Northbound

Ojay invited me to pick gochu peppers with him, and I agreed to go. I'd asked him what I should bring. He said that we needed a sack to carry the gochu but he already had one. "Just bring yourself," he said, so that's what I did. It was a cool autumn morning.

"Come on!" Ojay's mother stood next to the car in her old fur coat. She was small and the coat was large, so it looked like just the coat standing there. Ojay said that it would be the three of us picking gochu.

"Alright," I replied. We put three empty sacks on the back seat and set off. Ojay turned the radio on. His mom passed me a tomato, telling me to eat it, and I held the tomato in my hand for a while before taking a bite. We were speeding down the national highway, heading south, with the plan to reach the gochu field before lunchtime. It seemed like Ojay's mother hadn't been this excited about an excursion in a long time.

"Recently I've started learning minyo dance at the cultural center because my life is so boring," she told me, "and there's this woman in my class who's a bit off. I went over to her house and brought some bananas, and she just put them in the fridge without even asking me if I wanted one, and that kind of pissed me off so I told her, 'Bananas don't go in the fridge,' and she replied, 'Oh!' and then put them on the shelf, of course without offering me one, and when we ate she gave me leftover kimchi in a bowl that she'd already eaten from! Nothing else, just leftover kimchi, a bowl of it—hey, are you hungry by the way? I've got bananas and tomatoes back here—which do you want? Eat more tomatoes, they're good for your eyes and teeth. The reason I have so few wrinkles at my age is because I've always eaten a lot of tomatoes when they're in season." In a highpitched voice, she jumped from one topic to another.

The last time I'd seen Ojay's mom was two months ago, and when I commented that she'd gotten a lot thinner since then, she complained that it was because of Ojay's dad. Ojay's father had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer and undergone surgery to cut away part of his right lung. Before this, he was a model employee and had never failed to show up for his jobs as a security guard and grocery store handyman. But after losing one of his lungs he stopped going outside and spent all his time lying on the couch.

"It might be good for his recovery to take a walk or something, but all he does is sit," Ojay's mother complained. "He won't leave the house and nags me about cleaning. I can't deal with it.—" She took an irritated breath. Ojay drove silently.

Ojay's mother rolled up her coat like a pillow, lay down, and fell asleep. I rolled down the window and tossed out my dry tomato stems. The stems flew into the empty air without a sound, like feathers, and disappeared behind us. As we passed through several tunnels, the radio signal grew staticky. Eventually we lost the signal, and Ojay turned the radio off. It was bright and cool outside—a good day for picking gochu. We got off the highway and turned onto an empty country road, passing abandoned stables and the occasional unripe pear tree. We passed bean fields on the mountainside. They had been hit with a frost, and the beans were all dried up.

"Look at the beans."

At some point, Ojay's mother had woken up, and she spoke from the back seat.

"Look at those sad little beans."

We got lost once we were near the destination and began to drive around in circles. We should have passed two...