Chương 3: The Tourist Antiquarian Bookshop

He had not realized it from looking at a map, but Italy was really far. The airport was huge, the signs were everywhere, and Kichan learned very quickly that the amount of English he knew was thinner than he'd thought. His body, unable to sleep properly on the plane, felt folded from shoulders to waist like a sheet of paper, and the sandwich he'd eaten during his layover had technically been called a sandwich, though in flavor it had been closer to a damp receipt.

"They say travel helps you grow." After clearing immigration, Kichan adjusted the backpack he had chosen over a suitcase. Forget growth. His back just hurt. On the bus to Milano Centrale, he stared out the window. Strange buildings. Strange signs. Strange people. The excitement he had expected felt smaller than it should have. In its place, thoughts of his phone battery, the exchange rate, and hotel check-in times loomed much larger. No matter how heartbroken a person was, reality still demanded a charger.

Kichan dropped off his things at the lodging and headed back out immediately. The clue he had come for was still pitifully thin. North. Toward the mountains. A tourist bookstore sign. The real book is in the room inside. He fed every possible phrase into the map app—antiquarian bookshop, antique bookstore, old bookstore, used rare books. The results were far too many, and from the photos alone most of them looked fully prepared to pry open a tourist's wallet. Kichan bought a coffee and stood by the roadside.

Italian coffee was small. The cup was small. The amount was small. The time it took to drink was small. The price, unfortunately, was not.

"Is this culture?" He took one sip and frowned. The bitterness lingered on his tongue. If he'd come here with Sooyeon, would she have said this was nice? The instant the thought appeared, Kichan shook his head. Bringing the memory of getting dumped all the way to Italy was an absurdly diligent way to cling to the past. He looked back at his phone. The odd line beneath the comment he had screenshotted yesterday was still there. North. Toward the mountains. A tourist bookstore sign.

The real book is in the room inside. And beneath it, that thin line. Kichan zoomed the map in. For some reason, the line seemed to overlap with an actual route. A road heading north from Milan, winding between a small lake and the foot of the mountains. It was too uncomfortable to dismiss as coincidence, and he refused to call it fate. He bought a cheap train ticket. The train was quieter than he'd expected. The city receded. Low houses, trees, and mountain shadows passed the window one after another.

The sky was cloudy, but it did not rain. Watching the scenery slide by, Kichan dozed off. In the dream, he was sitting in the cafe again. Sooyeon was not across from him. Instead, a single old sheet of paper lay on the table. On it was a drawing that looked vaguely like a plant. But the roots did not sink below the table—they stretched toward the coffee in his cup. The leaves opened and closed like lungs, and the stem trembled tight as a guitar string. Someone behind him spoke.

"When you play guitar, you look fine." In the dream, Kichan clenched his teeth.

"Can you stop saying that already?" The voice did not answer. Instead, one tiny line, like the first sprout of a seedling on the page, slipped into his fingertip. Kichan jerked awake. The train had stopped at a small station. He could not understand the announcement, but the blue dot on his map app told him he was close to where he needed to be. He got off in a hurry. The little town sat somewhere between rural village and tourist stop.

Narrow alleys ran between old stone walls, and the bell tower of an old church stood under low clouds. The souvenir shops sold postcards, magnets, and saint paintings that all looked vaguely familiar from somewhere else. Kichan walked through the alleys with his map open. Most of the signs meant nothing to him. Then he heard singing from somewhere. At first he thought it was music from a speaker. It wasn't. The sound came from beyond a half-open window farther down the alley—a real person singing. Opera, maybe.

Art song, maybe. Or maybe someone was simply practicing classical vocals. Kichan had no idea what the lyrics meant. But somehow he understood how it ought to be sung. Where to place the breath. Where to release it. How open the throat had to be so the sound would lift instead of striking the wall. Even the fact that if you pushed the first note too hard, the next one would collapse. Without realizing it, Kichan almost followed that opening note under his breath before stopping himself.

"Have I lost it?" He had nearly joined a stranger's song in the middle of an alley in a foreign country. Clearing his throat for no reason, he quickened his steps. Then his fingertip gave a tiny throb. Kichan stopped and looked down at his hand. There was nothing there. His fingertips looked normal. But the shape of the sound he'd just passed still lingered somewhere inside his throat. He shook his head, as if he could fling the sensation away. Then, at the turn of one corner, he stopped. It was a small shop.

Old books had been stacked inside the window in a way that looked intentionally charming, and beside them sat leather notebooks, fountain pens, and postcards that tourists would love. A sign above the shop read, in English: Old Books & Memories It looked too much like something made for tourists. That only made it more suspicious. Kichan opened the door. A little bell chimed. Inside, the air smelled of paper, dust, and old wood. The owner was an elderly man sitting behind the counter. He smiled when he saw Kichan.

"Korean?" Kichan blinked.

"Yes. Korea." The old man nodded.

"Many Korean. Drama. Music."

"Ah. Right." Kichan smiled awkwardly. He took a slow look around the shop. The books looked old, but most of them were the kind of thing a tourist might buy. An old cookbook. A worn volume of poetry. A suspiciously clean picture book pretending to be medieval. A book that wanted to look like a Latin Bible but had a far too friendly price tag. The real book is in the room inside. Kichan glanced toward the back of the shop. There was a curtain. An old green curtain.

The old man followed his gaze, and some of the smile left his face.

"No photo." A chill ran down Kichan's spine. That was much too precise a thing to say to someone who had not yet asked anything.

"I didn't..." The old man raised a hand and stopped him.

"No photo. No scan. No copy." Then he added, very slowly,"Only look." Kichan's mouth went dry. He had meant to joke. To ask whether the part about books reading people was true too. What came out instead was much more ordinary.

"How much?" The old man studied him for a long moment. Then he reached beneath the counter and took out an old key.

"Not for sale." He walked toward the curtain. Kichan followed. The room beyond was much narrower than the shop. There were no windows. A single small bulb hung from the ceiling. A bookshelf stood against the wall, but there were not many books on it. Instead, a few volumes had been set apart with wide spaces between them. The old man opened the innermost drawer. From inside, he took out a thin box. It was wrapped in cloth. When he folded the cloth back, several old sheets of paper appeared.

There were too few of them to call it a book, but they were too old to call them loose pages either. The paper had yellowed with age, and the edges looked so fragile they might crumble if touched. On them were drawings of plants. Kichan stopped breathing. They resembled the blurry images he had seen on his monitor. But they were not the same. The lines here felt more alive. The roots looked like roots, but also like blood vessels, but also like notation on a score.

The leaves opened like lungs, yet if he looked more closely they also resembled the lines in a human palm. Kichan leaned in. His fingertips tingled. This time it was not his imagination. The vibration began at the tip of his index finger, climbed into his palm, then spread past his wrist and along the inside of his arm. It was not the lingering sensation left after pressing guitar strings for too long. It felt as if the strings themselves had appeared inside his fingers. Instinctively, he tried to pull back.

At that instant, the lines on the paper seemed to move. Kichan's eyes widened. They were not moving. No—nothing had moved, and yet his mind understood them as movement. Roots do not descend. They hold. Water does not flow. It remembers. Leaves do not breathe. They receive. The meaning entered his head. He had not read a sentence. No one had explained anything. But somehow Kichan knew what those lines were trying to do.

A completely foreign kind of knowledge settled into place inside him wearing the face of something that had always belonged there.

"What the hell?" He barely got the words out. The old man looked at him.

"You understand?" Kichan could not answer. To say he understood felt wrong. He had not read it. To say he had heard it was wrong too. There had been no sound. To say he had seen it with his eyes was also wrong. His fingertips had known before his eyes did. He looked down at the papers again. Tiny characters ran along the margins. They were less like writing than like tendrils, or ornamental notes in sheet music, or scratches left by someone holding their breath a very long time ago.

One by one, those characters seemed to slip inward. Kichan sucked in a breath. At that moment, the bulb flickered. Once. Twice. On the third flicker, the room went dark for an instant before the light came back. The old man spoke in a low voice.

"Enough." He reached for the cloth to cover the pages. Without meaning to, Kichan reached out. His hand did not touch the paper. But right before it would have, the air between his fingertips and the page trembled very faintly. Inside Kichan's ears, he heard the taut sound of a guitar string just before it was tuned. Then someone spoke. The voice resembled Sooyeon's, but it was not Sooyeon.

"Registered." Kichan staggered. The old man grabbed his arm.

"No more." Kichan shook his head.

"What just..." His words tangled in his mouth, neither English nor Korean coming properly. The old man placed the papers back into the box and covered them with the cloth. The movement was not hurried, but it was absolute.

"You go."

"Wait. I just saw..."

"You go." The old man's voice dropped slightly. There was more warning than explanation in it. Kichan was all but driven out of the inner room. Outside the display window, two tourists stood laughing over postcards. The afternoon was so ordinary it almost made his knees give out. He turned back before leaving the shop.

"That paper. What is it?" The old man did not answer. Instead, he slid a small scrap of paper across the counter. Kichan picked it up. There was no address on it. No name. Only a single thin line. A line like the root from the drawing he'd just seen. The old man said,"Already read." It took Kichan several seconds to understand. Already read. By who? By me? By the book? He stepped outside. The little bell rang behind him as the door closed. Sunlight slanted through the alley.

Kichan looked down at the slip in his hand. The line did not move. But his fingertips kept trembling. On the train back to his lodging, Kichan listened to no music. Mountains, lake water, and low houses slid past beyond the window. He opened his palm. There was a faint mark on the tip of his index finger. Just below the callus where guitar strings had worn his skin. It branched like a tiny pair of seed leaves.

"No." He rubbed at it. It did not come off. That night, rain fell outside the window of his lodging. Kichan lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. He was exhausted enough to die, but sleep would not come. The lines from the paper kept reconnecting in his head. Roots. Waterways. Breath. Memory. He flipped over his pillow and shoved his face into it.

"Damn it. I never should've come." Before the words had even finished, sleep dropped over him. In the dream, he was back in the cafe. This time Sooyeon sat across from him. But something about her expression was subtly off. She was not smiling, and she was not angry either. It felt as if someone had borrowed only the face from his memory and fitted it on in a hurry. The thing with Sooyeon's face lifted its coffee cup and said,"You were good at guitar." Pain throbbed at the tips of Kichan's fingers.

An old botanical sketch lay spread across the table. The roots in the drawing were gripping his wrist. In a perfectly calm voice, the thing said,"So now let's try something else." This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.