these adventures have been possible because of me.”
He coughs self-consciously and I feel very confused. Wiping his hands on his pants, he continues.
“I know, I have come to the realization these days that I am a foolish man. Not having a kid to hurry home to, and not having his cries and tantrums and needs filling up every waking moment of my life—it leaves a lot of time for thinking and remembering conversations that should have happened, but did not. And I want to rid my life of any regret. If I were to die tomorrow, I want to have said everything I should have to the people I know.”
He proceeds to tell me that he was the person who had called the police that night—that night of my injury. He had been walking to the Big House that day because Lady Chang had come into the shop for the first time and had left her scarf there. He couldn’t bear to think of Lady Chang worrying about the fate of her expensive scarf at the hands of his customers and he did not have her phone number, so he’d put it carefully into a shopping bag and set off for the Big House after his last customer of the evening.
In the twilight he had enjoyed the walk very much until he began hearing the unmistakable sounds of violence. His first reaction had been fear—he had turned around and started walking quickly away, but almost instantly he had come back to his senses and realized that the screams were those of young girls. He imagined the worst and he had to step up. He called the police from his phone and gave them the location and a description of what he was hearing, and as soon as he hung up, he crept toward the arch.
He saw me first, he says. He recognized me from my trips to the salon with my mother. In fact, she had been the one who had introduced him to Lady Chang, who continued to this day to be a loyal customer.
He saw me and what was happening to me and he began running toward us. It looked—he said—as if the girl was going to kill me. She appeared entirely crazed and was brutally smashing something against my head and showing no signs of stopping. He started yelling “Police! Police!” and other things he could not remember. In an instant, all the students, including me, had disappeared so fast that he had been dumbfounded. He’d taken a few halfhearted steps in the direction I had gone, but then had heard sirens and decided to stay to talk to the police so that they would not see him running and mistake him for a villain in the scenario. And sure enough, the police had seemed suspicious of his involvement, but luckily his clothes were free of bloodstains and a great deal of blood had been spilled that night. They asked if he had recognized anyone and he said that it had been one of his younger customers but he did not know my name, which was true. At the time, he had also not known that I lived at the Big House.
“It has recently come to my attention—actually, yesterday, when one of the women who work with your mother had her hair permed—that my inquiring about you and how you are doing in Seoul has been misconstrued as something resembling romantic attention, especially since, well, as I am sure you know, the situation with my wife,” he says quietly, looking at the floor. “It has made me quite miserable to think that people were thinking that about me, but I did not know how to set things right. This is why I was so astonished to find you and your friends looking straight at me through the window just now, because I had been pondering how to rectify matters.”
His phone rings and he fishes it out of his pocket. “Lawyer Ko” lights up the screen and he silences it, grimacing, before his eyes return to me. He takes a deep breath.
“No matter how dark things get for me, the memory that I saved a life—that my life has mattered—has been something I can cling to,” he says with a catch in his