The trouble with the apartment began last Tuesday, when three men came to take the windows away. I peered around the front door and pretended to understand the tall one’s staccato words, which blurred in my ears. When he finally paused and tugged on the bottom of his green utility vest, I bowed slightly into the small silence between us. He pointed to the back of the apartment and walked past me through the kitchen to the living room. A musky industrial scent filled the air as the other two men followed him to the balcony.
Was it the gas meter? The water dispenser? Or the washer hook-ups? I didn’t know how to ask these things, so I gazed out the door past the clusters of identical high rises into the hazy Bukhan mountains. The early afternoon smelled like a construction site. People were flocking north of the Han River for this air I could barely breathe, this air that would darken the inside of my nose by day’s end.
But then again, what exactly was I doing here in the Lucky Apartment complex in the northeast of Seoul? I had recently arrived on a research fellowship with only a handful of Korean words. Komo, my paternal aunt, never told me why I’d left Korea as a baby to live with her and Uncle in Chicago. She never spoke of my parents or of my Korean name as if my life had started with her.
I walked into the bedroom, next to the living room, and sat on the floor cushion in front of the sutra table, pushing away a draft of the film script I was working on.
Three men just came to my door, I typed on my laptop. They are on the balcony now, making a lot of noise. What should I do?
The shuffling and mumbling continued; then the front door slammed, leaving the apartment cold, breezy. When I stepped onto the balcony, the vertical blinds were flapping hard against the guardrail, the wind pulling me closer to the windowless edge.
How did they remove the glass panels from the sliding doors so quickly? And when would they bring them back?
I looked over the edge, and saw myself tumbling forward, down through the crisp open space of autumn, disintegrating into pieces before I hit bottom. I saw Oppah, my big brother gazing up at me from the parking lot below with a cigarette in his mouth, leaning against his SUV, smiling. He wasn't in his grey robes, the ones I’d seen him wearing at the temple where I first met him a few months earlier. He was in his black-and-white golf attire, light breezy slacks with a polo top. He was probably wondering what I wanted to do, if I wanted to see the latest blockbuster film, if I’d eaten dinner yet.
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