The Great Storyteller

“Juho Woo, that oddball,” Sun Hwa thought out loud about the person in her mind.

Whenever she thought of him, the first thing that came to mind was his droopy face. Whatever happened, he’d always be the only calm person. He was weird. It was hard to picture him being startled by something. Whenever she looked at him, she felt sorry for her cowardly self.

Sun Hwa held back her smirk.

The way he spoke was very much like his character – calm and unfazed, and their recent conversation had left her feeling vulnerable.

As she looked out the window, she saw Bom walking toward the cafe. ‘What if she doesn’t like me?’ she thought anxiously. It would have been a lie to say that she wasn’t afraid.

Still, there was nothing to regret.

As Sun Hwa greeted her, she found herself smiling before she even realized. No matter the result, Sun Hwa was able to smile.

*

Juho visited Sun Hwa in her class to return the comic book he had borrowed from her some time ago.

“Hey, this one’s good too. I love his illustration. I really dig it”

“Oh, yeah! I’ve read that one. I’m a fan too.”

He hesitated as he was about to call for her. She was in the middle of a conversation with someone he had never met before. However, he had seen her once when he had come to visit Sun Hwa. She had been sitting in the corner, on her own.

She had been reading her comic books then, so it made sense that they were talking to each other.

“I actually didn’t like it that much. I think this one’s closer to my preferences,” Bom said as she picked out one of the comic books. At that, Sun Hwa and the girl objected to her, “You’ll change your mind once you read it. I feel sorry that you can’t truly appreciate a masterpiece like this. Later, you’re going to think back and regret saying what you just said.”

Together, the three were laughing and joking around with one another.

‘If I chimed in now, I’d be interrupting.’

They were doing well, so he turned back light-footed.

Sun Hwa and Bom had been close with one another as in the past. As always, Bom was the first person to start cleaning while Sun Hwa was the first person to act on something.

Also, they had agreed to participate in different competitions.

According to Bom, after meeting with Sun Hwa at the cafe, she had received a written reply from her. Aside from the two, nobody else knew what was written in that response.

Juho took out his notepad as he walked down the hallway. One by one, he wrote down his newly aroused inspiration for a couple of characters for his story.

‘Spring and flower gently fell into a world where there was no one but parents and children.’

Juho leaned against the side of the subway doors and saw a rather large body of water among views that quickly passed by. He stared out the window at the Han River, which resembled a large, gaping hole. He thought as he watched the wavelets breaking, ‘Was that around where I drowned?’

“The doors will open on your right.”

People got in and out of the subway, and Juho moved aside to let people through.

It was his first time seeing the Han River since he had drowned. He wasn’t afraid of the water necessarily, but he didn’t want to go out of his way to look at it either.

‘Why am I here when I’ve drowned already?’ He didn’t want to know the answer to that question. If he found out, he wouldn’t be able to imagine, and if he couldn’t imagine, he wouldn’t be able to write.

He reminisced about the experience on that day. Starting from his head, his body grew colder and colder. He had started to suffocate and he couldn’t see anything. His limbs grew heavier as the current coiled around his entire body. It felt like he was being pulled down.

“Next stop is…”

It was his stop. He checked the time. There was still some time left until his appointment. After he walked out of the subway station and passed the bike rentals, a field of grass met his eyes.

While walking through the lawn, he made his way toward the water. There were people fishing, riding their bicycles and walking casually with their dogs. He saw the water. He walked toward it with his eyes transfixed.

He went down to the rock where the ground met the water.

A wave was breaking, and the wind was blowing gently. The water smelled slightly fishy.

He sat on the rock and reached for the water. Its coldness clung to his hand.

“I guess it’s because it’s still daytime.”

Strangely, he didn’t feel anything. Because he didn’t know how to swim, he had a natural wariness toward rivers and oceans and would normally feel uneasy whenever he saw deep bodies of water.

Now, things were different. He still didn’t know how to swim, but he was not afraid, even as he stared into the dark depths of the river. If anything, he felt more adventurous.

He dipped his hand deeper into the water. Better yet, he wanted to try going into the water. He felt like there was something violent at the end of death and rebirth.

He dipped his hand even deeper.

“Watch out!”

Somebody pulled him back from behind. Juho’s wet hand had been dragged out of the water, and he looked up to see a rigid face.

“Dong Gil.”

“I don’t think this is where we agreed to meet.”

“I got here early, so I was killing some time.”

“Were you looking to dive or something?”

“No way.”

Juho slowly got up, shaking off his hands. As he looked at Juho intently, Dong Gil asked, “Did you want to ride on the duck boat?”

“Duck boat? That’s random. What made you want to get on that?”

He slowly lifted his hand and pointed at something.

“You seemed like you really wanted to go in that direction.”

It was the center of the river. After staring intently at the water, Juho shook his head.

‘I want to live for now.’

“It’d be pushing it with a duck boat.”

“Don’t you underestimate my legs.”

With those confident words, Dong Gil turned around and walked further away from the water. Juho followed. He felt his hand getting stiffer as it dried up.

It wasn’t a special occasion. Since their meeting, the two had been texting one another frequently. One day, one of them suggested that they meet up to talk and kill some time together, and Juho had no reason to say no.

The two walked up to the observatory where the entire field of grass could be seen.

Although it was slightly windy, a screen was there to protect them from it. The sound of a clumsily played piano was coming from afar. There must have been a piano that was open to the public use.

“Do you play?”

Dong Gil had written a book about music once, and he gave off the impression that he knew how to play an instrument.

“Nope,” a quick answer. “Instead, I listened to it day and night. I turned the music on the moment I opened my eyes and then turned it off when I was about to go to sleep. I kept it playing while I was eating or showering. The entire writing process took me about eight months, and I listened to classical music the entire time. It felt like I had listened to my entire life’s worth of music. Whenever I had a dream, the sound of violin came out instead of my voice.”

Despite the content, he sounded quite calm. Unlike him, Juho asked with a disturbed look on his face, “What did that feel like?”

“It felt like I had been eating the same thing for a year.”

“I’ve never tried that myself, but I think I get the gist.”

In other words, he was sick of it.

Every author had a character that was similar to Dong Gil’s. No matter what people told them, they had to see things for themselves. They wouldn’t start writing unless they had identified things with their own eyes and understood what they had seen.

Dong Gil was especially unique even among authors.

Usually, an author would gather just enough information for his book. No one went to the lengths of making themselves feel like they had been eating the same food for the entire year.

He really didn’t know his limits.

“I think that was when I was the biggest jerk in my life.”

“I’m surprised you’re still sane.”

“I wanted to write well.”

He sounded like a student who had just started writing. In reality, that was also something frequently said by the Literature Club members: “I want to write well.”

‘Coming to think of it, that must have been why I went up to the bridge in the middle of winter before I fell into the water. I wanted to write well,’ Juho thought.

“Look,” Dong Gil called for Juho as he was lost in thought.

“What is it?”

At his voice, he walked toward the handrail. When he was one step away from reaching the rail, he was met with the wide, open view of the grass.

People about the size of the joints on his finger were sitting beside one another. Some had brought a mat while some had brought something to shield themselves from the wind. Some sat on flyers. There were all sorts of people.

“This.”

It was like a painting, but it wasn’t because of its beauty.

“There’s no movement.”

Nobody was moving. As if time had stopped, everything stayed completely still in its place. It was as if somebody had frozen them. Maybe they had all agreed with one another to be that way. If it weren’t for the leaves blowing about in the wind, one could’ve believed that something was seriously wrong with the world.

“This is unusual.”

“I know. It’s incredibly lifeless.”

It would’ve been nice to have people around playing badminton or kindergarten students on their class picnic.

Everyone was motionless and exhausted.

Juho looked to his side. Dong Gil was watching the motionless scenery as if that wasn’t his first time.

“When did you first see this?”

To answer his question, Dong Gil slowly parted his lips, “I was out for a walk to see if I could find anything interesting in amid the average, boring everyday life. I was looking for some inspiration.”

“Is there a ‘but’ coming?”

“But then this was all I saw instead of finding anything interesting. Well, it has become a form of inspiration in its own right since, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled about what I saw. It’s almost as if these people have been told to stay completely still.”

He was right. It wasn’t a pleasing sight. Despite the number of people around, the lawn was almost too quiet. The silence in the lawn brought Juho a sense of physiological fear. It was unsettling, and Dong Gil added, “If I were God himself, I’d pour water onto these people.”

“On these people?”

“At least it’d make them jump from their places. Besides, it’d look much more entertaining.”

Juho imagined it. ‘There’s a natural disaster. Water levels rise, and it floods over to the people. Still… I can’t really picture these people running and screaming. Wouldn’t they just be swept away quietly?’

“The water bill would be monstrous.”

“Well, I’d just have to reimburse them.”

As they joked around, a sound came from behind. When Juho glanced over his shoulder, he saw a foreigner. His blue eyes were fixated in Juho’s direction. They were as blue as the East Sea.

As their eyes met, the foreigner approached him.

“I ask for direction,” he said in awkward Korean, with a guide book in his hands.

“Where were you going?” Juho responded in Korean.

“Um, uh… Here.”

He opened his guide book and showed it to Juho. It was a picture of the duck boats, and Juho explained to him how he could get there, but he didn’t seem to understand.

“Would you like for me to explain in English?” Juho asked in English. His face brightened up at the sound of his native tongue.

“Ah, that’d be great. I’ve been lost for a while now. I’ve gone straight and then turned left like how it is in the guide book, but as you can see, I’m still lost.”

“You have to turn right here.”

“Oh my, I’ve gone the opposite direction.”

“It’s not too far from here. When you walk down from here, walk toward the water. You’ll get there in no time.”