1

Every time I hear someone say that the world has ended, I think of 1999, of the things that happened that year and the things that didn’t. Since elementary school, I’d always been interested in mysterious abilities and supernatural phenomena—astral projections, doppelgängers, prophetic dreams, spontaneous human combustion, levitation. While I’m sure reading articles about such fantastical topics had something to do with it (children’s magazines back then published articles like that at least once a month), the truth of the matter was that divination, fortune telling, and Dahnhak’s Brain & Body meditation were everywhere in society. Times were unpredictable and everyone was having financial troubles. The country was still in shock from the Seongsu Bridge collapse, and the IMF crisis was bringing about mass layoffs. So it was natural to look to the supernatural for reassurance.

    The prophecies that everyone was talking about back then were grim, although perhaps that’s more a reflection of what people were drawn to than it was a sign of the times. Case in point, Nostradamus. His most famous prophecy, that the world would end in 1999, naturally gained more and more attention as the end of the century drew nearer. And then, when it turned out the world was in fact not going to end in 1999, Nostradamus was all but forgotten—until he reappeared in 2012. This time, another one of his prophecies had entered the public eye: “From the calm morning, the end will come when of the dancing horse the number of circles will be nine.” Claiming that the prophecy referred to Psy’s “Gangnam Style” hitting one billion views on YouTube, people were yet again signaling Armageddon. There is perhaps no better example of the questionable symbol searching and backwards reasoning that plagues people and their prophecies than this.

    Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that in Korean, the word for “horse” and the word for “end” are homonyms. But I’m not trying to make puns here. As a novelist, I’m less interested in the content of prophecies than the fact that they must be formulated with language. Even if some prophet sees the future in a vision, they have no choice but to express that vision in their own vocabulary, which might be limited by their intellect. That wouldn’t be the case if they could physically show people their vision, but as long as the prophecy is being transmitted via language, the true meaning can never be completely conveyed. Translation only makes matters worse, inevitably leading to further distortions. In the end, there are a million opportunities for form to obscure the meaning of a prophecy. In that sense, the “sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce is unique. It is said that Cayce would enter a trance as though he were sleeping, lying down with his eyes closed. He would then deliver his prophecies as if he were reading a book placed in his mind’s eye. This might be the reason why his prophecies are not hard to understand. He left behind a legacy of prophecies about great movements of land and water; among these was the prediction that the western coast of the United States and the Japanese archipelago would eventually be consumed by the sea. But you don’t need to enter a trance to know this. Just open any book on geology. The only difference between him and us is that we can only read books that everyone can see, whereas he could read books that no one else could see.

    The fact that prophecies are a product of form is telling. Kwon Tae-hun was a famous Korean clairvoyant. A teacher of Dahnhak, he once said that in 1999, North and South Korea would be reunited, and the civilization of white people would end, bringing about a new world paradigm led by the “yellow” race—Korea, China, India, etc. The so-called White-Yellow turning point. Because prophecies are formalized by language, they change based on one’s point of view. In other words, whereas 1999 might have seemed like Armageddon to Caucasians, to a Korean prophet that year could be interpreted as the beginning of a new epoch. 

    Just like prophets of different personal backgrounds and intellect interpreted the year 1999 differently, we all experienced our own version of 1999. As for me, 1999 was an unforgettable year. In the summer of that year, I was on my way to meet my uncle on my mother’s side when I stopped at Kyobo Bookstore and discovered a piece of paper. As usual, I was in the religion section and looking at books with meditation or enlightenment in their titles when something that looked like a bookmark fell out from one of the books. When I opened the piece of paper, I realized it was a flyer: “Welcome! THE MOMENT in Seoul Center – The spirit medium Julia comes to Seoul this July. Come ask life’s deepest questions. The spirit will give you answers. For further information, call the number below.”

    The reason why I remember this so vividly is because of the girl I started dating that summer. After a semester of unrequited love, I finally confessed my feelings to her, but instead of accepting me, she made an unexpected suggestion. It was spring of my second year in college, and we were at the semester-end party; I discovered the flyer that following week. 

    I put the flyer in my pocket, found the girl—Jimin was her name—and we left the bookstore together. In the distant future, I would come to remember that summer as the summer of the fire tragedy at Sealand, as the summer that I saw The Matrix for the first time, as the summer a spirit answered my life’s deepest question, as the summer that sparked a long and beautiful relationship with a girl. But at the time, it was just another ordinary summer, no different from any other. 

    The publishing office my uncle worked at was located in an alley just behind the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts. I heard that a long time ago, the building was home to a famous cram school. Other than that, it was just another ordinary office situated in just another ordinary building. Walking down the epoxy coated hallway, I opened the door with the publisher’s sign hanging on it and found a small room on the right where my uncle worked. He sat at his desk with a compression sleeve on each arm, editing a manuscript as if he were some master horologist looking at a broken watch through a loupe. He told us to sit at the table in front of his desk, which we did.

    “How’s school these days?” he asked as he took a cup of instant coffee from a yellow plastic tray and placed it on his desk. Jimin was sitting next to me, and my uncle looked like he was trying his best not to ask what kind of relationship we had.

    “The semester ended last Friday.”

    “Already? Time sure flies. Have you made plans for summer break?”

    “Not really. I don’t have any special plans aside from continuing my part-time job at the library.”

    “Did you say you two are classmates? I’m sorry, I forgot your name. Oh right, Jimin. Do you have any summer plans?”

    I was nervous that she might say something like, “Your nephew and I are planning to do something together.” But thankfully, Jimin gave an ordinary answer. Unlike when she and I were alone, Jimin didn’t like to reveal herself in front of others.

    “Enjoy it while it lasts. You can have all the money in the world, but nothing will buy you the freedom of a college vacation. Even better if you can spend it with someone in love. Speaking of which, you two seem like—”

    I cut my uncle off. I didn’t like revealing myself in front of people either, even if they knew all about me.

    “My friend had a question that I thought you might be able to answer,” I said. “That’s why I brought her here.”

    “Well, what do you want to know?”

    My uncle took a sip of coffee, and so did I. The taste of that coffee still remains pungent in my mind, as though I’d sipped it only yesterday. With liquid coffee beans in my mouth, I motioned with my head toward Jimin.

    “Joon told me you’ve held, if not read, every book that has been published in Korea since Liberation. I was wondering if you knew about a book I’m looking for.”

    “What’s the title?”

    “Ash and Dust by Ji Young-han.”

    My uncle stirred his coffee with a teaspoon. It was already well mixed, so there was no need to stir it any further. The superfluous gesture meant my uncle—a man still in his forties whose glasses looked like thick white eggshells when viewed from the side, a man who’d been a poor bookworm his entire life, who, despite being a famously meticulous copy editor, had seen his usefulness disappear along with the twentieth century because of the popularization of internet searches—was searching his vast memory for an answer.

    “The one that won first place in the category of fiction for Modern Woman’s inaugural writing competition in 1974? Or was it 1975? I can’t remember.”

    “I think that’s the one. I heard that she became a star overnight because she won that competition.”

    “Then that must be the one. Why are you interested in that book?”

    “Her mother wrote it,” I said. “But she can’t read it. She doesn’t have a copy at her home, and she can’t find it at the library.”

My uncle nodded in a knowing manner.

    “I’m not surprised. The book was banned as soon as it was put into print and disappeared from bookstores.”

    “I never knew. None of my family told me. Why was it banned?”

    “Well, the main idea of the novel was that October 1972 was the end of time. Kids these days must know about October Yushin, right? After Park Chung-hee dissolved the National Assembly and gave himself emergency powers, he enacted the Yushin Constitution. Even the universities were closed. It’s impossible for such events not to seep into the literature of the time. I’ve always been interested in publishing books based on history, so I’ll go out of my way and pay a fortune just to buy them. For that one, I had to call the publisher to get a copy. I still remember the first sentence: ‘We called October 1972 the end of time.’ The censorship office probably didn’t like that sentence.”

    “A book could really get banned for just one sentence like that?”

    “When a military dictatorship bans a book, they don’t need to give a detailed explanation. The book just disappears one day. That’s what a dictatorship is, after all. We’re left figuring out the reason why the government didn’t like it ourselves. That’s why people living in a dictatorship make their own internal censorship office. People are often shocked when they finally get their hands on banned books and read them. Ash and Dust is a perfect example. You said your name was Jimin? Your mother was ahead of her time. If the book had been written now, we would have called it science fiction or fantasy because it dealt with time travel and the end of time. It was a really peculiar novel for the age, so I remember the whole plot.”

    When my uncle told us the plot, we couldn’t help but be surprised. In the novel, there were two lovers without a future. They realized that their time together was coming to an end. So, in that sense, the “end of time” wasn’t the end of the world but the end of their love. It was just a coincidence that it happened to take place at the same time as October Yushin. That coincidence got the book banned. Anyway, because the lovers in the novel realized that life without each other was pointless, they decided to commit suicide together. Just before they died, their lives flashed before their eyes. But the flashback wasn’t simply visual; they felt like they were reliving their whole life, as though they were experiencing a long vivid dream. The only difference was that time was running in reverse. The day they decided to kill themselves became the first day of their new life, and now when they went to sleep, they woke up not the next day but the day before. Only when they figured this out did they realize they must be getting younger by the day. 

    “No way. I can’t believe it. It’s almost like the novel predicted the future,” I said.

    “Predicted what future?”

    Before I could say anything, Jimin spoke up.

    “Joon and I were planning to commit suicide together this summer vacation.”

    My uncle and I both stared at Jimin.

2

When I finally read the book for myself, it was in autumn of 2019, twenty years after that day in Gwanghwamun. Perhaps influenced by my uncle, I had transformed myself from a student who just liked reading books to a serious novelist over the course of those twenty years. I came to know many editors from various publishing houses, and I would receive books from them that they’d edited. Among them was the collection of essays, Free Heart. The book started in a bold manner with the line: “I’m an enlightened person.”

    Although the author Kim Won introduced himself as a farmer, he originally had managed an investment consulting firm just a few years prior to the book’s publication. But, when he turned fifty, he realized there was something he absolutely had to do. He left the company and retired to the mountains in Gyeongsang-do province where he had no family or friends. The thing he absolutely had to do was achieve enlightenment; when I entered my forties, I was surprised to find out that there were a lot of people around me who wanted to achieve enlightenment. I guess it’s because life is hard and most people realize they’re too old to start something new. Anyway, life in the countryside wasn’t as easy as he thought, and he spent three years without any free time to look at the books he’d brought with him.

    Then one day after finally managing to get settled in his village, he finally had time to look at some of his books. He opened some of the Buddhist scriptures and writings of the sages he’d brought with him, and when he realized he understood everything he was reading, he knew he had already reached enlightenment. 

Free Heart’s introduction went like this:

People say that life is a sea of hardship, but the essence of our existence is happiness. Life is in fact a sea of happiness. But waves emerge on the sea to hide its true appearance. Waves may originate from the sea, but they are not the sea itself, and they eventually hide its true nature. Likewise, language comes from reality, but it is not reality itself; it obscures it. We have all experienced the unease that appears the moment we say to ourselves, “I’m truly happy.” But why? We say we’re happy because we’re happy, right? So why would we feel uneasy? The reason is because the word “happiness” isn’t happiness itself; it is nothing more than language, a substitute for the real thing. The meaning of language can change immensely depending on how we express it. Humans create their identity through the stories they tell. And stories are formulated through language. Therefore, a person’s identity will change depending on how that identity is formulated in words. In this way, our identity is an illusion. But even this requires language to express it. This only furthers the illusion. This is why life is so painful. Even if we gain a million insights, they are nothing but an illusion of language.

This last section pierced my heart. This is why life is so painful. Even if we gain a million insights, they are nothing but an illusion of language. Now that I think about it, the summer of 2019, which I’d spent engrossed in Free Heart, was the last summer before COVID-19. While I read the book, I became interested in the author, and I would often visit Kim Won’s Facebook page, which I found linked to Heo Jinho’s account, the editor who’d sent me the book. For a person who wrote a book about personal enlightenment, he was surprisingly interested in politics and often posted his opinions on current issues on his Facebook wall. The postings were a bit inflammatory, so much so that I wondered if he wasn’t doing it on purpose to incite reactions in the comments. And then I looked at his other postings. Among them was a picture of an old book. The title was printed in jagged font: Ash and Dust. When I clicked on it, I was confronted by a post that recounted how Kim Won came across the book.

    One summer twenty years ago, Kim Won, who was a graduate student at the time, was waiting at Gohan Station in Gangwon-do province for a train to Cheongnyangni. There was an hour left before the departure time, and the sun was just beginning to set over the mountains. Normally, he would use the time to eat dinner at one of the restaurants in front of the station, but that day, he decided to venture into an alley he’d never been to before. He passed restaurants, hardware shops, and clothes stores until he discovered a used bookstore at the end of the street. The store didn’t seem as if it received many customers. When Won entered and picked up a book, the owner of the shop, who looked to be about Won’s age, gave him barely more than a perfunctory nod. Won idled away his time by pulling random books off the shelf and reading them under the dim light of the bookstore. But no matter what book he picked out, he couldn’t focus on anything he was reading. There was this fire raging up from deep inside his heart, a fire that threatened to ignite his entire body.

    At the time, he had been into casinos. He only played games with 50/50 odds. And he had a rule to only join a game when he’d seen one side win five times in a row. He’d enter the game and bet on the losing side. Why? Well, the odds that a coin will turn up heads six times in a row is one in sixty-four, or about 1.5 percent. Conversely, the chances of the opposite happening (not getting heads six times in a row), is 98.5 percent. But in gambling, anything is possible and sometimes, even 98.5 to 1.5 odds will end up losing you money. In fact, it happens quite often. But for Won as a graduate student, that was fine. Because next time, all he had to do was stick to his guns and double his bet. After all, the chances that a coin won’t turn up heads seven times in a row is more than ninety-nine percent. And yet, it’s still possible to lose. That’s gambling for you. But it’s fine. All you need to do is keep at and double your bet one more time. There’s no way you can lose this time. There are a lot of factors at work at the casino, but this was Won’s basic strategy.

    That day, however, against all his expectations, he’d lost five times in a row and was down 310,000 won. He’d joined a game of dice. The rules were simple. Roll three dice. If the sum of the dice was ten or less, the result was called so. If the sum of the dice was more than ten, the result was called dae. The reason Won decided to join this particular game that day was because he had just seen the dice on the table come out so five times in a row. But after he bet dae, the dice came out so five more times, making that ten times in a row. That was when the trouble started. He had three options. He could keep betting dae, he could bet so, or he could stop. According to his own rule, the best option would have been to stop. He would need to bet at least 310,000 won to win back what he’d lost, but that was about all that he had left. The next best option was sticking to his guns and betting dae. But there was one other man who kept betting so. That man was betting with the same conviction that Won had when he’d entered the game. Because the man kept winning money every game, one by one the other people at the table started copying him. After thinking about it for a while, Won also changed and bet dae on his sixth bet. He lost all his money.

    On the train back to Cheongnyangni, Won read the book he’d bought from the used bookstore for 1,000 won and thought hard about what he’d done wrong. His biggest mistake was losing all his money; he didn’t even have enough left to buy himself dinner. If you want to win money at the casino, you must discern between the things you can control and the things you can’t. Although you can’t determine how much money you’ll make through gambling, you can set a limit on how much you’re willing to lose. It’s never a good idea to lose all the money you bring with you. When Won’s thoughts reached an impasse, he turned his attention to the book. The lights of the train were dim, his eyes were blurry, and his mind was a mess. Likewise, the paper was rough to the touch, the sentences alien, and the plot bizarre. And then he realized something. The past doesn’t determine the present. The future determines the present. If he kept losing, the chances of him winning on the next turn approached one hundred percent. As long as he didn’t give up on the future, he would eventually win. The only problem was he didn’t have enough money to make another bet. 

    In the novel he read on the train, there was a couple that attempted to commit suicide together. Miraculously, they got sent backwards in time and were made to relive their lives. As they went further back in time, they realized that they were converging on the moment of their first meeting. They remembered the year, month, and day, how excited and thrilled they were to meet. As they lived their second lives in reverse, barreling toward their first meeting, they were able first to experience all the things that happened because they met. They could actively imagine their future or, as we would think of it, their past. And then they realized how imagining the best thing coming at the end changes the present. This gave the two hope: hope that they could live again; hope that when they converged at the moment of their first meeting, time would start to flow in its original direction again; hope that at the end of time, when the world looks like it’s about to end, they would be able to imagine the best future. Time continued to run in reverse until the time of their first encounter, and they were able to experience that moment again. They couldn’t believe it. They had been so surprised, thrilled, and excited to meet. As soon as they realized this, the two of them looked at each other as though they were meeting for the first time all over again. And then time started to flow in its original direction, and then their third life began.

3

After reading Kim Won’s post, I emailed Heo Jinho asking if I could borrow Kim Won’s copy of Ash and Dust. He responded that he would look into it. A few days later, I got a response saying that Kim Won didn’t need the book anymore and was willing to give it to me. Feeling bad that I was always asking him for favors like this, I wanted to at least buy Jinho a meal. I thought about where to take him when I remembered the old Korean barbeque restaurant in an alley next to Gwanghwamun. I’d gone there a couple times with my uncle.

    I had no idea that Jimin would tell my uncle about our plans to commit suicide together that day. Then again, it was her contradictory attitude toward life, which was at once bold and pessimistic, that drew me to her in the first place. After hearing this, my uncle just stirred his coffee with his teaspoon.

    “Jimin, do you have any memories of your mother?” my uncle finally asked after a long while.

    Jimin shook her head.

    “I was fascinated by your mother’s works, so I remember feeling sad when I saw on the news that she died a few years after the book was banned. There were probably lots of reasons for her death, but the banning of her book must have hurt her greatly. There’s nothing more demoralizing for an author than to have their book erased like that.”

    Until then, I had no idea that Jimin’s mother had distributed flyers in the middle of Jongno street criticizing the Yushin Constitution, or that she had been sent off and locked away, or that she had killed herself.

    “I can’t forgive my father and the rest of my family for what they did. They drove her to insanity.”

    “I’m not suggesting that you forgive them, but can we talk a little bit more about this? I’m almost done with work. We can talk over dinner.”

    Jimin nodded. She was trembling. I extended my hand and held hers. She didn’t take her hand from me. That was the beginning.

    Just as I had done twenty years ago that summer, I was now headed to Gwanghwamun to meet an editor in his forties. When I got off the bus, Gwanghwamun was packed with two groups of protesters, one condemning the newly appointed Minister of Justice, and the other defending him. I stopped by Kyobo Bookstore; the time on the clock was about the same as when I’d visited the store twenty years earlier. Back then, Kyobo Bookstore had a lower hanging ceiling, was less well lit, and had more variety of books. It had felt like every book printed in Korea was on the shelves of Kyobo Bookstore. I went to the religion section, just like I had all those years ago, and picked out whatever book caught my eye, but nothing fell out of the bookshelf like before. Suddenly, I wondered to myself, what was that American named Julia, who had grey hair even back then, doing now? And where were those other people, the ones who had listened to the spirit’s voice through Julia that night? 

    The Korean barbeque place in the alley behind Sejong Center for the Performing Arts was just as I remembered it. I had another memory of the restaurant other than the one with my uncle and Jimin. I’d come here with my mother to meet my uncle. I think I was in junior high at the time. My mom and I were there to “see Seoul,” but she went back to the province the next day, and I stayed for three or four more days. We had shown up at the publishing office without warning, and my uncle, as always, was furiously stirring his coffee as he sat in front of us. Now that I think about it, that was the first time I’d gone on a train trip with my mother. Many years after that, I realized that my mother had made up her mind to divorce my father on that trip. At the time, I was too focused on the food to listen in on the conversation my uncle and mother were having. Because of this, I have no way of knowing how my uncle persuaded my mom. And yet, I have a hunch about how he did it. He probably told her the same thing he told Jimin.

    After eating with Jinho, he and I came out onto Gwanghwamun intersection to find the streets still bustling with protestors.

    “How long is it going to be like this?” I asked.

    “If there’s no reason for change, these scenes probably won’t change either,” Jinho answered. “Not next year, nor the year after that.”

    “If there’s no reason for change?”

    “A long time ago when I read that sentence from Wittgenstein’s book—you know the one: ‘But you do not really see the eye’—I was completely blown away by the insight. We can see whatever we want. But we can’t see the eye that we use to see. Our invisible eye decides what we see and what we don’t. In other words, we like to say that we see everything, but in reality, we only see the limits of our eyes. While editing books, I’ve come to think the same thing about writing. Every sentence of a book can only exist within the limits of the extent of the author’s thoughts. Every book is its author. In other words, you must first change the author to change the sentences inside their book.”

    “So, what you’re trying to say is that I have to change for these sights to change?”

    “That’s how you change the world in front of you. Try doing something different. Or try doing something you don’t usually do. Like learning to surf or volunteering. Or just make up your mind to do something different. Like deciding one day for no reason at all that you’re going to start loving classical music. As long as you make up your mind to live differently from how you’ve been living, no matter how small the change, the sights in front of your eyes will start to change.”

    Jinho’s words shocked me.

4

After meeting with Jinho, I came home and showed my wife Ash and Dust; her reaction was calmer than I had expected. She had escaped somewhat from the childhood trauma of her mother’s suicide, I guess. In fact, she was more interested in Kim Won’s losing all his money at the casino than she was in the book. With the book lying on the kitchen table, we enjoyed cold beers as we talked about that summer in 1999, when we’d met with my uncle. We filled in the holes of each other’s memories, and slowly I began to vividly remember the way I looked all those years ago, so flustered by the way Jimin told me, “I’m going to die soon. Don’t get close to me if you’re not prepared to die with me.” My uncle, who was still in his forties at the time, sat across from Jimin at the restaurant table and spoke to her:

    “The novel your mother wrote ends with the two lovers living out their third life. Because time in their third life flows in the same direction as their first life, it appears as if they’re living their life once again. But there’s a difference. They’re living life thinking the same way they did when they lived their second life in reverse. In other words, their whole awareness pattern changes, and they start to think that it is the events in the future, not the events of the past, that are the causes of the events in the present. What kind of things would happen if you thought like that? Jimin, let’s say that you and Joon get married in the future. If we think that the two of you sitting in front of me like this is the cause of your future marriage, how would that change us?”

When I heard this, I tried telling him we weren’t dating. My uncle told me this was just a thought experiment.

    “And if not that,” he continued, “then what if you thought that your sitting here was a result of your mother’s unfortunate suicide in the past? What then?”

    “They’re both just thoughts in the end,” Jimin answered.

    “I wonder, is that really true? If I said that both of you are here right now because you’ll get married in the future, you’d laugh at me and tell me I’m crazy. But if I said that your mother’s unfortunate death was what caused you two to decide on committing suicide together this summer, would you still laugh at me and call me crazy? They’re both just thoughts, but there’s a clear difference.”

    “The past is something that I definitely experienced, but our marrying each other is just a probability.”

    I don’t quite remember Jimin saying this, but she says she did.

    “You can easily imagine the past because you’ve already experienced it, but because the future only exists in probabilities, you can’t imagine what it might be. It’s this thought that bears human tragedy. What we must remember isn’t the past, but the future.”

    “Remember the future? What does that mean?”

    “That’s what your mother said in her book. By traveling through time, the couple in the book realize there’s no such thing as time. And because time doesn’t exist, neither does the past or the future. Only the present moment exists. And yet, humans only put significance on time that has passed; they only look for the causes of the present in the past. It doesn’t matter whether time flows from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century or backwards into the nineteenth century. The regrettable thing is that even after writing such an amazing novel, your mother wasn’t able to remember the you from twenty years in the future. If in her most painful moment, she could have remembered her daughter as a mature young woman, she might have changed her mind. Forgiveness is only possible when we remember the future, not the past. I hope that by remembering the future, you can forgive your father and your family for driving your mother to despair like that.”

    A few days after meeting with my uncle, Jimin and I went to meet Julia and get one final opinion from the spirit-medim. It was my idea to ask Julia about our committing suicide together. I didn’t expect much when I pulled out the flyer and showed it to Jimin on our way back from the barbeque restaurant, but she agreed to the idea.

    A few days later, we were outside Grand Hyatt Seoul, just in front of Namsan Mountain. We met late in the evening and got on a bus; by the time we entered Sowolgil Rood, the sun had already set. It was a summer evening, so we opened the bus window. It wasn’t like we were on our way to get into trouble, but we were still a bit excited when we thought about how we were going to meet an American spirit medium. Looking out the bus window, I could see Yongsan district, the Han River, and the lights across the water that sparkled like scattered jewels. As I did this, I thought to myself that the world had never been so clear.

    Taxis were lined up in front of the hotel, and there were suspiciously dressed women smoking near the public payphones. We called the number on the flyer and gave them our names and where we were. They told us if we walked down the hill to the side of the hotel, they would send a person out to meet us. Holding hands, we started walking down the street. Most words disappear without a trace after you hear them, but some words are like seeds, taking root in our minds. My uncle’s hypothetical statement about Jimin and my getting married was one set of such words. After hearing them, we acted like people who really believed what he said. We missed each other when we weren’t together, and when we were together, we didn’t want to say goodbye. Every day, we embraced and touched one another. At the bus stop, at the corner table of a partitioned café, at an empty double-feature movie theatre—wherever it was, we were always in contact that summer, unable to bear a single moment of separation. If she were to kill herself, I was prepared to follow her.

    Jimin laughed at this statement of mine just as she had twenty years ago.

    “Really?” she asked.

    “Of course. But you remember what Julia said to us. She told us we can’t die.”

    “I can’t believe we went all the way up to the top of Namsan Mountain that night just to hear that.”

    “But those were the words of the spirit.”

    “There’s a possibility it wasn’t actually the words of a spirit.”

    “Then whose do you think they were?”

    Jimin answered by reminding me of something else from that night.

    After we walked down that hill for a while, we saw a man waving to us from below. We followed him to a two-story, stand-alone house with a large front yard. He said the house was the Korean branch of THE MOMENT. Originally it had been the residence of an American who’d worked at the Seoul branch of a foreign bank, but he’d agreed to only use the second floor for himself and let THE MOMENT use the entire first floor. Seeing how much this man knew about the place, Jimin thought he must work for THE MOMENT, but like Jimin and me, he was just another person who had come here to get an answer from the spirit after seeing the flyer.

    “Remember that story you told me about Kim Won? In a game in which you can only pick one of two choices, the more you lose, the closer your chance of winning on the next turn converges to one hundred percent. That man said a similar thing. He looked at us with a look of regret on his face and said, ‘The people in the house right now are all people for whom nothing is going right. The two of you both look like college students. I don’t know how the two of you got here, but there’s this major league pitcher who’s quoted as saying, You can learn a little bit from winning and everything from losing. A life in which you only lose isn’t a bad life. As long as you don’t change your choice in the middle.’ ”

    “He said that?” I asked, not remembering this part.

    “The man said one other thing. He said it was a quote from Paul Valéry. ‘We enter the future backwards.’ The man said he was a graduate student, too. For all we know, he might have been Kim Won. Anyway, when we entered the room, the people asking Julia questions really were all failures. But do you remember? What the spirit that entered Julia’s body referred to itself as?”

    “No.”

    “It said it wasn’t a spirit. That was just what they called themselves. It said they were from the future, a collective consciousness without physical form.”

    “Right, right. I remember now. The spirit said it wasn’t a spirit. It wanted us to call it an ‘integrated mind’ from the future.”

    “It claimed that some mysterious being, neither ghost nor spirit, had entered Julia’s body. I almost believed this, but then I realized it might not be true.”

    “What do you mean?” I asked.

    “Do you remember what we asked the spirit? We asked two questions. Will the world end? This was your question. And is there a reason for me to keep living? That was my question. And this is what the spirit told us. The world will not end. And the two of you will get married. You can’t die.”

    “I’ll never forget that moment.”

    “Did you believe the spirit?” Jimin asked me. 

    “Of course I did.”

    “I didn’t.”

    Jimin stared at me in silence for a while. Looking into her eyes, I eventually confessed.

    “Actually, I didn’t believe it either. How could I believe something so surprising?”

    We both laughed.

    “Right? But after all these years, I realized it wasn’t so surprising. That prophecy was so ordinary. The world didn’t end and we didn’t die. We got married and are now drinking beer together. It’s these ordinary, unremarkable facts that Julia said to us. The only extraordinary thing was that she’d said them to us twenty years before they happened. It was the time difference that made it sound like something supernatural. My mother said to remember the future in her novel. So, why did she die? I’ve always wondered about that. But now I think I know. If only my mom could have remembered such a future as ordinary as this.”

    In summer of 1999, when Jimin told me at the semester-end party that she was going to die soon, I never would have imagined this future. The future I imagined as a kid was either filled with terrible things—the end of the world, cataclysmic earthquakes, a pandemic caused by a mutant virus, World War III. Or it was filled with wonderful things—space travel, magnetic levitation trains, artificial intelligence. But now I know. I know that even if we keep losing, the thing we must choose is this ordinary future. And as long as we don’t give up, the probability of that future coming true will converge to one hundred percent. In 1999, there were things that happened to me and things that didn’t happen to me. But if I hadn’t remembered the future, the things that happened to me wouldn’t have happened to me, and the things that didn’t happen to me would have happened.

Translated by Sean Lin Halbert