—I have wanted to die every day, since I was nine years old,” Yoon tells her quietly. “Ever since your mother died to keep me alive. How is that, for gratitude?”

Gil Young gives him the smallest twitch of a smile.

“You’re still alive,” she points out.

He waits for her to say something else, but instead, she sips at her coffee. Yoon feels suddenly dizzy, so he sips from his cup, too.

Yoon has scars Gil Young has never seen. Yoon fell to his knees in the wet grass, the night that Hwa Pyung found his secret, and begged God not for his life, but for a death that had meaning.

And still: he is alive.

Gil Young crumples her sandwich wrapper in her unscarred hand, the sudden motion making Yoon jump. Her eyes are looking not at him, but at a toddling child who is running precariously across the grass, laughing.

“Don’t look so sad, priest,” she says.

*

Hwa Pyung comes back. Is this the comedy? Is this the joke?

He is impossible to get rid of, that one. Yukgwang said that once, Yoon thinks.

Even Hwa Pyung, it seems, cannot entirely rest in peace. One of his eyes is gone; the one into which he plunged the knife. The scars are still there, at his wrist and across his palm. Yoon knows, without seeing, that the scar beneath his shirt is still there too, the final blow that should have meant death.

Blessed are they who do not see, and yet believe.

*

When Yoon smiles, his eyes are wet.

When Hwa Pyung smiles back with his new-carven face, his smile is exactly the same.

Yoon thinks: This. This is what I have done with the life you left to me, Lord.

And for the first time he also thinks: Thank you.