Flowers of Mold & Other Stories Read online

  Each time he had opened his eyes, he had heard the wail of the ambulance drawing closer. The blue sky had grown higher and bluer as the weather cleared, and people were carried away on stretchers. The ambulance went under the overpass. He thought he saw the words WELCOME TO BUSAN through the crack in the closed curtains of the ambulance.

  “Did you have a nice sleep?” A middle-aged man sitting up in a cot across the room greets him.

  “I don’t think I even dreamed,” he says. It’s only then that he registers the white bandage bound tightly around the older man’s head. There is blood seeping through the gauze.

  “You were out for four days. Now that you’re awake, I finally have someone to talk to. Were you with anyone on the bus?”

  He hazily recalls the words Please keep them safe … that had spun in the air. But the inside of his head feels like a jumbled-up puzzle.

  “Did anyone die?”

  “Nope. If the bus had kept rolling down the hill, no one would have survived. But there was a cow that was out grazing, and the bus hit it on the way down. That cow basically acted like a doorstop and stopped the bus.”

  “So only the cow died?”

  “Two cows, not one. Turns out it was pregnant. How’s your head? Doesn’t it hurt?”

  He touches his forehead and realizes there’s also a bandage around his own head. He then recalls the red seat that had crashed down on him.

  •

  A week passes before he’s able to wheel himself out of the ward. The nurse in the lobby buzzes the women’s ward on the sixth floor.

  “I’m sorry, but there’s no patient by the name of Choi Sun-ae.”

  He asks if there were patients who had been transferred to other hospitals.

  “No, we’re the closest hospital to the accident and anyone who was injured was admitted here.”

  There were some who suffered only minor injuries and were already released. Could she have been one of those people?

  He is still trying to piece together his memory. Just the day before, the name Choi Sun-ae had suddenly come to him. But the other pieces associated with this name eluded him. As the seat fell, its metal leg had stabbed him in the forehead. The doctor said his memory loss was the result of trauma to the brain, and although each case is different, his memory should return eventually. All at once, he remembers a distinct image instead of a word: two legs reflected in the shattered rearview mirror.

  •

  He is now able to go to the bathroom by himself. Piece by piece, his memory is coming back. He remembers standing between two Marilyn Monroes a year ago. As he is rounding a corner, he bumps into a young man. The young man walks very slowly, while holding onto an IV stand. His long hair, which comes down to his shoulders, is disheveled, and his face is badly bruised and cut. It’s a face that can look either seventeen or thirty-two years old. The young man smiles brightly as soon as he sees him, his eyes sparkling behind swollen lids.

  “Excuse me, but do I know you?” he asks, gazing into the young man’s face.

  The young man’s face stiffens and his eyes grow as dark as a well. “I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else. You look exactly like someone I know.” He moves the metal stand forward and gingerly takes a small step.

  “Were you on the bus that crashed?” he calls out.

  The young man, continuing in the other direction, shakes his head without looking back.

  Though it was for a mere second, the young man’s eyes seem all too familiar. But his thoughts are only of a girl named Choi Sun-ae. Who on earth is she?

  Then a new word flashes in his mind. He cautiously tries it out on his tongue. After a few attempts, he blurts it out. Mirabeau.

  Flowers of Mold

  From the fifth floor, the playground looks like a small pond. The heavy downpour from two days before has created muddy puddles that refuse to dry up. There are pools of rainwater everywhere—under the opposite end of the seesaw the woman straddles, even under the monkey bars the child hangs from.

  The woman is shelling kidney beans. Every time she twists open the shells, speckled beans peep out, nestled neatly in a row. If a bean happens to pop out onto the sand, she quickly reaches for it, raising her bottom in the air. Then her end of the seesaw rises a little to find its balance point.

  The child is catching his breath before swinging from the third bar to the fourth. If he wants to land on dry ground, he has no choice but to go all the way across. His pants are slipping down, and his shirt rides up to reveal a patch of pale skin.

  The woman sits hunched over with her back toward the man. From his vantage point all he can see is her plastic container on the sand. Soon the container brims with beans.

  “Are you planning to cook rice with beans tonight?” he asks, but his voice doesn’t reach her. “Who could forget that taste? The creamy texture? You mind if I have some?”

  Standing by the balcony window, he keeps smacking his lips. He can picture the downy fuzz covering the bean shells to the very fibers that get stuck under her thumbnails. Luckily the woman hasn’t noticed him watching. She is deep in concentration, like a student solving a math problem. The child still hasn’t crossed the monkey bars. With his teeth clenched, he continues to hang from the bar.

  From his back pocket, the man takes out a little notepad, curved from having been pressed against his rear end. Bits of food have dried between the pages, which stick together when he tries to turn them.

  Bean shells, seesaw, monkey bars, boy, puddles.

  The man writes down a few words that will help jog his memory. Later, the shells she chucks will become the only clue in identifying her garbage bag from the others. He doesn’t know which unit out of the ninety she lives in. Luckily there’s only one apartment building.

  On the news that morning, the weather person gave the forecast in a yellow raincoat while holding up a yellow umbrella. A low pressure system was moving in and developing across the western coast and all of Gyeonggi Province. Scattered spring showers were expected the entire week. She added that this early summer heat wave in April was the result of El Niño. If the heat and humidity continue, the man’s work will become difficult.

  He wakes to a woman’s shrieks. It’s a little past two in the morning. Glass shatters on the floor. Frantic footsteps echo throughout the apartment. A woman is screaming at the top of her lungs, but he can’t make out her words. His wardrobe and stereo system are placed against the wall, which is all that separates his room from 507. He gets up from his bed, walks over to the wardrobe, and listens. The front door of 507 opens, banging against the wall. Someone slips and lands with a heavy thud. A pot lid immediately follows, rattling noisily in the hallway until it eventually stops.

  “Don’t you dare come around here again!” she yells. The door slams and the bolt turns sharply.

  He tiptoes toward his front door and looks out the peephole. The corridor is as dark and gloomy as a cavern. Soon it will be time for the newspaper boy to come charging in with the morning paper. Nearly half an hour later, footsteps finally start down the stairs. The shoes don’t seem to be on properly; they sound like clogs. He waits until the footsteps have left the building.

  When he steps into his tiny storage closet, his shoulders get wedged between the walls. The sickening smell hits him full force. The humidity is already making his garbage rot. He takes a plastic bucket down from the shelf, puts on rubber gloves, and creeps down the stairs. To avoid attracting attention, he doesn’t turn on the landing light. Even in the dark, he knows these stairs like the back of his hand. The L-shaped stairway has a total of seventy-two steps—eight steps and then a landing, continuing in this pattern all the way down. The second step going down from the third to the second floor is higher than the others. At first this step caused him a lot of trouble. He even sprained his ankle once, but now he automatically adjusts his footing whenever he reaches this spot.

  Large rubber trash bins the size of small bathtubs line the flowerbed outside. Shadows fall a
cross the maple leaves the streetlights don’t reach. There’s no one in sight. The man pushes off the lid and steps up on the flowerbed ledge. There’s only one bag inside the bin since the garbage truck already came that morning. Because the bin comes nearly up to his chest, he has to bend over all the way to reach the bag. The smell at the bottom turns his stomach.

  His bucket barely holds twenty liters. In the beginning he hadn’t used a bucket. The next morning on his way to work he’d discovered the garbage had leaked, and a trail from the stairs ended right at his front door. The garbage bag is heavy. Even though he lifts it with care, putrid stuff drips onto his slippers.

  It’s a good thing he didn’t get rid of the small bathtub. When he first moved into this run-down, fifteen-year-old apartment, he repapered the walls, redid the floors, and replaced the bathroom sink. The porcelain tub and toilet were full of cracks. The navy blue tiles were mildewed and chipped with not a single tile intact. Some were missing entirely. One night after he washed his face and pulled the stopper to empty the sink, the dirty water that should have drained away poured onto his feet. It was a leak in the water pipe. While the plumber replaced the sink with one that wouldn’t get dirty so easily, he advised the man to get rid of the tub. The plumber kept pestering him: why did he insist on keeping a tub in this tiny bathroom, now that more and more people were opting for showers? The man ignored the plumber’s advice and kept the tub. However that night after the plumber left, the man regretted his decision. Though he was not tall by any means, water would slosh around his hips and overflow whenever he took a bath. The tub was so short that soaking his whole body was out of the question. If he tried to immerse his shoulders, he had to stick his feet out of the tub and place them on the taps, and if he tried to immerse his legs, he had to hang his rear end out of the tub. Before the man started this whole business, the bathtub was a real headache, just as the plumber warned.

  He places the garbage bag in the bathtub. It’s already starting to smell different. When summer comes he will have to stop. Even now, his 525-square-foot apartment reeks of rotten fish, though he disinfected everything with bleach and sprayed lemon-scented air freshener. Garbage spews from a rip in the overstuffed bag. He leans into the tub and struggles to untie the stubborn knot. Taking off his rubber gloves, he tries to undo it with his bare fingers, but it’s useless. He straightens and massages his sore back, cursing whoever tied the knot. He knows he shouldn’t blame someone for tying a garbage bag so tightly it doesn’t easily come undone. People never consider that their garbage might be opened. After all, that’s what he thought, too, until that incident.

  •

  The waste management program, which required everyone to use standard plastic garbage bags, started on January 1, 1995. The man was in bed all day after a drinking binge the night before. The doorbell rang. He wasn’t expecting anyone. After a few seconds, it rang again. He looked through the peephole, but the lens was so cloudy he had no choice but to open the door. Women who identified themselves as members of the apartment strata council crowded the doorway. There were over ten of them. Those who couldn’t fit in the narrow space spilled down the stairway to the fourth floor.

  An older woman, her face flecked with liver spots, nudged a young woman beside her. The young woman blurted, “Are you learning acupuncture by any chance?”

  It was only then he recalled the unopened box on top of his wardrobe. After purchasing acupuncture tools and a manual from a pushy salesman who had come to his office, he hadn’t opened the box once. How was it possible these strangers knew about his acupuncture set? The young woman stared at him, her gaze unflinching. He did receive a monthly newsletter from the acupuncture association.

  “Have you been snooping through my mail?” he blurted in a fit of anger.

  “We found him!” the women shouted in unison, and then began to whisper among themselves. “See? I told you it’d pay off. But we haven’t seen this one before.”

  The woman with the liver spots pushed the young woman aside. “So it’s the guilty dog that barks the loudest! And we’ve got one guilty dog right here!”

  A heavy garbage bag was passed from person to person up the stairs until it reached Liver Spots. She tossed it at the man’s feet. It burst open. Through the rip, he saw patches of the phrase Market delivery available written in red. It was his garbage from two days before. There was no doubt about it.

  “Do you know the trouble we went through to find you? We combed through every piece of stinking trash like we were picking lice. They’re right when they say persistence will pay off, because we finally came across this!”

  Liver Spots held up an envelope and shook it in his face. The words Acupuncture Association were written in Chinese characters and the man’s name and address were typed neatly in the bottom right hand corner. The envelope was dirty, as if flecks of kimchi had been stuck all over it.

  “Don’t pretend you didn’t know you had to use proper garbage bags. That’s not going to get you out of this.”

  A shout came from down the stairs. “It’s because of people like you our country’s in this state!”

  “Ever since I crossed the Taedong River with my father, I’ve been through all kinds of hell,” Liver Spots said, her voice trembling in anger. “But never, in my whole life, have I been forced to dig through someone else’s trash!” She let out a deep sigh.

  The man vaguely recalled hearing about the waste management program.

  “Don’t let this happen again.”

  One by one, the women filed down the stairs. The young woman who had been standing next to Liver Spots started to follow the rest of the group down, but stopped.

  “You live alone, right? Try to understand. It’s not just once or twice something like this has happened. I mean, how much can garbage bags cost that people are dumping their garbage secretly at night? Garbage trucks won’t collect something like this.”

  Liver Spots shouted from a few stairs down. “What are you doing? Hurry up! We have to go through the other bags.”

  “The fine is 100,000 won,” the young woman said as she headed down the stairs. “We’ll let it go this time, but that lady—she has arthritis. If you make her climb five flights of stairs again, you won’t get off the hook so easily.”

  Garbage spewed steadily from the rip. A trail of putrid discharge had leaked from the bag, dotting up the stairs to the man’s front door. He put on rubber gloves and picked up the garbage strewn about his entrance. Rotten potatoes and rice covered with green mold crumbled in his hands. He gagged repeatedly. Though the garbage was his own, it seemed completely foreign to him. He discovered crumpled-up letters; they were already somewhat flattened out. It was clear the women had already gotten to them. When he pictured them passing around his letters, snickering among themselves, anger surged through him. Even his own handwriting seemed alien.

  “The man you’re planning to marry isn’t right for you. I knew him long before you did. I’ve often seen a hidden side to him, a side you’re not aware of. But you haven’t taken my advice and you’ve gone ahead and picked a wedding date. Today I saw you standing side by side, handing out invitations around the office. Why can’t you see him for who he is? Is it like what you say—that love is blind? It’s not too late. I love you more than life itself—”

  Not a single letter was finished. Completely drunk, he had written letter after letter until early morning. In the end he hadn’t sent any of them. As soon as he picked up the bag, a soju bottle cap fell out of the rip and bounced off the ground. The noodles he had boiled to have with his soju had gone straight into the trash untouched. They were bloated, stuck to another unfinished letter.

  •

  The knot in the garbage bag finally loosens. As soon as the bag is untied, a fistful of trash spills into the tub. Strands of hair are tangled up in dust and cigarette butts. The man brings a folding chair, sets it up before the tub, and sits down. He puts on his rubber gloves again and pores over every piece. He recently re
placed the fluorescent light in the bathroom with a 100-watt bulb, and it’s blinding. The hair is easily over twenty centimeters long. He pulls the strands taut and examines them under the light. He picks up a cigarette butt burned right down to the filter, and peers at the teeth marks on the end of the filter. Looking at the contents splayed in the tub, he crosses his legs and spreads open his notepad on his knee.

  April 23. OB Lager bottle cap, Pulmuone soy bean sprouts, Shin Ramen, Coca-Cola, Chamnamu soju …

  The notepad is crammed with lists that look like items to find in an I-Spy book. He is more focused than a watch repairman who’s removing a part from a broken watch with tweezers. He inspects each thing meticulously, stopping occasionally to scrawl something down.

  Kool menthol cigarettes.

  His writing is barely legible, since he holds the pen by its end so that he won’t get his notepad dirty. Two instant udon noodle containers are stacked together, the kind that come with all-in-one soup mix and freeze-dried shrimp.

  Ottogi Vermont Curry.

  He also finds the peels from the potatoes and onions that would have gone into the curry.

  When he dumps out a twenty-liter garbage bag, the tub fills up halfway. The slimy cabbage leaves and potato peels slip through his gloved fingers. Foods rich in protein smell the worst. The foul stench of fish heads, entrails, and chicken bones is unbearable. A pink rubber glove surfaces with a chicken bone stuck to it. It’s a right-hand glove with the words Mommy’s Helping Hand printed on the wrist. The man flips through the pages of his notepad and finds the page that has a record of a left-handed rubber glove he had fished out a couple of days ago.