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By Root 359 0

and turns back. What was I doing? He hangs his head. The day before Mom went missing, he went out drinking with his co-workers, but it didn’t end well. His co-worker Kim, who was usually respectful and polite, made a subtle dig at him after a few drinks, pronouncing him “clever.” At work, Hyong-chol was in charge of the sale of the apartments near Songdo, in Inchon, and Kim oversaw the sale of the apartments near Yongin. Kim’s remark referred to Hyong-chol’s idea of giving out concert tickets as promotional gifts for people coming to the model home. This wasn’t his idea but that of his sister, the writer. When Chi-hon was over at his house, his wife gave her a bath mat that had been the promotional gift for the last apartment sale, and his sister said, “I don’t know why companies think homemakers like this kind of thing.”

He had been wondering what to give as a promotional gift this time, so he asked, “Well, what do you think would be memorable?”

“I’m not sure, but people quickly forget about things like this. Wouldn’t it be better if it were a fountain pen or something? Think about it. Do you think your wife would be happy if you got her kitchen gadgets for her birthday? If you get a mat to promote an apartment sale, you’d just forget about it. But I think I would be pleasantly surprised if it was a book or a movie ticket, and I’d probably remember it. If I had to make plans to use it, I’d keep remembering how I got it. Am I the only one who thinks like that?” His sister left the mat behind when she went home.

At a meeting the following week, someone mentioned promotional gifts. Everyone liked his suggestion of a cultural gift. A singer with many middle-aged fans was performing, in a convenient coincidence, a long-running concert series, so Hyong-chol got a block of tickets. He was praised by his boss; perhaps it was a singer his boss liked. A survey showed that the concert tickets heightened the company’s image. Though this probably had nothing to do with the promotional gifts, his apartments in Songdo had almost all sold, whereas the occupancy rate of Kim’s Yongin apartments stood at only 60 percent. So, when Kim made the remark, Hyong-chol just laughed it off, saying it was dumb luck, but after a few more drinks, Kim commented that if Hyong-chol used his clever brain somewhere else he could have become the head prosecutor. Kim knew that Hyong-chol had gone to a law college and had studied for the bar exam. He went on to comment that he didn’t know what scheme Hyong-chol had used to get promoted so quickly when he wasn’t even a graduate of Yonsei University or Koryo University, which produced the main power players in the company. In the end, Hyong-chol dumped out the liquor that Kim had poured in his glass and left. The next morning, when his wife said she would visit their daughter, Chin, instead of going to Seoul Station, he’d planned to meet his parents himself. Father wanted to stop by his younger son’s, who had just moved to a new place. Hyong-chol had meant to pick them up and drop them off at his brother’s, but once he was at work he felt a chill coming on and had a headache. Father did say that he could find his way.… Instead of going to Seoul Station, Hyong-chol went to a sauna near work. As he sweated in the sauna, which he often visited the day after he drank too much, Father was getting on the train without Mom.

As a boy, Hyong-chol made up his mind to become a prosecutor to get Mom to return home. She had left because she was disappointed by Father. One spring day, as flowers bloomed all around the village, Father had brought home a woman with fair skin, who smelled fragrant, like face powder. When the woman came in through the front gate, Mom left through the back. The woman, trying to buy her way into Hyong-chol’s cold heart, topped his lunch every day with a fried egg. He would storm out of the house with his lunch container, which the woman had wrapped carefully in a scarf, and he’d leave it on top of the large condiment jars in the back yard and go to school. His siblings, watching him always,