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He was six years old and held the string of his balloon tightly. If he let go, it would float endlessly upward or else get caught in the park trees or some other desolate place. A balloon cannot guide itself or move on its own, he knew this and took his responsibility seriously so that when he fell off the paddle boat and slipped through his life jacket into the deep water, his first thought was bitter resentment that he had been unable to save the balloon from its fate.
“I went to an amusement park with my mother on Children’s Day,” Ha-young told Chief Kook one night, drinking coffee together on the police department roof. “I saw a dead body for the first time that day. The body was in the water and I fell in by accident.”
Chief Kook took a deep breath. “You were pretty young, it must have been hard for you,” he said. He wondered if he was hearing a kind of birth story, the origin of Ha-young’s sensitivity.
Ha-young shook his head. “When I saw her face, she didn’t scare me, she just looked so lonely.” His face scrunched up as he spoke, a rare signal of emotion, like the moon being revealed from behind clouds, the pain of empathy for the dead and the lost.
When he was six and shivering in his mother’s arms, he had noticed the crowd of curious onlookers watching the body being taken away, seeing in their faces interest and repulsion but nothing like the emotions that had driven him to run to the open ambulance and cover the woman’s bare feet so that she would not be cold. In that moment the distance between him and others seemed to gape wide and his body stilled instinctively as his tears quieted. His mother felt the change as she held him and gripped him tightly, almost roughly, more fearful now than during the seeming eternity that he had spent underwater.
“Draw me a picture of what makes you sad,” the doctor had said when Ha-young was nine, and then watched the child gravely draw a picture of the woman in the lake, her long hair and her red dress, her tears separating the water around her. Ha-young did not also include an image of his balloon, wandering in the skies, because this information was personal and did not need to be shared.
“Ms. Park, it’s not that Ha-young is unable to feel anything. He can feel them way too deeply,” the doctor had reassured Ha-young’s mother afterward. “He realizes he’s different from others so he’s trying to hide his emotions.” He added unhelpfully, “I’m not sure you’ll be able to understand him.”
Ha-young’s mother had dismissed this thought immediately. She might have worried about his excessive quietness but she was still his mother. If he was in pain then she would comfort him. If he was sad then he should cry and be hugged.
Ha-young cried in frustration. When you are young and your mother comforts you wholeheartedly, tears well up without thinking. No matter how much he resolved not to let his feelings show, his body betrayed him. And yet, every time he broke his own internal rules, he determinedly resolved to do better. It became not enough to simply hide his tears from his mother, the greater victory lay in hiding the cause of the tears, so he could prevent that look of alarmed worry from ever appearing on her face. By the time his mother understood his strategy, it was too late to go back to that small boy who wept easily in her arms, their relationship had already become that of two adults. In their shared home, they had begun to live separately.
His mother now knew so little about his inner thoughts that she found herself looking for missteps on his part that she could mine for insights. The opportunities were rare, even in living together he was so self-sufficient and kept his day-to-day existence so private that she had to put in extra work finding ways to get closer to him.
In the hospital after the accident, during all the time he spent recovering from his injuries, she had allowed herself to enjoy their unexpected closeness, knowing that it would end as soon as he could return to work. Eating regular meals with him, talking about common things, taking walks together, she had chastised herself when she caught her thoughts moving toward the wish that her son could be normal all the time, that this unusual behavior would become the true reality.
Now she was back to searching his room for unwashed laundry and clues, pleased with herself when she came up with three pairs of jeans that had obviously spent some time in a police locker before making their way home. Feeling in the pocket of one of them, her fingers closed around something flat, square, crinkly, the top of it torn across.
A condom wrapper, she thought, making a leap of deduction, and sat down on the bed, getting over the initial shock. If that’s what it was, it was all right. He was a grown man who could have a personal life with someone he liked, and it didn’t matter to her whether it was with a woman, man, or alien, so long as he was happy. She steeled herself and drew the object from the jean pocket, then relaxed with an exasperated sigh at her investigative abilities as she held the empty chocolate package in her hand.
She sat looking up at the window meditatively. Ha-young had a sweet tooth from his earliest years, that was why she always made sure to buy a birthday cake along with the food for her husband’s death anniversary. He was born into the mourning period for his father but she never wanted him to think of his presence as a shadow that followed that loss. You are loved, she had told the solemn faced boy all his life, your existence has immeasurable value to me. She hoped that he understood. In the small smile he gave her whenever he saw her, she hoped she saw the reflection of this understanding. She sighed again, her hand unconsciously patting the folded clothing in her lap.
Jung Woo-joo had a habit of making drunken wishes. He wished on the moon and on other things he thought of as sacred or otherwise powerful. Tonight he slumped in front of his three empty beer glasses and raised his hand over them like a priest blessing his followers. His buzzy sleepiness made the warm glow of the bar table as good an object as any to wish upon.
“Hey, are you alright?” asked Ha-young with quiet concern, reaching out to steady him with a hand on his shoulder.
The touch left a pleasantly sparkly trail down the back of Woo-joo’s neck. “I’m alright,” he said, smiling to himself. He crossed his arms and folded up in his plastic chair like an umbrella.
“If you like a guy, just date him,” exclaimed Yoon-Ji the time he confessed that he liked someone that he also seriously admired and looked up to. Woo-joo felt that things were much more complicated than this easy solution but kept it to himself.
For one thing, he was pretty sure Ha-young was almost certainly completely undateable by anyone. Most importantly, Woo-joo was more interested in seeing what kind of a person a crush could become if you didn’t date them. The world was large and filled with possibilities. For instance, a deeply sexy person you saw once across a crowded hallway, all hooded charisma and perfectly waved hair, could become a serious-minded mentor later on after you impulsively transferred into their little experimental team and spent the next few years looking at far more photos of dismembered body parts than you had ever thought possible.
Woo-joo woke with his head on Ha-young’s chest, the night spreading out in streetlights and shadows past the windows of the cab. Ha-young smelled like soap and optimism and the newish sweater he had taken to wearing after his car accident, nearly dying apparently making him more vulnerable to cold weather. Woo-joo smiled happily and nestled in closer, basking in the fulfillment of his wish.
“Let me follow you forever, I’ll be your very own puppy dog man,” he mumbled, and nuzzled his face into Ha-young’s sweater before falling asleep again.
Kook Young-soo turned around in the front seat of the cab. “What in the world is he going on about?” he asked, woozily.
“He’s just really drunk,” said Ha-young, gently amused.
“My gosh, you guys are so unfair,” grumbled Chief Kook, turning around again. “Always playing favorites.”
“It’s because he likes me better,” said Ha-young, leaning against the cab window with a somewhat smug expression.
“Well make sure he doesn’t also throw up on you,” said Chief Kook, settling back in his seat and closing his eyes.
Ha-young’s reflection in the cab window became uneasy.
When Ha-young’s first comeback case had been concluded, Tae-goo dragged him up to the police station roof and lightly interrogated him, the vast display of the city at night incongruously providing them with the necessary privacy.
“Where were you going the day of the accident?” she asked, her eyebrows raised and her gaze steady and unblinking. “I looked at your GPS, you weren’t going home or back to work, you weren’t even going to the prison for an interview. Were you running away to the mountains or something?”
Ha-young’s lower lip pulled in as it always did when she brought up a harsh subject between them and he looked away from her. “Why are you bringing that up now?”
“You sure are good at avoiding questions,” said Tae-goo, shifting her weight intimidatingly. “Why were you speeding when the visibility was so bad? The road was barely visible that night, the fog was so thick.”
“I just got tired out,” he said, trying to pass it off, but seeing Tae-goo tilt her head, following the logic of this, he thought he might be making things sound even worse than they had been.
“I’ve been spending time with only evil, intelligent criminals,” said Ha-young, looking up and speaking more directly. “I was afraid I was becoming like them so I went to the park for a while.”
“To be around normal people,” said Tae-goo, “I get that. Then what?”
Ha-young hesitated again. The distance between himself and others had gaped disorientingly wide and he had felt a panic rising inside his chest, because he had carried the evil of those criminals in amongst these innocent people. After that, he had been in his car driving as far away from other human beings as he could while the voices of the men he had interviewed, had caught, had probed and coddled and manipulated, had gone on talking to him, telling him happily all about themselves.
“I started to be afraid,” he said finally. “I was afraid.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” said Tae-goo, narrowing her eyes and understanding enough, filling in the rest with relative accuracy. “You’ve done your best.”
He nodded, looking sad, reminding her of how exhausted he had seemed when she visited him in the hospital.
“I should hug you,” she said, in the manner of someone saying “I should punch you in the face for your own good.”
“Alright,” he said, lifting his face to be punched.
The thing that he liked was abundance, a way of countering the feeling that life was in short supply. The full package of foil wrapped chocolates sitting among the case files on his desk was comforting in this respect. A mouthful of sweetness and the promise of more.
The darkness of the office with its energy saving lighting closed in on him. He was alone again, as he had been before Tae-goo came to find him.
“Don’t expect this to happen again,” Tae-goo had huffed as she pulled him into the hug, fitting her body around him with bony awkwardness.
“I won’t,” Ha-Young had agreed, letting himself be held momentarily and then released. The chill night wind that whipped across the open rooftop swept his hair back and he had turned his face to it, his forehead pulling together in that inward expression that had worried his mother all his life.
He sighed now, realizing he had been sitting unmoving in his chair since he had returned to the empty office. He slipped a chocolate out of the bag and untwisted the bright covering, ate it slowly.
It was his mother’s idea in the first place.
“I can’t get that Captain Yoon out of my head. Why is she so haggard looking? Invite her over for a meal.”
“My mother wants to feed you,” he told Tae-goo the next day.
Tae-goo’s face did the thing he was still learning to interpret, somewhere between sardonic and embarrassed.
“How exactly should I take this?” she said, gesturing with her cup of mixed coffee, her gaze resting somewhere to his right.
“She’s good at cooking,” said Ha-young with gentle matter-of-factness. “She doesn’t often get to cook for others.”
“Oh,” said Tae-goo. She pulled her cup closer to her, let her eyes rest on him again. “Okay.”
The effect of Yoon Tae-goo in his home, sitting upright at the tiny kitchen table in her loose black shirt, with her uncut hair, was so much as though he had invited over a similarly odd friend from school that his mother forgot to watch them anxiously for signs of mutual attachment and instead happily talked about her old job and her social group at her church.
“Can I see your room?” Tae-goo asked suddenly when Ha-young stood up to clear the dishes.
Ha-young squinted at his mother who smiled at them unconcernedly and went on slicing apples, because of course a friend would want to see his room. He nodded silently.
Tae-goo stood in the only clear section of the bedroom and swiveled in place, taking note of the full bookcases, the piles of file boxes which took up most of the limited floor space, the desk arranged for active use, the smooth bed, an ironing board propped in the corner, the whole effect like a hermit’s cell or a traveling priest’s room. There was an unbothered neatness to everything that was in keeping with its occupant, how he wore his clothing, how he moved and spoke.
“Don’t act like that,” said Ha-young, waiting in the doorway with his arms folded.
“Like what?” asked Tae-goo, her hands in her pockets.
“Like you’re analyzing a crime scene.”
There was a small smile at the corner of his mouth when she glanced up and she turned away from him when she felt her own face responding.
“I’m just looking,” she said innocently.
Nothing made Chief Kook bristle with angry indignation like yet another colleague complimenting him on whipping Song Ha-young into shape. It upset him deeply to think that Ha-young might even agree with the people who treated him like a robot that had been taught human emotions. It had upsetting before and even worse now that he knew the truth, that Ha-young has so much emotion buried inside that it could literally kill him.
He had always wanted Ha-young to open his heart to him, to ask people for help, to be comforted, to be listened to. And yet, when Ha-young, despairing and exhausted, had asked why he had been chosen for the behavioral analysis team, he had seen the hurt and concern in his friend’s face and stopped, smiled at him reassuringly and took himself away. Kook Young-soo thought about this a lot when Ha-young was in the hospital. Thought about how he should have followed him out of the bar that night, at least driven him home. Maybe then things wouldn’t have gotten so bad later on. He almost couldn’t look at Ha-young when he visited him in the hospital, he felt so guilty.
He found Ha-young one evening standing in the middle of their office, gazing abstractedly at the blank chalkboard, as if searching for its future contents. "Oh there you are," he was about to say, but something about how silent and still Ha-young looked made him pause instead, let his shoulder bag drop onto the floor, something welling up inside him.
Ha-young drew in his breath softly in surprise when he felt Kook Young-soo wrap his arms gently around him from behind, pulling him close and placing his hand on Ha-young’s chest, patting in slow beats.
“At first, I assumed you were keeping what’s in your heart to yourself,” said Kook Young-soo, resting his chin on Ha-young’s shoulder, “but then I starting thinking that you’re not protecting yourself from others, you’re keeping others safe from what bothers you. I’ve always known you were sensitive to others, I’m sure you’ve always tried to do your best towards them. But just because you keep it all in your heart, that doesn’t mean you can’t still be comforted.”
Kook Young-soo’s reassurance came rushing at him like a tidal wave, breaking on shore, dragging everything into itself. Ha-young’s face trembled and he held back his tears, instead putting his hand up over his friend’s, quieting and holding it in place, holding his heart together with both their hands. For a moment he could feel his father’s presence through his friend’s embrace, but luckily the feeling passed before it crushed him completely.
In the thin sunlight of a spring day, he walked out across the hard sand of the beach and offered Tae-goo an ice cream cone.
“What flavor did you get me?” she asked, turning from looking out at the water.
“Green tea,” said Ha-young, unwrapping his own chocolate swirl with a little smile of satisfaction. “I know you don’t like anything sweet.”
“I do like sweet things sometimes,” protested Tae-goo incredulously, and blocked Ha-young’s attempt to switch cones with her elbow. They were still laughing when the others came to join them, all of them trying to dig around in the same bag of snacks.
An ordinary life is a blessing, Ha-young had said once to Chief Kook, at a time when he was close to giving up on himself. He was starting to understand now that he was wrong to think such a life was reserved only for certain people. A bag of roasted sweet potatoes pushed into his arms, still warm and fragrant. A gift shared back again with its givers. A celebratory meal on a rooftop. A walk on the beach and convenience store ice cream. Such common things were within the scope of his life, and he reached for them now without hesitation.