PROLOGUE
The early morning of September 12, 2004, was the last time I was firmly on my father’s side. I didn’t know anything at the time—not that he’d been arrested, nor that my mother was dead, nor what had happened overnight. Only as Mr. Ahn led me out of the barn at Seryong Ranch did I become certain that something was gravely wrong.
Two police cars blocked the road leading up to the ranch, the flashing red and blue lights bruising the alder trees. Insects skittered through the lights. The sky was still dark, the fog dense. “Keep it safe, okay?” Mr. Ahn whispered, referring to his cell phone, which he’d given to me earlier. An officer ushered us into a squad car.
I caught glimpses of the devastation as we drove through—the damaged bridge, the roads under water, the destroyed streets, the tangle of fire engines and police cars and ambulances, the helicopter circling the black sky. Seryong Village, our home for the past two weeks, had been completely destroyed. I was afraid to ask what had happened. I didn’t dare look at Mr. Ahn; I feared I might learn something terrible.
The squad car pulled up to the police station in Sunchon, on the other side of the mountain. The cops separated us. Two detectives were waiting for me in a small room.
“Just tell us what happened to you,” one of them instructed. “Not what you heard or what you imagine. Got it?”
I knew I couldn’t cry. I had to calmly tell them what happened last night so that they would let Mr. Ahn and me go. Then we could go find Dad and check that Mom was safe.
They listened as I explained.
“So let me make sure I understand,” the same detective said. “You played hide-and-seek tonight with a girl who died two weeks ago?”
“Not hide-and-seek. Red Light, Green Light.”
The two detectives stared at me in disbelief. A little later, one of them took me to the entrance of the station; Uncle Jongu was there to take me home with him. But reporters were swarming out front. The detective held my elbow as he pushed through the crowd. Flashes popped all around. Look up! Look here! Hey, kid, did you see your dad last night? Where were you during the incident?
I felt dizzy. I thought I was going to throw up. The detective hustled me along. I thought I heard Mr. Ahn calling me. I shook off the detective’s hand and looked back, searching for Mr. Ahn in the sea of faces. In that moment, all the cameras went off; I was an island in a sea of light.
Uncle Jongu opened the back door of his car and I hunched low in the seat. I put my head between my knees and tried to hold back my tears.
People would refer to that night’s events as the Seryong Lake Disaster. They would call Dad a crazed murderer. The story was so big that I, too, became famous, as his son. I was eleven years old.
LIGHTHOUSE VILLAGE
On Christmas Eve, a black SUV screeched to a stop in front of the pharmacy, and the driver walked inside. I was just about to dig into my ramen. It was three in the afternoon, but it was my lunch break. I forced myself to get up.
“Hey. I have a question,” the man said, taking off his Ray-Ban sunglasses.
I reluctantly put my chopsticks down. Hurry up, man, I thought.
“How do you get to Lighthouse Village? I don’t see any signs for it.” He gestured toward the intersection.
I glanced at his big, powerful SUV. What was it, a Chevy?
“Hey! Did you hear me? Where’s Lighthouse Village?”
“Don’t you have GPS?”
“I’m asking since the GPS can’t find it,” the man snapped, clearly irritated.
“How would I know if the GPS doesn’t?” I said, equally irritated.
The man left in a huff and gunned his SUV across the intersection.
I turned back to my lunch. Lighthouse Village was what the locals called Sinsong-ri. He should have turned left at the intersection, not gone straight through. I knew, because that was where I lived.
The village wasn’t on any map; it was as though it was so insignificant that it wasn’t worth calling out. According to Mr. Ahn, it was the tiniest village on Hwawon Peninsula. My boss, the owner of the pharmacy, said it was a dismal, out-of-the-way place that was impossible to get to. The village’s so-called youth club president referred to it as the edge of the world. It was true that the place was remote—you had to drive down an unpopulated stretch along the coast for about ten miles before you spotted it. The lighthouse from which it had gotten its name stood at the end of the jagged, beak-shaped cliff that jutted over the sea. Rocky mounds rose from the water and a long, tall ridge enclosed the village from behind.
When we first moved here, I’d gone up to the top of the ridge with Mr. Ahn. From there, you could see the other side of the mountain, a treeless wasteland as vast as the sea. The government had purchased the land for a tourism complex, but so far nothing had come of it. I’d heard that it had been covered with sorghum once, with a small village at the far edge. It was the kids of that long-gone village who had come up with the local name for ours.
With only twelve residents remaining, our town was also facing extinction. That number included Mr. Ahn and me; everyone called us “the little ones” because the average age of the residents was nearly seventy. Most were sweet potato farmers; although we lived in a coastal town, everyone was far too old to fish. Sometimes they were able to cajole us “little ones” into catching something. The last baby born in the village was now sixty-one years old—the youth club president. He owned the sole motorboat in the village and rented us one of the rooms in his lodging house; he also rented out to scuba divers who came to explore the underwater cliff off the coast. That was why Mr. Ahn and I had first come here, before deciding to stay on. Perhaps the man in the Chevy had been lured by the underwater cliff, too, though I hoped that wasn’t the case.
Even though Mr. Ahn was only thirty-nine, his hair was already thinning, and he had long white hairs sprouting from his eyebrows. His performance was pathetic at our version of Ironman, which we held every day. We would take the youth club president’s boat to the rock island not far off the coast and anchor it. First, we swam around the island. Then we swept the ridge of the underwater cliff to fill our bags with sea squirts, clams, and sea cucumbers. After that, we played basketball; we had nailed a hoop to the trunk of a pine tree. The first to sink five baskets won. Mr. Ahn had lost nine out of the past ten games. Last week, he pulled a muscle in his neck when he tried to dunk. Since then, he was always muttering about how some bastard had shoved his head down when he was trying to score.
My boss came in around seven in the evening and opened the safe, which signaled the end of my shift.
“I’m heading out,” I called out. I hopped on my bike, coasted through the intersection, and barreled down the meandering coastal road. It wasn’t too dark; stars dotted the night sky. The sea shimmered, the waves crashed against the cliff, and a silvery seabird banked silently through the air.