Nowhere to Be Found

by Bae Suah

The office I worked in was not a place where revolution happens.

Tired. I was tired. I was only twenty-four, but I was tired.

“This week’s topic is murder.” “Oh.” “Eight o’clock on Saturday night. I’ll be lecturing for three hours.”

My mind went blank for a moment. For the past several months, I had assumed that the person teaching criminal sociology was Professor Gang Jin-gu of Kangnam University, and I had sent that person all sorts of materials and brochures. I had also taken the occasional phone call that I thought was from him.

you sent crime scene pics to some rando? on the mail??

“What kinds of people commit murder?” “Murderers, I suppose.” “Why do they do it?” “I’m sure they have their reasons.” “Is this how all of your lectures go?”

After quitting he’d become one of the many ordinary people who failed at everything they tried to do.

He hadn’t gone to college, and he wasn’t a computer genius.

But I don’t believe that any of it—not the movies or the demonstrations or the jazz concerts at Janus or the French conversation classes at Alliance Française—really moved him.

Yet I don’t believe she had any particularly grand dreams for herself. She later married an ordinary salaryman (who was not from France) and lived off his wages in Seoul, where she had no use for all that French.

You have the eyes of a wolf-girl whose heart has never once been moved.

I want to be covered in blood. I’ll cry out in the end and weep for fear of leaving this world without ever once discovering the me inside me, the ugly something inside me.

But then I see her: another me passing by like a landscape

The me that is nowhere to be found now, the me that will turn to ash and vanish, turn to darkness and rot—that me extends a squalid hand at the final moment of this crash, having entirely deserted and abandoned my life.

In truth, I was not me. The me that was born into an animal body and lived as a slave to poverty and insult was nothing but the emptiness that had been momentarily bewitched out of me by an evil spirit. That distant me is precious and beautiful. No

I thought about getting mad at her but gave up on the idea.

Had their murder become this village’s great unsolved mystery?

Or was it simply that nothing else had happened after the case was solved, so they forgot to take down the flier? Just as I was debating whether to give the chicken to the dog, the bus came.

“There must have been a mistake. Maybe they confused him with the Kim Cheolsu who was in an accident.”

“Actually, there are two officers-in-training named Kim Cheolsu,” said the soldier.

No one had told me, and I never would have guessed. Maybe one of them really was the Kim Cheolsu I knew. All I did know was that, for reasons unknown to me, I could not meet the Kim Cheolsu who had been here. I would never get to see the Kim Cheolsu who’d met with some mysterious accident on a snowy winter day.

If I went back to the beginning, there would be another Kim Cheolsu, and I would be able to find him.

And what was it that I really wanted—reality or fantasy? The same old apathetic Cheolsu who’d been waiting a long time for his chicken, or the malnourished Cheolsu out here with the crows at the bottom of that cold cliff?

a dull affection buried deep inside? Or was I merely acting out some dramatic emotion in order to endure this chaotic life?

He looked like an aging thief.

You know as well as I do that this is all just theater.

become my mother and my father. But the other Cheolsu, who fell from the white cliff, and I would pass by in silence outside the window of an abandoned house in the rain. Rain falls on the corpses of time.

Send me letters on poisoned paper. I’ll swallow them whole.” Instead we sent him poison-free Christmas cards and candy. For all I knew, he might have eaten every page of every book we ever sent him.

There are so many other things that I could be doing.” She was the only one among us who had hopes for her future. “I’m going to be a lesbian when I grow up,”

My friends think it’s a genius idea.” She was talking about transcending your origins and your own willpower. Since she was the only one among us who’d gone on a class trip, maybe she could actually accomplish the things she said.

That was everything that happened in 1988. That year was my beginning and my end.

“What kinds of people commit murder?” “Murderers, I suppose.”

are they about to be murdered