Part One
1
Six were dead, and one was wounded that day. First were Mom and Granny. Then a college student who had rushed in to stop the man. Then two men in their fifties who had stood in the front rank of the Salvation Army parade, followed by a policeman. Finally, the man himself. He had chosen to be the last victim of his manic bloodshed. He stabbed himself in the chest hard and, like most of the other victims, died before the ambulance came. I simply watched the whole thing unfold before me.
Just standing there with blank eyes, as always.
2
The first incident happened when I was six. The symptoms had been there way earlier, but it was then that they had finally risen to the surface. That day, Mom must've forgotten to come get me from kindergarten. She told me later that she had gone to see Dad after all these years, to tell him that she would finally let him go, not that she would meet someone new or anything, but that she would move on anyway. Apparently, she had said all that to him as she wiped the faded walls of his mausoleum. Meanwhile, as her love came to an end once and for all, I, the uninvited guest of their young love, was being completely forgotten.
After all the kids were gone, I wandered out of the kindergarten on my own. All that six-year-old me could remember about his house was that it was somewhere over a bridge. I went up and stood on the overpass with my head hanging over the railing. I saw cars gliding by beneath me. It reminded me of something I had seen somewhere, so I gathered as much saliva as possible in my mouth. I took aim at a car and spat. My spit evaporated long before it hit the car, but I kept my eyes on the road and kept spitting until I felt dizzy.
"What are you doing! That's disgusting!"
I looked up to see a middle-aged woman passing by, glaring at me, then she just continued on her way, gliding past me like the cars below, and I was left alone again. The stairways from the overpass fanned out in every direction. I lost my bearings. The world I saw underneath the stairs was all the same icy gray, left and right. A couple of pigeons flapped away above my head. I decided to follow them.
By the time I realized I was going the wrong way, I'd already gone too far. At kindergarten, I'd been learning a song called "Go Marching." Earth is round, go go march ahead, and just like the lyrics, I thought that, somehow, I would eventually get to my house if I'd just go go march ahead. I stubbornly continued my small steps forward.
The main road led to a narrow alley lined by old houses, those crumbling walls all marked with crimson, random numbers and the word "vacant." There was no one in sight. Suddenly, I heard someone cry out, Ah, in a low voice. Not sure if it was Ah or Uh. Maybe it was Argh. It was a low, short cry. I walked toward the sound, and it grew as I approached closer and closer, then it changed to Urgh and Eeeh. It was coming from around the corner. I turned the corner without hesitation.
A boy was lying on the ground. A small boy whose age I couldn't tell, but then black shadows were being cast on and off him again and again. He was being beaten. The short cries weren't coming from him but from the shadows surrounding him, more like shouts of exertion. They kicked and spat at him. I later learned that they were only middle school students, but back then, those shadows seemed tall and huge like grown-ups.
The boy didn't resist or even make a sound, as if he'd grown used to the beating. He was getting tossed back and forth like a rag doll. One of the shadows kicked the boy in the side as a final blow. Then they left. The boy was covered in blood, like a coat of red paint. I approached him. He looked older than me, maybe eleven or twelve years old, around twice my age. But I still felt like he was younger than me. His chest was heaving quickly, his breath short and shallow like a newborn puppy's. It was obvious he was in danger.
I went back to the alley. It was still empty—only the red letters on the gray walls disturbed my eyes. After wandering for quite some time, I finally saw a small corner store. I slid open the door and stepped inside.
"Excuse me."
Family Game was on television. The shopkeeper was snickering so hard watching the show that he must not have heard me. The guests in the show were playing a game where one person wearing earplugs had to guess words by watching others mouth them. The word was "trepidation." I have no idea why I still remember the word. I didn't even know what it meant then. One lady kept making wrong guesses and drew laughs from the audience and the shopkeeper. Eventually, time ran out, and her team lost. The shopkeeper smacked his lips, maybe because he felt bad for her.
"Sir," I called to him again.
"Yes?" He finally turned.
"There's someone lying in the alley."
"Really?" he said indifferently and sat up.
On television, both teams were about to play another round of a high-points game that could turn the tide.
"He could die," I said, fiddling with one of the chewy caramel packs neatly lined up on the display stand.
"Is that so?"
"Yes, I'm sure." That was when he finally looked me in the eye.
"Where'd you learn to say such creepy things? Lying is bad, son."
I fell silent for a while, trying to find the words to convince him. But I was too young to have much vocabulary, and I couldn't think of anything else truer than what I had already said.
"He could die soon."
All I could do was repeat myself.
3
I waited for the show to finish while the shopkeeper called the police. When he saw me fiddling with the caramel again, he snapped at me to leave if I wasn't going to buy anything. The police took their time coming to the scene—but all I could think of was the boy lying on the cold ground. He was already dead.
The thing is, he was the shopkeeper's son.
* * *
I sat on a bench at the police station, swinging my legs hovering in the air. They went back and forth, working up a cool breeze. It was already dark, and I felt sleepy. Just as I was about to doze off, the police station door swung open to reveal Mom. She let out a cry when she saw me and stroked my head so hard it hurt. Before she could fully enjoy the moment of our reunion, the door swung wide open again and in came the shopkeeper, his body held up by policemen. He was wailing, his face covered in tears. His expression was quite different from when he had watched TV earlier. He slumped down on his knees, trembling, and punched the ground. Suddenly he got to his feet and yelled, pointing his finger at me. I couldn't exactly understand his rambling, but what I got was something like this:
"You should've said it seriously, now it's too late for my son!"
The policeman next to me shrugged. "What would a kindergartener know," he said, and managed to stop the shopkeeper from sinking to the floor. I couldn't agree with the shopkeeper though. I'd been perfectly serious all along. Never once did I smile or overreact. I couldn't understand why he was scolding me for that, but six-year-old me didn't know the words needed to form this question into a full sentence, so I just stayed silent. Instead, Mom raised her voice for me, turning the police station into a madhouse, with the clamoring of a parent who'd lost his child and a parent who'd found hers.
That night, I played with toy blocks as I always did. They were in the shape of a giraffe and could be changed into an elephant if I twisted down its long neck. I felt Mom staring at me, her eyes scanning every part of my body.
"Weren't you scared?" she asked.
"No," I said.
* * *
Rumors about that incident—specifically, how I didn't even blink at the sight of someone being beaten to death—spread quickly. From then on, Mom's fears became a reality one after another.
Things got worse after I entered elementary school. One day, on the way home from school, a girl walking in front of me tripped over a rock. She was blocking my way, so I examined the Mickey Mouse hairband she was wearing while I waited for her to get back up. But she just sat there and cried. Finally, her mom came and helped her stand. She glanced at me, clucking her tongue.
"You see your friend fall and don't even ask if she's okay? So the rumors are true, something is weird about you."
I couldn't think of anything to say, so I said nothing. The other kids sensed that something was happening and gathered around me, their whispers prickling my ears. For all I knew, they were probably echoing what the girl's mom had said. That was when Granny came in to save me, appearing out of nowhere like Wonder Woman, sweeping me up into her arms.
"Watch your mouth!" she snapped in her husky voice. "She was just unlucky to trip. Who do you think you are to blame my boy?"
Granny didn't forget to say a word to the kids, either.
"What are you staring at, you little brats?"
When we walked farther away, I looked up to see Granny with her lips pressed tight.
"Granny, why do people call me weird?"
Her lips loosened.
"Maybe it's because you're special. People just can't stand it when something is different, eigoo, my adorable little monster."
Granny hugged me so tight my ribs hurt. She always called me a monster. To her, that wasn't a bad thing.
4
To be honest, it took me a while to understand the nickname Granny had so affectionately given me. Monsters in books weren't adorable. In fact, monsters were completely opposite to everything adorable. I wondered why she'd call me that. Even after I learned the word "paradox"—which meant putting contradictory ideas together—I was confused. Did the stress fall on "adorable" or "monster?" Anyway, she said she called me that out of love, so I decided to trust her.
Tears welled up in Mom's eyes as Granny told her about the Mickey Mouse girl.
"I knew this day would come ... I just didn't expect it to be this soon ..."
"Oh, stop that nonsense! If you want to whine, go whine in your room and keep the door shut!"
That stopped Mom's crying for a moment. She glanced at Granny, a bit startled by the sudden outburst. Then she began to cry even harder. Granny clucked her tongue and shook her head, her eyes resting on a corner of the ceiling, heaving a deep sigh. This seemed to be their typical routine.
It was true, Mom had been worried about me for a long time. That was because I was always different from other kids—different from birth even, because:
I never smiled.
At first, Mom had thought I was just slow to develop. But parenting books told her that a baby starts smiling three days after being born. She counted the days—it had been nearly a hundred.
Like a fairy-tale princess cursed to never smile, I didn't bat an eye. And like a prince from a faraway land trying to win over his beloved's heart, Mom tried everything. She tried clapping, bought different colored rattles, and even did silly dances to children's songs. When she wore herself out, she went out to the veranda and smoked, a habit she'd barely managed to quit after finding out she was pregnant with me. I once saw a video filmed around that time, where Mom was trying so hard, and I was just staring at her. My eyes were too deep and calm to be those of a child's. Whatever she did, Mom couldn't make me smile.
The doctor said I had no particular issues. Except for the lack of smiles, the test results showed that my height, weight, and behavioral development were all normal for my age. The pediatrician in our neighborhood dismissed Mom's concerns, telling her not to worry, because her baby was growing just fine. For a while after that, Mom tried to comfort herself by saying that I was just a little quieter than other kids.
Then something happened around my first birthday, which proved that she'd been right to worry.
That day, Mom had put a red kettle filled with hot water on the table. She turned her back to mix the powdered milk. I reached for the kettle and it fell from the table, tumbling down to the floor, splashing hot water everywhere. I still have a faint burn mark like a medal from that day. I screamed and cried. Mom thought I'd be scared of water or red kettles from that point on, like a normal kid would be. But I wasn't. I was afraid of neither water nor kettles. I kept reaching for the red kettle whenever I saw it, whether it had cold or hot water inside.
The evidence kept adding up. There was a one-eyed old man who lived downstairs with a big black dog he always kept tied to the post in the yard. I stared straight into the old man's milky-white pupils without fear, and when Mom lost track of me for a moment, I reached out to touch his dog, who bared his teeth and growled. Even after seeing the kid next door, bitten and bleeding from doing the very same thing, I did it again. Mom had to constantly intervene.
After several incidents like this, Mom started worrying that I might have a low IQ, but there was no other proof of that. So, like any mother, she tried to find a way to cast her doubts about her child in a positive light.
He's just more fearless than other kids.
That was how she described me in her diary.
* * *
Even so, any mother's anxiety would peak if their child hadn't smiled by their fourth birthday. Mom held my hand and took me to a bigger hospital. That day is the first memory carved into my brain. It's blurry, as if I were watching from underwater, but comes into sharp focus every once in a while, like this:
A man in a white lab coat sits in front of me. Beaming, he starts showing me different toys one by one. Some of them he shakes. Then he taps my knee with a small hammer. My leg swings up higher than I thought possible. He then puts his fingers under my armpits. It tickles, and I giggle a little. Then he takes out photographs and asks me some questions. One of the pictures I still remember vividly.
"The kid in this photo is crying because his mommy is gone. How would he feel?"
Not knowing the answer, I look up to Mom sitting next to me. She smiles at me and strokes my hair, then subtly bites her lower lip.
* * *
A few days later, Mom takes me somewhere else, saying I will get to ride a spaceship, but we end up at another hospital. I ask her why she brings me here when I'm not even sick, but she doesn't answer.
Inside, I'm told to lie down on something cold. I'm sucked into a white tank. Beep beep beep. I hear strange sounds. My boring space trip ends there.
Then the scene changes. I suddenly see many more men in white lab coats. The oldest among them hands me a blurry black-and-white photograph, saying that it's the inside of my head. What a liar. That's clearly not my head. But Mom keeps nodding as if she believes such an obvious lie. Whenever the old guy opens his mouth, the younger guys around him take notes. Eventually, I start to get a little bored and fidget with my feet, kicking at the old man's desk. When Mom puts her hand on my shoulder to stop me, I look up and see that she's crying.
All I can remember about the rest of that day is Mom's crying. She cries and cries and cries. She's still crying when we head back to the waiting room. There is a cartoon playing on TV, but I can't focus because of her. The defender of the universe is fighting off the bad guy, but all she does is cry. Finally, an old man dozing off next to me wakes up and barks at her, "Stop acting miserable, you noisy woman, I've had enough!" It works. Mom purses her lips tight like a scolded teenager, silently trembling.
5
Mom fed me a lot of almonds. I've tried almonds from America, Australia, China, and Russia. All the countries that export them to Korea. The Chinese ones had a bitter, awful taste, and the Australian ones tasted kind of sour and earthy. There are the Korean ones too, but my favorite are the American ones, especially the ones from California. They have a soft brown hue from absorbing the blazing sunlight there.
Now I will tell you my secret how to eat them.
First, you hold the package and feel the shape of the almonds from the outside. You need to feel the hard, stubborn kernels with your fingers. Next, you slowly tear the top part of the package and open the double zipper. Then, you poke your nose inside the package and slowly breathe in. You have to close your eyes for this part. You take it lightly, occasionally holding your breath, to allow as much time as possible for the scent to reach the body. Finally, when the scent fills you up from deep inside, you pop half a handful of them into your mouth. Roll them around in there for a while and feel their texture. Poke the pointy parts with your tongue. Feel the grooves on their surface. You have to make sure not to take too long. If they get bloated from your saliva, they will taste bad. These steps are all just a lead-up to the finale. If too short, it will be dull. Too long and the impact will be gone. You have to find the right timing for yourself. You have to imagine the almonds getting bigger—from the size of a fingernail to the size of a grape, a kiwi, an orange, then a watermelon. Finally the size of a rugby ball. That's the moment. Crunch, you crush them. You will taste the sunshine all the way from California, flooding right into your mouth.
The reason I bother going through this ritual is not because I like almonds. At every meal of the day, there were almonds on the table. There was no way of getting around them. So I just made up a way to eat them. Mom thought that if I ate a lot of almonds, the almonds inside my head would get bigger. It was one of the very few hopes she clung to.
Everybody has two almonds inside their head, stuck firmly on somewhere between the back of your ears and the back of your skull. In fact, they're called "amygdalae," derived from the Latin word for almond because their size and shape are exactly like one.
When you get stimulated by something outside your body, these almonds send signals into your brain. Depending on the type of stimulation, you'll feel fear or anger, joy or sorrow.
But for some reason, my almonds don't seem to work well. They don't really light up when they are stimulated. So I don't know why people laugh or cry. Joy, sorrow, love, fear—all these things are vague ideas to me. The words "emotion" and "empathy" are just meaningless letters in print.
6
The doctors diagnosed me with alexithymia, or the inability to express your feelings. They figured that I was too young, my symptoms different from Asperger's syndrome, and my other developments didn't show signs of autism. It's not necessarily that I was unable to express feelings, but more that I was unable to identify them in the first place. I didn't have a problem with making sentences or understanding them like people who'd damaged the Broca or Wernicke areas in the brain, which dealt with primary speech functions. But I couldn't feel emotions, couldn't identify other people's feelings, and got confused over the names of emotions. The doctors all said it was because the almonds inside my head, the amygdalae, were unusually small and the contact between the limbic system and the frontal lobe didn't function as smoothly as it should.
One of the symptoms of having small amygdalae is that you don't know how it feels to be afraid. People sometimes say how cool it'd be to be fearless, but they don't know what they're talking about. Fear is an instinctive defense mechanism necessary for survival. Not knowing fear doesn't mean that you're brave; it means you're stupid enough to stay standing on the road when a car is charging toward you. I was even more unlucky. On top of my lack of fear, I was limited in all my emotional functions. The only silver lining, the doctors said, was that my intelligence wasn't affected despite having such small amygdalae.
They advised that, since everyone has different brains, we should see how things go. Some of them made rather tempting offers, saying that I could play a big role in uncovering the mysteries of the brain. Researchers at university hospitals proposed long-term research projects on my growth, to be reported in medical journals. There would be generous compensation for taking part, and depending on the research results, an area of the brain might even be named after me, like the Broca area or Wernicke area. The Seon Yunjae area. But the doctors were met with a flat refusal from Mom, who was already sick of them.
For one thing, Mom knew Broca and Wernicke were scientists, not patients. She had read all kinds of books about the brain from her regular visits to the local library. She also didn't like that the doctors saw me as an interesting specimen rather than a human being. She had given up hope early on that the doctors would cure me. All they'd do is put him through weird experiments or give him untested medicines, observe his reactions, and show off their findings at a conference, she wrote in her diary. And so Mom, like so many other overprotective mothers, made a declaration that was both unconvincing and clichéd.
"I know what's best for my child."
On my last day at the hospital, Mom spat on a flower bush in front of the hospital building and said, "Those hacks don't even know what's in their own goddamned brains."
She could be so full of swagger sometimes.
7
Mom blamed stress during her pregnancy, or the one or two cigarettes she had smoked in secret, or the few sips of beer she couldn't resist in the last month before her due date, but it was obvious to me why my brain was messed up. I was just unlucky. Luck plays a huge part in all the unfairness of the world. Even more than you'd expect.
Things being the way they were, Mom may have hoped that I would at least have a large computer-level memory like in the movies, or some extraordinary artistic talent in my drawings—something to offset my lack of emotions. If so, I could've been on TV, and my sloppy paintings would've sold for more than ten million won. Unfortunately, I was no genius.
After the Mickey Mouse Hairband Incident, Mom began "educating" me in earnest. On top of its tragedy and misfortune, the fact that I didn't feel much basically implied serious dangers ahead.
No matter how much people scolded me with their angry looks, it didn't work. Screaming, yelling, raising eyebrows ... I couldn't grasp that all these things meant something specific, that there was an implication behind each action. I just took things at face value.
Mom wrote down a few sentences on colored paper and pasted them onto a larger piece of paper. She put them all over the walls.
When cars come too close to you → Dodge or run away.
When people come too close to you → Make way so that you don't bump into them.
When others smile → Smile back.
At the bottom, it said:
Note: For expressions, try to mirror the expression the other person makes.
It was a little too much for seven-year-old me to grasp.
The examples on the paper got longer and longer. While other kids were memorizing multiplication tables, I was memorizing these examples like studying the chronology of the ancient dynasties. I tried to match each item to the appropriate, corresponding reaction. Mom tested me regularly. I committed to memory each "instinctive" rule that other kids had no problem picking up. Granny tutted that this kind of cramming was pointless, but she still cut out the arrow shapes to glue onto the paper. The arrows were her job.
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