The store at ten-thirty at night had a specific quality different from the store at any other hour — the light the same fluorescent as always, the coolers humming behind their glass doors, the shelves arranged with the particular tidiness of a small business run by someone who understood that appearance was a form of argument. Outside, the commercial edge of Seolmun had quieted to the specific quietness of a city that continues operating at reduced volume rather than stopping entirely. Occasionally someone came in.
The owner was in the back, running the evening accounting. Junho could hear the adding machine at intervals between long silences — the owner used an adding machine, which was unusual enough that Junho had noticed it the first week and asked once, early on, why not a spreadsheet. The owner had said the machine doesn't lose the file. This was a reasonable answer and Junho had not raised the subject again.
He restocked the drinks cooler. He wiped down the counter surface that had already been wiped down three hours before, because the counter accumulated something invisible between wipes and Junho had decided that was the kind of thing worth staying ahead of. He served four customers between ten-thirty and eleven-fifteen: two buying cigarettes, one buying instant noodles and two cans of beer, one buying nothing after looking at the candy section for six minutes and leaving without explanation.
He read the internal logic of each of them without meaning to — the way he read everything he looked at long enough. The woman who bought nothing had been deciding between the candy and something she couldn't afford to add to her evening. The man with the instant noodles was eating alone for the third time this week, which Junho knew because he had bought the same combination on two earlier nights and held the items with the specific non-consideration of routine. None of this information was useful. Junho noted it and returned his attention to the counter.
At eleven-forty-five the owner came out of the back with the ledger under his arm.
"Go home," he said. "The rest I can close."
Junho counted the drawer. The owner signed off. They said goodnight in the specific way of people who have performed the same transaction enough times that the words have become procedure rather than communication. Junho put on his jacket. He went out into the commercial edge's particular late-night quiet and walked home, and the store was behind him with its lights still on, and he did not have any reason to think about it further.
He had been looking for his pen.
The pen was not in the usual drawer, which meant it was somewhere on the desk surface, which meant he was moving things to find it, and the things on the desk included the book and his school notebook and the calculator and, at the corner nearest the window, the framed photograph.
He picked it up to move it.
He looked at it.
It was a photograph taken by his parents when he was eight years old, playing a game. Neither of them had told him they were taking it, which meant the expression captured was the expression he actually had during games — one of complete and total seriousness, the seriousness of someone for whom the internal logic of the game was a matter requiring full attention, eyebrows slightly drawn, mouth in a flat line, entirely unaware that he was being observed at all.
The expression was genuinely funny.
He laughed.
It was a real laugh — the specific involuntary kind that arrives before the decision to produce it. The sound of it in the quiet apartment. He looked at the photograph and his parents looked at their son from behind the camera they had not announced, and the eight-year-old in the photograph continued taking the game completely seriously, and the room was quiet after the laughter finished.
He set the photograph back in its corner.
He found the pen.
Three days later.
Junho arrived for his shift and the owner was near the counter rather than in the back. This was not the usual arrangement.
"Sit down," the owner said. Then: "You don't have to sit down."
He told Junho that he was closing the store. Not this shift — at the end of the week. He had been looking at the numbers for three months and the numbers had given him the same answer each time and he had run out of reasons to keep asking. He said this in the plain way of someone who has already finished grieving the decision and arrived at the part that follows grief, which is simply telling people.
He gave Junho his final pay in an envelope. The amount was correct and included the remaining days of the week that Junho would not work. He said Junho had been reliable. He said he was sorry the timing was what it was.
He said it the way he meant it, because he did.
Junho took the envelope. He thanked him. The owner nodded once and looked at the counter, which was clean.
"You'll find something," the owner said.
Junho put on his jacket and left.
The walk home was the same walk home it had always been. The shop fronts were the same shop fronts. The dry-cleaning establishment was already locked — five-fifty, as it had been for three weeks. The fruit cart was gone for the night. Junho walked through the specific quiet of the early evening with the envelope in his jacket pocket and did not take it out, because he already knew what it contained and the contents were not going to change on the walk home.
He sat at the desk. He took the calculator from the drawer.
He opened the envelope and smoothed the bills flat and wrote the amount at the top of a sheet of paper. Then he ran the calculation — rent, food, transportation, school fees, the specific costs of the next two months laid against what the envelope contained and what savings remained and what the scholarship timeline required of him before it paid out — and the number that resulted was not a number that accommodated the next two months. He checked it again because checking it was what you did when the result was the result. The number was the same.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he put the calculator back in the drawer and returned the bills to the envelope and placed the envelope at the corner of the desk where the photograph usually sat. The photograph he moved to the other corner.
Both things were on the desk now.
He changed his clothes. He turned off the desk lamp. He lay down.
The ceiling of the apartment was the same ceiling it had always been. Through the window, the neighboring building held its position in the dark. Somewhere in the city a vehicle passed at a distance that reduced it to sound. The number was still present in the specific way that unsolved problems remain present when everything else has been set aside — not loud, simply occupying the corner of awareness that would otherwise be empty.
Tomorrow there was class. Tomorrow he would search the listings or he would not find anything worth noting or he would find something and it would require an interview and the interview would go one way or another way and the number would move or it would not. These were the available arrangements. He had worked through them before arriving at the pillow and they had not resolved into anything different from what the calculator had already said, which was why he had not stayed at the desk any longer.
The number would be the same in the morning.
He knew this.
He closed his eyes.
End of Movement One, Chapter Two.