Work Text:
(geun-sae)
He had never given a rat’s ass about art. Paintings, films, architecture; trips to the museums in the summer and to the cinema in the winter — those had all been Moon-gwang’s hobbies, Moon-gwang’s interests. Truth be told, he wouldn’t have been able to pick Namgoong’s name out of a list of pop stars until Moon-gwang had found the job listing, had steered them toward the house on Pyeongchang-gil. It had been under construction when they first visited, the foundation still settling and the wooden frame skeletal and unvarnished, but Moon-gwang could see the house for what it would become. A masterpiece, she had said, and it was Moon-gwang who had taught him about the aesthetics of light and shadow; about the long lines of the balconies; about the precise angles of the circular staircase and about the North-facing windows, which meant that even in the earliest hours of the morning, when Namgoong rose from bed to drink the tea that Moon-gwang had brewed him and to draw, the light was good.
It had been Moon-gwang who had taken his hand one autumn afternoon, late in the day, and pulled him into the living room to dance. It had been Moon-gwang who had led him into the tunnels, too, and then, when the collectors had come and kept coming, to the bunker beneath the house.
In death, Moon-gwang is still, stiller than she ever was when she was living. Perversely, Geun-sae thinks that perhaps this is exactly where she would have wanted to die. Moon-gwang had been prepared to give her life to this house since the moment they first set foot on street, long before tonight, long before the Kims, and in a way, she already had. She had given her autumns to its gardens, her winters to its kitchens, her springs to culling the detritus from its closets and her summers to filling them again. But the fact remains: It should have been him.
The thought stuns him. It should have been him, he thinks, and it's the shock that propels him up the stairs and into the sunlight, a luxury forbidden from him for so long; it's the guilt that drives the rock into the boy's skull and the knife into the girl's chest; it's the rage that makes him laugh, and then laugh louder, laugh until he's sick with it, howling with mirth in the midst of the slaughter; and then, in the ringing silence that follows, it's the grief that's left over, drowning out everything else in its wake and making the spear in his chest feel something like mercy.
+
(yeon-gyo)
Afterward, while the children are still at the hospital, Yeon-gyo takes a taxi back to the house. Her daughter’s English tutor is being led away in handcuffs and her son’s art tutor is being led away in a body bag. There’s blood in the kitchen, blood on the lawn, blood behind her eyelids when she shuts her eyes and presses her palms into them, hyperventilating.
The police come to her, then, full of perfunctory consolations: Are you alright? Can we get you a glass of water? You’re Mr. Park’s wife, is that correct? So sorry to hear that. Would you be able to give a statement? Anything you can remember, anything at all, no detail too small. Thank you so much. We know this is a very difficult time for you.
Days pass. A cleaner comes; she doesn’t know who sent them. Da-song and Da-hye return from the hospital and with them come the nightmares: evil spirits, monsters with knives for hands, being trapped in the bunker with their screams bouncing off of the soundproof walls. Sometimes the two have bad dreams on the same night and she wakes up to find them curled up on either side of her, whimpering about ghosts in their sleep.
Weeks pass. The kids return to school and hurl demands at her that are almost unfathomable in their normalcy: a new iPhone charger, art supplies, notebooks, what's for breakfast what's for lunch what's for dinner? Without a housekeeper or a cook, she reverts into old habits: routines established in the years before the stock options and the IPO and the promotion that emerge, somehow, from the recesses of her muscle memory. She makes rice, heats water, sears beef, adds kim-chee. She does laundry — first whites and then colors and then delicates — and goes to bed that night swathed in pajamas and bedsheets still warm from the dryer. When Da-song's latest art project explodes in a mushroom cloud of pastels, she blanches — and then hands him a broom. The two of them spend the afternoon taking turns mopping and sweeping the living room floor until the mahogany is spotless again, though the upholstery on the couch is beyond rescue.
Months pass. In November, they sell the house and move to a new neighborhood. In Cheongdam, far from the hills and quiet, oak-lined streets of Pyeongchang, their lives begin to take on new patterns, new rhythms. On Wednesday nights, they watch old films. On Saturday afternoons, they make their way through the latticed fashion streets until they reach the river, and then they slowly wind their way back. On Fridays, they order pizza from a nearby American restaurant, rotating flavors and toppings until they've all picked favorites: Yeon-go prefers the classics, pepperoni and cheese, while Da-song is partial to mushrooms and Da-hye inexplicably loyal to Hawaiian.
Years pass. The police lose hope of ever catching Ki-taek. Now and then, there are unpleasant reminders that Seoul will never be big enough for the three of them to outrun the past. They go into a costume store and Da-song immediately faints. They try to watch a horror movie and Da-hye can't sleep for a week. Then there are the newspaper headlines, iPhone cameras flashing at the grocery store, neighbors asking with a little bit too much relish if her husband is away on a business trip, or—?
Yeon-gyo is not a fool. She knows what people see when they look at her. A widow, a tragedy, perhaps even a cautionary tale. A woman who had millions of dollars with which to keep her family happy, to keep her family safe, and still could not do it. A mother whose children now see an army of psychologists to keep their mind off of bunkers, and knives, and blood, and who still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night screaming; a headcase who needs a steady supply of Xanax and red wine just to get through the day and to the next one. Once she makes the mistake of reading the comments under a news article about her family: a stupid bitch, they call her, an airhead who fucked her way to a million bucks. It's too bad no amount of money could buy her two brain cells to rub together. People like that should all be guillotined anyway.
That night, she counts the pills as they come tumbling out of their tiny orange container and into the palm of her hand. She thinks about pouring, and pouring, and pouring, and then swallowing them all. It would be painless, and she wouldn't even be around to see the mocking comments left under her obituary by the likes of Guest3424 and truth_hurts_69. But what about Da-song, about Da-hye? The two of them have seen enough ghosts, she thinks; she doesn't want to become another.
+
(ki-woo)
Min-hyuk comes home. Asks, what the fuck happened while I was gone?
Ki-woo laughs.
You promised, he says. You said you wouldn’t—
“I’m sorry,” Ki-woo says. He thinks the right side of his mouth twitches a little bit, maybe.
Min-hyuk punches him in the face.
“You motherfucker,” Min-hyuk says, and punches him again, and keeps punching him, and between the blows and the uncontrollable laughter Ki-woo has time to think to himself: Wow, America has been good to Min. Handsome as ever, Min, but he’s gained some weight and filled out a little bit; his jacket is stretched tight across his chest, his shoulders.
It's the kind of thing that they used to talk about at dinner, back when it was just the four of them in the shitty apartment in Ahyeon, folding pizza boxes and trying not to suffocate from pesticide fumes. Dad would say, Min — now that's a boy who's going places, and then Mom would add, and handsome, too, and then Ki-woo would make suggestive eyebrows at Ki-jung until she got annoyed and stormed off. "Unlike you shitheads, I don't need to marry to get somewhere in life," she'd shout, crouched in whatever corner of the apartment had Wi-Fi that week, and he'd shout back, "That's right, you'll just cheat your way there instead."
Ki-jung never took offense when he said things like that, which took a lot of the fun out of it. Cheating had never bothered her as much as failing, and now, lying on a street that stunk of beer and piss and getting pummeled half to death, Ki-woo thinks that perhaps she had been right. If Ki-jung was in his position, she'd have happily lied her way to proper medical treatment, instead of letting them put her on a waitlist hundreds of thousands of patients long for some obscure experimental treatment that wasn't even guaranteed to work. She'd steal if they needed money and she'd forge something — a bill, a warrant, a check; hell, she'd forge the deed to the house if that's what it took — to get their father back. They'd never escape the scrutiny in Korea, of course, so they'd have to leave the country, and for that, they'd need Ki-jung to put together her petty crime trifecta: cheat her way to good test scores, steal plane tickets, forge immigration papers.
And then — well — then they'd go to America, Ki-woo decides, looking through swollen eyelids at Min's freshly cut hair, his perfectly clear skin, his knuckles, which are starting to split. They'd fly into Los Angeles, because it's closer to Seoul than New York City, and also because it's where all of the pop stars in the trashy tabloids they used to pick out of the trash were always getting photographed. It would be warm, like it always is in Los Angeles, and after they got off the plane they would drive through the city with the windows down and clean, bright air rushing through the taxicab. His father would be wearing a new windbreaker and his mother a dress that they would buy for her before leaving Seoul. Ki-jung would be sitting in shotgun, having called it before the plane even finished taxiing, so he wouldn't be able to see her face. But he'd hear the smile in every snarky comment that she would make during the drive, and that would be enough.
He can picture it so clearly that even after Min pulls himself away and storms off, he stays there, on the ground, tracing his bloody lip with his tongue and thinking of his family, his father, of wealth, of America.
+
(ki-taek)
Without clocks, without sunlight, he keeps time by the footfalls above him — some kind of primitive Circadian rhythm. When the new owners go on vacation, he loses track of the days and the nights altogether. Sometimes he slides the heavy bunker door open to find the house flooded with light, blinding in its brightness; other times he creeps from room to room in total pitch. Time dilutes, then dilates. He emerges into a symphony of crickets, muggy summer heat rolling into the pantry. He emerges to the perfect silence of snowfall. He emerges to stone fruits, then persimmons, then winter squash.
Once, he catches sight of himself in a mirror to find that he's grown monochromatic: his clothes faded, his skin pallid, his hair falling out in clumps. He's becoming part of the bunker, he thinks, disappearing into the slick gray of its concrete walls, and it's only a matter of time until his body is swallowed up entirely, entombed by the house he once thought could give him a new life.
Long stretches of time begin to vanish. Sometimes he comes to and he's standing in front of a light switch, his hands in the middle of patterns that are familiar but now indecipherable. He retains his habits but forgets their origins, their impetus. He knows he must only emerge from the basement when the house above him is still, though he does not know why. He knows that he must not leave the house, that the outside world poses some terrible danger, but he loses the particulars of that danger, and then he loses the concept of an outside world altogether. He's happier, after that: absolved of the knowledge that there might once have been a version of himself that existed outside of the house and all its sinister rhythms, a version rendered with history and in color.
In his dreams, he is on his knees in front of woman with short cropped hair and a smile that makes it impossible to tell if her amusement is at your expense. She places her hands around his head and pulls him into her stomach: a forgiveness, a benediction. He does not remember her name, and when he wakes, hours later, already listening for footsteps, his hands already in motion, thinking, inexplicably, of thunderstorms, even the dream itself has disappeared into the bunker.