* * *
• • •
TWO DEAD, two gravely injured. The survivors of the accident were taken to the hospital. Mr. Ahn, the youth club president, and I were taken to the police station for investigation. The police demanded details about the accident and the rescue, throwing around words like “willful negligence” and “manslaughter.” Soon enough, they had figured out who I was. Even though it became clear that they couldn’t charge us with a crime, the fact that I was the son of an infamous mass murderer made them keep digging.
We were finally allowed to leave at six in the morning. Somehow, reporters had discovered I was there, and they followed us to the van, shouting questions about what I had been doing these past several years and what I thought about my father’s situation on death row.
The reporters flooding in meant that our idyllic life in Lighthouse Village was essentially over. Neither of us said a word on our way home.
* * *
I remember the first time I played executioner. It was the summer I was studying for the middle school equivalency exam. We were living in Gunsan, and I went to the library and spotted a book called Theories and Practices of the Death Penalty. I walked past it several times before finally taking it off the shelf. I opened it to the first page. I finished the whole book sitting there on the floor by the bookshelf. I put it back in its place and went straight home. Nothing mattered anymore. I wanted to forget the picture of the gallows I saw in the book. It was hot that day, almost ninety degrees, but I lay down and pulled a heavy blanket over me until all I could see was crimson darkness.
Then, I was in front of an old wooden building with a persimmon tree growing outside, the setting sun stretching beyond the roof, and the heavy wooden door blocking my way. I pushed it open and stepped inside. The room was bright, although it had no windows or lightbulbs. In the center was a table with a black cloth on it. A white curtain shrouded the back of the room. I heard a noise behind the curtain, so I crossed the room and brushed it aside. A man was sitting there on a mat, wearing a hood over his head. A thick rope hung around his sweaty neck. His hulking shoulders were trembling ever so slightly. I heard a weepy sigh from inside the hood. “Execute,” I ordered. The floor opened up and the man vanished.
I threw off the blanket and sat up. I looked out. The burnt- orange evening sun hung in the darkening sky. The man I had executed was my father.
* * *
The next day, I finished tidying up and left the pharmacy at four. Mr. Ahn’s purple van wasn’t parked by the house. I looked through the window, but he wasn’t in our room. Maybe he had gone to the fisheries co-op. But then why didn’t he stop by the pharmacy, which was right next door? He hadn’t gone to gather information for a ghostwriting project, since the bag he took to those meetings was hanging next to the door. I parked my bike in the backyard.
“When did you get here?” the youth club president asked, coming up behind me.
I straightened up with a jolt. “Oh, were you home? It was so quiet I thought you were out.”
“I was in my room.” Holding out a box, he told me that a courier had brought it not long ago. It was slightly bigger than a shoebox and didn’t have the sender’s name or address, only my name and the address of the lodging house.
“Where’s Mr. Ahn?”
“Sunghwan? I don’t know. We had lunch together, and then when I woke up from my nap he was gone.”
I headed to our room but stopped to look back at the youth club president. Was it only a matter of time until he kicked us out, too?
I opened the box. Mr. Ahn’s reporting notebook, the recorder watch he wore when he went out to talk to sources, a coin-shaped USB drive I bought him with my first paycheck from my job at the pharmacy, a bundle of letters, a scrapbook secured with a rubber band. What was all this? At the bottom of the box was a thick stack of paper. The first page was blank. I turned to the next. What was this?
SERYONG LAKE
PROLOGUE
August 27, 2004
The girl was waiting at the bus stop in front of the school, kicking at the curb with the tips of her sneakers. She was looking down. Only her pale, round forehead was visible as her long hair fluttered in the wind.
A dump truck rattled past her, obscuring her for a brief moment. Soon, a silver van drove up and stopped in front of her; it was the shuttle from the art school. A merry voice pierced the damp, heavy air. “I’m not going to art class today. It’s my birthday and I’m having a party.”
The van made a U-turn and drove away. The girl crossed the road forlornly, her shoulders drooping as she stared at the ground. Across the street, Sunghwan watched her from the beginning of the path to the rest area. The girl looked up. The August sun glinted off the hairpin holding her bangs to the side. She stared at Sunghwan nervously. Sunghwan almost greeted her: Hello, young lady. Happy birthday.
She walked toward the main entrance to Seryong Arboretum. Sunghwan lit a cigarette. A few minutes before, at the rest area, he had spotted some kids who lived in the company housing heading into what seemed like a birthday party at the McDonald’s there. Everyone was holding a present. It clearly wasn’t her party.
He heard the traditional percussion quartet from Seryong Lake, announcing the beginning of a rite to remember the old Seryong Village, which was submerged a decade ago when the dam was constructed. While the company kids were at the birthday party, the kids from the low-lying village would be there.
There were two classes of people now living at Seryong Village: the natives and those who worked at the dam conservancy. The former had lived in the old Seryong Village; they had resettled in the lowlands below the dam, along the eastern bank of the river. Employees of the dam conservancy and their families lived in company housing across the river from the village. Company housing was adjacent to the arboretum, and just north of the arboretum was the Annex, which had three houses: 101, a two-story fortress, and 102 and 103, smaller structures that were rented out to the conservancy security guards. The birthday girl, named Seryong after the lake, lived with her father in 101. Her father owned the expansive property containing the arboretum, the company housing, and the Annex.
Sunghwan never saw the kids from the village playing with the kids whose parents worked for the dam. The girl, Seryong, didn’t play with anyone. Though she was born in the now-underwater Seryong Village, she lived in the Annex and was therefore classified as neither a kid from the lowlands nor one from company housing. That was probably why she was alone on her eleventh birthday.
Sunghwan looked up at the sky, a cigarette between his teeth. Leaden clouds were brewing. The sun was hiding behind the clouds and the cicadas had stopped wailing. It was a hot, sticky, unpleasant Friday afternoon.