Before you read this, know what I am.
My eyes are green. I come from the Fuquay line, Acadian French out of the French Quarter of Louisiana, and the work came to me down that line. It is not learned in a school. In the mountains of North Carolina I worshipped with the Sin Eaters, who keep an old rite of the dead: food is laid with the body, and whoever eats it takes up what the dead one carried. Korea has a word for a woman like me. You call her 무당, mudang, and the kind who inherits it you call 세습무, seseummu.
My son’s eyes were blue. He was fourteen, and already one metre eighty.
The night
At ten o’clock on the tenth of May 2008 he walked into the men’s side of a sauna in Gyeongsan. At two minutes past eleven a man who worked there saw him face down in the water and decided he was playing. At twenty-eight minutes past eleven someone called an ambulance, and asked it to come for a body.
Twenty-six minutes. I want the ones who were there to think about those twenty-six minutes. He does.
Somebody dried his hair before the ambulance came. A drowned boy, and somebody took a towel to his hair. It did not help. In the emergency room his hair still smelled of the pool.
What he is now
You have names for it. A spirit that dies wronged is a 원혼, a wonhon. A boy who dies before he is grown is a 몽달귀신, a mongdal gwishin. One who dies in water is a 물귀신, a mul gwishin, and any grandmother can tell you what a water ghost does. It waits in water, and it pulls.
I made sure of him. You bury your dead in three days. I kept mine for one hundred and nine, while every request for an honest examination was ignored. On the twenty-eighth day of the seventh month, the month when the dead come to be fed, two days before it closed, I gave him to the fire. Before the fire I put certain things in the coffin with him. I will not say what they were. I did not send him to sleep. I sent him awake, and I sent him hungry.
The table
A boy who dies at fourteen leaves no children to set his table. So I set it for him, and I chose who would keep it.
From the autumn of 2009 through the spring of 2010, on two campuses, at midterms and at finals, I baked. Sugar cookies, no bigger than a coin, made with the best butter money could buy. I stopped counting at two thousand sets. I put each one into a hand, and I touched the hand. Inside was a note in your own language: “When you eat this cookie, you taste my love.”
You did. A mother’s love for a murdered son is not a gentle thing to swallow.
What you ate was food from his table, and it was tied to what burned with him. That is the Sin Eaters’ rite joined to your own. You feed your own dead for four generations. I bound this for five. If you ate from my hand, you know what you owe him. Set food out for him in the seventh month, and if you know anything, say it.
For the ones who were in that room
This part is for you, and for the ones who made the paper say that nothing happened.
You will not see him first. You will smell him. The cold, sour, chemical smell of pool water, in a dry room. In your car with the windows shut. On your own pillow. On your hands, after you have scrubbed them raw.
Then the wet. A long bare footprint on a dry floor, too long for anyone who lives in your house. The slow sound of a drain swallowing water when no tap is open. Your towel hanging heavy and cold when no one has used it.
Then the hour. You will start to wake at two minutes past eleven. Every night, the same minute. You will look at the clock and it will say 11:02, and the room will be colder than it should be, and you will know without turning your head who is standing at the end of it: a tall, pale, dripping boy with a towel over his wet hair.
He will not shout. He was fourteen and a guest in your country, and he never had the Korean to argue with you. He will stand there with water running off him onto your floor, and look at you with wide blue eyes, and wait. Waiting is what a water ghost does.
And then, some day, you will be in water. A crowded bathhouse. A green river in summer. The sea in August. Your own bath, late at night, with your eyes shut and soap on your face. Remember then what the grandmothers say a water ghost does. Remember how long twenty-six minutes is.
The one who stands between
Someone well versed in the curses that mothers in the Middle East lay on the murderers of their children told me I had made my son into a monster. No. I made sure of that too.
I stand between him and you. He does not see what is taken. When he comes hungry he sees a long, bright, loaded table, set with care, and he eats like a boy of fourteen who has been in the water all evening. He sees the joy of it. That is all I let him see.
The taking is mine. I am the one who draws it out of you, slowly, the warm blood and the thin grey soul, and I am the one who washes it and dresses it and carries it to his table so that it looks like food. His hands are clean. Mine are red, up past the elbows, my apron drenched, and I do not want them clean.
I see the horror of it. I see all of it, every time, with my eyes open, and I am more than content to go on seeing it for as long as he is fed.
So do not look for mercy from the boy at the end of your room. He does not know what you are to him. Look past him, into the dark behind his shoulder. Something there has green eyes, and it does not blink.
And do not wait for me to die. When I go, it doubles.
He knows
He knows the man who gave the order and the ones who obeyed it. He knows the hands that worked the scrub tables. He knows which officers wrote nothing down, and who watched the tape and said there was nothing on it. He knows everyone who saw, and went home, and said nothing. And he knows every hand I touched.
Count the days yourselves. He went into the water on the sixth day of the fourth month and was pronounced dead on the seventh, the eve of Buddha’s Birthday, with your lanterns already hung. His death-day comes round with them every year. And when your court dismissed every claim I made, it did so in the seventh month, and the word reached me one year to the day after the fire.
The one way out
In the old stories a ghost like this goes to the magistrate, night after night, until one is found with the courage to listen. Then the guilty are named, and only then does the ghost lie down. No one in Gyeongsan has listened yet.
There is one way to loosen it, and it is cheap. It costs one true sentence. Say what happened. Say it to the police. Say it to a reporter. Until someone does, he comes hungry every seventh month, and he knows which doors.