The Plotters

The old man finished the rest of his whiskey and poked around in the ashes with the skewer to see if there were any more potatoes. He found one in the corner and offered it to Reseng, who gazed blankly at it and politely declined. The old man looked at the potato; his face darkened and he tossed it back into the ashes.

“I’ve got another bottle of whiskey. What do you say?” the old man asked.

Reseng thought about it for a moment. “Your call,” he said.

The old man brought another bottle from the kitchen and poured some for him. They sipped in silence as they watched the flames dance in the fireplace. As Reseng grew tipsy, a feeling of profound unreality washed over him. The old man’s eyes never left the fire.

“Fire is so beautiful,” Reseng said.

“Ash is more beautiful once you get to know it.”

The old man slowly swirled his cup as he gazed into the flames. He smiled then, as if recalling something funny.

“My grandfather was a whaler. This was back before they outlawed whaling. He didn’t grow up anywhere near the ocean—he was actually from inland Hamgyong Province, but he went down south to Jangsaengpo harbor for work and ended up becoming the best harpooner in the country. During one of the whaling trips, he got dragged under by a sperm whale. Really deep under. What happened was, he threw the harpoon into the whale’s back, but the rope tangled around his foot and pulled him overboard. Those flimsy colonial-era whaling boats and shoddy harpoons were no match for an animal that big. A male sperm whale can grow up to eighteen meters long and weigh up to sixty tons. Think about it. That’s like fifteen adult African elephants. I don’t care if it were just a balloon animal—I would never want to mess with anything that big. No way, no how. But not my grandfather. He stuck his harpoon right in that giant whale.”

“What happened next?” Reseng asked.

“Utter havoc, of course. He said the shock of falling off the bow made him woozy, and he couldn’t tell if he was dreaming or hallucinating. Meanwhile, he was being dragged helplessly into the dark depths of the ocean by a very angry whale. He said the first thing he saw when he finally snapped out of his daze was a blue light coming off the sperm whale’s fins. As he stared at the light, he forgot all about the danger he was in. When he told me the story, he kept going on about how mysterious and tranquil and beautiful it was. An eighteen-meter-long behemoth coursing through the pitch-black ocean with glowing blue fins. I tried to break it to him gently—he was practically in tears just recalling it—that since whales are not bioluminescent, there was no way its fins could have glowed like that. He threw his chamber pot at my head. Ha! What a hothead! He told the story to everyone he met. I told him everyone thought he was lying because of the part about the fins. But all he said to that was, ‘Everything people say about whales is a lie. Because everything they say comes from a book. But whales don’t live in books, they live in the ocean.’ Anyway, after the whale dragged him under, he passed out.”

The old man refilled his cup halfway and took a sip.

“He said that when he came to, there was a big full moon hanging in the night sky, and waves were lapping at his ear. He thought luck was on his side and the waves had pushed him onto a reef. But it turned out he was on top of the whale’s head. Incredible, wouldn’t you say? There he was, lying across a whale, staring at a buoy, a growing pool of the whale’s slick red blood all around him, and the whale itself, propping him up out of the water with its head, that harpoon still sticking out of its back. Can you imagine anything stranger or more incomprehensible? I’ve heard of whales lifting an injured companion or a newborn calf out of the water so they can breathe. But this wasn’t a companion or a baby whale, or even a seal or a penguin. It was my grandfather, a human being, and the same person who’d shoved a harpoon in its back! I honestly don’t understand why the whale saved him.”

“No, it doesn’t make any sense,” Reseng said, taking a sip of whiskey. “You’d think that whale would have torn him apart.”

“He just lay there on the whale’s head for a long time, even after he’d regained consciousness. It was awkward, to say the least. What can you do when you’re stuck on top of a whale? There was nothing out there but the silvery moon, the dark waves, a sperm whale spilling buckets of blood, and him—well and truly up shit creek. My grandfather said the sight of all that blood in the moonlight made him apologize to the whale. It was the least he could do, you know? He wanted to pull out the harpoon, too, but easier said than done. Throwing a harpoon is like making a bad life decision: so easy to do, but so impossible to take back once the damage is done. Instead, he cut the line with the knife he kept on his belt. The moment he cut it, the whale dove and resurfaced some distance away, then headed straight back to where my grandfather was clinging to the buoy, struggling to stay afloat. He said it watched as he flailed pathetically, filled with shame, all tangled up in the line from the harpoon he himself had thrown. According to my grandfather, the beast came right up and gazed at him with one enormous dark eye, a look of innocent curiosity that seemed to say, How did such a little scaredy-cat like you manage to stick a harpoon in the likes of me? You’re braver than you look! Then, he said, it gave him a playful shove, as if to say, Hey, kid, that was pretty naughty. Better not pull another dangerous stunt like that! All the blood it had lost was turning the water murky, and yet it seemed to brush off the whole matter of my grandfather stabbing it in the back. Each time my grandfather got to this part of the story, he used to slap his knee and shout, ‘That monster’s heart was as big as its body! Completely different from us small-minded humans.’ He said the whale stayed by his side all night, until the whaleboat caught up to them. The other whalers had been tracking the buoys in search of my grandfather. As soon as the ship appeared in the distance, the whale swam in a circle around him, as if it were saying good-bye, and then dove again, even deeper than before, the harpoon with my grandfather’s name carved into it still quivering in its back. Incredible, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s quite a story,” Reseng said.

“I guess that after that narrow escape from a watery death, my grandfather had some serious second thoughts about whaling. He told my grandmother he didn’t want to go back. My grandmother was a very kind and patient woman. She hugged him and said if he hated catching whales that much, then he should stop. He said he sobbed like a baby in her arms and told her, ‘I felt so scared, so terribly scared!’ And then he really did keep his distance from whaling for a while. But those crybaby days of his didn’t last long. They were poor, there were too many mouths to feed, and whaling was the only trade he’d ever learned. He didn’t know how else to provide for all those hungry children squawking at him like baby sparrows. So he went back to work and launched his harpoon at every whale he saw in the East Sea until he retired at the age of seventy. But there was one more funny thing that happened: In 1959, he ran into the same sperm whale again. Exactly thirty years after his miraculous survival. His rusted old harpoon was still stuck in its back, but the whale was just swimming along, all gallant and free, as if that harpoon had always been there and were simply a part of its body. Actually, it’s not uncommon to hear about whales surviving long after a harpoon attack. They even say that once, in the nineteenth century, a whale was caught with an eighteenth-century harpoon still stuck in it. Anyway, the whale didn’t swim off when it saw the whaling ship; in fact, it cruised right up to my grandfather’s boat, the harpoon sticking straight up like a periscope, and slowly circled it. As if it were saying, Hey! Long time no see, old friend! But what’s this? Still hunting whales? You really don’t know when to quit, do you?” The old man laughed.

“Your grandfather must have felt pretty embarrassed,” Reseng said.

“You bet he did. The sailors said my grandfather took one look at that sperm whale and dropped to his knees. He threw himself on the deck and let out a howl. He wept and called out, “Whale, forgive me! I’m so sorry! How awful for you, swimming all those years with a harpoon stuck in your back! After we said good-bye, I wanted to stop, I swear. You probably don’t know this, since you live in the sea, but things have been really tough up on land. I’m still living in a rental, and my brats eat so much, you’d be shocked at what it costs to feed them. I had to come back because I could barely make ends meet. Forgive me! Let’s meet again and have a drink together. I’ll bring the booze if you catch us a giant squid to snack on. Ten crates of soju and one grilled giant squid should do it. I’m so sorry, Whale. I’m sorry I stabbed you in the back with a harpoon. I’m sorry I’m such a fool. Boo-hoo-hoo!’”

“Did he really yell all of that at the whale?” Reseng asked.

“They say he really did.”

“He was a funny guy, your grandfather.”

“He was indeed. Anyway, after that, he gave up whaling and left Jangsaengpo harbor for good. He came up to Seoul and spent all his time drinking. I imagine he felt pretty trapped, given that he couldn’t go out to sea anymore, and with barbed wire strung all across the thirty-eighth parallel, he couldn’t go back north to his hometown, either. So whenever he got drunk, he latched on to people and started up with that same boring old whale tale. He told it over and over, even though everyone had already heard it hundreds of times and no one wanted to hear it again. But he wasn’t doing it to brag about his adventures on the high seas. He believed that people should emulate whales. He said that people had grown as small and crafty as rats, and that the days of taking slow, huge, beautiful strides had vanished. The age of giants was over.”

The old man swigged his whiskey. Reseng refilled his cup and took a sip.

“Toward the end, he found out he was in the final stages of liver cancer. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. As a sailor, he’d been guzzling booze from the age of sixteen to the age of eighty-two. But I guess the news meant nothing at all to him, because no sooner did he return from seeing the doctor than he hit the bottle again. He gathered his kids together and told them, ‘I’m not going to any hospital. Whales accept it when their time comes.’ And he never did go back to the doctor. After about a month, my grandfather put on his best clothes and returned to Jangsaengpo harbor. According to the sailors there, he loaded a small boat up with ten crates of soju, just like he’d said he would, and rowed until he disappeared over the horizon. And he never came back. His body was never found. Maybe he really did row until he caught the scent of ambergris and tracked down his whale. If he did, then I’m sure he broke open all ten crates of soju that night as they caught up on the years they’d missed, and if he didn’t, then he probably drifted around the ocean, drinking alone, until he died. Or maybe he’s still out there somewhere.”

“That’s quite an ending.”

“It’s a dignified way to go. In my opinion, a man ought to be able to choose a death that gives his life a dignified ending. Only those who truly walk their own path can choose their own death. But not me. I’ve been a slug my whole life, so I don’t deserve a dignified death.”

The old man smiled bitterly. Reseng was at a loss for a response. The look on the old man’s face was so dark that Reseng felt compelled to say something comforting, but he really couldn’t think of what to say. The old man refilled his cup with whiskey and polished it off again. They sat there for a long time. Each time the flames died down, Reseng added more wood to the fire. While Reseng and the old man sipped whiskey in comfortable silence, each new piece caught fire, crackled and flared up hot and ferocious, then slowly burned down to glowing charcoal, and then to white ash.

“I really talked your ear off tonight. They say the older you get, the more you’re supposed to keep your purse strings open and your mouth shut.”

“Oh, no, I enjoyed it.”

The old man shook the whiskey bottle and eyed the bottom. There was only about a cup left.

“Mind if I finish this off?”

“Go right ahead,” Reseng said.

The old man poured the rest of the whiskey into his cup and downed it.

“We’d better call it a night. You must be exhausted. I should’ve let you sleep, but instead I kept talking.”

“No, it was a nice evening, thanks to you.”

The old man curled up on the floor to the right of the fireplace. Santa sauntered over and lay down next to him. Reseng lay down to the left of the fireplace. The shadows of the two men and the dog danced on the brick wall opposite them. Reseng looked at his rifle propped against the door.

“Have some breakfast before you leave tomorrow,” the old man said, rolling onto his side. “You don’t want to hunt on an empty stomach.”

Reseng hesitated before saying, “Of course, I’ll do that.”

The crackling fire and the dog’s steady breaths sounded unusually loud. The old man didn’t say another word. Reseng listened for a long time to the old man and the dog breathing in their sleep before he finally joined them. It was a peaceful sleep.

When he awoke, the old man was preparing breakfast. A simple meal of white rice, radish kimchi, and doenjang soup made with sliced potatoes. The old man didn’t say much. They ate in silence. After breakfast, Reseng hurried to leave. As he stepped out the door, the old man handed him six boiled potatoes wrapped in a cloth. Reseng took the bundle and bade him a polite farewell. The potatoes were warm.

By the time Reseng returned to his tent, the old man was watering the flowers again. Just as before, he tipped the watering can with care, as if pouring tea. Then, just as before, he spoke to the flowers and trees and gestured at them. Reseng made a minor adjustment to the scope. The familiar-looking flower grew sharp and distinct in the lens and blurred again. He still could not remember its name. He should have asked the old man.

It was a nice garden. Two persimmon trees stood nonchalantly in the courtyard, while the flowers in the garden beds waited patiently for their season to come. Santa went up to the man and rubbed his head against the man’s thigh. The old man gave the dog a pat. They suited each other. The old man threw the deflated soccer ball across the garden. While Santa ran to fetch it, the old man watered more flowers. What was he saying to them? On closer inspection, he did indeed have a slight limp. If only Reseng had asked him what had happened to his left leg. Not that it makes any difference, he thought. Santa came back with the ball. This time, the old man threw it farther. Santa seemed to be in a good mood, because he ran around in circles before racing off to the end of the garden to fetch the ball. The old man looked like he had finished watering. He put down the watering can and smiled brightly. Was he laughing? Was that carved wooden mask of a face really laughing?

Reseng fixed the crosshairs on the old man’s chest and pulled the trigger.

ACHILLES’ HEEL

Reseng was found in a garbage can. Or, who knows, maybe he was born in that garbage can.

Old Raccoon, who had served as Reseng’s foster father for the last twenty-eight years, liked to tease Reseng about his origins whenever he got to drinking. “You were found in a garbage can in front of a nunnery. Or maybe that garbage can was your mother. Hard to say. Either way, it’s pretty pathetic. But look on the bright side. A garbage can used by nuns is bound to be the cleanest garbage can around.”

Reseng wasn’t bothered by Old Raccoon’s teasing. He decided that being born from a clean garbage can had to be better than being born to the type of parents who’d dump their baby in the garbage.

Reseng lived in the orphanage run by the convent until he was four, after which he was adopted by Old Raccoon and lived in his library. Had Reseng continued to grow up in the orphanage, where divine blessings showered down like spring sunshine and kindly nuns devoted themselves to the careful raising of orphans, his life might have turned out very differently. Instead, he grew up in a library crawling with assassins, hired guns, and bounty hunters. Just as a plant grows wherever it sets down roots, so all your life’s tragedies spring from wherever you first set your feet. And Reseng was far too young to leave the place where he’d set down roots.

The day he turned nine, Reseng was snuggled up in Old Raccoon’s rattan rocking chair, reading The Tales of Homer. Paris, the idiot prince of Troy, was right in the middle of pulling back his bowstring to sink an arrow into the heel of Achilles, the hero whom Reseng had come to love over the course of the book. As everyone knows, this was a very tense moment, and so Reseng was completely unaware that Old Raccoon had been standing behind him for a while, watching him read. Old Raccoon looked angry.

“Who taught you to read?”

Old Raccoon had never sent Reseng to school. Whenever Reseng asked, “How come I don’t go to school like the other kids?” Old Raccoon had retorted, “Because school doesn’t teach you anything about life.” Old Raccoon was right on that point. Reseng never attended school, and yet in all of his thirty-two years, it had not once caused him any problems. Problems? Ha! What kind of problems would he have had anyway? And so Old Raccoon looked gobsmacked to discover Reseng, who hadn’t spent a single day in school, reading a book. Worse, the look on his face said he felt betrayed to learn that Reseng knew how to read.

As Reseng stared up at him without answering, Old Raccoon switched to the low, deep voice he used to intimidate people.

“I said, Who. Taught. You. To. Read?”

His voice was menacing, as if he was going to catch the person who had taught Reseng how to read and do something to them right then and there. In a small, quavering voice, Reseng said that no one had taught him. Old Raccoon still had his scary face on; it was clear he didn’t believe a word of it, and so Reseng explained that he’d taught himself how to read from picture books. Old Raccoon smacked Reseng hard across the face.

As Reseng struggled to stifle his sobs, he swore that he really had learned to read from picture books. It was true. After he’d managed to dig through the 200,000 books crammed on the shelves of Old Raccoon’s gloomy, labyrinthine library to find the few books worth looking at (a comic book adaptation about American slavery, a cheap adult magazine, and a dog-eared picture book filled with giraffes and rhinoceroses), he’d deciphered how the Korean alphabet worked by matching pictures to words. Reseng pointed to his stash of picture books in the corner of the study. Old Raccoon hobbled over on his lame leg and examined each one. He looked dumbfounded; he was clearly wondering how on earth those shoddy books had found their way into his library. Hobbling back, he stared hard at Reseng, his eyes still filled with suspicion, and yanked the hardback copy of The Tales of Homer from his hands. He looked back and forth between the book and Reseng for the longest time.

“Reading books will doom you to a life of fear and shame. So, do you still feel like reading?”

Reseng stared blankly at him—staring blankly was all he could do, as he had no idea what Old Raccoon was talking about. Fear and shame? As if a mere nine-year-old could comprehend such a life! The only life a boy who’d just turned nine could imagine was complaining about a dinner that someone else had prepared. A life in which random events just kept happening to you, as impossible to stop as a piece of onion that keeps slipping out of your sandwich. What Old Raccoon said sounded less like a choice and more like a threat, or a curse being put on him. It was like God saying to Adam and Eve, “If you eat this fruit, you’ll be cast out of Paradise, so do you still want to eat it?” Reseng was afraid. He had no idea what this choice meant. But Old Raccoon was staring him down and waiting for an answer. Would he eat the apple or not?

At last, Reseng stiffly raised his head and composed himself, fists clenched, his face a picture of determination, and said, “I will read. Now, give me back my book.” Old Raccoon gazed down at the boy, who was gritting his teeth, barely containing his tears, and handed back The Tales of Homer.

Reseng’s demand to retrieve his book did not come from an actual desire to read or to defy Old Raccoon. It was because he was clueless about this whole “life of fear and shame” thing.

After Old Raccoon left the room, Reseng wiped away the tears that had only then begun to spill, and curled up into a ball on the rattan rocker. He looked around at Old Raccoon’s dim study, which grew dark early because the windows faced northwest, at the books stacked to the ceiling in some complex and incomprehensible order, at the maze of shelves quietly staked out by dust, and wondered why Old Raccoon was so upset about him reading. Even now, at the age of thirty-two, whenever he pictured Old Raccoon, who had spent most of his life sitting in the corner of the library with a book in his hands, he couldn’t wrap his head around it. For that nine-year-old, the whole incident had felt as awful as if one of his buddies with a pocketful of sweets had stolen Reseng’s single sweet from his mouth.

“Stupid old fart, I hope you get the shits!”

Reseng put his curse on Old Raccoon and wiped the last of his tears with the back of his hand. Then he reopened the book. How could he not? Reading was no longer just some simple way to pass the time. It was now this boy’s Great and Inherent Right, a right won with much difficulty, even if it meant being hit and cursed to live a Life of Fear and Shame. Reseng returned to the scene in The Tales of Homer where the idiot prince of Troy pulls back his bowstring. The scene where the arrow leaves the string and hurtles toward his hero, Achilles. The scene where that cursed arrow pierces Achilles’ heel.

Reseng trembled as Achilles bled to death at the top of Hisarlik Hill. He had been certain his hero would easily pluck that damn arrow from his heel and immediately run his spear through Paris’s heart. But the unthinkable had happened. What had gone wrong? How could the son of a god die? How could a hero with an immortal body, unfellable by any arrow, unpierceable by any spear, be undone by an imbecile like Paris, and, worse, die like an imbecile because he hadn’t protected his one, tiny, no-bigger-than-the-palm-of-his-hand weak spot? Reseng reread Achilles’ death scene over and over. But he could not find a line about Achilles’ coming back to life.

Oh, no! That stupid Paris really did kill Achilles!

Reseng sat lost in thought until Old Raccoon’s study was pitch-black. He couldn’t yell, he couldn’t move. Now and then the rocking chair creaked. The books were submerged in darkness, and the pages rustled like dry leaves. All he had to do was stick his hand out to reach the light switch, but it didn’t occur to Reseng to turn on the light. He trembled in the dark like a child trapped in a cave teeming with insects. Life made no sense. Why had Achilles bothered to cover his torso in armor, when he should have protected his left heel, his one and only mortal weakness? Stupid idiot, even nine-year-olds knew better. It burned Reseng up to think that Achilles had failed to protect his fatal weak spot. He couldn’t forgive his hero for dying like that.

Reseng wept in the dark. On every page of the sea of library books that he was either itching to read or would eventually get bored enough to read, heroes and beautiful, charming women, countless people struggling to overcome hardship and frustration and achieve their goals, all died at the arrows of idiots because they failed to protect their one tiny weakness. Reseng was shocked at how treacherous life was. It didn’t matter how high you rose, how invincible your body was, or how firmly you clung to greatness, because all of it could vanish with a tiny, split-second mistake.