The married couple next door invited me over for dinner last month. I had only ever exchanged silent greetings with my eyes, when one day we started talking; I was unable to refuse their sudden invitation. This was my first time exchanging names with anyone since moving down to Suncheon. Her name was Bo-kyeong Bu, and his was Mok-won Park. Both beautiful names. They had skipped the wedding, and said they had no plans for children. Like an idiot, I said they’d be even happier with kids—something I didn’t even believe. I wondered if an idiotic comment like this was the consequence of getting older or just a product of awkward interactions between strangers. I’d lived close to twenty years with a man myself; I didn’t have children, and I used to believe that I didn’t need them.

They prepared some pollack roe pasta and a dish of stir-fried tomatoes and scrambled eggs. I chewed the food slowly as we sipped beer and conversed quietly. The food didn’t taste as good as it looked, and whenever I needed to laugh because they said something cute or funny, I had to be careful not to let bits of food escape my mouth.

“I like that album, too,” Bo-kyeong said as she turned toward me.

“Do you really?” Mok-won asked her.

“Why are there so many things you don’t know about me?” Bo-kyeong glared at Mok-won with slivers for eyes.

“There are a lot of advantages to being ignorant.” Mok-won laughed sheepishly as he looked at Bo-kyeong.

Seeing these two bicker over my T-shirt, which had an Andy Warhol banana on it, I took out my phone, opened YouTube, and started playing “I’ll Be Your Mirror” from The Velvet Underground & Nico. They turned to me once the music started and smiled.

Bo-kyeong brought over a Marshall Bluetooth speaker and connected it to my phone. As the two bobbed their heads and asked me a slew of questions, I became a DJ and played for them “Chelsea Girl” by Nico, “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” by Leonard Cohen, “I am a Fool” by Gilli Smyth, and “Hurt” by Johnny Cash. Mok-won got up from his seat and went over to the window. As soon as he opened it, a refreshing evening breeze entered the room and washed over us.

“Do you mind?” Mok-won asked as he pulled out a cigarette.

I shook my head.

Bo-kyeong went over to the window as well.

“Smells like summer. I think the air’s gotten cleaner. It must be because of COVID. Give me one.”

He stuck a cigarette between her lips. The smoke consumed their heads. Unable to control myself, I went over to the window, too.

“If you don’t mind—” As I exhaled a steady stream of smoke I continued: “My doctor told me I’ll die if I keep smoking.”

They looked at me with wide eyes.

“I’m just kidding. I quit four years ago.”

“Maybe we should quit, too.”

“You think so? Or maybe we just continue living this way till we die.”

My doctor once told me I needed to quit both smoking and drinking. “What about the smell?” I asked the doctor. “Can’t I at least smell them?” The neurosurgeon frowned. “I’m not sure what to say. I don’t think I’ve ever had a patient ask me that before—”

After staring out into the darkness for a while, I returned to my seat and played “Night Flight” by Affinity.

“Can I call you Unni?” Bo-kyeong asked me as she came back with another beer from the refrigerator.

“Of course not.”

Bo-kyeong and Mok-won were both documentary filmmakers. They started living together after co-directing a film about Suncheon Bay. They’d moved their home and business to Suncheon earlier this year. Bo-kyeong’s hometown was in Incheon, and Mok-won’s in Seoul. I’d been born in Suncheon but left a long time ago; I only came back just two years prior. When I told them this, they batted their eyes, oohing and ahhing in admiration.

“What did you use to do?” they asked me.

“This and that. Whatever I could find.”

“You seem like you have a lot of secrets. When I first saw you, I was a bit wary of you.”

Bo-kyeong’s face was flush, probably from all the beer.

Mok-won picked at the green tablecloth for a while before speaking up again. He was a bit tipsy and his voice was louder than before.

“People are so strange. They criticize our experimental works for being too experimental, and our nature documentaries for having too many landscape shots. I wonder if they’ll accuse us of being too political this time.”

“Why are you worrying about that already? We haven’t even started.”

“What kind of documentary are you filming this time?” I asked.

“Have you heard of the Phantom Schoolgirl Army?” Mok-won asked.

“No.”

“Don’t you have any older relatives in Yeosu or Suncheon?”

“None.”

“Stop it. You sound like you’re interrogating her,” Bo-kyeong said, critical of her husband’s tone.

“It’s fine. What’s the Phantom Schoolgirl Army?”

“You know about the Yeosu-Suncheon uprising, right?”

Seeing the look on my face, which was saying neither yes or no, he began to explain.

“In 1948, after suppressing the uprising in Yeosu and Suncheon, the government made something called the Writer Investigation party, which they dispatched to the area to ‘document’ what happened. The group was made of authors, painters, photographers, and illustrators. Among the things they found was a story of female students who’d fallen prey to communist ideology. According to these stories, the girls would lure soldiers to them with water and then pull out a carbine from their skirts and shoot the men. These stories were serialized in the papers and later made into a book titled Uprising and the Resolve of the People. Oh, that reminds me, Bo-kyeong. We must find that book. Anyway, the book was used for political purposes, to fear monger and justify the massacres. It was recently revealed that the story, which was referred to as the Phantom Schoolgirl Army, was actually a made-up story—it never happened. But they didn’t know that at the time, so it continued to be told and embellished. There were also stories of schoolgirls who seduced soldiers, calling them oppa and what not, before shooting them with a Type 99 rifle. All of these were different versions of the same story intended to frighten people about the threat of communism.”

“They say some schoolgirls were arrested and interrogated,” Bo-kyeong said, adding onto her husband’s explanation. “We want to interview those who are still alive. But COVID has made that difficult. Perhaps we could do it virtually. Of course, we’d need to be cautious when approaching them, as it’s probably a traumatic experience for them. I’m positive that the stories were influenced by the war films and novels of the time. I want to find those sources. It’s a really strange and terrifying story.”

“I think my mother must have been attending school in Yeosu around that time.”

“Really?”

“She died, though. When I was young.”

Silence filled the room. After turning on the song “I Hate You” by Jung-in—like a person who believes there’s a song for every situation—I played one last song: “Restless” by Bibi, which was one of my favorite K-pop songs at the time. Bo-kyeong vibed to the music, and Mok-won cleared the table.

“How about we go to your place next time,” Bo-kyeong suggested as they saw me out the front gate.

“Of course not.”

“Then it’s settled,” Bo-kyeong said in a cutesy voice while she locked arms with Mok-won, as if to say she understood my sarcasm. “Treat us to some more good music.”

 

That night, I went back to my place and searched up the Phantom Schoolgirl Army. There were only a few articles. I used my finger to select an article published way back on October 24, 2001 by OhmyNews titled “What’s the truth behind the Phantom Schoolgirl Army?” I perused the article before my eyes stopped on a picture. A group of schoolgirls wearing jeogori, sailor blouses, and overcoats were huddled together. The caption read, “Students from Yeosu Girls High School apprehended for conspiring with insurgency forces.” I tried unsuccessfully to zoom into the picture with my fingers. I used Google Images to find another image of the photo. Some of the girls in the picture were very young. I carefully examined each picture, wondering if my mother was among them. Eyes staring into the camera, drooping heads, and faces outside the frame.

I hadn’t quite realized it before, but not having a single picture of my mother was a large void in my life. The irritated person who refused to open up to me and would only protect her own territory. The person who remembered every birthday and death anniversary of my older brother, whom I’d never met. The person who would talk back even as her own mother grabbed her by the hair and called her a commie bitch. The person who threw a wooden ash tray at her husband, who was four years younger than her. The person who’d told her daughter, who was bleeding in the head from being hit by the ash tray, “It’s all right,” and “It didn’t break.” The ash and cigarette butts had scattered across the floor.

“But it did break. Don’t you know?”

The violet curtains hanging from the window rustled from the silence of my voice. As I touched the scar above my eyebrow, now nothing but a faint memory, I got ready for bed earlier than usual.

 

I made a quilt for the couple next door, but I can’t meet them to give it to them. I put the quilt in my bag whenever I go out, thinking I might run into them on the street. It’s been more than a month. I ring their doorbell, but there’s no answer; I never hear the sound of the door opening or closing. Even as I think to myself that they must be out of town because their blue Chevrolet Spark is missing, I sense something is off. So, whenever I go out of the house, I knock on the door and peer through the window, but the blinds always prevent me from seeing inside.

Why didn’t we exchange numbers? I start to wonder if they ever existed at all. As I do this, I realize that there’s no one to call me affectionately by my name. My name is Cha-jeong Lee. But my name isn’t Cha-jeong Lee. I have no name, no friends.

My friends, there are no friends.

That’s what Coco Chanel said. And before her, there was Aristotle. Deleuze and Derrida, even Agamben quoted Aristotle. After reading Agamben’s essay “The Friend,” I was going to send him an email. I was going to declare that we should break up, but our relationship had long been over. Thinking to myself that we could maintain a long-distance phantom relationship by exchanging letters of friendship, I wrote an email so light-hearted you might think we’d broken up only yesterday. Only after sending the message did I learn that his email address had been deleted and no longer existed. Was he just a phantom now? Of course, I could figure out what he was up to by asking around, but I abandoned the idea. Ten years have passed since then.

Today is his birthday. He is probably slurping up seaweed soup somewhere or burying his face in a cake. Or perhaps he’s staring vacantly out the window at the rain, having forgotten all about his birthday. Idiot. It rains. It’s July 25, a Saturday, and the forecast for the entire country is rain. Is there a reason, a context for why people are attracted to other people, why they get sick of them, why they reminisce about them? I think again about the couple next door. I think about what they said about context.

“People read context less and less these days.”

“It doesn’t matter. We must make context.”

“How about just removing context?”

“If that were possible—”

“And what if it is?”

“It’s not.”

“There are lots of things you can’t explain with context.”

“There will always be people who search for context, whatever you create.”

“So many people get the context all wrong!”

“The blind spot of context!”

“The context of blind spots!”

“Stop! We sound like idiots.”

“What if instead of calling it context, we called it Lucky?”

“What?”

I couldn’t tell if their eyes were drawing me closer or pushing me away. What was the Lucky of that thing called friends? But before that, I had to find my own Lucky. Whenever I thought about things like that, I’d be reminded of Flora Simone’s words.

Tell your story. Be true to you. Don’t make a mockery of other people’s lives.

With these words, I decided to survey myself and the lucky things that surround me. I wanted to recall things from the past and summon the scenes of oblivion that I’d missed. Even if you call the time that one waits after the doors of memory open until they find the reason for their oblivion, the context of their oblivion, the Lucky of their oblivion—even if you call it time overwhelmed with regret and grief, can regret and grief not create a spark? We’re not holding onto our heads, which might be destroyed at any moment, as we try to tidy up our pasts. In fact, life is impossible to tidy up. Can’t we keep chasing that spark?

 

On the bamboo blanket on my bed are fallen breadcrumbs and fragments of the body. What’s happening inside my body every night? The time of a machine-like body is fair to everyone, so when I get up after lying down for a while, it feels like the right and left halves of my body have swapped, and my two feet, which feel distant, are telling me to go somewhere. This happens even more often on rainy days. I throw the pillow at the ceiling. The ceiling is miles away from me, and the pillow falls back down to me slowly. Some days, the pillow remains suspended in air. I enjoy the destruction of time.

The more my body deteriorates, the sharper my mind becomes. With lucid and perceptive eyes, I see through objects and phenomena. My hair stands on end. I imagine a tiny universe being contained within each strand of hair. Every day, universes explode, and new ones are born. A tempest of dust rises. The larger the tornado, the better I see. I dab the physiological tears hanging from the corners of my eyes with the sleeve of my Gucci Mickey Mouse pajamas and realize with a smile that I’m not yet dead. Time enjoys my destruction.

“Détruire, dit-elle.”

I mutter the title of Marguerite Duras’s film to myself. Destroy, She Said.

“Duras will always remain at your side.”

I can hear his voice. Spring, 2010. Two months after announcing our breakup, he finally packed his things and left. In September later that year, I saw every film shown at the Duras Film Festival, hosted by the CineCode Sonje in Anguk-dong. I ran into the same people several times during the film festival. And during the showing of India Song, people looked back at me several times because I was unable to stop coughing. The sound of my frequent coughing became a secondary voice-over for the film. I wonder, Were the coughs a form of sobbing? People who chased the traces of the rustling light in that film, that boring and dark, boring and bright, boring and hot, boring and cold, boring and hideous, boring and beautiful, boring and exotic, boring and erotic, boring and close, boring and distant, boring and remote, boring and drowsy film. Among those people who closed their eyes for a second to be transported to another world, some of them must have already erased their bodies from this life.

 

I wake, make my bed, comb my hair, and shower, after which I lean against the window and look out toward Suncheon Stream in the distance, into which rain is falling. I don’t see anyone. Nor do I see any animals. Or phantoms. I hear the footsteps of the people I can’t see, of the animals and phantoms I can’t see. As I follow those sounds, I find in the distance my two feet.

Today, I have something to think about, I have somewhere to go, I have something to do, I have something to forget, and I must disappear. I go to Cinema Gwangju. It will be a lengthy excursion. I haven’t been to the cinema for a long time because of COVID. This is my first time going to Cinema Gwangju since coming to Suncheon. I’d had plans to go there once I moved here even before the pandemic, but I never got around to it. I got exhausted just walking around the city.

Once a month, they hold a “One Day Cinema” event in which they play long movies that aren’t possible in regular theatre settings. The first One Day Cinema will feature Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights trilogy. There are some movies that you must watch in theatres to get the full experience. This is especially true for ultra-long films. Last year, after two back-to-back viewings of Miguel Gomes’s Tabu on my laptop, I was unable to sleep, and once I saw the news about Arabian Nights through Cinema Gwangju’s Instagram page, I started counting the days. Even though I was worried that I couldn’t make it to the end—I was afraid that my brains cells would become overloaded and my eyes would become blurry until I was trapped in darkness—before I knew it, my two feet were already walking about the cinema.

Yesterday, I took out my favorite pair of Twin Peaks-themed socks, which I’d shipped to Korea. Because my feet are always cold, I always wear ankle-high socks, even in the summer. There’s nothing better than the feeling of putting on a new pair of socks—a feeling so sublime I can’t even put words to it. I’m a member of a group that believes that changing socks can change your mood. Who was the person who first invented socks? And were they the first person who wore socks, too? Or had they invented socks for someone else? I wonder what it must have felt like for them, that first person who put on socks. Were they floored by their invention? I wouldn’t be surprised if I was that person in some past life. So, who was the first sock-wearer in history? There are so many questions about humanity that will never be answered. A life spent slowly and methodically trying to answer these questions would be an interesting life. If possible, I’d like to make the act of putting my feet into socks something that can be repeated endlessly, until the end of time.

Sewn along the top of the pair of socks are the words “FIRE WALK WITH ME,” a famous quote from the movie. When the socks stretch around my calves, the text warps. A fire of language ignites. I imagine for a moment watching Twin Peaks season three with him, the two of us wearing matching socks. The more impossible and vain an imaginative thought, the better.

 

I first met him in 1992, at the occasionally held “Progressive & Underground Music Concert” in the Koa Musical Gallery on the second floor of the Koa Art Hall in Jongno. I’d seen him several times there and finally decided to make a move. We had tea, ate, watched movies, went on walks, explored each other’s bodies, and then decided to live together. His family was living in Toronto, Canada. On the other hand, I barely talked to my father after leaving Suncheon, and was currently working at a company after graduating from college with both a degree and a patent attorney certification. Teaching French language education at a university, he was two centimeters taller than me, but because of his small frame, we wore the same size clothes. We were like sisters who liked the same music and shared the same clothes, and we spent our time like arcade brats once our soul-sucking labor responsibilities to society—a.k.a. our jobs—finally ended. We traded off sleeping at each other’s place for a while until we got a house in Seongbuk-dong near Simujang—the historic house of the poet Han Yong-un—with a small courtyard that bloomed with beautiful trumpet flowers.

We watched Twin Peaks, which aired on KBS 2TV in 1993, without missing a single episode. We would turn off the lights in the living room and watch those strange, absurd, and nightmarish videos on a red television set, and sometimes we’d make love on the hard floor when the show ended. One time when I mounted him and wrapped my hands around his neck, he curled his lips and said, “Le feu marche avec toi.” His facial expression looked like it belonged to a loveable idiot—perhaps someone like Robin Gibb from the Bee Gees. I answered this with a line from Yi Sang’s poem, “I Wed a Toy Bride”: “You smell, dear, just like a newborn babe.” After that, I wrapped my fingers a bit tighter around his neck and rocked back and forth. As he struggled, he accidentally kicked the TV stand, causing the TV to come crashing to the ground, sending sparks everywhere and filling the air with smoke. Despite being naked in a room that smelled of burning electronics, we couldn’t stop laughing. Fire was always walking alongside us.

The next day, we went to Hwanghak-dong, bought a used TV, stopped by Dol Record Store to say hi to the owner, picked out a few old LPs, ate a bowl of anchovy noodles, then came back home. Despite not liking alcohol that much, he drank a whole can of beer, then with a flushed face, he placed on the turntable an album of the Norwegian band LeopoldLeopoldobeach, music which brought us great jouissance. He placed the needle on the song “beach B.” Did he want to start another fire? I wondered. I took a marker and wrote “No Fire! No Sound!” on one of the cathode ray tubes from the broken TV that we’d left out as decoration, and then hugged the TV. He lay down with his stomach on the floor. He wriggled his body. He crawled on the floor like the unnamable moving voice from Samuel Beckett’s novel L’Innommable, which he’d once tried unsuccessfully to translate into Korean, just for me. A while later, he came toward me, rubbed his face against the TV, then started to cry. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?” I asked him as I played with the cord like a whip. There was a candid reflection of the two of us in the mirror. I wrinkled my eyebrows as if I was watching that nonsensical experimental play we saw together in Toronto, which was the first and last time I would see his parents; I then spread my legs and tried to hug him and the TV tighter. I thought to myself that one day in the future, when I became overcome with insanity and melancholy, all of this would feel like a distant dream. Even then, we would be nothing.

After we broke up, I worked for four more years at the company, then quit to travel South America and Europe for two years. When I came back, I felt pain in my head, as though something was bursting, and collapsed on the street. After receiving cerebral aneurysm surgery and being discharged from the hospital, I packed up my life in Seoul. Before changing my name to Cha-jeong Lee and moving to Suncheon, I bought myself a pair of Gucci Mickey Mouse pajamas, either to compensate myself for past time or to buy a shroud to cover myself. I had a lingering quiver in my left eye from the brain surgery, and sometimes my vision would suddenly blur, making it hard to see what was in front of me. My doctor told me that in bad cases, people lost their sight completely. The doctor warned me to be careful, that if I damaged my optical nerve again, I could have a cerebral hemorrhage.

 

While watching the third season of the Twin Peaks TV series, which came out twenty-five years after the film, I thought to myself that I wasn’t the only one who was getting older, that I wasn’t the only one with a hole in my head. I cried as I watched David Lynch’s Weather Report on YouTube, in which he’d wake up every morning in LA, don the same clothes, and say, “Beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine.”

After going through a transition period, I started a new daily routine in which I would go on the internet to read, watch, or listen to the bizarre things that I used to enjoy. I welcomed the various changes in visual and auditory media brought about by the accelerating age of electronics, and experiencing and enjoying the new forms of functional and aesthetic material consumption was an act that breathed life into my dying flesh. I figured time for me would stop once the balance in my bank account reached zero, but as I spent more time as an idle loner, I began to look forward to the moment that I would accept the future that would be extinguished as a Lucky for my life, to the time of another change and the end of the world.

 

I put on the T-shirt I had custom-made for me with a picture of the score of John Cage’s “4’ 3”” printed on it, throw over a green cardigan, a pair of cream-colored linen slacks and sneakers, then leave the house with an umbrella. There are several letters in the mailbox next door. I ring the doorbell. No sign of anyone. I kick the front gate. My leg slips through the bars and trespasses into their courtyard. I pick up a rock from the alley and throw it at the window. The rock disappears as the window absorbs it. I pick up another rock and throw that. The rock is again absorbed by the window. I throw several more rocks, but the result never changes. I stride over to a large, sharp rock in the distance, feel its edges for a moment, then stick out my tongue to have a taste. Electricity jumps from the rock to the tip of my tongue.

When I exit the alley, a stray, rain-soaked dog is loitering about. Our eyes meet for a moment. If it’s still here when I come back, I’ll take it in. “You can’t come back,” the stray says, as if reading my mind.

I take my time walking to Suncheon Terminal and get on a bus for Gwangju, about two hours away. There are three people sitting in the bus with masks on, and in a few more seats are phantoms without masks. As I stare out the window at the thin streaks of rain falling from the sky, I think of the first time I went to Gwangju with my father, all those years ago.

 

One Sunday morning in late autumn, 1980, my father suggested we go to Gwangju.

“Why?”

“To see a movie.”

“But we have Cinema Mammoth here in Suncheon.”

“Hurry up and get changed.”

“I’m scared. I heard a lot of people died.”

“Who said that?”

“Everyone.”

“It’s fine now.”

There was a Hyundai Pony pick-up truck parked outside. My father casually opened the car door and told me to get in. He said that he was borrowing the truck from a friend, but as far as I knew, he didn’t know how to drive. He took out a pack of Taeyang cigarettes from the pocket of his leather jacket, stuck one in his mouth, and started the car. Soldiers stopped us several times to question us on our way through Hwasun to Gwangju. Whenever this happened, he grabbed my hand and contorted his face into a smile as he kowtowed. As soon as they motioned us on, he let go of my hand and sucked on his cigarette until his dimples appeared. I played with the window, rolling it up and down, until my father threw his cigarette out the window and spoke to me.

“Quit it.”

Gwangju city center was quiet, probably because it was Sunday. And the streets were clean, unlike the rumors I’d heard. I wondered if I could glean any information from people’s faces. I had to turn my head left and right to see the signboards of an unfamiliar city. My father patiently surveyed the surroundings before turning the wheel and parking the truck on the corner of the street next to the cinema. I followed him into the building. He greeted the woman at the ticketing booth as though he knew her.

“How are ya?”

She chewed on gum as she gave him an unimpressed stare.

Once we were in the lobby of the cinema, there appeared a passageway that continued outside. On the wall of an empty lot were several layers of movie posters. My father opened the rusted iron door to a warehouse; once inside, a strong smell of paint hit my nose. A man was painting the sign to the cinema, and when he saw my father, made a look of surprise and got to his feet. My father took out a cigarette and offered it to the man, who came over and clenched my father’s leather jacket.

“How are ya?”

“Don’t get me started. My tongue might fall off.”

“Well, we can talk outside.”

My father glanced over at me.

“She’s looking more and more like her mother,” the man said. “Do you remember me? I was at your mother’s funeral last year.”

He was wearing a camo jacket with blotches of paint everywhere. He touched my head. His body was giving off a smell that I couldn’t quite place my finger on.

“Is this movie suitable for kids?” my father asked.

“It’s an oldie. You haven’t seen it? I’m sure it’s okay for middle school students. It’s a good watch, and she can learn a bit of history, too.”

“Enjoy the movie,” my father said to me.

“Can I go to the bathroom first?”

Without answering, the man and my father opened the door to the theatre and pushed me inside through the thick curtains. It was pitch black. I stuck my head into the darkness in front of my eyes. Smelling cigarettes, perfume, and mildew, I started groping around for an empty seat, but lost my footing and almost fell over. I lowered my head, sat down, and then waited for my heart, which was racing for some reason, to calm down. Towards the middle of the movie, the actress wearing a blue qipao shot beastly men with a gun.

“Listen carefully,” she said. “Are you going to put words into your brain, or are you going to put lead into your brain?”

Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness surrounding the projection screen, I was able to see the inside of the auditorium and found that most of the seats were empty. And even though the current scene was anything but sad, someone was sobbing. No one was saying anything to them. The heroine taught the bandits how to read and write, became the head of the band of thieves, killed her father, and was seeking revenge on the Japanese soldier who hurt her, but in the second half, there was more and more contextless violence and sex, and the movie eventually turned adulterous and primitive, with scenes of men forcing themselves onto women. Only when it ended did I learn the title of the movie: The Lady Bandit.

My father wasn’t in the cinema lobby. A small number of shadowy faces were leaving the theatre, and bright faces were coming into the theatre for the next showing. Seeing me loitering, the woman from the ticketing booth spoke to me.

“I guess you’ve been abandoned.”

She gave me a smile and a stick of gum. I just nodded and didn’t accept her token of consolation.

A while later, my father and the man from earlier came into the theatre.

“Good movie, huh?” the man asked me. “Take care of your dad and study hard to become a good woman, just like the one in that movie.”

I gave him a look that said neither yes or no.

“Let’s go home.”

My father smelled of booze and onions. He handed me a bag with a bun inside.

He didn’t say a word on the drive home. I ripped off pieces of the red bean bun to eat as I stared out at the blazing sun, which threatened to lay waste to the horizon.

A few days later on my way home from school, I stood in the middle of the bridge above Suncheon Stream staring at the ripples in the water as I recited to myself one of the lines from The Lady Bandit.

“Listen carefully. Are you going to put words into your brain, or are you going to put lead in your brain?”

Nor did I forget what her father said to the spy for the Japanese army.

“Shut your mouth before I put a lead bullet in your gut. If you try something, your entrails will be crawling out of your side.”

This reminded me of something my mother had said.

“There were entrails crawling on the street.”

My mother would sometimes mutter this to herself without context. Something light hit the back of my head. I turned around, but there was no one there, no crumpled-up piece of paper on the ground, no waterfowl that had been flying too low. But that was obvious. Waterfowl didn’t come here.

“Where the ocean waves wash away the waterfowl tracks, the song of the conch digs deep into my heart and the sound of the waves carries it away. Aaaa, Aaaa, Aaaa.”

As I walked slowly through downtown Suncheon, I thought of the song “Sea, Conch, Waterfowl” by Jung Mijo which my mother used to sing, squatting on the back porch as she stared out into the distance.

I went into my father’s photography studio and immediately picked up the kettle to drink some water. The water dribbled down my chin, wetting my school uniform and neck. He was nowhere in sight. The turntable had reached the end of the album, and the needle was now spinning vainly about the middle of the record and making scratchy popping sounds. This was the record that contained one of my father’s favorite Bee Gees’ songs, “I Started a Joke.” I stared down at the exhausted record for a while before lifting the needle and placing it back on the rest. There wasn’t a picture of my mother to be found anywhere in the studio. I pulled back the velvet curtains of violet and went further into the recesses of the studio. The passageway was only a few strides long, but it felt like I was walking forever. I pressed the black button next to the door outside the dark room. A moment later, the door open and my father stepped out.

“What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be headed home?” he asked. His eyes were bloodshot. He pulled out a Taeyang cigarette from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. I asked him a question.

“Is it true Mom died?”

 

After I left home to attend university in the capital, some of the upperclassmen showed me the Gwangju video. After seeing that, I was positive that my father had taken me with him to Gwangju so that he could pass the checkpoints with ease. The memories returned to my head one after another, all the way up to the point when I ran out of the music club room because the upperclassmen demanded I tell them my reaction after watching the video. For a long time, I’d mistakenly thought that the place where I watched The Lady Bandit was the real Cinema Gwangju. When I told him I had been to Cinema Gwangju in 1980, he looked at me in surprise and told me to tell him everything that happened that day. As I told my story, I embellished, probably to fill all the holes in my memory. In August of 2003, we went down to Gwangju because he said he wanted to watch the films that were being shown in memory of João César Monteiro at the Gwangju International Film Festival. We got a room at the Gwangju Mudeung Hotel and wandered through downtown. Only when we finally arrived outside Cinema Gwangju did I realize it wasn’t the place that existed in my memories. But then at which cinema did I watch The Lady Bandit?

After that, I always went down with him to Cinema Gwangju when they were showing rare movies. We’d sit in the empty show rooms and make love with our lips and hands. In 2015 after we broke up, I watched Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn by myself; I hadn’t been back to the Cinema Gwangju since.

 

When I saw the sign for Cinema Gwangju, my heart started to race. I stood across the street and stared at the entirety of the building for a while before walking toward the ticketing booth. After someone took my temperature, I wrote my name down on the visitor log, only to realize I’d written down my previous name. I corrected it to Cha-jeong Lee. I bought tickets to all three movies and went inside. I perused the cinema’s souvenir shop then went up the stairs and examined the historic pictures hanging on the left side of the second-floor lobby. There was a picture titled “1971 Prayer Room” and a caption explaining that the men in the picture were thugs hired to maintain order at the theatre. Feeling like I recognized one of the men, I took out my phone and snapped a picture. After that, I went to the second-floor balcony and waited as I stared outside.

“Ahh, the smell of Cinema Gwangju—”

As soon as I went into the auditorium, I was hit with that distinct smell. There were a few people dispersed throughout the seats. I sat down and took out my glasses from my bag. The lights went out and the movie started. It seemed like there was a technical problem because I had to squint to read the subtitles toward the right of the screen. This seemed like a premonition of the migraine to come. I saw someone sitting in the first row of the second level of the auditorium, adjusting the subtitles with their laptop. I wondered if I would be able to make it to the end. After successfully watching all of Arabian Nights – Volume 1: The Restless One, I came out of the cinema, entered a restaurant in Chungjang-ro, and ordered a roll of kimbap minus the pickled radish. When I was done, I went over to Gwangju Stream and stared at the nearby ripples in the water for a while before heading back to the cinema to watch Arabian Nights – Volume 2: The Desolate One. When my eyes started to feel strained, I would close my eyes and doze off for a bit. I’d made up my mind to watch each film to the end, even if it meant my head would explode with pain. When I came out after finishing volume two, the rain had stopped. I saw the person who’d been fixing the subtitles ride past on his bicycle. I went to a local convenience store to buy some vegetable juice, and then I went to Gwangju Stream again to stare at the distant ripples for a while before heading back to the cinema, perusing the souvenirs again, and then going up to the second floor and taking my seat. There was a new person working on the subtitles.

Volume 3: The Enchanted One ended. All the subtitles disappeared, the lights turned on, and I became the last viewer in the seats. I finally stood up and headed down to the first floor. The person who had been adjusting the subtitles for volumes one and two asked me if I saw all three parts. When I said I had, they gave me a card and told me that next time I came to One Day Cinema and made it through all the films, I would receive a small gift. On the card were the words “Arabian Nights (July – 6 hours 21 minutes)” as well as a list of the up-coming showings, complete with miniature film posters and running times: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour (August – 5 hours 17 minutes), Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (September – 9 hours 17 minutes), Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (October – 7 hours 18 minutes). This alone felt like a gift.

 

I went outside. Night and the front of the cinema. The only people on the sidewalk were moviegoers who had just left the theatre and were dispersing in both directions. But my feet wanted to stay put. Just as I wondered to myself how I was going to disappear, someone poked me in the back.

“Unni, is that you? It is you!”

“Oh, Bo-kyeong.”

“Mok-won! Over here!” Bo-kyeong called out to her husband, who was late coming out of the cinema. He’d changed his hairstyle into a crop cut since the last time I’d seen the two.

“Wow, what are the chances of bumping into you here?” Bo-kyeong said.

“Did you watch all three movies?” Mok-won asked. “We got here late and were only able to see volumes two and three.”

As we waited for Mok-won to bring the car over from the parking lot next to the cinema, I took out the quilt from my bag and handed it to Bo-kyeong. She exclaimed several times about how beautiful it was and how she loved it. She explained that they’d been staying in Seoul because Mok-won’s mother had passed away. On their way back to Suncheon, they stopped by Gyeongju and now Gwangju.

I sat in the back of their blue Spark. It smelled of eucalyptus. There was a Snoopy doll clipped to the air vent. Bo-kyeong reenacted her excitement from earlier as she showed Mok-won the quilt.

“Isn’t the pattern beautiful?”

Mok-won turned to me and bowed his head in thanks.

“Mok-won,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”

“Thank you,” he said in a low voice.

There were several black books lying in the back seat.

“We finally found them.” Bo-kyeong turned around once she noticed me touching the books. “That’s why we stopped in Gyeongju. They were at the library at Dongguk University’s Gyeongju campus this whole time.”

“Can I take a look?”

“Knock yourself out. You can have one, if you want. We made several copies just in case.”

There was nothing written on the front or back covers, which were plain black. When I turned past the first page I found the title written vertically in a mix of Chinese and Korean characters, ÚäÕ¯°ú ÚÅðéÀÇ ÊÆçö, beneath which was the trace of a label that read “Donated by Professor. . .” I recognized the characters immediately as “Uprising and the Resolve of the People.” Inside the darkness of the car, I had no problem seeing the disturbing yet blurry images.

“The original was in such poor condition. A lot of copies had been printed and distributed initially. But most of them have been thrown away, I guess.”

We exited Gwangju and got onto the highway.

“Do you want to watch Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour in August together?” Bo-kyeong asked.

“Sure.”

“Have you seen Asako I & II, as well?”

“No.”

She handed me a headphone jack which was connected to the car’s auxiliary port.

“Treat us to some music.”

I took the cord, connected it to my phone, and thought for a moment before opening YouTube and playing “Say You, Say Me” by Lionel Richie.

“Hey, wasn’t this song in volume two?” Mok-won said.

“I thought I’d heard the song before. Is it famous?” Bo-kyeong asked.

“When this song came on, I laughed out loud,” I said. “It was just so out of context.”

“Oh, I remember hearing someone laugh.”

“Have you seen Miguel Gomes’s Tabu?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“No.”

The two of them gave their answers simultaneously.

I played for them “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star, “Over” by Portishead, and “Lumbini” by Oh Ji Eun. They listened to the music as I stared at the music videos on my phone, which all happened to be continuous black-and-white images. When the music ended, Bo-kyeong continued to sing one of the lines from the last song: “. . . but I just walking walking. . .” I didn’t need to turn on any more music at this point. They must have been exhausted because they were quiet, too. If I was able to return home, and if that stray dog was still hanging around the alley next to my house, I would name it Dixie, after the phantom dog from Arabian Nights. After an extended silence, Bo-kyeong opened the glove compartment and pulled something out.

“Want some gum?”

“No thanks.”

It was almost 11 pm when we passed Songgwangsa tollgate and it started to rain again. The car continued straight past the exit for west Suncheon. Bo-kyeong stared at the side of Mok-won’s face. He was gripping the wheel with two hands, and a black, sparkling light was falling on his short cut hair. The Snoopy doll on the air vent fell to the floor. The quilt I’d made for them was lying on the dash. Bo-kyeong and I met eyes through the rearview mirror. The front wipers were making the sound of Squeegees. One by one, the vehicles on the road disappeared, and before long I couldn’t even see the lamps above the highway. My left eyelid started to quiver. I opened the window and stuck my head into the darkness before my eyes.

“I want to find them, too. The Phantom Schoolgirl Army.”

Bo-kyeong and Mok-won looked back at me.*

 



Translated by Sean Lin Halbert