WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Potter

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ My Fired Uncle Is a Genius Guitarist? ◈

Chapter 1: It Seems This Wasn't a Dream

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What was the most important thing for a guitarist?

Hands? No. Ears? Not that either.

A contract.

If you don't read your contract properly, you end up like me.

"Han Yong. I'm sorry."

If looking that unapologetic while saying sorry was a talent, Kang Taeo had it.

Kang Taeo.

Muri's vocalist, Billboard's darling, and my friend of sixteen years.

Honestly, Muri first became popular because of Kang Taeo.

Back in our Hongdae basement days, a fan-cam went around. Not because of the song, but entirely because of his face. "A band with a handsome vocalist." That was our first tagline.

People came for the face, then got hooked on the songs. From there on, that was all my doing.

Everyone was gathered in the meeting room. The company CEO, Taeo, Gibeom on drums, and Wonwoo on bass.

Gibeom had been staring at the edge of the table for a while, while Wonwoo fidgeted with an innocent phone.

A phone that was switched off.

"We voted. It was unanimous. Clause 12 of the contract says a member can be expelled if three or more members agree. So... you'll have to leave."

The contract.

Right. That contract.

Sixteen years ago, at a rehearsal-room table stained with ramen broth, Taeo had told me, "You just have to trust me," and I signed it without reading it.

That piece of paper had waited sixteen years with Clause 12 tucked inside, then sank its teeth into me today.

"How is a vote without me unanimous? That's three out of four, so fifty percent."

"..."

"I'm kidding, jerk."

Nobody laughed. The only reaction was Gibeom's shoulders twitching.

The CEO slid the documents across the table. A withdrawal agreement. A penalty clause. A noncompete clause. All rights to Muri's name and music going forward.

Eight full-length albums. Sixteen years. Eighty percent of them were my songs.

Taeo had written lyrics for half of them, though. No, sixty percent... seventy? Maybe eighty.

The guy did have a knack for lyrics. That didn't mean they were good. They were generally full of teenage edginess, which I hated, but the problem was that I couldn't write even that much.

Those sixteen years had been reduced to one line on paper: "Assets of the band."

My thumb tightened around the corner of the document.

"Hey. Let's ask why."

"Creative differences?"

"Fuck that. Not the headline you'll feed the press. The real reason."

Taeo briefly avoided my gaze.

"...There's nobody who can sing your songs."

I laughed in disbelief.

It wasn't that nobody could sing them. He couldn't sing them.

"Breakneck Run." The title track of our third album. The song that dragged us out of the Hongdae basement and into the world ten years ago. The original chorus went up to D5. Taeo couldn't manage that note. I lowered the song by a half-step, and it became a hit. Everyone praised it as a masterpiece.

But I was the only one who knew.

That song was only half of what it should have been.

After that, I kept writing songs the same way. I would compose them, cut them down to fit Taeo's range, and shove the originals into a drawer. My drawer was filled with the real songs that had never seen the light of day.

"Taeo. Remember when we put out our third album?"

"...What?"

"The day we hit number one. You cried in the rehearsal room. Back then, I thought there was nowhere we couldn't go as long as you sang and I played."

For a moment, Taeo's eyes wavered.

I knew that look. The eyes of the Kang Taeo from our twenties, still lingering somewhere inside him.

But then they returned to the eyes of Kang Taeo now.

"Yeah. There was nowhere we couldn't go."

Taeo smiled. A thoroughly calculated, stage-ready smile.

"But everywhere we went, the reviews said the same thing. LA, Tokyo, Paris. Do you know what the first line of every local review was?"

I did. That was why I kept my mouth shut.

"Muri, One Dragon's band."

Taeo slammed the table. The CEO flinched.

"Fans buy tickets to see me. I'm the one who goes on TV. But the critics, the magazines, the industry people, they all call Muri your one-man band. They say the vocalist is just a replaceable part. And honestly, tell me this. Did you ever listen to us? The songs were yours, the arrangements were yours, the stage direction was yours. For sixteen years, we were just machines playing back your songs. I, I spent sixteen years by your side..."

"By my side doing what? You became the most famous vocalist in the world."

"On a stage you made for me!"

Taeo looked more startled by the words that burst out than anyone else.

The meeting room fell silent.

Right.

That was it.

Every time this bastard had stepped onstage for sixteen years, he must have felt like he was repaying a debt. I had thought that stage belonged entirely to all of us.

I started to argue, then shut my mouth.

Because he wasn't wrong.

The songs, the arrangements, the stage, I had the finished version in my head. Why waste time discussing things when I already knew the fastest, best path?

At least, that's what I had believed.

"...So if you cut me loose, that goes away?"

"It will. The cause will be gone."

"If the cause is gone, Muri will be gone too, idiot."

"We'll see about that. We'll see how far Muri can go without you."

Taeo rolled a pen across the papers. Then he added something he didn't need to say.

"Oh, and what are you going to do with all those songs piled up in your drawer? The songs nobody can sing."

"..."

"Those aren't songs, Han Yong. If nobody can sing them, they're just sheets of paper."

Something in my head snapped.

That was it.

When I came to, my hand was wrapped around Taeo's collar. Taeo and his chair had been shoved back, and the CEO was halfway out of their seat.

"You can't sing them because it's you, you bastard!"

"Let go! Let go of me!"

"Han Yong! Hyung!"

"And if it weren't for those sheets of paper, you wouldn't even have a stage to stand on, you bastard!"

Gibeom grabbed my arm from behind and pulled, while Wonwoo wedged between Taeo and me.

"Please. Please, hyung."

Wonwoo pushed against my chest, begging me. His eyes were red.

I knew these two hadn't voted because they wanted to. They had simply decided Muri would run better without me than without Taeo.

That calculation hurt the most.

I let go.

It was the first collar I'd grabbed in sixteen years, but Taeo's shirt was expensive enough that it barely wrinkled.

Taeo straightened his collar and glared at me. Red marks stood out on his neck.

That neck. The neck that couldn't even hit D5.

"Fuck... Fine. I'll sign. Yeah, I'll leave. You bastards."

I steadied my breathing and picked up the pen.

Sixteen years fit onto six sheets of A4 paper. The moldy smell of our rehearsal room, the Hongdae basement, ramen, our first TV music show, our first overseas concert, our first Billboard appearance. Coachella sub-headliners. All of it, just six pages.

This time, I read every word clearly, then signed without hesitation.

Because clinging pathetically wasn't rock and roll.

...That would sound cool, but really, after grabbing his collar, if I kept holding out, all that would come next would be punches.

As I left the meeting room, Gibeom followed me.

"Hyung, I..."

"Gibeom."

"Yes."

"It's time to replace the left spring on your drum pedal. Your timing's been dragging by half a beat lately."

I left only those words behind and stepped into the elevator.

Gibeom stood motionless in the hallway until the doors closed.

#

It was night, it was raining, and I was driving.

Three things I should have avoided, all in one sentence.

The radio was playing "Breakneck Run," of all songs. The chorus lowered by a half-step. Kang Taeo's voice.

Even lowered by a half-step, it was a pleasant voice to hear.

That made me even angrier.

Even after hearing it for ten years, that part still made me clench my jaw.

It should rise to D right there...

Lights from the wet road slid over the back of the hand gripping the steering wheel.

A hand hardened with calluses. A badge of honor earned by carrying a guitar for over twenty years, since I was thirteen.

I could start over with these hands. My drawer was overflowing with songs, and I was only thirty-six. If, as Taeo said, there was nobody who could sing them...

Then I just had to find someone.

Someone who could sing my songs properly.

That was my last thought.

Headlights crossing the center line swallowed my vision in white.

A shrieking horn, metal grinding, and then...

#

I opened my eyes.

There was a yellow stain on the ceiling. An old water mark spread in the shape of a world map.

"...?"

It wasn't the ceiling of my home.

My place was a duplex. Its ceiling was at least three times as high, and the Han River flowed beyond the floor-to-ceiling living-room windows. I had spent the price of an imported car just on building a soundproof studio in the basement.

If a stain like that had appeared on its ceiling, the building management office would have been in chaos long ago.

I sat up.

More accurately, I tried to.

"Ugh."

An unfamiliar sound came from my lower back. My body felt heavy. At first, I wondered if it was an aftereffect of the accident, but it didn't hurt. It was just... heavy.

Wait.

The accident.

The headlights. The horn. The grinding sound. I had definitely collided head-on with that car.

Shouldn't I have died?

No, even if I had survived, I should have been in a hospital at minimum. Wrapped in bandages from head to toe, a cast on my leg, with a nurse clapping beside me and calling it a miracle.

But this wasn't a hospital.

It was a cramped studio apartment. Dress shirts hung from a clothes rack, a laptop sat on the desk, and empty hangover-remedy bottles rolled around beside it. The refrigerator door was covered with delivery-app magnets.

A calendar hung on the wall. Yesterday's date was circled, and beneath it someone had written, "Team dinner. Department Head's pick."

Department Head?

A phrase that had never existed in my life.

I stood before the bathroom mirror.

Some fat middle-aged man was standing in it.

"...Who are you?"

The man mouthed the same words.

Who are you?

The features were unmistakably Lee Han Yong's, my face. But they were one size bigger than the face I knew. I looked down. A gentle hill rose beneath my T-shirt.

I placed a hand on it.

Jiggle.

"..."

I hadn't had the kind of body to rip my shirt off onstage, but at least I had a physique that looked good in clothes.

Where had my body gone?

Then it happened.

Something came rushing into my mind.

Memories. Memories that were mine, but not mine.

The call saying my father had collapsed during the winter when I was twenty. The day I sold my beloved guitar secondhand. Military service. Returning to university at twenty-three. Starting at a small company at twenty-six. Assistant manager at thirty. Manager at thirty-five. Overtime, overtime, company dinners, then more overtime. The marriage nagging I heard every holiday until my ears hurt. And yesterday, seven glasses of soju-beer cocktails at the department head's chosen dinner.

Two lives meshed together in my head like a zipper.

I understood.

I didn't want to, but I understood.

The day my father collapsed.

I had spent all night agonizing in the hospital hallway. Music or family.

The Lee Han Yong I knew had chosen music. He had carried the guilt he would owe for the rest of his life like interest on a debt.

But the Lee Han Yong in this body had chosen family.

He had sold his guitar, found a job, paid his father's hospital bills, and lived like that for sixteen years.

"...Ha."

So what was this? Let's sort it out.

I died last night. Probably. Then I opened my eyes in my own body from a world where I had given up the guitar. Probably.

What did you call something like this? Regression? No, time hadn't gone back, so that was out. Possession? It wasn't someone else's body, so that was questionable too.

A multiverse?

...Yeah. That was the closest fit.

But that was a word for tight-suited heroes saving the universe, not for a potbellied middle-aged man waking up in a gloomy studio apartment.

One thing was certain.

Whatever this was, something had gone very, very wrong.

I opened my palm.

It was soft.

There wasn't a single callus. The badge of honor I had built up since I was thirteen, battling guitar strings, had vanished without a trace. These were the hands of an ordinary office worker who had only handled paperwork and keyboards.

As I stared at them, another thought suddenly crossed my mind.

Could it have been a dream?

That rock star life?

Muri, the stage, Billboard, Coachella. What if it had all been a crazy dream created by seven glasses of soju-beer cocktails last night?

No.

It was too vast to be a dream. Hundreds of songs were intact in my head. Every chord, every line of guitar riff, all vivid. My sixteen years couldn't possibly have been that elaborate a dream.

The problem was that this body's sixteen years were just as vivid.

Even the hangover from seven glasses of soju-beer cocktails.

Which was real?

My head throbbed as if it would split. I couldn't even tell whether it was from the hangover or this goddamned confusion.

"...I don't know."

I lay back down.

The world-map stain on the ceiling looked down at me as though it were mocking me.

Sleep. If I woke up after sleeping, I'd see the high ceiling of my home. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Han River. Right, this was just a nightmare made by that damned alcohol. When I opened my eyes again, everything would...

Then my phone rang.

The vibrating screen beside my head showed three Korean characters.

Department Head.

My body reacted before I could. A reflex that wasn't mine pressed the call button.

"Hey, Manager Lee! What time do you think it is? You're not coming to work? Huh? Have you lost your mind?"

"..."

"Hello? Lee Han Yong! Hey!"

An unfamiliar older man shouted through the phone.

I stared blankly at the world map on the ceiling and thought.

It seemed this wasn't a dream after all.

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