The window blinds were still up. The dawn light seeping through the glass was a deathly blue. By now, the member bastards should all be deep asleep. I lay in bed staring blankly at the ceiling, then got up. In that hushed hour, my feet left a deep echo when they touched the floor. I pulled on the white turtleneck sweater I’d tossed carelessly over the chair. Static made my hair puff out messily. I put on a black long padded coat and slung the duffel bag I’d shoved into the corner over my shoulder.
I opened the bedroom door slowly and stepped into the living room. My gaze went in turn to Cha Seokhyeon’s room, Yoon Jiwoo’s room, then Kang Yejun’s, before I headed for the entryway. I crushed my feet into my dirty white sneakers. The entryway sensor light came on, then went out when I opened the front door. I put a cigarette between my lips out of habit and waited for the elevator. The mouth of the elevator, stopped on the seventh floor, opened brightly in the dark.
The dawn wind was blowing hard as fuck. What a shitty day to leave. Even the wind was making a goddamn fuss. I irritably swept back the hair whipping around my face. The cigarette wouldn’t light properly either. I clicked my tongue, cupped one hand around it, and flicked the lighter. The wavering flame barely caught at the end of the cigarette. The moment I inhaled deeply, the irritation disappeared, and helplessness wrapped around my whole body. I lowered my eyes. I never knew why bad things made humans so boring.
Headlights spread over my feet. The taxi I’d called had arrived. I threw the cigarette onto the road and exhaled. With every step, white breath and cigarette smoke mixed together and crumbled behind me.
Inside the taxi, it was sweltering. The cold was shitty, but heat was fucking worse. I asked the taxi driver what kind of maniac ran the heater in the middle of winter and told him to turn it off. The driver twisted his face like I was talking bullshit, but when I smiled and said, “Please,” he shut up. He immediately listened when I asked him to turn off the radio because it was distracting, so, being polite, I even said thank you.
The taxi drove for a long time. It tore down the wide-open road without obstruction. I leaned back in the rear seat and shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my long padded coat. My fingers toyed with the side of my phone. Last night, I’d called my younger uncle. He hadn’t picked up. Instead, he’d sent a text.
「Yuhan Cathedral, 4 a.m.」
I stared indifferently at the streets flashing past the window. The streets at dawn were so silent they seemed dead, and I thought they looked perfect for killing someone.
*****
Hell had to exist. I really wanted to see my younger uncle suffer like a dog in the flames. I looked up at the impressive cathedral and smiled crookedly. Maybe because it had been built by a man with no faith whatsoever, the place had an eerie chill to it, like a ghost story. It lived up to its price as a place tucked away in an isolated corner where secret acts took place. When I came here with my maternal grandfather as a child, I used to ask all sorts of questions.
Why isn’t anyone praying?
Why is that lattice window crooked?
I really had been as innocent as I looked. When I went inside, my footsteps rang heavily. I saw the familiar back of a man sitting in the very front pew. It was ridiculous, the way he was dressed in priest’s robes from who knew where. I sat beside him. The man in priest’s robes smelled of bitter cigarette smoke, faint aftershave, and thick blood. I threw my bag on the floor and spoke without feeling.
“Father, I have come to confess my sins.”
“What sin have you committed?”
“I killed a person.”
I blinked slowly, bored. When was I going to get to the broadcasting station? I was so tired I could die.
“When did you kill them?”
“In a dream last night.”
My answer must have pleased my younger uncle quite a bit, because he burst out laughing. Only then did I properly look at him. He hadn’t changed much. If anything, he seemed even younger. He had a baby face to begin with, but since my younger uncle had been born late, there wasn’t much of an age gap between us. I could have called him older brother, honestly. When I was little, playing with him had been the most fun.
“Why did you come find me?”
“I need a favor.”
“A favor? Nothing big, right?”
“It’s not something I need to take to Grandfather.”
Rigid human figures were set into the brightly colored lattice window. I didn’t know what the fuck those pictures were supposed to mean, but the people beneath the sun seemed to represent “good.” Even now, just like when I was a child, the figures with their stiff faces were strange.
The middle was subtly misaligned. If you pushed that lattice window, stairs leading underground appeared. Once you went down those stairs, the reek of blood hit you like hell. It was impressive, really, how people could work in a place that smelled worse than food waste. I remembered the place I’d visited once and smiled.
“You’re definitely going to fall into hellfire, Uncle.”
“What’s with the curse out of nowhere?”
“If you get rolled around in there enough, that face pretending to be relaxed will fall apart, won’t it?”
My younger uncle put on an unreadable expression.
“I really love seeing you make a truly fucked-up face.”
“…Crazy bastard. What twisted your mood this time?”
“Some idiot bastard pissed me off.”
My younger uncle took out a cigarette and asked, “Want one too?” I nodded and quietly accepted the cigarette he put between my lips. Cigarettes smoked in a fake cathedral tasted pretty damn good. You know how it is. Honest bastards make you want to drag them down into filth. Clean bastards make you want to roll them in the dirt. Innocent bastards make you want to throw them out like whores.
Park Yuhyeon was a clean bastard. Whether because of Father’s influence or his own nature, even his bad deeds were half-assed. And he despised drug addicts. That started when he became a prosecutor, so Father must have told him around then. That he hadn’t had an affair, that Mother had drugged him and raped him. I should have seen Father’s face when he confessed that. How ashamed must that honest man have been? What kind of face had that half-assed Park Yuhyeon made?
Fuck. I put on an innocent smile. If I’d known that Park Yuhyeon bastard would get filthy enough to kill me, older brother or not, I would have rolled him around until he made a dirty face too. I shouldn’t have held back just because he was Father’s son. Park Yuhyeon had probably killed me believing in Father and in my mother, who was insane over Father. Well, whatever. There was still time. There was still further down to fall. There were still countless filthy things left to roll him through. I erased my smile and spoke in a low voice.
“Your Idol. Investigate every single contestant on that show for me.”
“What’s that?”
“An idol debut program. I’m going on it too.”
“…Your grandfather won’t let that slide. He already hates that you’re an idol.”
“He won’t kill me. Grandfather treasures me terribly, doesn’t he?”
Not that I planned to stand out too much. I would have to ask the producer nicely to cut down my screen time. Hopefully he’d listen nicely while I was asking nicely.
All I needed was for a few fleeting scenes of me looking close to Yoon Jiwoo to air. I had to appear as garnish centered around Yoon Jiwoo for Park Yuhyeon to bite the bait. If I openly clung to him and acted close, that bastard would get suspicious instead. He thought of me as some socially maladjusted psychopath. I exhaled cigarette smoke and said,
“Every trainee, every celebrity on that show. And the producer too. Dig up everything.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“I’m going to take my sweet time crawling up through a trash heap.”
Cleaning up trash was just as worthwhile as ruining people with trash. I tapped the floor with the dirty sole of my sneaker. If something got dirty after you used it to your heart’s content, you just threw it away.
What was the point of holding on to it? It wasn’t as if I lacked money or power. Dirty sneakers went in the trash can, and irredeemable garbage dumps got thrown into hellfire.
“It sounds fun, doesn’t it? Starting with the little pieces of trash and fucking up the whole nauseating dump.”
When I said that with an innocent smile, my younger uncle drew a strange smile of his own.
“Then what do I get out of it?”
“Older Uncle.”
“…….”
“I’ll clean up our adorable older uncle for you.”
Bad things made humans boring. Cigarettes did that, and drugs did that. My older uncle was a junkie. He’d been using drugs since high school. Of course a human being eaten away by drugs did stupid bullshit. My younger uncle, born so late, had been forced to endure that stupid bullshit from a very young age. And it still hadn’t ended. Every minute, every second that man breathed, he gnawed away at the family fortune, some worthless bastard hitting my younger uncle and screaming for drugs. In that way, the adorable idiot extended a life so dull it was laughable.
It was thanks to my maternal grandfather leaving him alone. My maternal grandfather had always been like that. Even while cursing, “That damn worthless bastard!” he let Mother do whatever she wanted, and he let my older uncle become a moron. It wasn’t because he had any particular affection for them. They simply weren’t reason enough to clean up. They didn’t bother him, so he left them alone.
Then all I had to do was create a reason for him to be bothered. What mattered was who created that reason. My maternal grandfather was someone who would leave me alone if I cleaned up my older uncle. Because even if he didn’t love his own children, he was terribly fond of me, his grandson. Because he wanted me to inherit this secret and magnificent family business.
Whenever his anger flared up, my maternal grandfather would lament, “It’s my sin for giving birth to human garbage!” Then he would grip my hand and say, “Yuha, you must succeed me! You take after me perfectly, so you’ll do well!” with his eyes blazing. Those unwavering eyes pissed me off so badly I became an idol. But that idol life turned out to be fucking boring. Bastards who weren’t even gangsters played gangster and did disgusting shit, and that wasn’t even funny.
Idols, actors, producers—there was trash everywhere. There was so much trash that the humans who weren’t trash suffocated, buried inside the heap. Around the time of our debut, a music show producer openly fondled a rookie girl idol’s ass and spewed bullshit like, “You don’t have any backing, do you? Your agency’s broke too. If you want to come on music shows again, you need to look good to me. Huh?” From the way that producer bastard’s hands moved, he was clearly a repeat offender. But the staff around him pretended not to see, and the idol bastards just greeted that producer sweetly.
How pathetic. Those nobodies, those pieces of shit with nothing to their names, making disgusting faces because they wanted to protect their own bowls of rice. I wanted to twist those shameless faces out of shape, so I acted right away. I beat the producer bastard to shit. I drove my elbow into the bastards who tried to stop me and kept beating him until every tooth in his mouth was gone. Then I smiled brightly at the bastards standing around me with dazed faces and said, “Does someone want to kill me? The producer bastard sexually harassed that woman, and I assaulted the producer bastard, so who kills me next to keep the game going?” Then I added,
“Oh, this is a game, right? That’s why all of you were standing around doing nothing.”
Their faces back then had been no joke. It had been fucking fun. Seeing those faces made me feel like beating that shitty producer bastard had been worth it. It was the same anywhere. Trash only became entertaining when you stomped on it hard enough.
“You mean… you’re saying you’ll do this work?”
“What’s stopping me?”
“You became an idol because you didn’t want to do it.”
“Being an idol turned out to be even less fun.”
“…….”
“Are you having fun, Uncle?”
My younger uncle didn’t answer. I pulled the cigarette, now reduced to a butt, from my lips and placed it in his palm. Leaving my stiffened younger uncle there, I grabbed my duffel bag and walked outside.
It was still dark dawn outside. I leaned against the cathedral and took out my phone. They were up early. Kang Yejun and Yoon Jiwoo had contacted me. The gay bastard was making a fuss, asking where the hell I’d gone when today was our first shoot and whether I’d packed my things for the broadcast dorm. Yoon Jiwoo had only left a short message: See you later at the broadcasting station. I was about to put my phone away, then stopped and smiled. My younger uncle had sent me a text.
「Investigation. Five days.」
A black car stopped close by. The window lowered, and the man in the driver’s seat bowed his head to me. This bastard looked like a gangster too. Did bastards who knew how to use knives have their faces change after the fact or something? I met the frozen dawn wind and climbed into the back seat. Then I sent my younger uncle a text.
Let’s dig into one gangster bastard too. Ha Jaeyoung.