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By Root 367 0

knowing what to make of what the woman told him, he continues to give out flyers after she has left. His entire family has posted flyers and distributed them everywhere, from Seoul Station to Namyong-dong, from restaurants and clothing stores to bookstores and Internet cafés. When the flyers were torn off because the family had posted them in a place they weren’t supposed to, they reposted them in the same place. They didn’t limit it to the area around Seoul Station, either, but handed out and posted flyers in Namdaemun, Chungnim-dong, and even in Sodaemun. They didn’t receive a single phone call from the ad they had placed in the newspaper, but some people did call after seeing the flyers. They received a tip that someone like Mom was at a restaurant and rushed over, but it wasn’t her; it was a woman around Mom’s age who worked there. Once, a caller said that he had invited Mom into his house, and carefully spelled out his address on the phone; filled with expectation, they ran over there, but the address itself didn’t exist. There was even someone who said that he would find Mom for them if they would pay him the five-million-won reward up front. But even these calls became sparse after about two weeks. The members of his family, who had rushed around with hope-filled hearts, would often find each other sitting at the base of the Seoul Station clock tower, dejected. When people crumpled the flyer as soon as it was handed to them and threw it on the ground, his younger sister, the writer, picked it up, smoothed it out, and gave it to someone else.

His sister, who came to Seoul Station with an armful of flyers, stands next to him. Her dry eyes glance at his. He relays the woman’s words and asks, “Should we go to the Yongsan 2-dong office and look around?” His sister asks, “Why would Mom go there?” Looking despondent, she says, “We can stop by later,” and, addressing the people brushing past them, says loudly, “It’s our mom—please take a look at it before throwing it away,” and hands out flyers. Nobody recognizes his sister, whose picture is sometimes featured in the daily paper’s culture section when she publishes a new book. It must be more effective to combine yelling and giving out flyers, as his sister does. People don’t throw away her flyers as soon as they turn around, the way they do with his. There aren’t many places Mom might go to, other than his siblings’ houses. This is the root of his and his family’s agony. If Mom had some places she might head for, they would focus their search there, but because there isn’t any such place, they have to comb the whole city. When his sister asked, “Why would Mom go there?” he didn’t immediately realize that his first job in this city had been at the Yongsan 2-dong office. Because that was thirty years ago.

The wind has turned cool, but beads of sweat dot his face. He’s a few years past fifty, a marketing director for a developer of apartment buildings. Today, Saturday, is not a workday, but if Mom hadn’t gone missing he would be at the model house in Songdo. His company is recruiting last-minute buyers for units in a large apartment complex there, which will soon be completed. He’s worked day and night to reach 100 percent occupancy. All through the spring, he was in charge of the ad campaign and worked on selecting an ordinary housewife as the model, instead of going for the typical professional. During that time, he never got home before midnight; he was so busy with the construction of the model house and wining and dining journalists. On Sundays, he would often escort the CEO and other executives to golf courses in Sokcho or Hoengsong.

“Hyong-chol! Mom’s missing!” His younger brother’s urgent voice on a midsummer afternoon created a fissure in his daily life, shattering it as if he’d set foot on thin ice. Even as he heard that Father and Mom had been about to get on the subway heading for his brother’s house, but that the car had left with only Father aboard, leaving Mom behind in the station, and that she couldn’t be located, it didn’t occur to him that this would lead