Rivers and Mountains Without End

The parking lot guard outside the hospital's main gate blew his whistle, bringing the incoming traffic to a halt. There was no separate gate to the mortuary in the back, so the funeral procession was leaving the hospital through the front. After executing a hand salute toward the procession's rear end, the guard let the incoming traffic pass through. I parked my car on the third underground floor and went up to the lobby. The new hospital building had a raw, stinging smell. A few janitors were hunkered down, rubbing stains off the tiled floor.

The hospital was the conglomerate's first general unit, built as it entered the medical industry. The clinics were not divided into specialties such as internal medicine, surgery, or pediatrics but categorized according to diseases specific to a body part or an organ. A sign propped up in the center of the lobby informed which floor one should go to for a particular body part. The Uterus & Breast Examination Room was on the first floor, the Liver Center and Heart Center were on the second, and the Kidney, Lung, Bladder, and Spine Centers were on the third.

A banner outside the Uterus & Breast Examination Room advertised the operation of precision laser medical examination equipment brought in from Germany, and a group of women were sitting on a sofa awaiting their turn. The women, who appeared to be around the same age, either health club buddies or former schoolmates, cackled as they chattered away. Some knitted. Others were reading a book. The children, having tagged along with their mothers, were blowing gum bubbles between their lips. A woman looking into a hand mirror, trying to fix her lips, scolded a child as he clung to the woman's arm, pushing the child away. I went past the hallway where the women sat in a row and went up to the Cancer Center on the second floor.

________

I could not remember when my symptoms of faint nausea began whirling inside my body. It was as if they had always been there, but it also felt as though they were not real symptoms but mere shadows or hallucinations of a symptom. I could not tell whether it was near the pit of my stomach or the far end of my intestines or the rim of my throat where the shadows of my nausea were spinning. Late at night after returning home from work, or drinking wine, watching a history drama on TV, on rainy Sunday evenings, they would squirm up from someplace deep inside my body like fog or smoke, but after a while would usually subside and vanish without a trace. When the foggy yet smoky things slithered up toward my throat as though they were about to leak out of my body, I slowly clenched my teeth and pushed them back in. Holding the nausea in, I would let out a yawn, and closing my mouth shut, I would notice that my eyes had watered. My nausea was like a yawn or a burp, for even when I tried to scrape it out my stomach through my gaping mouth, I would vomit nothing. During the executive meetings that continued all afternoon each Monday, holding in a fart made me burp, the end of the burp tinged with a foul smell. If you hold gas in your stomach, it is bound to seep out as a fart or a burp, and my nausea was no different. I thought it was a sort of fart, burp, or yawn.

________

The nausea exploded when I visited the dentist to get an implant where a molar had been taken out. Having slit open my gums, the dentist demanded, Ah, Ah, Ah, that I open my mouth wider, as though he were a construction worker in the midst of an excavation project on the bone structure of my lower jaw. Each time I opened my mouth wider, the nausea wormed itself up my throat and through my vocal chords, the pain so excruciating that it felt as if my intestines were being flipped inside out, and just as the nausea subsided, my mouth filled with a sour fluid. After I rinsed out my mouth and then opened it once more to his AhAhAh, the nausea lunged into my throat as if a strange, franticly kicking beast were about to burst out. AhAhAh, AhAhAh, the dentist said again and again, and suspended his work each time. The nausea did not cease, so the nurse placed a gag between my upper and lower jaws. My mouth remained open with the iron gag stuck inside, and the nausea, unable to break out of my throat, went berserk throughout my intestines. The nurse wiped off the tears and saliva dripping down from my chin. The dentist tightened the implant screw with an electric screwdriver.

— It looks like you have a damaged liver. You should take a comprehensive physical. The machines these days are so good, a full checkup won't take more than two hours.

On the last day of my summer vacation, I went to the hospital and underwent a comprehensive physical. The boss's nephew was the sales office head of a life insurance company. In an effort to help my boss maintain his face, I had contracted to pay 10,000 won each month for insurance and was told to first get a comprehensive checkup with a fifty percent discount coupon, which was due to expire that day. It took a full day to undergo a blood test, a urinalysis, a lung MRI scan, and a stomach endoscopy, and the following day, I went through a positron emission tomography test. PET is cutting-edge technology that scans, with precision, everything from cancer cells to malignant metaplastic cells in every body part from head to toe, the nurse said. She wrote me my schedule for five days later when a doctor would see me and inform me of the test results. The nurse said,

— Five days from today will be next Monday.

________

The dockworkers union ended its weeklong strike and went back to work. The containers that had been stacked outdoors at the Ports of Busan and Incheon were now being loaded onto ships. Mid- to low-priced winter sweaters, parkas, long underwear, socks, and gloves bound for South America had been tied up on the docks for a week. Even mobile cranes were brought in for the delayed shipments, but their loading still took two whole days. Cargo ships requested the payment of late fees, and buyers put in claims for the delay. I sent a section head to Incheon and supervised the loading at the fourth dock of the Port of Busan. At night, I drank with the Port Authority employees.

It was fortunate that the air temperatures at Buenos Aires and San Diego did not drop suddenly. Even if the arrival were delayed by a week or so, it seemed there would be no difficulty in entering the winter market. The weather forecast sent over by the Chilean branch manager was positive. Even the exchange rate was not that bad, bottoming out at the end of a downward path. I sent a fax to the Chilean exporting companies explaining the dockworkers strike at the Port of Busan and agreed to an amount of compensation for the shipping delay. It was fortunate that we were able to make the goods arrive before it started getting cold in South America. When I sent off the last container and returned to Seoul, my boss threw a drinking party in honor of my hard work and ordered me to review and report on a plan to change our port of business to the Port of P'yŏngtaek starting next year. I sent a team supervisor to the Port of P'yŏngtaek to assess the circumstances. That was how the five days went by. As if it had somehow leaked out of my body unnoticed like a burp or a yawn, the nausea seemed absent.

________

A waiting list of patients was posted to the noticeboard outside the Liver Center.

'Kim, Ch'ang-su (M, 57) 9:30 a.m.'

That was me. A nurse opened the door to the doctor's office and called out my name. I went inside and sat before the doctor. The elderly doctor was studying an image on his computer screen. The fingers controlling the mouse were hairy. He carefully examined my face.

— What kind of work do you do?

— I work at a company that makes clothes.

— Manufacturing?

— It is a manufacturing company, but I'm in the export division.

— Is it a large company?

— Well, our sales ranking is pretty high for the mid- to lowpriced clothing industry.

— Is your position high up?

I was somewhat offended and began to wonder what the doctor was up to. The doctor was looking at his computer screen.

— I'll have to retire soon, so managing director will probably be the highest I go.

— You'll probably have a lot to settle, so I'll just tell you right now.

— …

— You're a little too late. If you had come about six months ago, you would've been okay, but …

— …

— Cancer cells were discovered in your liver. It looks as though they've spread to the upper part of your stomach as well. You didn't feel any symptoms?

— Now and then, after feeling nauseous, I'd yawn or burp. …

— The liver normally produces no subjective symptoms.

Which is why it's all the more terrifying.

— How bad is it?

— Sir, the staff looked at your scans yesterday and arrived at a final conclusion. Its progression has been slow until now, but I'm afraid it will start to spread rapidly from now on. PET does not misdiagnose.

— Should I be hospitalized?

— You should check into a hospital in three to four months at the latest. From then on, you should be prepared for a long battle. In the meantime, wrap up necessary matters, and come back every three days for outpatient treatment. You need to take the long view. Freeing yourself from your work and uniting as a family is what's most important.

— …

— Do not inform anyone outside your family. If anyone around you knows you have cancer, you may have to suffer disadvantages as you settle personal matters. I say this because I've seen it happen to a great many patients.

The doctor took out a notepad and wrote down some points of advice. Give up alcohol, tobacco, and sex, and sleep a lot. Take walks that are brief enough to avoid fatigue. Eat plenty of fermented soybeans. Eat plenty of mackerel, mackerel pike, yellowtail, and other kinds of blue-backed scombroids. … I went past the hallway in front of the Uterus & Breast Examination Room where women sat in a row, and left the hospital.

________

There were seven cigarettes left in the cigarette pack. When I finish smoking all seven, I will give up tobacco, I thought. Seven did not seem such a small number to smoke for the rest of my life. It did not seem so probably because, at any rate, there were still seven left to smoke. The cigarette smoke that my body sucked in then coughed up was as comforting and familiar as breathing.

When the war ended and my family returned to Seoul from our refuge in Busan, I was in elementary school. Our school building, once occupied by the North Korean People's Army, had been destroyed by the bombing of our national armed forces during the Battle to Recover Seoul. Instead, a tent given to us by the U.S. Army was set up in the schoolyard, and the classes were divided into three shifts each day. In the winter, we would light a heater with clam-shaped briquettes inside the tent. Cold wind blew in through the tear in the back of the tent. Some kids always sat next to the briquette heater, but my seat remained at the rearmost of the tent classroom in front of the tear. The teachers did not allow any of us to change seats. We would stick pencil stubs into empty M1 cartridges and write, but when winter came, the brass was cold like ice in our hands.

On the streets, empty Lucky Strike cigarette packs thrown away by U.S. soldiers flew about in the wind. Each case had a bright, intensely red circle with a black ring drawn around it. The intense Lucky Strike red that shook my youth was shocking and chaotic. Scattered over the streets of this world were colors so brilliant and translucent that they seemed to alienate human beings as if they were colors from another world. On the way home from school, I would pick up one of those packs flying in the wind. I would cut the bright red circle out with scissors and stick it on a top and make it spin, or paste it onto the cover of a notebook. The color seemed sharp enough to pierce my eyes, but the overflow of the unapproachable primary color made it utterly remote. The Lucky Strikes logo in weekly magazine advertisements today is still the circle of bright red. Maybe the few remaining cigarettes had been stirring up all past cigarettes, but at home, as I was smoking the last cigarette after being diagnosed with liver cancer, I remembered the color of the cigarette packs that littered the streets of my youth fifty years ago.

Along with the color of Lucky Strike, I remembered the smell of the women's bodies dressed in short skirts and short-sleeved shirts, passing by on U.S. Army Jeeps through the streets of my youth fifty years ago. I am not sure if what made me think of those women, who by now must have left this world or be close to eighty, was the color of the Lucky Strike circle or the scent of the makeup worn by the women sitting along the hospital hallway in the morning. The color of fifty years ago and the smell of today seemed to have blended into one another, conjuring up the women of fifty years ago. Those women, whom my mother and maternal aunts use to call "Westerners' whores," smelled sweet. When I used to cling to a U.S. Army Jeep with one hand and beg for chocolate with the other, the scent of the women in the vehicle seemed to pierce and enshroud, seemed to push and pull. Compared to the hazy achromatic lives of my mother and her sisters, the smell of those women was an evident substance, sharp and vivid. The taste of the chocolate from the U.S. soldiers on the streets fifty years ago was as striking as a blind man gaining eyesight, and my youth was spent flustered in the presence of the naked arms and legs of those sweet-smelling women. The doctor told me to settle personal matters, but recalling a color and smell from fifty years ago cannot count as "settling personal matters." I threw the cigarette that had burned down to its filter in an ashtray. There were six cigarettes left.

________

I took two days, sick leave, making an excuse that I was suffering from alcohol intoxication. I lay down until it was noon in the morning sunlight that entered the room at an angle. I heated pancakes in the oven and dunked them in syrup for lunch. I thought of asking the doctor over the phone if it was okay to drink coffee, but just went ahead and drank it. Winter was to begin in four months. I called in the housekeeper and cleared out my winter wardrobe. I was going to send the clothes in ramyŏn boxes to the town office recycling center. The shocked housekeeper asked,

— These perfectly fine clothes?

— I think I'll be emigrating to a warmer country before winter arrives.

— Is it okay if I take a couple?

— They've been worn, but if that's okay with you.

I called the company personnel department and asked about the compensation involved in retirement. The export products for the winter had all been loaded onto a ship and put to sea, so there were no business-related matters for me to pass on. The bills for the exports were going to be deposited online into the company's corporate account, and the head of the accounts department was responsible for demanding any amount left outstanding. I had changed companies several times, so my employment there had been no more than seven years. My severance pay would be around fifty million won. The company had a voluntary early retirement plan. If high-wage earners with less than five years until retirement tendered their resignation, the plan gave severance pay for their consecutive length of employment along with half of the remaining wages that would have been paid until retirement as compensation. It was voluntary only in name, however, as it urged high-wage earners to resign. I had two years left to retirement, so if I applied for voluntary retirement, my compensation would amount to around eighty-four million won.

In late August, the company had every employee take a routine physical checkup. We had to go to a hospital designated by the company and undergo a thorough examination, and those employees discovered to have a disease that would make it hard for them to continue their job at the company were dismissed after a six-month waiting period. In order to receive compensation for voluntary retirement, I had to tender my retirement around mid-August, before the regular checkup.

The company gave out bonuses once at the end of each year, and employees leaving after October 1st were considered to have worked until the end of the year and were paid a full-year's bonus. My bonus for the year was going to be around fifteen million won. If I applied for voluntary retirement in mid-August, I would be giving up the year's bonus of fifteen million won and would instead receive a voluntary retirement compensation of eighty-four million won. If my cancer were to be discovered during the late-August company physical examination, I would be on a waiting list and able to receive an end-of-the-year bonus but be excluded from those eligible for voluntary early retirement. Two weeks remained until mid-August.

So I had no choice but to hurry and wrap up matters at the company. After the two days of sick leave, I went to the company and tendered an application for voluntary early leave and my resignation. The head of the accounts department said, looking at the documents,

— Sir, it seems if you can work at least until early October you'll be able to receive the voluntary retirement compensation and the end-of-the-year bonus as well.

— Well, the thing is … I think I'll be emigrating. I'll need time to wrap up.

When I went to the president's office to say goodbye, the president was out. I wrote a simple letter, gave it to his secretary, and returned home. The money I received upon leaving the company was a voluntary retirement compensation of eighty-four million won plus a severance pay of fifty million won, which amounted to one hundred thirty-four million won.

"Do not inform anyone outside your family. If anyone around you knows you have cancer, you may have to suffer disadvantages as you settle personal matters," the doctor had said, and his were not empty words.

The doctor had prescribed four kinds of medications. When I went to a pharmacy with the prescription, the pharmacist handed over the medicine in a plastic bag. The weight of the medicine plus the packaging seemed to be over six hundred grams. I was to take the powder an hour before meals three times a day; the liquid, thirty minutes after meals three times a day; the red capsules, thirty minutes after lunch once daily; and the sleeping pills were for nights when I could not fall asleep. The pharmacist made a note of the times at which each type of medicine should be taken. I stuck the pharmacist's note on the refrigerator with a magnet and made a handwritten copy in tiny letters and put it in my wallet.

On days when I took a sleeping pill to fall asleep, my consciousness dawdled far away even after I woke up the following morning. My mind was so obscured I would be unable to track it down. It was like the light of a faraway kerosene lamp and like a heavy fog. From a remote and hazy place, the desire to smoke a cigarette wormed its way closer. I knew not whether the desire was a hallucination or something real, only that it was desperate. I heated pancakes in the oven and dunked them in syrup for lunch. I bought some canned mackerel following the doctor's recommendations, but the blue-backed scombroid meat had no seasoning and its stench was nauseating, so I could not eat much.

After lunch, I went for a walk. In the middle of the day, the skies clear of heavy summer rain, the fierce August sun blazed down. The pavements and the surfaces of high-rise buildings gushed out light. The density of the light filled the world and flowed over. The streets in the rippling heat looked bloated.

There was a park on the hill right behind the apartment complex, and in the middle of the park stood a museum. I walked on the path alongside the artificial waterway with wild waterweeds, and into the courtyard of the museum. On a bench at the edge of the pond where water lilies were in bloom, elderly men were playing a board game of changgi. A solitary old man was fanning himself, wearing a thin ramie-cloth jacket and a blank stare. I sat on a bench away from the old men and swallowed the red capsule I had to take thirty minutes after lunch. I heard the sound of a ball bouncing, coming from the tennis court behind the bench. It was a clear and powerful sound. The ball should have been empty inside, but the sound of the empty ball bouncing was full yet light. I could also hear the sound of feet moving with the ball, and the sound of running feet slipping in dirt and making an abrupt stop. As if some sort of stimulant was in the capsule I swallowed, the distinct sound of the tennis ball bouncing pierced my ears.

Under the fierce, scorching sun, the water lilies dotting the pond were in full bloom. The flowers had a reddish color, but they were not simply red but all the colors that grow in the procession toward red from white or perhaps from something that was not even a color. They had all blossomed into flowers, so the path I took alongside the flowers seemed long, and the colors seemed to be moving endlessly along that long road. Yellow water lilies were also in bloom. A sign staked next to the pond informed that they were an indigenous species known as the "yellow wicker basket lotus." The yellow flowers looked not like colors on the move but colors that had already come a long way and stopped because they were filled with the color yellow. The center of that yellow was dizzying, as if something were spinning at a ferocious speed. Looking into the yellow wicker basket lotus, I thought that there probably was a stimulant or hallucinogen mixed into the medicine the doctor had prescribed.

I had no memory of when I first saw a water lily. It seemed as if I had seen the flower once before, but that day could have also been my very first time to see one. I either often saw the flower before but felt as though I saw it for the first time in my life, or I saw it for the very first time but felt as though I had seen the flower often before—it must be one of the two—but I also could have completely forgotten about a flower that I once saw long ago. Even if it were a flower that I once saw long ago, the colors would have again traveled a long, long distance, so to say that it was my first time ever to see water lilies in bloom in the museum pond felt like the right way to put it. The pistils and stamens looked warm inside the petals where sunlight swarmed about. Shiny leaves were floating on the water, reflecting light. Ducks drifted between lotus leaves. As the effects of the medication spread through my body, my shoulders drooped languidly and sweat drops formed on my forehead because of the heavy heat, but the water beneath the shadows of the lotus leaves looked chilly under the scorching sun. Things like heat or cold were merely words and sometimes seemed as if they had never existed in the first place, but every time the wind blew across the water's surface, the heat carried over a whiff of the rancid smell of the water.

Hanging vertically on the museum building was a banner that read, "Special Exhibition of Kaya Earthenware—2nd - 4th centuries AD." Whenever the wind blew, waves of light rippled on the banner. I had once visited the Kyŏngju Museum during a field trip in the second year of high school. The museum looked like a glimmering Silla dynasty jewelry shop. While I could not remember the glimmering sensation itself, the memory of the sensation had stayed. I had never gone to a museum since then. I did not know what Kaya earthenware looked like, or the types of vessels there were, but waves of light and wind rippled on the banner that informed of the special exhibition of that ancient state's clay vessels. I heard the laughter of the old men playing changgi on the bench next to mine, quarrelling over whether to take back a move or not, and there could have been a change in the tennis match from singles to doubles, as the sound of feet chasing the ball increased twofold.

Around three o'clock p.m., I returned home. I had left the balcony curtains open, so the living room was full of sunlight, and the leftover canned mackerel on the dining table had all dried up. The stroll had taken about two hours. As the doctor had recommended, I had taken a walk short enough to avoid fatigue.

________

Thirty minutes after lunch, I drank the liquid medicine, went to the bank, and closed my installment savings account. It was an account that would have matured by March next year, and I was to have received a hundred million won. If I checked into a hospital before this winter it would be a hassle to deposit the installments. I deposited 2.5 million won for the four months up to December's installment, all at once, and in advance, and had it be closed on the 31st of December. Once I paid the four months' installment of the 2.5 million won on paper and had the account closed on the 31st of December, the total payment would be, even without the interest, around five hundred thousand won more, explained a clerk at the window using a calculator, but I could not understand her well because it was complicated. Excluding the installments for next January, February, March, and the interest, the payment total was ninety-six million five hundred thousand won.

— Shall I make it all out in one check?

— No. I just want one check for fifty million won, and please transfer the rest into a bankbook.

The clerk at the window handed me one check for fifty million won and a bankbook with the transferred amount of 46.5 million won.

I had lost the note with the bank account number of my wife I had divorced four years ago. My married daughter once gave me a call saying that her mother's account number had changed last spring, and I could not find the note I had written then. When my wife and I separated, we decided that I would keep the apartment and pay her three hundred million won in alimony. She agreed to this on the condition that I write her an IOU. If I were not able to find the note, I would have to call my daughter over and have her send the fifty million won check in person.

In the evening, I disposed of my stocks. They were electronics stocks and automobile stocks, blue chips that had the possibility of growth. I went on the internet and searched for stock charts. For the past two months, there were fluctuations to some degree, but the stock prices rose steadily and the trading supply was increasing. Because the prospects of the stocks were good, they were too valuable to cash in immediately, but I was worried what it would be like at the end of the year. I had eighteen stocks left until next year. I called the stock company and asked to speak to a consultant. If I divide the stocks' total worth into eighteen lumps and cash in one lump each week, I could flexibly avoid the risks caused by market price fluctuations and maximize the profit, said the consultant. I requested the stocks to be sold in the way suggested by the consultant. The consultant requested that I leave it up to the stock company's judgment to decide the day of the week and time to sell off the stocks, and I accepted. The money would be sent online in forty-eight hours from the time of disposal every week, said the consultant. Before the year was over, the stocks were going to be, according to the market prices each week, automatically disposed of.

________

Thinking about whether I may call my divorced and separated wife my wife is awkward and amusing. There is the term ex-wife, which contains the traces of a shattered interdependence, but it is impossible to know what makes one's ex-wife different from a stranger. One's wife obviously means one's current wife, so if the term current-wife is based on a breakable interdependence, then the link forming the interdependence implied in "ex-wife" seemed no more frivolous than that in "current-wife," but these matters were not easy to comprehend. But of course, one could not say that all the twists and turns of being the wife then being a stranger renders the interdependence invalid.

When I called my daughter telling her to come over to my flat, she said she was busy and would come by my office tomorrow. I had not told her I was diagnosed with cancer and had quit my job. My daughter got married three years ago. Her husband was a lawyer at a law firm that dealt with law suits and contracts for multinational corporations, and my daughter, who had majored in public relations, worked at a four-mugunghwa hotel as its PR manager and was running her own PR agency. Once at the end of last year, there was an article in the newspaper with her photograph on how the hotel's sales recorded number one in the industry. I met my divorced wife at my daughter's wedding and posed for the family photograph, the newlyweds in the middle, my wife and me, and the mother- and father-in-law forming a line on either side, all dressed in fine-silk hanbok.

Only after eleven p.m. did my daughter arrive at my flat.

— Dad, the parking lot was full so I parked on the road outside.

She was worried about parking attendants. Dressed in a summer dress cut low at the back and sleeveless, her body gave off a strong smell of makeup. Her drooping plump lower lip and round chin resembled her mother's as if they had been plucked off and transplanted. She had also resembled my wife in that her weak skin had formed wrinkles around the eyes from early on, but my daughter's wrinkles were erased with plastic surgery. Traces of my separated wife's features remained in my daughter's face, but the traces of that bond were persistent and strange.

— Do you see your mother often?

— We treated her to lunch on her birthday.

After my wife's second marriage, my daughter stopped going to the home of my wife and her new husband, and when they had to meet, they met in public.

I took the envelope containing the check from a drawer and handed it to my daughter.

— Give this to your mother.

— What is it?

— It's the rest of the alimony. Tell her I'm sorry for being so late. Get a receipt and please mail it to me.

— Why don't you just send it online?

— I lost her online number.

My daughter took out her mobile phone from her purse.

— I'll call mom and find out.

My daughter made the call. Mom? I'm at dad's right now. … Dad says he wants to send the remaining alimony but lost your account number. … I'd like it now. Fifty thousand won? … I don't know the amount either. … My daughter spoke in a tone that showed her annoyance in both being called over late at night for something that could have been taken care of over a phone call and having to run a money errand between her divorced parents.

She handed me the note with the account number and the name of the bank.

— Send it to this number.

— Right. Thanks.

She got up from the sofa and went into the bathroom. I realized for the first time how noisy the sound of flushing down a toilet was. The water emptying out from the fifteenth floor into the underground beneath the first floor sounded as if it were sucking the entire living room space into the darkness at the end of the drainage pipes. The final sound of the ending water gurgled down, and I heard the sound of air sputter out from the drainage pipes. My daughter returned to the sofa.

— Dad, did you quit smoking?

— Yes, it's been around five days.

— They say jogging's good for you during the first days.

— I'm taking short walks.

— The housekeeper comes on schedule, right?

— Right. Once every two days. And her cooking suits my taste.

— Keep her coming for a long time. It isn't easy getting someone as good.

— I'm more worried that she'll quit on her own.

— I feel better with her here even if you're alone.

The housekeeper was someone my daughter had asked around and found for me after I separated from my wife. My daughter always asked after the housekeeper as her way of asking after me.

That day, just as my daughter was about to go home, I held back and told her that I was diagnosed with liver cancer and had retired from my company. She listened, slowly checking the color of my face. It was difficult seeing my wife's face alive in my daughter's looking into mine.

— You should go to other hospitals. There's a specialist among my schoolmates' husbands.

— They say PET scans do not misdiagnose.

— Should I tell mom?

— Well … do as you see fit.

She took out her mobile phone once more. I stopped her.

— Later, maybe you could tell her when I'm not present. … She stopped pressing the buttons and folded the phone shut.

— What about my brother?

— You should let him know, but you don't think he'll take it hard?

— Maybe, but I should tell him still. He is your eldest son …

My son was five years older than my daughter. After graduating from college, he went to study abroad in the U.S. Ever since he was a child, he had excelled in logical thinking and enjoyed studying. He majored in mathematics at an American graduate school and had been planning to settle down there as a professor. A letter he had sent a few years ago said that the title of his dissertation was "A Study on the Distance between Lao Tzu's Wu and Archimedes' Zero," but I could not tell what that study was supposed to be about. His dissertation was disqualified at MIT, and eventually, without earning a doctorate, my son gave up his plan to be a professor and was living in L.A.'s Koreatown. With the social status of an intellectual who studied at an MIT graduate school for over a decade, he was running a retail liquor store selling bottled alcoholic beverages. Recently I heard news that he had opened a small dry-cleaner's next to the liquor store. He had married a woman of Irish descent and fathered two children, though he must have been pressed for money seeing as he had asked for money in the few letters he sent every once in a while, but I had to deal with the monthly installments for an apartment purchased beyond my means for which I had to borrow money, so I also did not have any money to spare. Around the time I divorced my wife, I was working at a company that exported stuffed toys. I paid alimony by begging the company president, a former schoolmate, to receive my severance pay in advance without interest, but later I heard from my daughter that my wife had sent about half of that alimony to my son.

— Let Ch'ang-sik hear it from you. It's an illness that lasts long so don't make too much of a fuss. … Tell him I'm calmly wrapping up matters on my own.

My daughter went home around eleven p.m. I took a sleeping pill at daybreak and fell asleep.

________

On September 5th, I ripped August off the calendar. I went for a walk in the park that evening toward the museum. I stopped by at the bank near the rear gate of the apartment complex and wired fifty million won to my wife. The sun was setting, the daylight dimming, so I could see far into the park grove, into the depth between the trees. The dryness of early autumn made the cooling air light. Breathing in, I felt a sharp-edged strip of air being sucked into my body and reaching the far end of my intestines. The air split and entered my body strand after strand as if I were slurping noodles, swallowing one noodle at a time. The old men playing changgi were not there, and I heard the sound of a ball bouncing from the tennis courts. In between the sounds of feet scurrying, I heard the frustrated cry of a woman fumbling the ball. It was dinnertime, so the young housewives on the playground took their children home. The times of the evening approached as if they were retreating. If time flowed in two directions like oncoming trains brushing past one another, my body could be running in reverse, carried on a procession of time moving in the opposite direction of the time going forward, I thought. Maybe it was the medication, but it seemed as if my body were drifting backward, abandoned by time and loaded onto another time. They say cancer is not a germ that breaks in from outside the body but a creature living in the body that emerges, grows, and breeds on its own, so there seemed to be another procession of time inside my body, flowing beyond my reach. On the courtyard pond in front of the museum, water lilies were afloat like kerosene lamps, their petals closed in the hazy dusk of the cloudy day. The shadows of trees cast on the water's surface rippled in the wind, and it appeared that the water lilies were going to spend the night with their petals shut, but even as lighted lamps seemed to grow inside these flowers at night after their petals shut on their own as the lights dimmed over the land, flowers of an unfamiliar time once again in bloom, I could not see inside the petals sealed shut. Ducks came out of the water, shaking their wet bodies dry, arranging their feathers with their bills as they received the evening, and on the bodies of the small fish, once in a while swimming up to the surface and poking out from between the lotus leaves, the sunset shimmered like needle points.

The banner hanging on the museum building changed from "Special Exhibition of Kaya Earthenware" to "Special Exhibition of Late Chosŏn Dynasty Paintings." Late Chosŏn probably began over fifteen hundred years after Kaya, but the banner had changed in no more than a few days.

I had put on light clothing, so the early evening darkness felt cold. I remembered the doctor's words that if I caught even the slightest cold my illness could rapidly advance. I stepped into the museum, out of the chill. The last time I had been in a museum was when I visited the Kyŏngju Museum during a high school field trip. That day felt as far back in the past as Kaya was from late Chosŏn. With thirty minutes to closing time, there were no visitors in the exhibition rooms. The Late Chosŏn Dynasty Paintings Special Exhibition was being held in Exhibition Hall No. 1. In the hall hung a mountain-water painting titled Rivers and Mountains Without End.¹ It was a long scroll painting, over eight meters horizontally. The title card explained that it was on loan from another museum collection for this exhibition, and since the painting was long, they had taken down the partitions in the exhibition hall.

I had never heard of the painter Yi In-mun. Like the title of the painting, across the long horizontal spread of over eight meters, mountains and rivers unfurled without end. Rivers and mountains seen in the flesh, in dreams, and not even in a dream, all connected, overlapped, and undulated. In each valley where the mountains tapered off was a village, and where the village came to its end, plains unfurled, and at the end of the plains, the mountain range resurged. The mountains with unraveled contours drifted into empty space as they entwined and dispersed like smoke, and beyond the traces of the fading and vanishing mountains being drawn up to the skies was where the sea began. Pumped out by the sea, the fog coiled around the fading base of the faraway mountains and, in that fog, particles of an unknown time blossomed, grew, and flourished.

A slight fever rose inside my now warmed body, making it feel cold. I sat on a sofa in the exhibition hall, scanning the painting hanging on the opposite wall, from left to right, right to left. The rivers and mountains bloomed into being and then withered away but soon reemerged, so there was no end. It was my first time really seeing a landscape painting.

It seemed that this place, either a drawing of rivers and mountains of this world, or of rivers and mountains in a dream yet to be born when the painter was falling asleep inside his mother's womb, either strokes of a brush dipped in black ink or the painter's

breath gushed out on paper, was the landscape of an endless world and time that I had to go alone. The lights went out, and a security guard came over and asked that I leave the museum. I arrived home at around 7 p.m. As the doctor had recommended, I had taken a walk short enough to avoid fatigue.

________

I was not sure if my wife's faith was a Christian one. In fact, I was not that interested in the source of her religious behavior. I sometimes wondered if worms were what had caused her faith to escalate into insanity, but a part of me wishes that it had not been something so trivial.

My wife was a timid and fearful woman. Even when the crosswalk light turned green, clearing the path, if a vehicle approached from afar, she could not walk across. Ever since we witnessed a traffic accident long ago on our way back to Seoul from my father-in-law's funeral, a taxi crashing into a cargo truck and being overturned on the expressway, my wife stopped riding passenger cars.

My wife was afraid of high-rise apartments, and when we frequently moved between rental homes as newlyweds, we never looked into flats on the fifth floor or higher and always had the balcony draped with curtains.

One summer, during a prolonged heavy rain, I heard someone scream and ran over to the bathroom where my wife had fainted flat on the floor with her panties down, naked from the waist down. When the 119 emergency personnel pressed down on her stomach and massaged her limbs, my wife regained consciousness, vomiting and defecating what she had eaten. She broke into a cold sweat, gasping breathlessly for air. My wife held her face in her two hands and cried.

— Yŏbo, in the bathroom tub …

Two worms about the size of chopsticks were squirming in the bathtub. One was crawling up the tiled tub wall, and the other had half of its body sticking out of the drain, twitching its head in desperation. Had the worms climbed up the drainage pipe from the ground on the first floor of the apartment to the fifth? Had they seen inside the pitch-dark pipe the light from the fifth-floor bathtub drainage hole? Or had they simply wandered up in the darkness inside the pipe without setting any direction? Did the worms slide down to the first floor whenever water came pouring down the pipe, falling again and again until they finally made it up to the fifth floor? The annuli of the dark red bodies were all bloated. I picked up the worms with tongs, put them in a plastic bag, and threw it down the garbage drop.

Worms also crawled out of the kitchen sink drainage hole. My wife, who had been in front of the stove boiling up some stew, once again fell to the floor screaming. The boiling pot of stew overturned and my wife suffered a burn on her thighs. A 119 emergency crew carried her to a hospital. I poured insecticide down the sink and bathtub drain.

Worms no longer appeared but my wife clamored for us to move. Saying that the worms must have multiplied, swarming in the drainage pipes, she held her face in her hands and cried. She was unable to find a new place. My wife, who could not bear the height of high-rises, could neither move to the top floor where no worm could climb up to nor could she go lower than the fifth floor, closer to the ground.

It could not have been the worms. Even before the worms emerged, my wife had gone to church every Sunday, and at every funeral of a fellow Protestant's family member, she would make a call of condolence and sing hymns. Following the emergence of the worms, my wife's weeping became more frequent and more ferocious. My wife wept while watching a TV news report about a small child, who was gnawed to death by a Tosa fighting dog while living on his own in a greenhouse made of plastic film without his poor and divorced parents. My wife stopped watching the news, went into a room, and wept. In the middle of her weeping, she sounded ferocious and urgent, as if her internal organs were on fire. In between weeping, she would call out for her father. Father, Father, she would call out in succession. Her weeping was persistent and prolonged. Just as a burning building collapses on its own, her weeping subsided into a prolonged whimpering only after it exhausted itself.

When U.S. Army fighter planes bombarded Baghdad, when labor protestors pulverized police lines, severely beating the combat policemen with iron pipes, when the Hwasŏng serial killer committed his sixth murder, when rescue squads at the site of the collapsed Sampoong Department Store pulled out dead bodies with ruptured sides, when hundreds of people died in the arson attack on the Taegu subway, when a former comfort woman and army sex slave over ninety years old died a natural death, my wife wept like a scalded child. Her weeping was that of a person rendered incapable by bounded hands. The person weeping as well as the person listening to the weeping were both incapable of doing otherwise. My wife watched the news, turning the TV channels as if habitually searching for events to weep about. She was like a person continuously taking the severe beatings of this world. Her weeping could not be quieted. It resembled defecation or violent purging from both ends. All I could do for my wife was to pour insecticide down the bathtub and sink drainage holes once a week, twice in the rainy season.

My wife would leave our home for days on end to enter a prayer retreat and then return home with a hoarse voice. As my wife went to the prayer retreat with greater frequency, our daughter went to see the church's pastor, explained her mother's behavior, and asked him to help her resume a "normal life." According to my daughter, the church pastor said,

"To feel sad seeing the world's evil and violence is proof that one's nature is sound. That is normal for a human being."

I was the one who first brought up the subject of divorce, and my wife willingly complied as if there had been no marriage to begin with. The divorce was agreed upon without so much as having one argument. My wife packed up her clothing and household items and entered the prayer retreat. Three years after our divorce, my wife married an evangelist.

________

I got rid of my mother's grave before the Ch'usŏk holiday. Following the death of my father who had joined the army as a soldier during the war, my mother lived the rest of her life spouseless. Only a notification arrived that he had died in combat at the central front battle to retake the Lucky Highlands. His remains did not come back. My mother held no memorial ritual for his soul. It feels like we're waiting for a runaway, she once said. My mother died of liver cancer. While it cannot be proven medically, statistically liver diseases tend to be hereditary, the doctor had said. Her grave was twenty-five square meters, located at the highest part of the park cemetery. There were no ownership registrations at the park cemetery. I signed a lease contract with the cemetery management office during her burial. The lease deposit was ten million won, the monthly fee thirty thousand won. I sent the fee in a lump sum each year online.

There were six months left until Hansik, but I was not going to be able to visit her grave on Hansik, nor could I entrust my daughter with the duty of taking care of her grave. I made a call saying I was going to have her remains dug up and cremated and return the burial spot, and the maintenance office assisted with the process for cremation. There was a cremation facility in the park cemetery. Before the grave mound, the maintenance office set up steamed rice, seaweed stew, and liquor, fruit, and jerky. I offered up a cup of liquor and bowed down to the ground twice. Laborers shoveled away the mound and started digging downward. A tree's roots had extended themselves underground and were coiled around the rotten casket. The laborers wore rubber gloves and gathered away the decayed shroud. There was no moisture underground, so her flesh had vanished from her body without a trace. Her skull had an expression of indignation, the jaws missing teeth and wide open, and shriveled hair was piled up like dust near her head. When she was alive, her shoulders had been round, but the meatless shoulder bones formed firm right angles. Her thigh bones were two neatly aligned spare stems separated from the hip bones, and her finger bones and toe bones were disjointed and scattered.

The laborers retrieved the remains and placed them in a wooden box, then swept up the burned casket pieces and shroud. They poured gasoline into the pit and set it on fire. It took two hours to cremate the bones and powder them into ashes. The park cemetery was a basin enclosed by mountains. A paved road led to the mountain top, and there stood a platform for scattering ashes. It was a place on top of a tall tower where one could sprinkle ashes in the wind. I held onto the jar containing the powdered bones and went up to the platform. The bone powder formed a whitish strip, settled on the wind, and disappeared. A Buddhist monk working for the cemetery management office sounded a wooden gong as he read out the Thousand Hands Scripture. On the way back, I stopped at the management office and paid for the grave. Of the ten million won lease deposit, they subtracted two million won to pay the laborers and gave back eight million won. They made out a receipt for the eight million won. An office worker stamped "void" on the lease contract signed at the time of her burial and attached a receipt.

Upon returning from her grave that evening, I received a letter from my son. The point of his letter was that I should bring the money I received as severance pay and from selling my flat to L.A. and check into an American sanitarium. My son is a U.S. citizen so he would have no problem inviting over an immediate family member, and since American sanitariums are financed with government support, not only are the facilities good but the cost is lower than in Korea, my son explained. He added that he could hire a Korean caregiver for around fifty dollars a day. As it took time to get the documents ready and go through the invitation procedure, he demanded that I make my decision soon. If the flat sold before I left this country, the money I could take to the U.S. would be around 750 million won, and if I checked into a state-government-run sanitarium, that money would eventually become my son's. If I were hospitalized in Seoul, even if I hired a caregiver, my married daughter would take my remaining time hard, so my going to the U.S. and the money becoming my son's share inevitably felt like the natural thing to do.

When I went to the hospital and explained my intentions, the doctor said,

— There is no difference between liver cancer treatment standards in Korea and the U.S. Only over there it'll be a great deal cheaper and the facilities better. Also, our hospital doesn't have a hospice system yet, so we won't be able to take care of you to the end. The U.S. has a good hospice system so you won't have to trouble your family. If you're going, it's important that you go soon.

About a month ago, returning home after being diagnosed with cancer, I had shot back empty words to the housekeeper who wondered why I was clearing out my winter clothes, but in the end it turned out that those words had not been empty.

________

Night had fallen, and the water lilies were closing their petals. Through the narrowing gaps between them, one could see the pistils and stamens inside, and the petals were lined with a murky darkness. The darkness seemed to have flowed into the closing flowers, but it also seemed that the darkness had been created inside the flowers and were flowing out through the gaps between the petals. Each time small fish fluttered on the water, the evening lights shimmered on its surface and the water lilies trembled. The quivering shadows on the water calmed down, and the fish darted from shadow to shadow. Creases formed behind the darting fish, thin like thread. A group of high school girls leaving the museum sat near the pond, eating snacks and taking pictures. When one girl laughed, the others followed suit. Their laughter spread quickly like ripples, a gust of laughter sprouting up as another passed by. It seemed as if the sound of laughter formed ripples on the water and shook the lotus stems. After the high school girls all left, the petals sealed themselves shut. The flowers floated like kerosene lamps fallen asleep on the water, and the increasing darkness tinged the air surrounding the flowers. From the tennis courts, a dog out on a stroll with its owner barked. I could not see the dog; I only heard it barking. It was probably a large dog, since the barking resounded deeply, its echoes hollow inside. The dog barked woof, woof, woof, woof, as if one bark were pulling out the next one. The barking sound shook the air and then dissipated. I could not catch the tail of the vanishing sound. The tail of the sound I failed to catch was low and thin, pulling along a long trail of ripples, flowing above the apartments toward the skies.

Across the wide street from the museum's rear gate was an alley of small restaurants. Old shops were huddled close together. Lined up next to one selling rice-cake bits in chili sauce, fishcake soup, an assortment of fritters, and starch-noodle sausage were others selling meat dumplings, vegetable strips wrapped in rice and laver, spaghetti, and mung-bean pancakes. Some had propane tanks placed in front, steaming dumplings or cooking broth. I could smell soy sauce boiling, fish on the grill, cheese, and pork fat burning over a charcoal fire. I went into a restaurant that served fish.

— Will you be eating by yourself?

— I'll have the braised mackerel.

— Our braised mackerel is too big a portion for one person.

— I'll have the grilled mackerel then.

A grilled mid-cut of mackerel was served. It had been spread apart in the middle, revealing its neatly aligned bones. At the top of the cut I could see a dark blue strip of meat. It was a blue-backed scombroid that the doctor had recommended. I tore off a piece of dark blue meat with chopsticks from the back and put it in my mouth. The tender meat smelled rancid and sweet. The mackerel is a fish that lives in the cold currents of the East Sea and contains plenty of nucleic acids, effective in preventing lifestyle diseases, read the words written on the wall. I could not picture the East Sea in which the cut-up and grilled mackerel had lived. What surfaced was not the East Sea but Rivers and Mountains Without End, the image of the sea at the topmost part of the landscape painting breathing out like fog. Even in that sea, there must be blue-backed scombroids ready to be caught. At around seven p.m., I returned home. As the doctor had recommended, I had taken a walk short enough to avoid fatigue.

________

The flat did not sell. A bubble had formed in real estate prices, so the prices went up but no deals were made. I entrusted my daughter with the authority to sell the flat as my agent and told her to reach an agreement with my son and share the money when it was sold. The amount of money I could take with me to the U.S. was around four hundred million won. Since I could not send the money in dollars, I entrusted it to the accounting department at my former employment. The department made a cash deposit certificate out to me. When I bring the deposit certificate to the company's L.A. branch, they will give me four hundred million won in dollars. At the hospital, they made me a copy of my medical records. All examination results, photographic negatives, medication and treatment details, plus the doctor's medical opinions until then were put on a diskette. The diskette contained the records I had to submit to my doctor in the U.S. when my hospitalization was decided. The entirety of my luggage was one trunk containing some clothes and a few books. On the day of departure, my daughter drove her car over and took me to Incheon Airport. As the car crossed the Yŏngjong Bridge, my daughter said,

— Mother said she'd be coming to the airport.

— That's unusual for your mother. …

— She said she'd be offering up a prayer for you. …

— A prayer?

As it was early in the day, not too many passengers were at the airport departure gates. Next to the escalators across from the airline check-in windows was my wife, who had come with a group of people who looked like fellow Protestants. I did not approach my wife but observed her sitting on a sofa in front of the check-in windows. My daughter went over to her mother. My wife looked in my direction. She and the Protestants stood in a circle next to the escalators. A man in a black suit led the prayer. He was tall and sturdily built. He might be my wife's new husband, I thought. I could hear parts of the sound of the man praying.

— Lord, have mercy upon thy stray sheep. Lord, forgive poor Kim Ch'ang-su of his sins and lead him in his journey forward.

My wife and the Protestants together said Amen and sang a hymn. The Protestants sang softly, but their singing reached my ears even as I sat on a sofa on the other side. The hymn sounded as though it were pushing me off the edge and out of this world.

As I give up both body and soulAnd move on to eternal life,Though my flesh and bones may scatter,Blessed I shall be.

I remembered the smell of insecticide I poured down the bathtub drain in the flat with worms. When the hymn was over, the man in the black suit began another prayer. My wife and the other Protestants, each with their hands joined, lowered their heads and together said Amen during the prayer. Before her prayer ended, I took out my passport and left for the departure area. As the automatic doors closed behind, my daughter said,

— Dad … and wiped off her tears, unable to continue.

The plane took off on schedule. Mountains and rivers, remote and without end, drifted by under my eyes. As the airplane neared the East Sea, I could see in the distance, where the mountains and rivers came to an end, an ocean hazy like fog. The day was cloudy, giving the ocean an ashen hue, and a bouquet of light gushed down through the clouds, casting a motley pattern on the snow-covered mountains far away. Rivers and Mountains Without End was spread out beneath my living eyes, and above the painting, around the edge where the mountains wither into visual remnants and the ocean begins, I saw a bright red Lucky Strike cigarette pack flying in the wind. When the airplane flew out into the skies over the East Sea, I pulled down the window shutter. An in-flight announcement informed us that, due to a strong headwind, the plane's arrival at

L.A. will be delayed by around an hour.