After this first time, it was easier for me to do it again, but each time, I would be seized by strange, ominous premonitions. I was thick-skinned by nature, and certainly wasn’t in the habit of entertaining outlandish notions, but the darkness and silence of the living room would strike a chill through me all the same. The following morning, sitting with my wife at the breakfast table—her lips pressed firmly closed as per usual, clearly not paying the slightest bit of attention to anything I might be saying—I would be unable to conceal a feeling of abhorrence when I looked across at her. I couldn’t stand the way her expression, which made it seem as though she were a woman of bitter experience, who had suffered many hardships, niggled at my conscience.
It was the evening three days before the family gathering. That day, the humidity in Seoul was the highest on record and the air-conditioning was blasting out in all the big shops. After spending all day in the office I was starting to shiver, and so I returned home a little earlier than usual. On opening the front door and catching sight of my wife, I stepped hastily inside and closed the door behind me; it was a corridor apartment, and the last thing I needed was for someone to pass by and peek in. She was sitting leaning against the decorative television cabinet, peeling potatoes, wearing thin white cotton trousers but with her upper body bare to the waist. She had now lost so much weight that her breasts were little more than a pair of small bumps beneath her sharply protruding collarbones.
“Why have you taken your clothes off?” I asked her, trying to force out a laugh.
“Because it’s hot,” she answered, neither raising her head nor pausing in what she was doing.
I gritted my teeth. Look at me, I willed her, but without saying the words out loud. Look at me and laugh. Show me that your answer was just a joke. But she didn’t laugh. It was eight in the evening and the door to the balcony was open, which meant that the apartment was quite cool, and my wife’s shoulders were covered in goose pimples like tiny sesame seeds. The potato peelings were piled up in heaps on sheets of newspaper. Thirty-odd remaining potatoes formed a small mound.
“What are you planning to do with them?” I asked, affecting perfect composure.
“Steam them.”
“All of them?”
“Mm-hm.”
I laughed falteringly and waited for her to laugh in response. But she didn’t laugh. She didn’t even lift her head.
“I was just, you know…hungry.”
—
Dreams of my hands around someone’s throat, throttling them, grabbing the swinging ends of their long hair and hacking it all off, sticking my finger into their slippery eyeball. Those drawn-out waking hours, a pigeon’s dull colors in the street and my resolve falters, my fingers flexing to kill. Next door’s cat, its bright tormenting eyes, my fingers that could squeeze that brightness out. My trembling legs, the cold sweat on my brow. I become a different person, a different person rises up inside me, devours me, those hours…
Saliva pooling in my mouth. The butcher’s shop, and I have to clamp my hand over my mouth. Along the length of my tongue to my lips, slick with saliva. Leaking out between my lips, trickling down.
—
If only I could sleep. If I could shrug off consciousness for even just an hour. The house is cold on all these nights, more nights than I can count, when I wake up and pace about in bare feet. Chill like rice or soup that has been left to go cold. Nothing is visible outside the black window. The dark front door rattles now and then, but no one comes to knock on the door or anything like that. By the time I come back to bed and put my hand under the quilt, all the warmth is gone.
—
Sleeping in five-minute snatches. Slipping out of fuzzy consciousness, it’s back—the dream. Can’t even call it that now. Animal eyes gleaming wild, presence of blood, unearthed skull, again those eyes. Rising up from the pit of my stomach. Shuddering awake, my hands, need to see my hands. Breathe. My fingernails still soft, my teeth still gentle.
Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts, nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe. But not my breasts. With my round breasts, I’m okay. Still okay. So why do they keep on shrinking? Not even round anymore. Why? Why am I changing like this? Why are my edges all sharpening—what I am going to gouge?
—
The sunny south-facing apartment was on the seventeenth floor. True, the view out east was obscured by other buildings, but to the rear the mountains were visible in the distance.
“Now you’ve forgotten all your worries,” my father-in-law pronounced, taking up his spoon and chopsticks. “Completely seized the moment!”
Even before she got married, my sister-in-law In-hye had managed to secure an apartment with the income she received from managing a cosmetics store. Leading up to her pregnancy, the store had expanded to three times its original size, and after the birth she insisted on stopping by—only at night, and just for a short while—to make sure that everything was running smoothly in her absence. As soon as my nephew Ji-woo turned three and went to a nursery, she’d apparently started spending all day in the shop again.
I envied her husband. He was an art college graduate who liked to pose as an artist, yet didn’t contribute a single penny to their household finances. True, he had some property that he’d inherited, but he didn’t bring in a salary—in fact, his activities were limited to sitting around and not doing an awful lot of anything. Now that In-hye had rolled up her sleeves and gone back to work, her husband was free to spend his whole life messing about with “art,” without a single worry to trouble his comfortable existence. Not only that, but In-hye was also a skilled cook, just as my wife used to be. Seeing the lunch table she had swiftly set made me feel a sudden pang of hunger. Taking in her nicely filled-out figure, big, double-lidded eyes, and demure manner of speaking, I sorely regretted the many things it seemed I’d ended up losing somehow or other, to have left me in my current plight.
Neither complimenting the house nor thanking her sister for taking the trouble to prepare the food, my wife sat quietly eating rice and kimchi. Those were the only things she touched. Mayonnaise contained egg, so that was another thing off the menu for her—she didn’t so much as stick her chopsticks into the mouth-watering salad.
Her face was blanched, a result of protracted insomnia. A stranger coming across her in the street would have assumed she was a hospital patient. A little earlier, pretty much as soon as we’d both come in through the front door, she’d been summoned to the master bedroom; after a while, my sister-in-law was the first to emerge, and judging from her baffled expression I guessed that my wife had come out without a bra. Sure enough, when I looked closely I could see her light-brown nipples showing through like smudges on the cotton.
“How much was the deposit here?”
“Really? We went to look at the real estate site yesterday; this apartment had already gone up to around fifty million won. Because next year they will have completed the underground line extension, you see.”
“My brother-in-law certainly has a good head for this kind of thing.”
“What did I do? It was all down to my wife.”
While our polite, amiable conversation carried on in intermittent bursts, the children seemed unable to sit still, hitting each other and making an almighty racket, pausing only to stuff their mouths with food.