Mom keeled over, blood spraying across the ground. I pushed the glass door to get outside, but Granny screamed and blocked it with her body. The man dropped the hammer and sliced the air with the knife in his other hand. I pounded on the glass door, but Granny shook her head, barricading it with all her might. She said something to me again and again, half weeping. The man bore down on Granny. She wheeled around to face him and roared. But just that once. Her big back covered my sight. Blood splattered over the glass door. Red. More red. All I could do was watch the glass door turn redder and redder. No one stepped in during that whole time. I saw a couple of riot police, all frozen. Everyone just stood there and watched, as if the man and Mom and Granny were putting on a play. Everyone was the audience. Including me.
18
None of the victims had any relationship to the man. He was later discovered to be a very typical working-class citizen living an ordinary life. He had graduated from a four-year college and worked in the sales department of a small business for fourteen years before he was suddenly laid off due to the recession. He had opened a fried chicken diner with his severance pay but had to close it in less than two years. In the meantime, he fell into debt, and his family left him. He shut himself in his house afterward, for three and a half long years. He never left his semi-basement room aside from grocery shopping at a nearby supermarket and visiting the public library every so often.
Most of the books he checked out from the library were introductory manuals about martial arts, self-defense, and wielding a knife. But the books found in his house that he owned were mostly self-help books about rules for success and positive habits. On his shabby desk was a will he wrote in large, crude letters as if he didn’t want anyone to miss it.
If I see anyone smiling today, I will take them with me.
His journal contained further traces of his hatred of the world. Many sections implied that he felt an urge to kill whenever he saw people who smiled in this miserable world. As details of his life and background rose to the surface, the public’s interest shifted from the crime itself to a sociological analysis of what inevitably drove him to do what he did. Many middle-aged men found his life no different from their own and despaired. The public grew more sympathetic toward the man and began focusing on the realities of Korean society, which had allowed this to happen. No one seemed to care about the victims he had killed.
The incident made the headlines for a while, with titles like “Who Made Him a Murderer?” or “Korea: Where a Smile Will Kill You.” Before long, as quickly as foam dissolves, even those subjects were no longer talked about. It took only ten days.
Mom was the only survivor. But they said her brain was in a deep sleep with very little chance of waking, and that even if it did, she would not be the person I knew. Soon after, the victims’ families held a joint funeral. Everyone was crying except for me. They all wore the expressions you’d expect, standing before your brutally murdered family members.
A female police officer stopped by the funeral, and as she bowed to the bereaved, she burst into tears and couldn’t stop. Later I saw her at the end of a hallway being scolded by an elderly male police officer. You’ll witness this kind of thing every so often, so train yourself to be numb. Just then, his eyes met mine. He stopped talking. I just bowed at him as if nothing had happened and walked past to the restroom.
I heard people whispering about me for showing no emotion during the three-day-long funeral. They all made different guesses. He’s probably too shocked. What would a teenager know? His mom’s good as dead, and he’s practically an orphan, but it hasn’t sunk in yet, that must be why.
They might’ve expected visible symptoms of sorrow, loneliness, or frustration from me. But floating inside me were not emotions, but questions.
What had Mom and Granny been laughing so gleefully about?
Where would we’ve gone after the naengmyeon restaurant if that hadn’t happened?
Why did the man do that?
Why didn’t he break the television or the mirror, instead of killing people?
Why did no one step in and help before it was too late?
Why?
Thousands of times a day, I asked myself question after question until I went back to square one and started all over again. But I had no answer to any of them. I even shared my questions with some policemen and a therapist, who listened with worried expressions, who said I could tell them anything. But nobody could give me answers. Most stayed silent, others tried to answer but gave up. I knew why. It was because no one had the answers. Both Granny and the man were dead. Mom would be silent forever. So the answers to my questions were gone forever, too. I stopped asking my questions out loud.