WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Chen
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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈
Chapter 64: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (64)
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#64.
Someone once asked the Dalai Lama,
“What interferes with your spiritual practice the most?”
The Dalai Lama pointed at his crotch.
“This bastard. This dangling bastard interferes with my practice more than anything.”
Mahatma Gandhi, who practiced celibacy for religious reasons, described the difficulty of spiritual practice this way.
“Enduring sexual urges is like walking on a blade.”
Gandhi certainly deserves much criticism for using spiritual practice as a pretext to bring all manner of young girls into his bed, then claiming that they had slept only holding hands.
Still, this famous nonviolent pacifist’s words were worth considering when it came to the difficulty of celibacy.
(Contrary to many Koreans’ distorted understanding, Gandhi did not like nuclear weapons or bloodshed.
A certain game designer from a former colony of that wretched island nation ought to apologize to Gandhi.)
Onik’s hardship resembled this.
Sexual desire itself was not much of a problem for him.
Though he was at the age when he should have begun awakening to sex in earnest and feeling stronger urges, Onik was strangely indifferent in that regard.
It was not as though he had no desire at all.
It was simply so mild that, unless he consciously thought about it, he could almost forget it in daily life.
If it had to be compared to something, it was like the appetite of someone who was comfortably full.
In that respect, Onik seemed like a child who could live without eating.
Perhaps in exchange for that?
The blood-red urge to kill easily overwhelmed the sexual urges boys his age felt, both in strength and frequency.
Onik often dreamed of killing people.
If those terrifying, ecstatic, contradictory nightmares were treated as the equivalent of the erotic dreams ordinary boys had, Onik was a child who had erotic dreams very often.
Suppose there was a boy born with such abnormally powerful urges that he had erotic dreams and nocturnal emissions two or three times a week.
Could that boy restrain his sexual desire in daily life?
Amazingly, Onik was managing exactly that.
His restraint and endurance truly resembled walking on a blade.
He maintained them by gouging at his own heart with sharpened self-loathing. It was an extraordinary thing.
Then a great stone fell onto that precarious balance with a thud.
This awful stone.
Onik bitterly resented the police officer who had hurled so many vile words at his precious teacher, Lee Eun-jeong.
‘I’m having a really, really hard time holding back. I’m trying so hard not to show it, trying to act like nothing but a good child...’
Beneath the resentment, murderous intent, and anguish surging up inside him, Onik once again faced the dilemma he had poured out before Yohan’s gravestone.
‘If I had noticed the Village Youth Association President’s bad intentions early on and reported him to the police officers...’
It would not have helped.
Even if the boy had noticed the murderous intent of that fifty-six-year-old self-proclaimed youth early on, it would ultimately have been no more than the boy’s own feeling and suspicion.
How could the boy clearly prove that intent?
All he had was circumstantial evidence.
To make matters worse, the fifty-six-year-old fake young man was close to the local police.
So, short of murder, the only choice left was for the boy to persuade the fifty-six-year-old stalker to give up.
He had to make him give up his feelings for Teacher Lee Eun-jeong, and give up his desire to kill Yohan as well.
But would that truly let him relax, certain that they were one hundred percent safe?
Could he take at face value a promise the man gave to a boy? Had that really been a situation where it was safe to do so?
The boy asked himself those questions, then sadly shook his head.
‘No!’
That would not guarantee one hundred percent safety.
Therefore, the only path to one hundred percent safety for Teacher Lee Eun-jeong and Yohan was for the Village Youth Association President to disappear.
Yet there was no chance that the Village Youth Association President would abandon all his ties and leave for some distant place...
In the end, the only choices left to the frightening boy were murder as a preventive measure, or extreme violence comparable to murder.
(Violence comparable to murder meant violence severe enough to leave someone completely paralyzed.
And Onik was not yet confident that he could control violence against people with that degree of precision.
It was not because he lacked the ability. The moment he inflicted violence comparable to murder, the dark-red strangeness within him would not remain quiet.)
But that choice conflicted with Grandfather’s teachings.
With a pained heart, Onik chewed over the question he had once put to the dead.
“Yohan hyung. Right now, there’s one path where you might still have been alive, and another where I keep avoiding Grandfather’s regret.”
“If I have to go on living while killing people, if I was born as someone who has no choice but to live that way...”
“Where between those two paths am I supposed to find my balance?”
Onik was a frightening child, but he was also a lonely one.
A lonely child who still blamed himself for Yohan’s death and felt Yohan’s absence as an emptiness that could not be filled.
This child did not want to risk even a one percent chance of losing his precious teacher.
‘If I lose Teacher too... I know what will happen. I won’t be able to pretend to be a good child ever again.
‘That can’t happen. It absolutely can’t.’
Even as he repeated that to himself, when his thoughts turned to the question, ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ he could only feel lost.
Onik resented that situations like this kept being forced upon him and his kind teacher.
It felt as though some transcendent entity of malice were continually leading the lonely boy into trials.
#
Not long ago, on the day a district National Assembly member came to meet Lee Eun-jeong, the famous female teacher who had raised an English prodigy, a written order arrived at the town police substation from a higher office.
A certain National Assembly member would be visiting an elementary school in their jurisdiction, so the local substation was instructed to take special care with public safety and harmful wildlife.
The officers who received the order sighed with dark expressions.
“First the Provincial Assembly’s Education Committee made a huge fuss, and now a National Assembly member is coming too?
“What’s with all these big shots? Is that obnoxious bitch really such a big deal?”
“If this keeps happening, our whole work schedule will get messed up. How much longer do we have to suffer because of that bad-tempered woman...?”
At first glance, the order from above appeared ordinary.
But it contained a subtle trap.
Normally, the police would not strengthen on-site security just because a National Assembly member was visiting an elementary school in their own district.
This remote town was a little different.
At the beginning of the year, had not a man died a dog’s death after becoming food for dogs in a clan village not far from town?
The frightening boy who had turned the fifty-six-year-old fake young man into dog food did not know it, but the incident had significantly affected the work of the local police.
The remote backcountry where the frightening boy lived was already a high-risk area with one of the highest densities of feral dogs in the country.
Then, in a place like that, a horrifying accident had occurred in which an adult man was torn apart and eaten by a pack of feral dogs, leaving not even his body intact.
It would not have been strange for the local police’s alert level to rise two or three stages overnight.
To make matters worse, another incident had occurred early last summer in the metropolitan city that represented the region.
About ten large feral dogs had roamed through the heart of the bustling city center, surrounding passing vehicles, barking at them, and threatening citizens.
The problem was that these damn dogs had been raising hell right beside a kindergarten and an elementary school.
It was a tremendous relief that no children had died.
Even in the metropolitan city representing the region, they had captured as many as eleven hundred feral dogs over the previous year. It was an emergency.
That was an increase of a full twenty percent from the year before.
The feral dog population was growing at a truly vicious pace.
Under those circumstances, it was reasonable enough for the higher office to issue a special safety order to the police station responsible for the area where a dog had eaten a person early that year.
The problem was that the written order did not contain the phrase “feral dogs” anywhere.
The officers read it and gave hollow laughs.
“Ah, I see. If something goes wrong while we deal with the dogs, we’re supposed to take all the blame.”
“Am I the only one who gets more fed up every time this happens?”
“They want to keep the National Assembly member safe, but they don’t want to see animal rights groups, or animal-fucking groups, holding signs and raising hell. Pick one. Just pick one.”
Both the higher office and the officers on the ground knew that the harmful wildlife mentioned in the order meant feral dogs. Legally, though, feral dogs were abandoned animals, not harmful wildlife.
The higher office later drove the point home with a verbal order over the phone.
“You understand what the order we just sent means, right? Make sure things like feral dogs don’t cause any trouble. This comes directly from above.”
Within the police organization, all orders from a higher office to a lower office were supposed to be issued in writing.
That rule existed to make responsibility clear if something went wrong.
So supplementing an ambiguous written order with a verbal one was a clear violation of regulations.
Still, what could they do?
The officers on the ground were weak.
In an organization with such a strict hierarchy, it was nearly impossible for the weaker members of lower offices to challenge the injustices committed by higher ones.
The town officers sighed.
“There’s no helping it. We’ll have to pull two people and assign them to the National Assembly member’s close protection.”
They could not simply catch and kill every feral dog in advance.
If they did, complaints from every animal rights group under the sun would come down on them like a storm. They would be showered with warnings and disciplinary notices, lose sleep for days, and have to submit dozens of written explanations.
So there was no alternative but to assign close protection to the National Assembly member.
And that was what the higher office had truly wanted.
Neither the written order nor the verbal one had ever mentioned close protection.
Yet the lower office had taken it upon itself to provide it.
That meant the higher office could completely evade responsibility if the opposing party made an issue of excessive protocol.
“We never said anything like that. The officers on the ground did it themselves. It has nothing to do with us, so would you please stop trying to tie us to it?”
With that safeguard in place for any possible trouble, they could still safely win the National Assembly member’s goodwill.
“We have paid this much attention to the National Assembly member’s safety. We hope you will look favorably upon us in the future.”
Someone had to know how to wield this level of scheming as naturally as breathing to qualify for climbing high in a police organization bloated with ranks and saturated with military culture...
The two officers suddenly assigned to the National Assembly member’s close protection were in terrible moods.
Lieutenant Seo Mun-seok was one of them.
#
Seo Mun-seok arrived at the site on time with a colleague who was just as unlucky as he was.
When the two officers reached Eun-jeong’s school, their hearts were full of professional frustration and the sorrow of the powerless.
Because they were weak, they had no choice but to suffer the tyranny of powerful people, like district National Assembly members and elementary school English teachers.
The National Assembly member they met was not in a particularly good mood.
Though the town where the female teacher worked was technically inside his district, it was a backwater far too distant from the district’s center.
His district itself was already too far from Seoul.
Still, he could not simply neglect his voter base.
‘The next general election is still a long way off, but if I want to draw party resources during the redistricting process, I need accomplishments I can show the party elders ahead of time. I can use this chance to improve sentiment within the metropolitan council too...’
As the wave of regional extinction approached, it was becoming harder and harder to preserve metropolitan council constituencies.
Once those constituencies collapsed, the National Assembly districts would be next on the chopping block.
Ideally, one put out the fire while it was at someone else’s feet.
But even if the party poured every political asset it possessed into the effort, it could not defend every constituency facing consolidation or abolition.
That was why he needed something that would put him ahead of competitors in the same situation, at least in terms of publicity.
If he could show the party elders vision and promise, that was the next best thing after a bribe.
‘The old men are at that age. They prefer people who get out there and work.’
That was why he had come personally to this backwater.
An English teacher at a rural school who had gained a little fame was far beneath the status of someone who represented an entire district in the National Assembly.
Precisely because of that, though, she was useful for reinforcing the image of a diligent party worker who personally looked after even small, trivial matters.
He had decided to listen to the local council members from his faction and meet the female teacher while he was visiting the district for other business.
Besides, National Assembly members were exceptionally good at inflating minor matters into grand projects.
It was something they had to do well for their own interests.
For that, he needed to get a few good photographs.
“Assemblyman, these are the officers sent by the local substation for on-site safety.”
At his aide’s words, the National Assembly member, who had looked annoyed, gave the two officers a glance and a lazy nod.
“Yeah. Good work.”
That was the end of the attention he gave them.
His attitude made it obvious that he treated them as background props, even though he was receiving protocol he would never have received under normal circumstances.
With their heads lowered, the officers once again chewed over the sorrow of the powerless.
For better or worse, the National Assembly member’s mood improved when he saw the female teacher in person.
‘Oh, this is quite...!’
Compared to the high-end hostess-club women whose breasts and asses he had groped in Seoul, Eun-jeong’s looks and clothes were plain.
Yet when that plainness was paired with her reputation as a current teacher known for her ability and character?
It became not plainness, but the neat air of an intelligent, virtuous woman.
It was an elegant atmosphere that women who sold their bodies could never imitate.
‘Even accounting for makeup, with looks like that and a job as a teacher, she’d go over well with the old men and voters too...’
Politicians had political instincts.
Just as people obsessed with stocks linked everything they saw and heard to stocks, people steeped in politics measured everyone they met by political value.
Their way of thinking was fundamentally different from ordinary people’s.
The party the National Assembly member belonged to was in a political crisis.
That meant it desperately needed to renew its image.
His political instincts awakened, and he began calculating the female teacher’s value in his head.
‘If this woman becomes more famous than she is now, she might be worth recommending as a proportional-representation candidate to refresh our public image.
‘Her chances of surviving the competition are low, but if it works out, I get another lackey National Assembly member in my faction. Not bad. Even if it doesn’t, I won’t lose much.’
He nodded inwardly at his own thoughts.
In a declining region like this, it was not easy for even someone like this female teacher to emerge.
It did not matter that she had not been born and raised here. If she could raise the local residents’ pride, that was enough.
It would be nice if it worked. If not, so be it.
Promising proportional-representation candidates had to be found years in advance.
In the National Assembly member’s eyes, the teacher before him seemed worth adding to the preliminary candidate list he kept for himself.
‘She’s a little lacking now, but she has plenty of room to grow.’
At the very least, she was much better than the riffraff who applied for young proportional-representation candidate positions only to be rejected during document screening.
These days, there were too many immature young people who had been sheltered and were full of nothing but confidence.
That was even more true now that his party was in crisis. The number of decent new recruits had fallen sharply.
‘With bold talent recruitment, we could create the impression that our party takes regional extinction and education seriously. It would be good for appealing to parents too.’
The National Assembly member remembered that the female teacher in front of him ran internet broadcasts with her student.
He had only half-listened to his aide’s explanation on the way there, so he did not know the details. Still, he knew that internet streamers sometimes did better than broadcast television personalities these days.
There were more than one or two National Assembly members in his party who deliberately sought out famous internet streamers.
Some of those streamers were objectively trash, but the National Assembly members did not care.
Politics was never elegant.
Politics was the fierce screaming of vulgar people.
‘Even some announcer wins a National Assembly seat based only on looks and image, and even a high-school-graduate con artist, a Filipino half-breed bitch who was no more than a movie extra, wins one too.
‘Why can’t a famous female teacher who does internet broadcasts with her student win one as well?’
Not long ago, a famous private academy instructor who taught Korean history had gained considerable influence within the party.
If a famous academy instructor could gain influence, then a famous schoolteacher could gain influence too.
The key was how much more famous the female teacher before him could become.
‘If so, why not give her a little help so she can become more famous?’
Quick with calculations, the National Assembly member decided to make a small investment in the female teacher.
He felt like an investor putting spare cash into an unlisted prospect.
Years still remained until the next election he would contest, so this was a time when he could afford to invest for the long term.
The National Assembly member wanted to plant as many seeds as possible.
He did not consider Eun-jeong’s wishes at all. He had never seen anyone refuse when offered an opportunity to enter politics.
(Some people did make insincere refusals because they wanted to raise their value.)
For the same reason, he never considered that the teacher before him might reject a political opportunity purely because she loved her student.
So the National Assembly member treated the promising female teacher in an exceedingly kind, gentlemanly, and affable manner.
The two officers watching from nearby naturally felt uncomfortable.
What was this? Was that woman really so impressive?
The important man who had treated them like background props was acting so warmly toward a mere female teacher at a rural school.
Since they had bad blood with the teacher, they could not help feeling uneasy.
What made the officers even more uncomfortable was the female teacher’s glances in their direction.
Of course, Eun-jeong was looking because the presence of the officers made her uncomfortable in her own way.
But the officers, who never doubted that they were weak, believed the now-powerful teacher was deliberately trying to intimidate them.
Soaked in worry and a sense of persecution, Lieutenant Seo interpreted the female teacher’s uneasy gaze like this.
‘Are you watching? This is who I am. You enjoyed humiliating me before, didn’t you? Just wait. Things are going to get very tiring for you from now on.’
Lost in thoughts like that, his expression could only grow darker.
And the continuously darkening expression of the officer with whom she had bad blood made Eun-jeong feel even more uneasy, causing her to check his face more and more often.
As Eun-jeong checked the officer’s face more frequently, the warped officer’s twisted delusions drew ever closer to certainty.
Those near-certain delusions appeared on his face again, making Eun-jeong uncomfortable.
It was a vicious cycle that looked like a comedy from far away and a tragedy from close up...
As this human and ridiculous vicious cycle spun on, the National Assembly member, who had no interest in the officers serving as extras, continued the conversation at his own pace.
Then, after glancing briefly at his whining smartphone, he said something that sharply caught the crooked officer’s attention.
“I heard from the education committee members around here that it is time for you to be transferred, Teacher.”
A transfer? A transfer?!
Lieutenant Seo’s eyes lit up.
If this troublesome woman would only leave for somewhere else, a great weight would be lifted from his mind.
Footnotes:
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