Love in the Big City E-Book

Sang Young Park

• Herausgeber: Tilted Axis Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 301

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Love in the Big City is an energetic, joyful, and moving novel that depicts both the glittering nighttime world of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning-after. Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and Marlboro Reds. Over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life. Love in the Big Cityis an exploration of millennial loneliness as well as the joys of queer life, that should appeal to readers of Sayaka Murata, Han Kang, and Cho Nam-Joo.

Leseprobe

Love in the Big City

Love in the Big City

Titlepage

Part One: Jaehee

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Part Two: A Bite of Rockfish, Taste the Universe

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Part Three: Love in the Big City

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Part Four: Late Rainy Season Vacation

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Acknowledgments

Translator’s Note

Copyright

About Tilted Axis Press

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start of Content

Love in the Big City

Part One

Jaehee

1.

I took the elevator to the third floor of the hotel and went into the Emerald Hall. Had she said the guest list was four hundred people? It looked like a lot more than that. I sat down in my designated seat and looked around the table: my cohort of French majors, all of us aging at different speeds. How many of them were there? I guess this was the reward for Jaehee saying yes to every postgraduation bender and homecoming-day event. Moments like these made Jaehee’s social life seem to border on the grotesque. I was forced to acknowledge acquaintances I hadn’t talked to in five, even ten years. “Congratulations! I hear you’re a writer now.” “You should get in touch more often.” “Hey, there was a rumor that you’d died, but here you are!” “Where can I find your stories? I tried searching for them on the Internet.” “Wow, writing must be tough on you. Look at how much weight you’ve gained.” “Do you still drink as much as you used to?”

My book is about to come out, I don’t drink as much as I used to, you guys are just as old and fat as I am, and your questions are about to drive me to old drinking habits—these answers were all on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed them, upholding the dignity of an educated contributor to society in his thirties and laughing off their snideness. I’d been ready to swear to anyone who read my stories that everything I wrote was made up—how silly of me to have prepared an answer for a question that would never be asked. An excess of self-awareness was a disease in itself.

—Please take your seats, the ceremony is about to begin. The emcee was a close friend of Jaehee’s husband-in-progress. This friend had a sharp chin and greasy skin, not my type at all, and on top of his thick Gyeongsang Province accent, it was all too clear that this country boy wasn’t great at moving things along. And he was a television reporter somehow? I’d have been a much better choice. Who cared about these stupid traditions about whose-best-friend-does-what anymore? The green monster of jealousy was rearing its head.

Next to the platform was a large screen that was flashing photos of Jaehee and her groom. I took another sip of red wine as the low-resolution phone-camera photos flicked by. Cheolgu—who sat next to me and had apparently gotten a job at the Industrial Bank recently—poked me in the ribs.

—Be honest with me. You and Jaehee. Were the rumors true?

The rumors were true, but, dear Cheolgu, what you’re implying seems a little rich coming from the guy who asked Jaehee out only to be viciously snubbed.

◊

The summer we turned twenty, Jaehee and I became best friends.

I had a funny drinking rule back then—I would do anything I was told by whoever bought me a drink—and so on that fateful day, there I was again with a man of an uncertain age in the Hamilton Hotel parking lot, sucking face. He had bought me about six shots of tequila at some basement club. The moon and streetlamps and neon signs of the whole world seemed to be shining their lights just for me, and I could still hear the strains of a Kylie Minogue remix in my ear. It wasn’t important who the guy was. The only thing that mattered was that I existed with someone, there in those dark streets of the city, and that was why I was wrestling tongues with a stranger. Just when I thought the heat of the whole world was about to overflow just for me, I felt a hard slap on my back. In the midst of my complete drunkenness I thought, A hate crime! And in full drama-queen mode, I detached my lips from his and turned around, ready for a fistfight—but there stood Jaehee. As always, she was holding a lipstick-smudged Marlboro Red in one hand, and the sight of her instantly sobered me up. Jaehee could barely catch her breath as she laughed at how shocked I was to see her. Then she said, in her typically brash voice:

—Just eat him, why don’t you?

Before I knew what was happening, I’d burst out laughing at her joke, and at some point I realized the man I was kissing had disappeared, and I can’t even recall his face now. But I do remember more or less what Jaehee and I talked about in the parking lot.

—You’ll keep it a secret around campus, right?

—Of course. I’m a broke bitch, but I’m loyal.

—Weren’t you surprised? Me with a man.

—Not at all.

—Since when did you know?

—Since the moment I laid eyes on you. The usual cliché.

The usual clichés.

◊

Up until then I didn’t know Jaehee very well; she was just a girl who wore short-shorts and was always first to run out of class, desperate for a cigarette. Actually, she was pretty close to having the worst reputation in the department.

Even if I did end up an outsider among the French majors at our college, I hadn’t been like that from the beginning, when I was still invited to parties by our male upperclassmen sunbaes just because I happened to be a taller-than-average male. These gatherings always took the same course, all the guys going to the pool hall or PC rooms first, then to a restaurant specializing in MSG cuisine to make the soju flow, then picking one of the less messy sunbaes’ rooms to drink more and talk about girls until we collapsed, snoring. Standard-issue nineteen and twenty-year-olds talking about what a big deal they were and what great sex they were having, how well they satisfied their women, which of the French department girls were easy. And Jaehee was someone they kept returning to. Listening to their stories, which were obviously at least half fiction, and fed up with wondering why I had to put up with this shit even in college, I came to a point where I drunk-shouted, “Fucking stop it with the bullshit, you all have faces like rat dicks,” and flipped the table, after which I was never invited to hang out again.

As is the nature of any group, a member who had fled the fold was inevitably fated to remain as gossip fodder thereafter. Tired of their exhaustive critiques of the female frosh, they tossed me into the meat grinder instead, saying I seemed gay and was hanging out in Itaewon doing God knows what, spreading the kind of rumors only a bunch of innocent nineteen-year-olds would care about, half of which were true. (Truth always surpasses fiction.) Barely a semester had gone by when almost the entire department knew who I was, and I’d heard the rumors myself, making me the butt of everyone’s jokes. I guess I’ll never make friends in this department, not that they can drink to save their lives, and they’re boring as hell. As I was consoling myself with such self-justifications, Jaehee veered into my life.

After my defense of her sort of outed me, the two of us developed a relationship that consisted in the first place of talking trash about boys, as neither of us had previously had anyone with whom to share such thoughts, making us both desperate for a sounding board.

Jaehee and I had very little sense of chastity, or none at all, to be honest, and we were apparently known for it in our respective spheres. Jaehee was five foot six and 112 pounds, while I was five ten and 172 pounds, both a bit taller than average but neither particularly attractive nor a complete lost cause, just enough not to embarrass any partner. (Note that when I won a New Writers Award for fiction, the judges’ comments were united in their praise of my “objective self-judgment”.) The world was just not ready for the boundless energy of poor, promiscuous twenty-year-olds. We met whatever men we wanted without putting much effort into it, drank ourselves torpid, and in the morning met in each other’s rooms to apply cosmetic masks to our swollen faces and exchange tidbits about the men we had been with the night before.

—He works at a company that makes hiking gear. Small dick but good foreplay, I think worth fifty points?

—He said he went to Yonsei University, studying statistics, but I think that’s a lie. His face was a blank space, and I kept wanting to laugh because whenever he said something it was obvious his head was just as empty.

—He tried to take a video while we were in bed, so I threw his phone across the room. He said he wasn’t going to share it with anyone, like I’d ever believe that bullshit.

And after we made fun of the men from the previous night, our eyes would begin to close and we’d fall asleep side by side, with dried-up masks on our faces. Being an early riser, I would get up first and let Jaehee rest longer, with the quilt pulled all the way up over her head, as I boiled instant pollack stew or ramen, and when it was ready Jaehee would finally get up at the smell and eat the breakfast with sides of soured kimchi and cold rice. At some point, Jaehee’s room had an extra set of my hair wax and a Gillette razor, while my room had a double of Jaehee’s eyebrow pencil and MAC powder compact. Jaehee didn’t know this, but when I was alone, I used her liner to fill in the gaps in my eyebrows and helped myself to her compact to half-heartedly apply a puff or two of concealer on my cheeks and forehead. Which made me wonder if Jaehee used my razor on her legs or armpits without telling me.

Jaehee stopped talking to her mother and father the spring she turned twenty. Neither of us had been on good terms with our parents, but that didn’t mean they were especially evil or anything more than typical middle-class conservatives. Like most people’s parents, they constantly nagged their children about propriety and how one should behave, but in their own private lives joyfully indulged in affairs, excess religion, the stock market, or pyramid schemes. I had a real parasitic streak in that as much as I hated my parents, I felt completely entitled to every coin they gave me (was that why my demeanor grew mischievous?) when I was receiving hundreds of thousands of won in monthly allowance. Jaehee, however, cut off contact with her parents after their blowout and refused any form of financial support thereafter. She really did have the heart of a lioness.

She got her first-ever job working at a café called Destiné. She picked it not because it had a large sign with a French name but because it was one of the few places in her neighborhood where smoking was allowed. The sight of her puffing away as she handled the espresso machines was a vision of oblivious nineteen-year-old cuteness. Whenever I had some man in my life, I’d bring him to Destiné for Jaehee to give him the once-over, and every time, she would tell me that the men I liked were always horny with classic asshole personalities. Thinking back, she was right.

By day, Jaehee worked as a barista, while by night she was a private tutor, and then after that she drank until dawn like it was a third job. But she never missed a class, and her grades were OK, and while she did better than average at anything she put her mind to, this talent didn’t extend to her ability to choose men who weren’t a total mess, or to dump said men when the time was right. Which was why I often ended up getting rid of her men via text messages. I, on the other hand, was very practiced in that skill—at least vicariously—because of all the lines I’d heard from men who refused to see me again, easy enough to regurgitate at a moment’s notice. I used to think of myself as the doormat of a naengmyeon restaurant: all you had to do was wipe your feet on it and be on your way (“objective self-judgment”!).

Around the time the Brown Eyed Girls’ “Abracadabra” had conquered the Korean peninsula, I received a summons for national service. Because I knew of someone who during his service had received a letter from his boyfriend that began with “My loving hyung” and was outed for it, resulting in untold torture throughout his time in the army, I instructed K, the guy I was going out with, to write to me under Jaehee’s name. She was a handy smokescreen in times like this. I asked not only K but the real Jaehee to write me funny crap while I was in there, but knowing how lazy she was about that kind of thing, I didn’t expect much from her.

Yet during the second week of boot camp, when the letters began arriving, I felt my heart rise up to my throat. Unlike K, who had acted like he’d have given me his liver or spleen if I had asked for it but in two weeks had written me only a single letter (and not even a whole page at that), Jaehee had written twelve. At first it was just chitchat about her boring day (“I was drinking at Squid Ocean and accidentally tipped over the table”) or cursing out the people in our department (“that fucking nut Cheolgu asked me to sleep with him when I know for a fact he’s talking shit about me behind my back, he’s as disgusting as his face”), but as the days wore on, she wrote more about the times we had together and how much she missed me. In her latest missive she even said, “There’s something to be said about realizing how precious something is once you’ve lost it. Like with you”—God knows where she got that from—and even though I knew she’d written it drunk, I was almost moved to tears. That made me take up a sheet of military-issue stationery and begin my response to her with, “To my dear, ugly Jaehee,” trying hard to keep the letters straight.

Around the time I left boot camp and was assigned to my regiment, I heard news that Jaehee had reconnected with her parents and, thanks to them, was being sent to Australia as an exchange student. She also informed me that K seemed suspicious, and suggested I interrogate him when I had the chance. (It didn’t take long for her instincts to be proven correct.) Jaehee served as my loyal girlfriend throughout my six months of military service, up until the incident that earned me a medical discharge.

By the time I was banished back to civilian society—and back to my mother’s house—Jaehee was already in Australia. Which meant I had to spend about half a year without her until she returned. Not really having anything I wanted to do or anyone else I wanted to see, I mostly lay in bed in my room and ate and slept. My umma was a parent who found such an attitude most contemptible, and her constant nagging eventually drove me to find my own place, a tiny goshitel unit near campus where I could finally be alone.

◊

The new year arrived, and I was there to greet Jaehee when she landed at Incheon International Airport. She saw me standing at the gate and dropped her wheelie suitcase, running to embrace me. The scent of cigarettes in her hair truly brought home that we were finally back together.

Almost the moment Jaehee got back to Korea, she found herself a 350-square-foot studio apartment, registered at an English hagwon, and studied hard to get her TOEIC score up. She also declared a minor in economics, joined a marketing club, and began to look like every other undergraduate preparing themselves for the job market. This new Jaehee felt alien to me, but when I saw her going out to drink seven days a week again, I was reassured that she was the Jaehee of old after all.

Not long after she moved into her new place, Jaehee started noticing something unnerving. Every night at ten, some man would come to her building and stare up at her window.

—Well, jeonse rentals are pretty rare now, maybe he’s a realtor?

Despite my glib reply, I was a little bothered by the whole thing. Once, she said she was in her underwear, drying her hair, when their eyes happened to meet. Jaehee added that the ceilings were low and she was only on the second floor, so he could easily climb into her apartment using the balcony. If she was so worried, why didn’t she let me stay over for a couple of nights, given that despite everything I was still a man? Jaehee replied she wasn’t that worried, but it was pretty boring at night and she wouldn’t mind the company.

Like a schoolboy going on a class trip, I packed underwear and a tank top and shorts for clothes to sleep in and headed to Jaehee’s apartment. We made Japanese curry and watched an idiotic TV show, on which panelists gave advice about the love lives of celebrities, while we simultaneously criticized everything the panelists were saying. I lay in bed and fiddled around with my phone while Jaehee took a shower. She had come out toweling her hair when I glimpsed a shadow behind the curtain. I was looking at it, my brain as blank as a sheet, when Jaehee strode to the window and whipped back the curtain. A man as skinny as a twig was crouched next to the air conditioner’s outdoor fan unit. Oh wow, it’s true, I had just barely managed to think, before Jaehee, in a series of tightly executed moves, slid open the door to the balcony and kicked the dumbstruck man in the face. He fell over backwards. He moaned and raised his head, blood spurting from his nose and mouth. Jaehee had been brought up in a neighborhood where they took education seriously, which meant she had taken piano and taekwondo lessons since kindergarten, achieving dan 2 in the second grade; such was the power of early learning. I held on to the man, who was barely conscious at that point, and shouted at Jaehee to call both 112 (the police) and 119 (the medics). It was hard not to laugh.

Four days later, I put all of my things into a bag and moved into Jaehee’s apartment.

We didn’t have a contract or anything. I agreed to pay her 300,000 won in rent and half the utilities. A lot of my things were already in her house anyway, 350 square feet was more than enough space for two to live comfortably, and neither of us had ever had a real relationship by the time we reached our mid-twenties, which meant the closest person we had at the time was each other.

Jaehee was good at making sweet perilla-leaf soy sauce preserves, and I had my special recipe for spicy vongole pasta. I was an expert at washing dishes spotlessly, and Jaehee’s courageous soul allowed her to swipe the shower drain clean of clogged hair. After seeing me snacking on frozen blueberries, she always stocked the freezer with bulk-size bags of frozen American blueberries.

In return, I bought her favorite cigarettes, Marlboro Reds, and stacked them next to the blueberries in the freezer. Jaehee said she loved how cool her lips felt whenever she smoked the first cigarette from a new pack.

2.

When Jaehee said she was getting married, the first thing I said was, “Are you pregnant?” Jaehee commented that everyone had reacted that exact same way, without a single exception, and cackled. Surprisingly, she wasn’t, nor had she gone anywhere near getting pregnant. Things had just turned out that way—that was the way she put it. And her putting it so made me think it was serious this time.

Jaehee? Getting married?

I couldn’t quite believe it. It was more likely that I would take a bride than she a groom. Jaehee just seemed too far removed from the idea of stability and settling down.

◊

When we reached our mid-twenties, Jaehee drank and went out with multiple men as if it were an Olympic sport and she were competing for gold. Since I hated losing, and since I was into booze and men to begin with, I also got drunk and slept with a new man every night. And every morning, I realized anew that the world was filled with lonely people as I walked out of the motel cluster in the Jongno district with my hair in disarray. Some of the men I met wanted more than just drinking followed by a one-night stand. No matter how many times I refused, they kept going on about wanting to date me and threatening to come see me at my apartment, at which point I would fend them off by saying I had a roommate.

—A roommate?

After discussing how we would tell a partner about each other, Jaehee and I decided that the male version of her would be Jaeho, a supposed cohort in the department, and I would be the lovely Jieun, a friend from back home. In each other’s worlds we lived as Jaeho and Jieun, perfect excuses for keeping men at bay.

For example, Jaehee might receive a text from her (temporary) boyfriend:

Hey Jaehee, why did you turn your phone off last night?

And not look at your texts?

Ugh. Jieun got sick last night. I was in the ER with her all night! (“Jieun” had been perfectly fine and was snoring away at home while Jaehee was drinking five bottles of soju with guys from school.)

Hyung, are you free this weekend?

Sorry. Jaeho and I are going to the Han River for some beer.(“Jaeho” was probably busy meeting up to have sex with men, and I was probably going to fuck someone else before dumping you.)

That kind of thing.

Jaehee’s fifth or sixth man had dropped out of a technical school where he’d been learning about fixing boilers and was now going from club to nameless club, allegedly a DJ. My eighth or ninth boyfriend had also been a “DJ” in Itaewon. There were so many DJs in Seoul that I wondered if there ought to be some regulating association that handed out licenses in order to ensure quality spins. But the one I met had a big dick, lots of tattoos, put on good music when we had sex, and was just the right amount of stupid, which allowed us to shape up into a pretty normal couple for a little bit. But two months in he said he loved me but couldn’t bring himself to love me when I was drunk (when I’d sing on the street and kiss him and curse and make a scene before inevitably collapsing into tears at the end) and, therefore, couldn’t see me anymore, which left me with a very rational grudge against all DJs. Jaehee, who had no inkling of my complex feelings, spoke about her new boyfriend with a face filled with joy and animation.

—His hair is so long he has it in two braids. He looks just like a doll. It’s hilarious when we have sex.

She showed me a photo in which he didn’t look at all hilarious, with his cruel gaze that made me think he’d turn into an asshole on a dime. He kept insisting Jaehee bring Jieun (aka me) to the club because he wanted to see my face, but Jaehee would always bluntly refuse.

—She’s really, really shy.

Really, really shy Jieun was actually sneaking a look as she sat down at a table next to Jaehee and her boyfriend, eavesdropping on them and discreetly glancing at the man to size him up. His manner of speech, facial expressions, everything about him gave me a bad feeling.

—Jaehee, why do you like that guy?

—I don’t know, because he treats me well?

—You’re only giving him the time of day because his dick is big, right?

Jaehee’s face looked like Moses’s gazing at the burning bush as she asked me how I knew that, and I replied out of jealous spite:

—It’s my God-given talent.

Marveling, Jaehee confessed to me that I was right, the only thing he had going for him was the size of his genitals, to which I spake unto her that he was surely of lowly consequence and that she must leave him and return to the light, whereupon she vowed to offer up any man she met thenceforth to me for inspection, grasping my hand and gazing at me like a true believer. Nodding sagely, I embraced Jaehee’s poor soul.

And, unfortunately, my God-given talent was proven once again.

I had come home from classes one day to find Jaehee’s face as white as a sheet. In her hand was a home pregnancy test. Not even putting down my bag, I looked right at the two lines on the small window. My jaw dropped.

—Jesus, can’t you limit yourself to doing one thing at a time?

—I’m fucked, aren’t I?

—What do you mean, “fucked”? Grab your bag, we’re going to the clinic.

—Sure, that’s all we need to do, but there’s a problem.

—What.

—I’m utterly broke. Penniless.

—You didn’t make this baby on your own, we’ll shake the boy down.

—That’s the real problem.

—What’s the real problem? Just spit it out.

—I don’t know which boy I’m supposed to shake down.

According to the story that followed, the idiot DJ she was head over heels with was all right at sex but had a terrible personality and was the worst ever when drunk. Worse, he was stupid enough to believe that his personality was proof of an artistic soul, which made Jaehee more determined than ever to finally dump him. She had just been introduced by a coworker at the café to an art student who was our age, and she’d found out only later on that he had long since dropped out of art school and was working as a tattoo artist. The day Jaehee went on her first blind date with him, I just happened to be spending the night elsewhere; she had no choice (?) but to bring him into our apartment and have wild sex with him. But without a condom. It’s human nature to find the first time difficult and every subsequent time easier, meaning Jaehee had unprotected sex a few times more. With both men.

—The DJ is better at sex and the tattoo guy is better looking, which gave me a lot to think about.

In this, the Great Information Age, you might imagine she would’ve processed her thoughts a lot faster, like a normal person, but Jaehee was locked in an unsolvable dilemma as she ping-ponged between the two men for three months. I said to her that if she had this dilemma twice more, she’d end up with enough children for an orphanage, a quip she ignored. She showed me a photo on her phone. The tattoo artist’s face, she said. The man she showed me had shorter hair than the DJ but was otherwise surprisingly similar, and as skinny as a dried-up anchovy you wouldn’t even try to boil for broth.

—He looks the same as the other guy. I bet you can just have the baby and claim either man is the father?

Jaehee seemed too down to even laugh at my joke. Most uncharacteristically, she began to mumble things like “I should’ve drunk less… I can’t even afford food, I can’t ask my umma for the money, what do I do?” Which was so annoying to me that I just said:

—Forget them. I’ll give you the money.

—Hey, that’s too much.

—I’m not just giving it to you for free. I expect it back, with interest. But get it done quickly for now, all right?

—Really? Are you serious? You’re the best. Thank you.

Jaehee changed from the jeans she was wearing to a dress with an elastic waist, and then began to put on makeup. Her lipstick was a color I hadn’t seen before, and when I asked when she’d gotten it, she popped her lips a few times at her reflection and said she’d bought it at a Hyundai department store a few days ago. Before I could stop myself, I cried:

—How could you be putting on Dior lipstick at a time like this?

As if I had the right to scold, like I’d ever done anything for her in my life. She was putting on her sneakers like slippers, not bothering to slip her heels into them. I said to the back of her head:

—You’re the one getting surgery, so why do I feel nervous?

—There’s nothing to it. Think of it as getting a pimple popped.

—Not the same thing.

I said it with a growl but felt a little relieved. All right, if she herself was fine with it, no need for me to get overdramatic. Her impervious (close to insensitive) personality that normally irritated me was a source of huge relief now.

We headed to a nearby gynecologist. She said the doctor there was rude and the place a dump, but she began going there when they offered a 40 percent discount on HPV vaccines. Whether the specialist even did abortions was a separate issue. “Shouldn’t you have researched that on the Internet beforehand,” I asked, but there was no way Jaehee would spend even a microsecond thinking about that kind of thing. She said if they didn’t do abortions, we’d go somewhere else. No one was better than her at bumbling through life’s important decisions. The clinic truly was a dump. We were the only people there, which got Jaehee a meeting with the doctor as soon as she registered. I sat to wait on a sofa so old that it had permanent butt depressions in its seats. On the walls were posters of all kinds of viruses, the diseases they caused, and the miraculous medicines that cured them, as well as a little blackboard advertising summer deals on laser hair removal, Botox, and fillers. I read all of them while waiting for Jaehee, musing over how much it would cost to make my stupid face more tolerable. It was taking longer than I thought for her to get an appointment. The young nurse sitting at the reception desk yawned. They weren’t going to do the procedure today, were they? What was taking so long…?

Unwrapping a couple of the plum-flavored candies on the table and popping them in my mouth, I thought about the urology clinic I’d gone to a few months back. It had a similar vibe. At first, my urethra had tingled a bit when I peed, but after a while it felt as uncomfortable as if someone were squeezing it, prompting me to get it checked. And since I was going to the clinic near the university subway station, I figured I should take the engineering student I was seeing with me. I felt it was right because we’d done it a few times at that point. An innocent mistake on my part.

After peeing into a cup and getting that analyzed, I learned the results weren’t some dramatic STD, just my urethra infected by germs, and inflammation resulting from it. “I didn’t know you could get infected in there,” I mumbled to myself, and the doctor, with a concerned expression, delivered an unsolicited lecture about how a woman’s genitals featured many kinds of bacteria and in some cases the urethra would get infected. Feeling weirdly guilty, I closed the consultation room door behind me, face red. Slightly embarrassed, I went into the injection room and was lying there with my trousers halfway down when I heard across the silence two male nurses talking to each other behind a partition.

—Did you see those two? I’m right, aren’t I?

—Yeah. Faggots.

—Fuck, so disgusting.

Before I could stop myself, I burst out laughing. The engineering student I’d come with said there was no trace of an infection in his sample. I joked about what I’d heard in the injection room, but the engineering student immediately flew into a rage and demanded to see the two assholes who had said such bullshit. Watching his reaction, I finally realized this was something I should’ve been angry about from the beginning, and that I had a tendency to laugh loudly in situations where I should be angry. The shot I received that day was painful, and I went out with the engineering student a few more times until it became boring and I stopped returning his messages.

In the midst of reminiscing about my great past loves, I suddenly heard Jaehee screaming inside the consultation room. The nurse who had followed her in opened the door and said to me, with an apologetic expression, “I think you should come in here.” Inside, neither doctor nor patient looked like they had the wherewithal to pay me any attention. The middle-aged doctor, with an angry face, was waving a small ultrasound printout right under Jaehee’s nose.

—This is all because of the way you live your life. Understand?

—Fuck this, I can’t take it anymore.

Just when the doctor was about to say something else, Jaehee grabbed her bag and stood up. And that’s not all she grabbed; she also picked up the 3D model of the uterus on the desk. I had just enough time to think of the word What? before Jaehee ran out of the consultation room with it. The doctor got up and shouted:

—Hey! Put that back!

Jaehee was gone like the wind, and there was no point in following her. She had, after all, been a champion sprinter up until middle school.

I was left to pay the consultation fee: 48,900 won. Feeling sorry about the whole thing, I said to the nurse:

—I’ll get the model uterus back to you right away. She has no endurance, she won’t have gone far.

The nurse answered me with a long sigh.

Sure enough, Jaehee was only a few steps outside the building, hugging the model womb as she leaned on a utility pole. As soon as she saw me, she waved an arm in the air, asking for a light. I took out a lighter from my pocket and held it out to the Marlboro Red in her mouth. Jaehee stared at the model uterus and said:

—It’s so fucking old.

—He must’ve bought it on graduation day. It says he entered SNU medical school in 1988.

—How did you find that out?

—I was so bored I read his doctor’s license on the wall.

—I’ve made a decision. Never deal with shits from Seoul National University.

—Fuck SNU for a minute. Why did you have to do that? If he wasn’t going to do the procedure, you should’ve just left.

—I wouldn’t have screamed at him like that for no reason. He’s a psychopath. Listen to this.

As soon as she mentioned she was pregnant, the doctor had immediately made her lie down on the examining bed and administered an ultrasound. The results showed that the fetus (which is what he called the clump of cells) was about eight weeks along.

—He demanded that the father come in and see it, and I told him that you weren’t the father and that in fact I had no idea who the father was.

—Would it have killed you to lie? Just make shit up!

—You know I cannot tell a lie.