Chương 4: The Dream Borrowed Sooyeon's Face

Kichan woke to the sound of his own scream. More precisely, scream was not quite the right word. A strangled noise had leaked out from somewhere deep in his throat, and he was sitting halfway upright in bed, gasping. The room at the lodging was dark. Outside the window, the rain had stopped. Somewhere in the distance, a car passed over wet pavement. The refrigerator hummed softly. The world kept up the night as if nothing had happened. Kichan looked down at his wrist. There was nothing there.

Only sweat marked the place where rootlike lines had wrapped around him in the dream.

"I really am losing it." He grabbed the water bottle beside the bed and drank. The water was not cold. Even so, once it slid down his throat, he felt a little more alive. The real problem was his fingertip. The tiny seedling mark at the end of his index finger had become clearer. A thin split line like a pair of little cotyledons was embedded beneath the callus. It was too fine to be a tattoo and too clean to be a wound. Kichan scratched at it with a fingernail. It hurt. It hurt, and it did not come off.

He turned on his phone. 3: 17 a. m. In Korea, it would be daytime. For a moment he thought about messaging his mother, then gave up. If he sent, I have a weird seedling mark on my finger, the worry he got back would be more expensive than an international call. Instead, he tried taking a picture. He opened the camera and aimed the screen at his fingertip. It would not focus. No matter how many times he tapped, the mark smeared into a blur.

His finger showed up perfectly well, but that mark alone shivered as if it were underwater. Kichan lowered the phone.

"They said not to take pictures, and apparently they really meant it." The joke went cold almost as soon as it left his mouth. He lay back down. Sleep did not come. When he closed his eyes, he saw the cafe. The yellow bulbs, the iced Americano gone warm, Sooyeon's lips. And the scene of something wearing her face speaking to him in that level voice. He forced his eyes open again. The ceiling was empty. That only irritated him more. By morning, the fear had receded a little and the exhaustion had grown.

He ate the lodging's breakfast of hard bread and jam. The bread felt less like something made to keep people alive and more like an object intended to test the condition of their teeth.

"When I get back to Korea, I'm eating kimchi-jjigae." He muttered that while chewing. An elderly foreign couple at the next table glanced over, but Kichan did not have the energy to care. He decided to go home a day earlier than planned. For a moment he considered going back to the shop, but his feet would not take him there. The old man's You go still lingered in his ears. He had seen enough. No. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

He had already been caught deeply enough. On the return flight, he slept like someone passing out. The dream came again. This time it was not the cafe. Kichan was standing in his own room. The guitar leaned beside the bed, and his work laptop, receipts, and earphones lay scattered over the desk. Everything was familiar. Except for the small flowerpot in the middle of the room. It was the basil pot his mother had bought a long time ago.

In reality, it had dried up months earlier, and Kichan had never thrown it away because he felt guilty that he'd forgotten to water it. In the dream, the basil was dead too. Its leaves were shriveled brown, and the stem was so thin it looked as though it would snap if touched. Something with Sooyeon's face sat beside the pot.

"You remember this, right?" Kichan did not answer.

"You played guitar well, ate well, and somehow kept going to work." The thing continued in an almost administrative tone.

"But this, you just let dry out and die."

"Stop."

"Fine. Then look at this." The thing wearing Sooyeon's face tipped its chin slightly toward the pot. The tone was less mocking than mechanical, like an interface moving on to the next item on a screen.

"Save it." Kichan looked down at the pot.

"What?"

"This."

"It's dead."

"How do you know it's dead?" Irritation flared up in him.

"The leaves are dry, the stem's brittle, there's no water, and the soil is hard. Is that enough for you?"

"That's only what you saw on the outside." The thing tapped the soil with one finger.

"What about the inside?" At that moment, Kichan's fingertip went hot. Even in the dream, it hurt. The line at the end of his index finger felt as though it were glowing. He tried to pull his hand back, but his body would not listen. Instead, his fingertip descended slowly toward the pot. The instant it touched the soil, a strange sensation rose through him. Cold. Not fully dry. Hard on the surface, but a little remains below. A hollow channel inside the stem. A flow that seems broken but is not completely severed.

The tiny resistance at the tip of the roots. Kichan stopped breathing. This was not seeing. It felt as though the flowerpot itself were entering through his fingertip. The path of the roots, the blockage in the stem, the place where the leaves had dried and stuck, the moisture inside the soil—he felt all of it at once, both as an image and as a bodily sensation. The thing spoke.

"You see it, don't you?" Kichan could not answer.

"You were good at pressing guitar strings. Too hard and the sound dies. Too light and it doesn't ring properly." The comparison made terrible sense. Watering was similar. Not soaking the dirt, but waking the path that still remained. Not forcing open a blocked stem, but nudging the flow only as far as it could endure. Kichan grabbed the pot. Something flowed out through his fingertips. There was no light. No dramatic sound.

It only felt like tuning an old guitar string with extreme care, a tension somewhere slowly settling into place. One of the dried basil leaves slowly, very slowly, opened. Kichan jerked his hand away in shock. The thing nodded.

"There." Kichan snapped back at it.

"What is this?"

"What you can do now."

"Who said I wanted this?"

"You looked." It said that not like an explanation, but like a confirmation. That only made Kichan angrier.

"I looked at some weird paper, not signed up for whatever kind of tutoring this is." For a moment, the thing almost seemed to smile. Then its face flattened again into that blank expression.

"Too late. You're registered." Kichan woke up. He was in his airplane seat. The cabin lights were dim. The passenger beside him was asleep under a blanket. Outside the window was a darkness that might have been night or dawn. Kichan looked at his fingertip. The line was still there. And inside his palm lingered the damp smell of soil. By the time he reached Korea, he was completely drained. When he got home, his mother narrowed her eyes the moment she saw him in the entryway.

"Why does someone who just got back from a trip look like that?"

"Jet lag."

"You were gone for two days. What jet lag?" She had a point. From the living room, his father folded his newspaper and asked,"Did you have fun?" Kichan thought for a moment. The bookshop. The old man. The seedling mark on his fingertip. The dream wearing Sooyeon's face. The dead flowerpot.

"It was tiring." His father nodded. That was too short to count as a travel story, but his father had never been the sort to demand long explanations. Kichan went into his room. He dropped his backpack and was about to collapse onto the bed when he stopped. In the corner of the veranda. The dead basil pot was there. Actually there. The same pot from the dream. Kichan walked toward it slowly. The leaves were still brown. The stem still looked dry. He was just about to let out a sigh of relief.

Then he noticed one of the very lowest leaves. It was not completely brown. At the tip, a faint trace of green remained. Kichan froze. He crouched in front of the pot. His fingertips tingled. The path through the soil that he had felt in the dream came to him again, faint but real. He reached out, then stopped.

"No." He said it to himself.

"This is a coincidence." Coincidences did not answer. Instead, one basil leaf trembled very slightly, almost too little to see. That night, Kichan did not play guitar. He sat in front of the flowerpot for a long time with a cup of water beside him. Should he water it or not? Should he touch it or not? Or should he just throw it away? The normal choice would have been to throw it away. Kichan looked at the normal choice for a very long time. In the end, he picked up the cup.

"Just a little." He poured water carefully around the edge of the soil. Then he pressed the dirt very lightly with the tip of his index finger. The seedling mark went hot. He felt the path inside the pot. And from somewhere, very faintly, came the sound of a single guitar string being tuned. Kichan gritted his teeth. He was scared. But at the same time, a tiny part of him was hopeful. That part disgusted him even more. The voice from the dream laughed and whispered,"Good. Next."

Kichan snatched his hand back and swore.

"Ah, damn it. Fine. I'll do it. I said I'll do it." The instant the words left his mouth, the heat in his fingertip vanished as if it had never been there.