In truth, this was all meaningless banter. Jokes that were only possible because everyone knew he had no personal interest in me (what my Noona would call a ‘dark heart’), and that we had only taken the photo in that sort of mood by chance.
Feeling myself being worn down by that harmless conversation, I felt like an overly sensitive person. Either that, or I had a special reason to be sensitive to this kind of joke. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to think about it right now.
The beer he had handed me was also nearly empty. I didn’t know my exact tolerance for alcohol yet, so I had a tendency to drink faster when I wasn’t paying attention. There was also the fact that I wasn’t much of a talker, so I would just keep drinking whenever I felt awkward or flustered.
I wasn’t drunk, but I felt a little hazy and wanted to clear my head for a moment.
“Noona, the shoot is all done now, right?”
“Why? You want to change?”
“Yeah, and I want to wash my face….”
I answered, lightly rubbing the cheek where the freckles would have been drawn. I felt his gaze stick to the left side of my face, but I had no desire to meet it.
“Go on inside, change your clothes, and wash up. You remember the room you changed in earlier? The bathroom is right to the side of it. It’s a guest bathroom anyway, so use it as you please.”
“You say that like it’s your house.”
“Then you should’ve guided him yourself, Representative. This is what I get for doing your dirty work.”
Watching my Noona and him exchange words so casually and effortlessly, I put down the empty bottle and stood up.
The moment I passed behind him on my way to the entrance, he lightly grabbed my wrist. Tilting his head back to look up at me, he said,
“Feel free to use anything in the bathroom.”
It was probably the kindest thing I had ever heard him say. Was it because he’d been in a good mood since yesterday?
I had a feeling that the one who had made him so generous was probably Mr. Shushu, who wasn’t here. I didn’t bother to ask myself why that thought made me feel an unpleasant discomfort. “Thank you,” I mumbled in a small voice and headed straight for the entrance.
Because he had a certain arrogant leisureliness and a glamorous air about him, I had expected his home to be a high-rise apartment complex towering like the Tower of Babel, or a luxury mansion with a unique, modern exterior overlooking the Han River.
Of course, like the mansions on the hill where Morae’s house was, it was a home on a scale large enough to make an ordinary person like me gasp, but seeing the small, trail-like stone staircase that led from the main gate to the garden and the exterior walls that preserved the red brick, it gave the impression of a house that had been built quite a long time ago.
The interior, however, seemed to have been completely remodeled.
The hallway that began at the entrance split to the left and right. We had opened the main gate with the key he had given us beforehand and had been using the back door connected to the kitchen, at the rear of the building, so as not to disturb him. Once I found the kitchen, finding that room would be simple.
Relying on my sense of direction, I turned left. What appeared before me was his living room.
Unlike the dim, windowless hallway, the living room, with its high ceiling that opened up all the way to the second floor, was filled with the abundant, slanted light of the late afternoon. It seemed if I crossed the living room and turned right, I would find the kitchen.
But I couldn’t take a single step into the living room.
More than the camera lens that felt like it would dissect me piece by piece, more than his gaze that had boldly strode up to my thighs and ‘caressed’ me with a lens that felt not like an eye but like lips… I was confronted with an incomparable terror.
In a completely unexpected place, without warning or a hint.
Like a knife plunging into my stomach the moment I carelessly turned a corner.
I had believed I knew better than anyone that life’s malicious pranks could be as sudden and violent as a bomb dropped in the most peaceful of places, without rhyme or reason.
But once life decided to play a prank, a person had no choice but to fall for the same trick twice, and then a third time.
I had thought I’d come a long way.
My father, eroded by his own sorrow, had let me go, but I had Han-i hyung and Morae. I had also offered up five years—a period by no means short in a twenty-two-year-old’s life—as a sacrifice.
When someone provoked me, I had felt the impulse not to turn and flee, but to poke back and provoke them in return. In front of someone else’s work, I had been seized by an intense desire to pick up a brush again.
Perhaps I hadn’t overcome it, but like a lump that had risen on the skin, like a scar that no longer bled but remained, hideously distorted, hadn’t I come to accept it as a part of myself?
I had been under a grand delusion.
Nothing had changed. I was still the child who had been denied.
From outside the entrance, beyond the living room’s large picture window, I could hear the laughter of the three of them. I wanted to run out into that world of people who possessed passion, talent, and the strength to confront their wounds.
But I couldn’t. The past I thought had been stuffed and mounted was reviving as a present more vivid than anything could be, smiling as it tightened its grip around my neck, and I didn’t have the strength to loosen even a single one of its knuckles.
“I thought you might not be able to find the room, so I followed you.”
It was his voice. But I couldn’t turn my gaze to look at him. I couldn’t turn my head away from myself.
“Ah… you like it?”
I felt him draw closer, having likely followed my fixed gaze.
“The artist who painted this was sixteen at the time. A monster.”
“……”
“What do you see in this painting? I’m curious what Seo Yeehyeon, the one Choi In-woo praises so highly, sees.”
“Isolation.”
“……”
I muttered it as if to myself in a very small voice, and his silence grew heavy in its wake.
No, silence can’t have weight. I couldn’t deny that I had been conscious of his presence from our first meeting, and that as time went on, I had shown strange reactions in relation to him, but his gaze, which must have been looking down at me with interest from right beside me, held not an ounce of meaning in this moment.
“Hmm. No one’s ever gotten that right before. Should I really entrust the preface to you, Seo Yeehyeon? How did you know? I mean, even though the expression is bold, it feels like the two people have affection for and rely on each other. The colors are warm, too. Most people interpret it as love, or lovers, something along those lines. But you, Seo Yeehyeon… why did you think it was a painting about ‘Isolation’?”
He placed a hand on my shoulder and gripped it firmly, his words tumbling out. He was more excited than I had ever seen him.
I turned my head to look at him. As if my neck were held fast by some device, or as if a knife were pointed at my back, making every muscle rigid and stiff, I kept my neck still and moved only my face, slowly.
When I focused on his gray-blue eyes, his distinctive scent, as deep as his excitement, rushed over me as if to attack my whole body, but this time, even the scent’s mysterious stimulation couldn’t ensnare me. Why did you think that? I answered.
“Because I painted it.”
○
The probability of winning first prize in the lottery: 1 in 8,145,060.
The probability of dying from a fall in the bathtub: 1 in 801,923.
The probability of dying in a plane crash: 1 in 1,000,000.
The probability of dying from being struck by lightning: 1 in 4,289,651.
Experts estimate that one billion people will die from smoking in the 21st century, but most people who can’t quit smoking buy a new pack and light up with the baseless, gamble-like belief that they will not be one of those billion people.
Things that feel like they won’t happen to me.
The habit of feeling more fear than necessary for certain things and preparing for them thoroughly, while for other things, entrusting one’s future purely to luck and holding a gutsy, optimistic belief, was not a matter of one person, but a long-standing contradiction of humanity itself.
Today, which feels like it will repeat forever, doesn’t feel like it will ever lead to the future, no matter how much time passes.
A fifteen-year-old boy cannot concretely picture himself at twenty or thirty, and a twenty-three-year-old young man cannot imagine himself at forty or fifty, having reached middle age.
One rationally understands that such a day will eventually come, but a situation arises where the imagination fails to embody the concept that reason has accepted.
One naturally accepts turning from fifteen to sixteen, but turning thirty, turning forty, and one’s skin, unable to defy gravity, forming deep wrinkles, one’s no-longer-young appearance—these are not felt as reality.
It feels like a very distant, a very, very distant future, almost like a future a hundred or a thousand years from now, so unreal that one lives as if one can live forever in one’s present form, spending each day pretending not to know the one certain fate—that one will someday lose the self of today. Perhaps that is the substance of an ordinary human life.
If, for convenience, we define that as ordinary, then Yeehyeon’s parents could be said to be individuals who deviated from the ordinary to some extent.
They were people who did not fear facing themselves, who tried not to overlook the secret everyone knows—that life is limited.
Yeehyeon’s father was from a fishing village, an honor student who had never once troubled his parents due to his excellent grades and gentle personality, and who spent his student years expected to enter a prestigious university and earn a living that would help his family in the future.
But even a seemingly gentle person could possess an inner passion. Although being gentle and having no convictions are completely unrelated concepts, the prejudice that a child who doesn’t assert his stubbornness or raise his voice must not have an object of desire he would sacrifice everything to obtain was also a frequently occurring misunderstanding.
His passion was for painting.
He had hidden his passion so thoroughly that until the year he turned twenty-three, when he confessed to his parents his actions that had deceived them until then, no one in his family knew he had a dream of painting.
Perhaps it wasn’t because of his thoroughness, but because a terrible indifference or a deception that saw only what it wanted to see had turned his passion into an unintentional secret.
Having been accepted into a top-tier prestigious university as expected, he moved to Seoul alone and, hiding the truth from his parents, submitted a leave of absence as soon as he enrolled and registered at an art academy for college entrance exams.
Except for the time he spent tutoring part-time for a minimal living, he devoted almost all his time to painting. Before and after class, he would find an empty classroom at the academy and paint whatever he could. He was happy just to be able to receive formal practical lessons, and in the moments he was absorbed in the process of lines becoming planes and planes becoming three-dimensional forms, he could even feel a freedom, as if he had escaped from all other relationships and only the subject and himself existed.
Freedom. Painting was the means that allowed him to feel human freedom.
Yeehyeon’s mother was in the opposite situation.
Her great-grandfather was an artist whose mid-sized works maintained a hammer price in the billion-won range nearly 50 years after his death, and he was one of the important figures discussed in the history of modern and contemporary Korean art.
Her father was a painter and art critic, and her mother was a poet who had a deep knowledge of various arts, including fine art. She grew up surrounded by painting, and whether by genetic force or environmental factors, she naturally became interested in painting. Unlike Yeehyeon’s father, she easily entered the painting department of a prestigious art university after attending an arts middle school and high school with the support of her parents, who were very pleased with it. It was the department at the university that Yeehyeon’s father had wanted.
But her passion was for comics.
And her parents held a strictly negative stance on all kinds of art treated as minor arts.
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