Chapter Text
A conversation in the rain
Nine years before he decided to die, Song Mingi was in the small, cozy music room at Deiji Middle School in the town of Bucheon. He sat on the bench, randomly playing keys on the piano.
“Mingi, dear, it's normal to worry about your future,” said his teacher, Mr. Seonghwa, his eyes shining like falling snow.
Mr. Seonghwa began with a little melody, perhaps the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or perhaps not, but it made Mingi take his hands off the keys.
“Of course, you must devote time to your exams. But you could be anything you want to be, Mingi. Think of all the possibilities. Isn't that exciting?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“You have your whole life ahead of you.”
“My whole life.”
“You could do anything, go anywhere. Somewhere less cold and damp, perhaps.”
Mingi accompanied that sound with a few arrangements.
It was impossible not to compare Mr. Seonghwa to his mother, who tried to correct every mistake, Mingi being one of them. When he was a baby, his nose looked a little flat, which was common in children his age, so she constantly ran her finger along his nose, pressing down on the sides to make it upturned and straight like hers.
“I hate the cold and damp,” Seonghwa added to emphasize her previous proposal.
Mr. Seonghwa wore a brown V-neck sweater over a gray turtleneck shirt and had black hair. He was older than Mingi, yes, but younger than Deiji's teachers. That's why, out of everyone, he connected very well with Mingi. Mr. Seonghwa always spent his breaks in the music room, even on sunny days.
“Cold and humidity don't always go hand in hand,” Mingi explained. “For example, Antarctica is the driest continent in the world. Technically, it's a desert, even though you have to wear more than four layers of clothing to be there.”
“Wow, that place would suit you perfectly, don't you think?”
“I don't think it's far enough away.”
“Well, then maybe you should become an astronaut and travel the galaxy.”
Mingi smiled. “The rain is worse on other planets.”
“Worse than in Bucheon?”
“On Venus, it's pure acid.”
Mr. Seonghwa took a handkerchief out of his pants and blew his nose loudly.
“See? A brain like yours can achieve anything.”
Through the rain-streaked windows, Mingi saw a brown-haired boy running by. He recognized him; he was two grades below him. He was chasing someone, or maybe he was being chased. Since Mingi's brother left, he felt a little vulnerable. The music room was a small refuge of civilization.
“I've stopped going to track practice. My father thinks I'm throwing everything away.”
“Well, I don't think it's my place to say, but there's more to life than running fast. You have many lives ahead of you. Like I told you last time, you could be a great doctor. I've been doing some research and...” Suddenly, his phone rang. “Excuse me, I have to take this,” said the teacher. Mingi stared at his elder. “Yes, here it is.” The teacher's expression changed, and he moved away from Mingi a little, but his words could still be heard. “Oh no. Yes, of course.”
The man at the door
Nineteen years later
Twenty-seven hours before he decided to die, Song Mingi sat on his sofa to scroll through the happy lives of others on his phone, waiting for something to happen. Suddenly, out of nowhere, something did happen. Someone, for some unknown reason, had rung his doorbell. He wondered for a moment if he should open the door. After all, he had already changed into comfortable clothes, even though it was only nine o'clock. He was embarrassed to go out in his oversized T-shirt that said “Be biodegradable” and his plaid pajama pants.
He put on his slippers, to look a little presentable, and found a man at the door. A man he recognized immediately. He was tall—even taller than him—and had a boyish, friendly face, although his gaze was bright and sharp, as if he could see through things.
It was good to see this guy, although he was somewhat surprised, especially because he was dressed in sportswear and looked hot and sweaty despite the rainy, cold weather. Seeing him face to face made him feel more disheveled than he had five seconds earlier.
He felt lonely, he couldn't deny that. He had studied the existentialists extensively and knew that loneliness was a fundamental part of being human in a universe that was fundamentally meaningless, but it was good to see that boy.
“Yunho,” he said, smiling. "Your name was Yunho, right?
"Yes, Yunho."
"What brings you here? I'm glad to see you."
A few weeks ago, Mingi was sitting at the electric keyboard, playing, and he had run past, seen him in the window, and given him a quick wave. Yunho had even invited him for coffee one day years ago. Maybe he was about to invite him again.
“I'm glad to see you too,” he said, but the tense wrinkles on his forehead didn't say the same thing.
When Mingi talked to him that other time, in the music store, it seemed to me that he was speaking in a carefree tone, but now a weight weighed down his voice. Yunho scratched his eyebrow and made a sound that failed to become a complete word.
“Were you running?” It was an absurd question. Of course he was. But the boy seemed relieved for a moment to be able to talk about something trivial.
“Yes. I'm going to run the Bucheon half marathon. It's next Sunday.”
“Oh, that's great. Wonderful. I also planned to run a half marathon, but then I remembered that I hate running.”
The comment had sounded funnier in her mind than in the words coming out of her mouth. She didn't hate running. Still, his serious expression disturbed her. The silence ceased to be awkward and became something else.
“You told me you had a cat,” he said at last.
“Yes, I have a cat.”
“His name is Voltaire, right? A Roman cat?”
“Yes. I call him Voltio. Voltaire seems a little pretentious. Turns out he's not a big fan of philosophers.”
Yunho looked down at his sneakers.
“I think he's been killed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw him lying on the road. I saw his name on his collar.” He must have been hit by a car. I'm sorry, Mingi.
Mingi was so shocked by that emotional slap in the face that he could only keep smiling, as if the smile were an anchor holding him to the world he had lived in until then, where his cat was alive and the boy Mingi had sold several guitar sheet music books to was ringing his doorbell for a different reason.
He remembered that Yunho was a surgeon. Not a veterinarian, but a human surgeon. If he said that a living being had ceased to be alive, then that was probably the case.
“I'm so sorry,” he repeated.
Mingi felt a familiar pain. Only sertraline was able to stop him from crying in such cases.
“Oh my God.”
He went outside, absorbing the dampness of the day, walking over the wet, cracked cement slabs, and saw the poor furry creature lying on the asphalt, glistening in the rain, near the sidewalk.
“Oh, Voltio. Oh, my God, Voltio, no!”
Mingi knew he should feel sadness and despair for his feline friend—and he did—but he had to embrace another feeling in his heart. As he gazed at Voltaire's still and peaceful expression—the absence of pain—he felt an inevitable emotion creeping into the darkness within him.
Envy.
String Theory
Nine and a half hours after deciding to die, Mingi was late for his afternoon shift at String Theory.
“I'm sorry,” he said to his boss Shion, who was sitting in his office, a small windowless room flooded with clutter. “My cat died. And I had to bury him. Well, someone helped me. But then I was alone in my apartment and couldn't sleep, and I forgot to set the alarm, and I woke up at noon and had to rush.”
All of that was true. Mingi imagined how she must look from the outside and figured it would help support her story: her swollen, makeup-free face, her hair disheveled under a cap she grabbed on the run, and the same overalls she had been wearing to work for a week, which gave her an air of weary desperation.
Shion looked up from the computer screen and leaned back in his chair. He interlaced his fingers, resting his extended index fingers on top of each other, forming a kind of church needle that he placed against his chin, as if he were Confucius meditating on a deeply philosophical universal truth and not the manager of a music store dealing with a clerk who had arrived late.
“Look, Mingi. I like you.” Shion was harmless. A fifty-something guitar enthusiast who loved to tell bad jokes and played passable versions of old Bob Dylan songs for the store's customers. “And I know you have mental health issues.”
“Everyone has mental health issues.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I feel much better, in general.” He lied. “It's not a clinical problem. My doctor says it's reactive depression... And, well, it seems like there are a lot of things to react to lately. But I haven't taken a single day off. Except for the day my mother died... Yes, except for that day.”
Shion sighed. When he sighed, he made a whistling noise through his nose: a mournful B flat.
“Mingi, how long have you been working here?”
“Twelve years...” He kept perfect track. “Eleven months and three days. Give or take a day.”
“That's a long time. I've always believed you're destined for better things. You're in your thirties.”
“I'm thirty-five.”
“A lot is happening to you. You teach people to play the piano...”
“I have one student.” Shion brushed a crumb off his sweater.
“Can you imagine spending your life locked up in the city where you were born, working in a music store? Come on, what did you want to be when you were fourteen?”
“When I was fourteen...? I don't know. An athlete, maybe?” He had been the fastest fourteen-year-old in the country at running, and the second fastest in the combined events. He remembered standing on the podium at a national athletics championship.
“And what happened?”
He resorted to the shortest explanation. “It was too much pressure.”
“But pressure is what makes us who we are. You start out as coal and end up as a diamond.”
Mingi decided not to correct Shion's knowledge of mineralogy. He didn't tell him that, although coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to become a diamond, no matter how much pressure is applied to it. Science says that you start out as coal and end up as coal. Perhaps that was the vital lesson to be learned.
He smoothed a loose strand of his coal-black hair and tucked it under his cap. “What do you mean, Shion?”
“It's never too late to pursue a dream.”
“To pursue that particular dream, of running, it certainly is.”
“Mingi, you're a highly qualified person. You have a degree in philosophy...” Mingi looked at the mole on the back of his hand. That mole had been with him through everything he had been through. And there it was, indifferent to everything. Doing its own thing. Being a mole.
“It's not like there's a massive demand for philosophers in Bucheon, to tell you the truth, Shion.”
“You went to college, lived in Seoul for a year, and came back.”
“I didn't have many options.” Mingi didn't want to talk about his dead mother. Nor about his ex, Jongho. To Shion, the fact that Mingi canceled his wedding two days before the date seemed like the most fascinating love story.
“We always have options, Mingi. There's this thing called free will.”
“Well... If you adhere to a deterministic view of the universe, no.”
“But why did you want to work here?”
“It was either here or an animal shelter. Here paid better. And, well, you know, the music...”
“You were in a band. With your brother.”
“Yes. Heartbreak. But we had no future.”
“Your brother doesn't think so.” Mingi was taken aback by this observation.
“Hongjoong? How do you know?”
“He was here and bought an amp. A Marshall DSL40.”
“When?”
“Friday.”
“Was he in Bucheon?”
“Unless he was a hologram, he was in Bucheon.” He probably went to visit Wooyoung, Mingi thought. Wooyoung was his brother's best friend. Hongjoong had given up on the guitar and moved to Seoul, where he had a crappy job at a tech company he hated. Wooyoung, however, had stayed in Bucheon. Now he played in a cover band called Los Cuatro Vientos, which performed at local pubs.
“Wow, how interesting.” Mingi was pretty sure his brother knew that Friday was his day off. Realizing this made him feel sick to his stomach.
“I'm happy here,” Mingi continued, returning to the subject.
“No, you're not. But... whatever you say.” Shion was right. Mingi had a wound deep inside his soul, and the wound was festering. His own mind had thrown in the towel. He broadened his smile.
“What I mean is that I'm happy in this job. Happy, satisfied. Shion, I need to work.”
“You're a good person. You care about the things that happen in the world. The homeless, the environment.”
“I need to work.” Shion returned to his Confucius pose.
“What you need is freedom.”
“I don't want freedom.”
“This isn't an NGO, Mingi. Although I have to say, if we continue down this path, it soon will be.”
“Listen, Shion, what's all this about? Is it because of what I said last week? About you needing to modernize some things? Look, I've come up with some ideas to make people more jov...”
“No,” Shion cut him off defensively. "This store only sold guitars. String theory, you get it, right? I diversified. I made it work. The only thing is, things are going badly now, and I can't keep paying you to scare my customers away with your gloomy face."
“What?”
“Mingi, I'm afraid...” He paused for a few seconds, the same amount of time it takes to raise an axe in the air. “I'm afraid I'm going to have to fire you.”