Chapter Five
JL Entertainment HQ, Hannam-dong. February 23, 2026. 3:11 p.m.
It had been eight days and I had not gone insane.
I want to put this on the record because eight days is, by the standards of the books my college roommate Lola read for her psych minor, the median duration of an acute psychotic episode if one is going to declare itself an episode. Eight days is the floor of the window. I had been counting. I had not, on Day Three or Day Five or Day Seven, gone to a doctor; I had instead gone to my closet, opened my mother's old Bloomingdale's suitcase, taken out the gray Theory blazer she had bought me for my Stanford graduation, and worn it to work three days in a row because the blazer was the most rational article of clothing I owned and I had needed, those three days, the rationality of its shoulders. On Day Eight I was wearing it again. The blazer was beginning to smell faintly of me, which is to say faintly of green fig and faintly of fear, and I had decided this was fine. There were worse smells.
The Day Eight situation was this: I was the most junior person at a strategy meeting on the fourteenth floor of JL Entertainment, and the most senior person at the meeting was the chairman, who had not spoken to me since the hwesik but who had, according to Min-ji's increasingly frantic 11 p.m. texts, twice walked past the artist-development bullpen on the way to the elevator without his usual route through accounting on the eleventh, and who was reportedly drinking his lunch.
I was, in this meeting, taking notes. I had a felt-tip pen and a leather-bound notebook my mother had pressed into my hands at the airport. The notebook had two ribbons. I was using the green ribbon for action items and the red ribbon for things to follow up by Friday, and I had been so disciplined about this small ribbon-system over the past eight days that I had started, in the bathroom mirror at home, to be afraid of myself.
The room was bright. The walls were the new JL-white, the very particular white our brand consultant had chosen in 2023 by mixing Farrow & Ball Skylight with two drops of a Korean traditional white called baekja-baek, the white of Joseon porcelain. I knew this because Min-ji had told me. Min-ji knew everything about the brand. The conference table was a single slab of unstained walnut so long that the woman at the far end, our streaming-platform liaison from JYP, looked the size of a thumbprint. There were ten chairs. There were eleven people. I had not gotten a chair. I was standing along the inside wall with my notebook, in the row of three junior staff who took standing notes during strategy meetings, the way A&Rs and JR managers and the one trainee-coordinator did in every meeting in every label in this country.
The chairman sat at the far end.
He had come in eleven minutes after the meeting started. He had not apologized. He had walked in soundlessly — the executive floor was carpeted in something Italian and absorbent — and the room had done a small reflexive thing it did when he entered, which was that every shoulder lowered by half a degree and every pen got picked up. He had taken the chair at the head. He had not looked at me. He had not, in eleven minutes, looked at anyone except the Senior VP of Distribution, who was presenting Q1 numbers from a slide deck whose typography I had been unable to keep my eye on because it was the same Pretendard Variable in the same gray-on-white that every Korean slide deck has used since 2022, and my eye, fed up, had drifted.
It had drifted to him.
I had told myself, walking up Itaewon-ro this morning past the Krispy Kreme that opens at six, that I would not look at him in the meeting. I had told myself walking through the JL lobby. I had told myself in the elevator on the way up, in front of the chrome that gave back a smaller, paler, more wide-eyed version of me with my hair freshly washed and pinned at the nape. I had told myself in the bathroom on fourteen, leaning over the sink with cold water dripping off my fingers. I had told myself I would not look.
I looked.
I looked because he was, today, sitting in three-quarter profile to the room and his face had the same composed unhurried stillness it had had in the restaurant, and I had been telling myself for a week that I had imagined the stillness, that I had been three soju in and that drunken women tell themselves the man across the room is looking at them because drunken women, like all women, have been trained to invent small importances for themselves at parties. I had been telling myself this so hard that I had begun to believe it. I had begun to believe it the way a child believes a lie a parent has told her about a dog that ran away to a farm. Then I looked, and he was sitting in three-quarter profile in the gray light of the conference room, and his hand was on the table, and the hand had no scar on the thumb.
I knew it had no scar before my eye told me. I knew it because I had been looking at the thumb on the way to the rest of the hand. The thumb was the spot. The thumb was where the glass had cut him last Saturday and he had bled the slow decorative bleed of a man whose body was not following the usual protocols. I had thought about that thumb for eight days. I had thought about it while brushing my teeth, while ordering a tuna kimbap from the GS25 downstairs from the office, while listening to a demo recording in the playback room and pretending to take notes about the bridge. I had filed the thumb under Things I Have Not Imagined, in a folder behind a tab in my head labeled, in red, Evidence.
The thumb on the conference table this afternoon had no scar.
It had no scar in a particular way. It did not have a healed scar. It did not have the small white seam of a glass cut that had closed over. It had the smooth uncalloused skin of a thumb that had never been cut, in the way a young girl's thumb had not yet been cut. The whorl of the print was perfect. I could see it from where I stood ten feet away because his hand was at rest on the table and the late-winter light from the south window was catching it sideways, and the whorl on the meat of his thumb was the kind of whorl you see in books on fingerprint identification where they want to show a clean example.
I closed my notebook.
I did not mean to. My right hand closed the notebook of its own accord and slid the felt-tip into the small holder along the spine. My left hand went to my own thumb, the way the body sometimes goes for a thing the mind has not yet thought of going for. My thumb was, of course, perfectly normal. It had a hangnail. I had been picking at it through the meeting.
I looked up.
He had turned his head. Maybe half a degree. He had not looked at me. He was looking at the slide deck. He was, I saw with the small clarity of someone seeing a thing through a window in a thunderstorm, ostentatiously not looking at me. The not-looking had a quality. The not-looking was the not-looking of a man who had decided in advance how he was going to manage every angle of his head for the next forty minutes.
I felt, for the second time in eight days, the room arrange itself.
I want to be careful describing this, because I will hear myself describe it later to a therapist and to my grandmother and to a man who will already know what I mean, and I want the description to be the same description each time. I will say what I felt. I felt the room slow. I felt the bright JL-white walls lose a shade of brightness, the way fluorescent lights do when somebody on the floor below has plugged in a hot kettle and pulled a little juice off the building. I felt the slab of walnut take, for one second, the particular stillness of a piece of furniture about to be moved by a person who is going to lift it with effort. I felt, in the small pocket of air just under my collarbone, the place where last Saturday night the woman had screamed in old Korean under the Noksapyeong overpass, that small pocket of air go cold.
He did not look at me.
The Senior VP of Distribution finished a slide.
The next slide, the slide called Q1 Strategy Recap, came up. There was a small laser-pointer dot on it. The dot was a steady red dot. It did not move.
The chairman, without looking at the dot, said in the kind of voice you use to a colleague you trust, in jondaetmal, "Forgive me. I will need to step out for ten minutes."
He stood.
He stood, and the room did the small bowing thing again, and he gave the room the small bowing thing back, and he turned and walked the length of the carpet to the door behind me. I did not turn. I did not, because there was a part of me — the disciplined part, the part that had been pinning my hair at the nape every morning for fourteen months — that knew the only way to survive what was about to happen was to not turn. I did not turn. The door opened. The door closed. He was gone.
I did not write anything in my notebook.
Three minutes later, my pager — yes, JL still gave us pagers, a deliberate JL retro affectation that the Senior VP of Distribution insisted was brand — buzzed once at my hip with a soft single hum.
I looked.
The pager said, in the same Pretendard gray-on-white as the slide deck: Han team lead — Chairman's office, 4F lobby coffee station, now.
I excused myself with the half-bow of a junior who has been paged. The Senior VP of Distribution made the small mm sound that meant go quietly and do not interrupt me when you come back. I walked the length of the conference room along the inside wall, past the row of senior coats hung on a chrome rack, past the credenza with the orchid and the small calligraphy scroll, and out into the hall, and the door closed behind me with the soft pneumatic sigh that Italian executive doors close with all over the world.
The hall was empty.
I walked to the elevator bank. There were three elevators. I had used two of them in fourteen months. The third one, the one farthest right with the brass plate, was the elevator that went to sixteen — that did only sixteen, that was, by long company habit, never used by anyone but the chairman or the senior VPs riding with the chairman.
He was standing in front of the third one. The brass-plate one.
He was not waiting for me. He was waiting for the doors. The doors opened. He stepped in. He did not look back. He did not gesture. He did not, in any way that I could later describe, invite me. He simply did not move to press the button that closes the doors, the way every Korean man in every Seoul elevator presses the close button the instant he is inside.
I had four seconds.
I will not say I made a choice. I will say I had four seconds and at the end of the four seconds I was inside the elevator with him. I had paged in. He had paged me. The pager said Chairman's office, 4F lobby coffee station, which was on the fourth floor and which we were now bypassing. The elevator started to move upward. The numbers on the panel were not numbers in this elevator; they were Korean characters, il-cheung, i-cheung, sam-cheung, the old-fashioned way of marking floors, which I had registered the first time I was in this elevator at orientation and thought was a charming JL affectation. The character for the third floor lit and went dark. The character for the fourth floor lit and did not light long enough. The character for the fifth.
The elevator made the small sigh elevators make.
He did not speak.
The mirror in the back of the elevator was, by some directional design choice, slightly tilted, so that I was looking at the top half of my own face in it without trying, and my hair, pinned at the nape that morning at six, had loosed a single strand at the temple. I had the absurd small thought I should fix that. I did not lift my hand.
His face in the mirror was a half-second behind his face.
I could not, for a beat, work out what I meant. I was looking at the back of his head — black wool overcoat, neat short hair, a coat hanger of a man, the back of his head was nearly geometrical — and I had the very specific cognitive misfiring of seeing his face in the mirror at the same time. The mirror was angled to show him, too. His face was. His face in the mirror was. Looking at me.
His real face — the face attached to the back of his head — was looking, presumably, at the door.
His mirror-face was looking at me.
I felt my stomach do the small fall it does on a roller coaster. I had ridden the Demon at Great America with my brother in middle school in Cupertino. I had ridden the wooden coaster at the Daejeon amusement park three summers ago with my cousins. The small fall was that fall, the unmoored oh of the inner ear losing its bearings. The fall was wrong; I was standing still; the elevator was moving up; my feet were on a carpet. The fall happened anyway.
He spoke.
He spoke in the small flat private voice of a man speaking to himself in a corridor. He said two syllables.
"Neo-gu-na."
I want to put this very carefully on the page, because in the months after this elevator I will, in the small free hours of the mornings I cannot sleep, try to remember the exact sound he made, and I will fail and fail and fail. I will try to remember which syllable was the heavy one and which was the light, whether neo was rounded or flat, whether gu came up at the end or down, and the memory will turn the syllables in my mouth like coins in a coat pocket, and I will not be able to remember. What I will remember is this:
Neo-gu-na. It's you.
He said it in banmal.
Banmal is — Min-ji had explained this to me twice, the second time at the airport in Daegu when she had taken me to visit her mother — banmal is the speech you use with people you are intimate with, who are younger than you, or who are equal to you and have explicitly agreed. It is not the speech you use with a Stanford graduate gyopo A&R you have known eight days and met in a restaurant. It is not the speech a chairman uses to anyone in his company. It is not, properly, the speech a Korean man uses to a Korean woman the first private time they are alone in any room.
He used it.
He used it on me.
He used it like a man using a key he had owned a long time.
I felt — I will say this and I will not soften it — I felt my body sit down somewhere inside my body. There is a chair inside me. I had not known there was a chair inside me. There is a chair, and the chair is mine, and at the sound of his voice in banmal something in me that had been standing in that chair for as long as I had been Han Ji-won walked across the small distance to the chair and sat down. Not collapse. Sit. The way you sit when you have been on a bus for many hours and you finally come to a friend's house and your friend has set out a cup of barley tea and a cushion.
I sat down inside myself. The body, however, kept standing.
The body kept standing for one second. The body kept standing for two.
Then the body did the small reset the body does when it is being asked, by some sub-floor of cognition, to be in two places at once. My knees went. They went unceremoniously. I felt the carpet rise toward my left side with the slow undignified rise of a swimming pool's bottom on the day you first learn how to float on your back and lose it.
He caught me.
He caught me in the way of a person who had been listening for the sound of someone falling. He did not, I noticed even as I went, lunge. He did not turn dramatically. He stepped backward into me, half a beat before I went, and his right arm was already there at the level of my shoulder blades, and his left hand was already coming up to the back of my head — the gesture of a parent who has caught a child off a high bed too many times — and he had me, all of me, against the front of the black wool coat before my notebook hit the carpet.
The notebook hit the carpet. It made a soft slap. The felt-tip rolled out of its holder.
I did not lose consciousness. I went somewhere else. I went, for the duration of a heartbeat or several heartbeats — time was a thing that had taken its hands off the controls — into a slope of pine and rock with two moons in the sky.
The slope was waiting.
I had always known the slope was waiting. I had not, until now, known how patient the slope had been.
I stood on it for a moment. I stood on it long enough to feel the cold of the rock through the cotton beoseon. I stood long enough to lift my hand and see, for the first time in twenty years, that the hand was wrapped at the wrist with the white knot of mourning. I stood long enough to feel a small steady warm thing at the base of my throat. I stood long enough to know that the small steady warm thing was a knife.
Then I was back.
I was back, and the smell against my face was not pine. The smell against my face was wool, and Diptyque green fig — which is my smell, which is the smell my mother bought me when I graduated — and somewhere underneath the wool and the fig was the smell I had smelled in the alcove with the celadon vase last Saturday: thin sweet vegetal smoke, hyang, Joseon palace incense. The smoke smell was him. The smoke smell was rising off the coat.
I was in his arms. His left hand had gone, at some point, to the back of my neck. The hand was cool. It was the hand that had been cut and was not cut. I could feel, against my temple, the steady not-quite-right thrum of him. He was not breathing the way a man breathes. He was breathing the way a man pretends to breathe.
I tried to lift my head.
"Don't," he said. He said it in jondaetmal. The polite formal voice was back. The banmal had been one word and was over. "Don't, please. The floor is too hard."
"I'm okay."
"You are not okay."
"I'm — "
"Hush."
The word in Korean is not really hush. The word is gamanhi. The word means be still. It is the word a parent uses to a child who is trying to wriggle out of an embrace. He used the word the way one uses it to a child. I did not, at twenty-six, in a JL elevator on the way to the sixteenth floor, mind being spoken to as a child. The body had stopped pretending it was an adult some four seconds ago, when my knees had given.
The elevator stopped. The doors opened. We were not on sixteen. We were not anywhere I recognized. The doors had opened onto a parking-level corridor whose concrete was painted JL-cream, and there was a black Genesis in a numbered slot, and a single guard in a black suit standing by the rear door of the Genesis who saw me in the chairman's arms and did the small calibration of his face that men paid to see things do, and then did not, after that, see anything.
The chairman, with no apparent effort, carried me to the car.
I want to say, also for the record, that I am five foot seven and one hundred and thirty pounds and that I have always considered myself a person of substance. He carried me as if I weighed nothing. He carried me as if he had spent four hundred years carrying things slightly heavier than me, in preparation. He did not stagger. He did not adjust. He did not, as a man might, make the small face a man makes when he is being a hero and would like the witness to remark on the heroism. He simply carried me. The guard opened the rear door. He laid me on the rear seat. He did not put me on the floor. He laid me on the seat in the way one lays a sleeping child on a couch, with the head propped on the arm-rest and my feet, gently, swung the right way so that the heels did not catch in my coat. He buckled the middle seat-belt across my chest.
He looked at my face for one second.
I will say what I saw. I saw a man who had been waiting four hundred years to do this — to set this body down somewhere safe — and who was now doing it. I saw a man whose mouth was a flat line not because he was angry but because the flat line was holding something back. I saw a man whose eyes did the cat-light thing. The cat-light thing was unmistakable in the parking-level fluorescents. The eyes were not human eyes. They were not, in any conventional sense, animal eyes either. They were the eyes of something that had been pretending to be human for so long that the pretense itself had become a kind of accent.
He closed the door.
He got into the front passenger seat. The driver — the guard — did not ask for an address. The Genesis pulled out of the lot. The car climbed a ramp. The car turned right. The car climbed Hannam-daero. The Genesis was the kind of car that does not make engine noise. The car was a small silent room moving smoothly through the city, and I was a body buckled into the rear seat of it, and the chairman of my company was sitting in the front seat with the back of his neck very still, the way the back of his head had been very still in the elevator.
I closed my eyes.
I opened them, what felt like ten seconds later, and we were not on Hannam-daero.
We were stopped. The car had stopped. We were in a narrow alley of stone walls and pine trees. The alley had the particular gray of Bukchon. I had been to Bukchon twice. Both times to take an out-of-town friend to the tea house on the side street with the small wooden sign. I had not been to this part of Bukchon. The walls were higher here. The walls were older.
The chairman opened the rear door.
"Han Ji-won-ssi." He used the polite form of address again. "Please. I have made an error of judgment. I will take you to a hospital if you wish. Or I will take you here. I would prefer here. You will be safe here. Here is — " he stopped. He had stopped a sentence midway. He started another. "Here is a house. The doctor will come, if you wish. Will you come inside."
I looked at him.
His face was, in the gray Bukchon light, a face I had seen.
I do not mean I had seen it in the restaurant. I mean I had seen it before. Not at my mother's funeral, which my mother had not had. Not in a photograph. Not in a slideshow at JL orientation. I had seen this face in the dim back-room of a memory that was not mine, by lamplight, with snow falling outside, and the man with this face had been holding out a brass cup of yakju to me with hands warmer than they should have been after a day in the snow.
I should have run.
I did not run. I lay buckled in the rear seat of his Genesis and I looked at him and I felt, between my collarbones, the small steady cold that had been the knife in the dream, and I thought: I have, somewhere, before, decided to stay.
"Yes," I said.
"Yes."
"I will come inside."
He nodded once. He held out his hand. The right hand. The hand with the thumb that had been cut last Saturday and that had no scar today. I let him unbuckle me. I let him help me out of the car. The pavement was slick. I did not, properly, walk to the gate. He half-carried me. The driver-guard did not get out of the car. The driver-guard, when I glanced once over my shoulder, was looking very fixedly forward, the way a person looks forward when he has been paid not to look sideways.
The gate of the hanok was old. The gate was the dark gray of pine that had been worked by weather for at least a century. The gate had two iron rings as door handles. The chairman opened the gate with a key he took from the inside pocket of his coat. The gate gave the small soft groan an old gate gives. We went through. We went down a stone pathway, between two walls, into a small inner courtyard. There were three hanok. He took me to the one in the middle.
He slid the front door open.
The middle hanok was warm.
It was the kind of warm a Korean grandmother's house is warm — the warmth of the ondol floor under the room, the warmth that had been climbing into the wood and the air for hours, the warmth that smelled of cedar and a faint old smoke. He took me, with the same unhurried half-carry, across a small entry where the floor was lacquered black, and through a sliding door into a larger room, and in the larger room he eased me down onto a low couch the size and shape of a Korean baesan daybed, and he put a folded blanket of grey silk over my knees, and he stood up and stepped back.
He stepped back.
He stepped back the way a man steps back from a bird he has just freed from a window. He stepped back to the wall. He bowed, once, with the formal small Joseon-coded bow he had bowed to me with that day, although he had not bowed to me with that bow that day in the restaurant. He stayed at the wall.
I sat on the couch and the blanket was warm and my fingers found the green ribbon of my notebook, which somehow had made it from the elevator carpet into my coat pocket, and I held the green ribbon, and I looked around the room.
The room was a Joseon-style sitting room. It had a heated floor. It had a low table. It had a single brazier in the corner with a tea-kettle on it, which was, I noted, brass — old brass, brass with the patina of two or three centuries of polishing, brass the color of an old coin. The walls were paneled in pale wood. There was a single scroll above the brazier, which I could not read because the calligraphy was the cursive Joseon style that even my mother could not always read.
Along the far wall was a folding screen.
I want to be careful again here.
The folding screen was the eight-panel kind. It was old. The paint on it was faded by light to the color of weak green tea. The figures on the screen were the figures one expected on an eight-panel Joseon screen — pines, rocks, a small stream, a single crane, an old man on a path with a stick, a mountain in the far distance with a temple eave at its summit. These were arranged across the eight panels in the appropriate sequence and any tourist at the National Folk Museum would have recognized them and walked on. I would not have recognized them. I had only been to the National Folk Museum once and had spent most of the visit at the cafe.
On the third panel from the left, between the small stream and the crane, there was a fox.
The fox was painted in the small economical brush-strokes of a hand that had not loved foxes but had been paid to put one in. The fox was small. The fox was the size of my own hand. The fox had — I counted before I knew I was counting — nine tails. The nine tails fanned behind it across the panel into the next panel, where they thinned into pine needles, in the small visual joke of an old painter who had decided to hide the tails inside the pine. The fox was sitting on a rock. The fox was looking out of the panel at the room.
The fox was looking at me.
I knew the fox.
I knew the fox the way you know a door in your own house in the dark, the way your hand finds the doorknob in the night without your eyes. I had seen this fox. I had seen this fox in the bottom of a brass tea-cup in a wayside shrine in a snowstorm. I had seen this fox in the corner of a hanok I had never been in, four hundred and three winters ago, by a brazier the size of this brazier, while a man with warmer hands than mine poured yakju into the cup the fox was painted in.
I made the small soft sound a person makes when she has, for the first time, found the word for a thing she has known in her body all her life. It was not a cry. It was not a gasp. It was a small ah, the ah you make when the cab driver tells you the name of the alley you grew up on and you had forgotten you forgot.
The chairman, at the wall, said: "You know this room."
He did not phrase it as a question.
I did not phrase my answer as one either. I said: "Yes."
"Yes."
"Yes."
He came across the room. He came across it slowly, the way one walks across a frozen pond to a person who has fallen through. He sat down on the floor in front of the couch, on the heated wood, and he did not touch me. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, in the formal posture of a man waiting to be questioned, the way I had seen a Sungkyunkwan scholar sit on a porch in a dream the slope had not yet shown me but I knew was waiting.
He was crying.
He was crying without making any sound at all. He was crying the way the very old cry — without lifting a hand to it, without acknowledging that the tears were on the face, with the dignity of someone who has wept long enough in private that the body has learned to do it as a kind of breathing. The tears were going down both sides of his nose into the corners of his mouth and he was not, in any way, attending to them.
I was so tired and so scared I almost reached up to wipe his face.
I did not. The body had not, in eight days, made many right decisions, but it made this one. I sat with my hands in the green ribbon and I watched him cry without making a sound and I felt, for the first time since I had come back to Korea fourteen months ago, that I was, by some small private metric, finally home — not because the room was a home I knew but because the man on the floor in front of me had been keeping it warm for me a long time, and the kettle, when he had said in the dream come inside, the kettle is on, had not, after all, been lying.
I said, after a long minute: "Who am I."
He did not answer for a while.
He answered, when he answered, in jondaetmal. He answered the way a man answers an oath.
"You are Han Ji-won, who is twenty-six years old, who was born in Cupertino in California, whose mother is Han Soo-yeon and whose father is Han Jae-hyuk, who is an A&R at JL Entertainment, and who is the most patient person I have ever asked to wait for me."
"That was not the question."
"I know."
"Who am I."
He looked at the floor between his hands.
"That is the question," he said, "I would like you to wait one more night to ask me. I will tell you everything in the morning. Will you wait one more night."
The kettle on the brazier began, just then, to make the small high whistle a brass kettle makes when it has been on for too long.
I looked at the fox on the screen.
The fox on the screen, I would swear in front of a judge, blinked.
"One more night," I said.
He bowed his head.
The kettle whistled. He went to lift it off. He did this without looking at me, the way a man moves through a kitchen he has lived in for a long time, and the small care of the gesture — the way his hand, the right hand, the hand of the thumb-with-no-scar, lifted the brass handle of the kettle in the cloth he had folded for the purpose, on a small hook on the wall I had not seen — the small care of the gesture was a care that had been practiced longer than I had been alive in this body or any other. He poured the water into a celadon pot. He put a measure of barley tea into the pot. He set the pot on the low table in front of me. He brought one celadon cup. He set the cup beside the pot.
He stepped back to the wall.
He said, "Sleep, please. If you can sleep. The doctor I would call is in Pyeongchang-dong. I can have him here in forty minutes. Tell me if you want him."
"I don't want a doctor."
"Then sleep."
I lay back on the couch with the silk blanket on my knees, and the brazier made the small ticking sound a brazier makes, and the kettle steamed faintly, and the fox on the third panel of the screen kept watching, and I closed my eyes.
I dreamed of nothing.
That, more than anything else, told me what kind of room I was in. The slope did not come. The bruise-sky did not come. The woman in white with the knot on her wrist did not come. For the first night in twenty years, I lay down inside a closed space and the dream did not find me, and I knew, the way you know in dreamless sleep what is and is not happening to you, that the dream had decided not to come because the dream had ended where it had begun — in this room, on this couch, under this blanket, with the man at the wall finally, finally, in the same room.
I slept four hours.
When I woke he was still at the wall. He had not moved. The kettle was warm. The fox on the screen was looking at the brazier now, not at me, which I took to mean it had decided the watching was no longer urgent. The chairman, when I sat up, said: "Good morning, Han Ji-won-ssi. The doctor is no longer necessary. Are you hungry."
I said: "I would like to know who you are."
He bowed his head.
"My name," he said, "is Seo Yi-jun. I am thirty-two. I am also one thousand and forty-three."
I did not say anything.
He said: "I will make breakfast. We will eat. We will talk after. You may leave at any time. Min-ji-ssi has been informed you are safe. Your manager has been told you are taking the morning. The car is waiting at the gate when you want to go."
He went to the kitchen.
I sat up. I put my feet on the warm floor. I looked at the fox on the third panel of the screen, and the fox looked back at me, and I thought, with the small ridiculous clarity of a woman who has slept four undisturbed hours for the first time in her life, all right, fox. Tell me who I am.
The fox, very kindly, did not.
It was leaving that part, I understood, to him.