A couple who looked to be in their late thirties was standing at the counter going through check in procedures with their daughter, who seemed to be in first or second year of middle school, placed behind them.
Maybe they didn’t have much experience traveling abroad as a family; beyond the checked baggage, each of them had a crossbody bag over a backpack, and the tension was plain on the parents’ faces.
At last check in finished without incident, and after they were told to wait on the bench to the side until the inspection confirmed there were no issues with the baggage loaded into the hold, the couple pushed the now empty cart over this way.
They settled side by side in the seats opposite the bench where I was sitting.
"Did you not put the camera battery in the carry on?"
"Yeah, it’s in the backpack."
Brushing back, with care, the daughter’s hair that had slipped down by her temple because it had only been loosely tied, the father asked, and the daughter answered in a slightly put out tone.
"I’m worried she didn’t sleep well today. She’s going to be uncomfortable on the plane too."
The mother looked at the daughter with a worried expression and spoke.
"Mom, what time did you say we get to Prague? I want to go to Charles Bridge as soon as we arrive."
Even though she was tired, the trip must have excited her; watching their daughter ask about the schedule, the couple wiped the worry from their faces and looked at each other with a smile.
When all of us from Phantom had gone on a business trip to Hong Kong together, I barely noticed my surroundings. I was excited, but the nerves were bigger. Like the couple in front of me now. But sitting on an airport bench as someone not traveling, things that hadn’t been visible then came into view.
Morae and my brother had left.
They suggested we skip the cliché of watching until they were out of sight going into the departures hall, and part ways in front of the check in counter. They would head toward the departures side, I would head back toward the gate we’d entered through. No one would stay behind to watch the other’s back; we would each go our own way.
But after I turned away waving, I came back and sat on this bench. It just felt like I shouldn’t leave here too quickly.
Families leaving on trips for summer vacation were easy to spot anywhere in the airport. It was an era when the number of outbound travelers in a year reached thirty million, and it had long since ceased to be the preserve of the wealthy.
Even in my grandfather’s village, several times a year there were inexpensive package trips abroad organized by groups like the fisheries cooperative, the agricultural cooperative, and the women’s association, and when I was in middle school I often heard friends’ travel stories about countries all over the world after the semester started.
The three of us—my mother, my father, and I—had never gone on one of those now common overseas trips. My mother seemed to have traveled a lot in the past, but the three of us as a family had never had the chance.
That didn’t make me think our family was unhappy, and I never shrank with envy at my friends’ travel tales. Because my parents prioritized securing time to paint when they worked, money was not plentiful, but I never once felt unhappy or deprived just because I couldn’t wear branded shoes or clothes.
I was thinking about the days right after my mother’s award announcement.
I was recalling my father and mother’s faces at the dinner table every evening, bright with excitement as they discussed how best to use the fairly large prize money for our family.
Whether to put some toward replacing the used car we’d been driving for more than ten years, top up my mother’s digital equipment, replace my laptop—handed down from my father—with a new one, have a suit made for my father, and save what remained.
As if the act of deciding where to spend it was more enjoyable than spending the money itself, the dinner table buzzed with lively chatter every night. My mother never brought it up outright, but I knew even then that she was also keeping in mind a museum tour of Europe for the three of us.
However, that scene had no reality for me now; it wasn’t a memory of time our family had actually spent together, but more like a video that staged happiness artificially. And as if the signal were interfering, the screen crackled for a bit and then went dark. Like our plans, which had had several candidates but none that became real.
The moment I sensed I’d stirred up too much, it felt like a safety device in my chest clunked and seized me by the scruff of the neck. A signal to stop.
I lifted my gaze from the girl flipping through a travel guide thick with colored tabs and Post its marking important pages, and rose to my feet.
As the driver had said—that you can’t stop long in front of the departures gate, so call on your way out—I got in touch to say I was leaving the airport now. «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» He told me to come out to the gate in five minutes, but I hurried to get out of the airport.
Outside, where rain was still scattering down like yesterday, the air was humid, but because the air conditioning had lowered my body temperature I didn’t feel the heat.
Everyone passing in front of the departures hall wore the same heightened expressions of people about to travel. Like in front of the hotel, I felt out of place here too.
Suddenly fatigue swept over me. As the tension faded, it was like all the bodily exhaustion of the last few days without proper sleep or rest hit at once.
I crossed at two lights to get to the location the driver had given me. The black sedan that had let us move comfortably yesterday and today slowed and approached.
I dipped my head toward the faintly visible outline of the driver through the heavily tinted windshield of the stopped car, then went to the rear door and opened it.
"Parting earlier than I expected, I see."
It was his voice. He was inside.
With one hand braced on the edge of the door, my back bent, I froze like that for a moment.
"How...."
It was definitely the car I’d ridden in with Morae and my brother, and it was the same driver who had been at the wheel. As far as I knew, he had never moved around in this car with him.
Clicking his tongue, he slid a little closer to my side and tugged at my wrist that was holding the door.
"You’ll get soaked again. Get in."
Even after I awkwardly let him guide me into the car, I couldn’t make sense of the situation, and I sat pressed against the door, looking at him with eyes full of questions.
"Is it really that surprising I’m here?"
His expression said he hadn’t expected me to be this startled.
To be honest, more than surprised, I was glad. I was so glad I didn’t know how to manage my face. Only after sending off Morae and my brother safely did I realize my chest had been shredded like someone had wrung it hard for days on end... so his completely unexpected appearance made me happy. Just seeing him felt like healing had begun.
Already, he was exercising influence as someone I liked.
"I never even thought of it...."
As the car pulled out and I adjusted my posture to sit more comfortably, I muttered. For some reason I was embarrassed to look him straight in the eye.
"It doesn’t seem like such a surprising thing for me to be in my own car."
His perverse logic made me laugh. Whatever reason had him here, the comfort he gave in this moment couldn’t be spoiled.
Thinking my unfiltered joy at this unexpected meeting might be showing, my gaze, which had been lingering around his chest, caught on his sunglasses. It was monsoon season, but as a habit he kept his sunglasses stuck in the left chest pocket of his jacket.
"The sunglasses look great...."
"Hm?"
Maybe he hadn’t expected the topic; he tipped the end of his sentence up with a note of curiosity.
"Could I... try them on once?"
For me it was a bold move. Maybe the fatigue after getting through a big ordeal and the excitement of his appearance were drawing out a version of me that wasn’t my usual.
As if he’d just heard a proposal that piqued his interest, he looked at me with an intrigued face, the corners of his lips pulled up in a silent smile, and cheerfully handed over the sunglasses. With a simple frame and dark lenses, the thin, sharp arms gave an intelligent impression; they were very well suited for hiding one’s expression.
"Let me see. They look good on you."
Even facing him as he turned my shoulders and lifted my face to look, I could avoid meeting his eyes. A very useful item.
He stared straight at my face with eyes bright like he was looking at something fascinating, and only after a long moment did he look away. Then he took a phone from the inside pocket of his jacket and held it out.
"What... is this?"
"It’s your new phone, Seo Ihyeon."
The phone I took without thinking was the latest model from a brand my brother Juhan had been going on about wanting these days.
"Up until now their target was those two, so there wouldn’t have been any need to put direct pressure on you, but once they realize it’s become impossible to track the two of them, the only person to dig for information from will be you, won’t it. The situation isn’t the same as before. You could be a target, easily. You need to prepare."
He spoke in a voice without a smile while tapping numbers on the screen of his own phone, and a moment later a slight vibration buzzed in my hand. A message from him.
"It’s a new number, so use that from now on."
The message box stood white and empty, with only his number—which wasn’t yet saved in contacts—displayed. The empty device in my hand, carrying no traces of anything, felt like a futuristic tool that would let me reset the entire past and set out anew. I silently mocked myself for the sentimental, groundless hope.
"Where you work and where you live. Inside the border, finding out that much is easier than you think. Even if they find where you are, the best thing is to stay somewhere they can’t easily access."
Looking at him through the sunglasses made his outline a little blurrier, but the color of his eyes seemed even clearer. During sex his eyes, white and fizzing like soda and blue, now calmly faced me.
"There’s a place that’s suitable as your atelier and a temporary place to stay. I was thinking we might go check it out together now; would that be okay?"
It was a little hard to keep up with how fast the plan was moving, but dragging my feet wouldn’t change anything. I nodded, and he showed a satisfied smile.
"Your body and mind must have been at their limits for days; get some sleep on the way."
He reached out an arm to the controller on my behalf, since I didn’t know the internal system well, and reclined the seat. For a moment my whole body went taut at the sweep of his arm across my chest and the strong smell of his cologne.
Today it wasn’t the cologne I knew him to wear. This scent—heavy, dark, with a clear presence—suited him too, but for no reason it made me feel a little disappointed. It was only cologne.
As he withdrew his arm he glanced at my face, and with a quiet sigh like a hum, he lightly ruffled my hair.
"I get it, so don’t... look at me with eyes like that."
Saying so, he turned his head toward the window. The profile of him rubbing at his lips with his big hand, his brows drawn together, looked troubled.
Don’t look with eyes like that. It was a strange thing to say. He couldn’t even see my eyes with the sunglasses on.
■ ■ ■
"Each unit has its own private elevator and elevator hall, so even the residents practically never run into each other."
Opening the glass door directly in front of the parking space with a card key, he spoke. Inside the glass door was a hall space of about three to four pyeong, even furnished with a comfortable three seater sofa.
There was no familiar button next to the elevator on the wall opposite the sofa. Where a button should have been there was only a black digital pad. When he tapped the card key to the pad, the door opened; when he presented the card to the pad inside, this time the light for the fifth floor came on automatically. The parking and lobby level where we had boarded, basement levels one and two, and the fifth floor. The elevator couldn’t go to any other floor.
"As you saw coming in, the layout makes it basically impossible for outsiders to access the complex at all. That’s partly because this side is on a hill, but also because they raised and built up the land more to open up a wider view of the Han River. There are five households total, one per floor from the first to the fifth, but in practice you can think of it as the third through seventh floors. The first and second basements don’t have the open river view, so they were arranged as common areas."
I was listening as he explained, fanning the card key as if to cool himself, but the only thing I could really grasp about this situation was that the villa he’d brought me to was extremely high end.
The elevator doors opened on the side opposite the one we’d gotten in. The entryway was right there as soon as we stepped out. To be precise, a rectangular room used as an entryway. The long entryway floored in marble of a light gold beige tone was clean, with not a single unnecessary decoration.
"You can just keep your shoes on."
I hesitated at the step where the entryway met the hall, and he, who had opened a flush built in storage cabinet with no handle to quickly check its interior, closed it and came up behind me as he spoke.
To get from the entryway into the actual living space, you had to go through another turn in the hall. From the entryway you couldn’t see the interior at all; it was a layout with considerable attention to privacy.
"The building’s exterior design already makes outside access difficult, but there are also five or more guards posted at all times, twenty four hours a day, so you can be very reassured about safety."
At the end of the hall a spacious living room opened up, one you could only describe as completely unblocked. The ceiling was high, giving an excellent sense of openness, and one entire side of the tall wall was finished in glass. Thanks to that, even on a cloudy day like today there was plenty of light.
"I bought the place for foreign rental as income property, but the previous tenant’s contract with the company here ended in May, and he wrapped up his life in Korea and returned home. Since then there hasn’t been a new tenant, and I’d already been considering moving into this place. What do you think, do you like it?"
As he slowly swept his gaze over the simple living room furnished with only the minimum, he turned back to look at me, still standing awkwardly at the end of the hall, and asked. His tone was like he’d picked up a T shirt on a display shelf and was asking about it.
It would be a lie to say I had no idea why he was asking me whether I liked it. But if the reason I understood was right, this time I didn’t understand the reason.
Maybe he thought my hesitation meant I didn’t like it much, because he started to appeal a little more specifically to the good points the place had.
"It’s a duplex, so you and I can basically live almost like we’re separate and still have our privacy, and for me I’ll only be at home evenings because of work, so you’ll be able to stay as comfortably as you like, focusing on your painting."
