Me, I'm Mi-So Yun. People I've met for the first time have always asked me to repeat my name. Mi-So? [Miso means 'smile' in Korean.] It brings back memories of smiles that have crossed their own lips, I guess. Mi-So. . . , I've often wondered about that myself. Why on earth did my father give me a name like that of a storybook character to live in such a complicated world? Maybe he hoped the world would be a little more generous to someone with a name like that. Or maybe he thought of my name as his gift to the world. If that's not it, perhaps he simply recognized the absurdity of life a long time ago. . . . I don't know my father's true intention, but anyway, I think I'm pretty generous in my own way. To others, and to myself. I just wish life would be a little more generous to me.
        I want to become a waitress. I picture myself wearing a long faded skirt, selling saeuggang [shrimp-flavored snacks], chocolate, "88 Light" cigarettes, coffee, tea, doughnuts, and instant noodles, maybe on a street corner in an out-of-the-way village near a beach or at a small rest stop on a country highway. There would be lots of snow-white seashells pushed up on the sandy beach by the noisy waves, or if it were a shop by a country highway, the cars would pass by quickly, just like time.
        I'd also like to have a cat with a black spot on it's nose. It would play with my yarn and make a mess, leave its paw prints like torn petals on my opened books, and wake me up in the late morning every day by standing on my forehead and licking my closed eyelids with its coarse tongue. And sometimes, it would suddenly get a very cold expression on its face and scratch the back of my hand. That's the attraction of raising a cat . . . the wild instinct that makes it scratch its owner, cry loudly, and run away every now and then. After the cat grew up, I'm sure it would go outside into the darkness. And one day it wouldn't come home for a whole day, or two days, or three days. If the cat didn't come home for a week or a month, I wouldn't wait any longer or mourn for it. I'd just forget about it and get a new kitten to raise.
        I'd plant some morning glories along the fence of the little shop by the sea or by the country highway. They would bloom every morning from summer to late fall, swinging in the morning breeze as if they were part of a musical score playing by themselves . . . from early morning till noon, from noon till late afternoon, from early evening till midnight. From 7 o'clock in the evening until 7 o'clock in the morning, I wouldn't be bothered by anybody else or responsible to anybody else. I would turn the light on in the evening, and I would turn the light off. I would have a life that was unwatched and unscrutinized by anyone. It's not really important what I would do. Living the way I wanted would be the important thing, and the place would just be a neutral setting for my life.
        Of course, I, too, once dreamed of becoming something brilliant and of moving faster than time itself. I wanted to lead an existence so dazzling that the newspapers and women's magazines would have to pay attention to my activities. A free existence that would be like sprouting wings and flying away. . . . But when you meet misfortune over and over again, the frustration deepens like a sound sleep. The feathers in your dream of flying end up ruined like the straws in an old broom, and the twinkle in your eye ends up damaged like the buttons of an old overcoat. The days go by really fast after that, until before you know it, the very essence of your bright dream has changed into something really preposterous, like becoming a waitress in a long faded skirt.
        My husband's dream is a little paradoxical. It sounds like a joke, but there is a certain truth and sincerity in it somehow. I'm not sure, but it could contain both a joke and the truth at the same time, under a wound. His dream is to read books in a prison cell. At one time in the past, he actually experienced doing nothing but reading books for a year when he was confined as a political prisoner.
        Even so, it surprises me that he wants to read books instead of watching video tapes. These days, he doesn't even read three books a year. Instead, whenever he starts watching videos, he has his own little video festival, watching two or three tapes in a row until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning or sometimes until dawn every day for a whole week. When I ask him why he does that, he simply answers, "Because I can't bring myself to do anything else."
        He stays up and watches video tapes all night because he can't bring himself to do anything worthwhile, and I sleep. I sleep both at night and during the daytime, like a chair in an empty house, my face covered with a sheet. What is our truth? Whatever it is, it's clear that I'm not part of his dream. My husband doesn't exist in my dream either. Life sets our dreams aside and flows like the water in a river with the 9 o'clock news on TV, the latest monthly magazines lining the shelves of book stores, and unfamiliar fashions wandering the streets. With the public phones slowly breaking down on the street corners, with the neighborhood women who are like toys that have lost their batteries. . . . Now the only truth we have left are the trivial hobbies and habits that have become our obsessions.
        My husband rubs the soles of his feet together violently as he watches his video tapes. Like a giant fly, he rubs the calloused soles of his feet together, making a steady grinding sound. I sleep. I close my eyes tight to keep the time from flowing out. Then time doesn't move if I don't want it to. Are we ever going to get the things we dream about? Do we really want our dreams to come true, or are we afraid of them?

        My husband's car was still there in the parking lot. He was walking slowly back to the car after emptying his ash tray in the trash can. I glared down at him from the balcony as I shook and hung the laundry. His arm thrust forward with the ashtray in his hand, his arrogantly stiff back, his trembling shoulders. . . . His body looked very awkward and strange. I stared at my husband with a sad and anxious expression on my face, holding one of his socks. It seemed like I could never have been touched by that body. It was like a strange home that I had never been in before. He got into the car slowly, started it up, changed the cassette tape, picked up something from the passenger's seat and put it in his back pocket, unwrapped a stick of chewing gum and put it in his mouth, and then just sat there for a while, before the car finally started to move. He looked so slow and heavy that it seemed to me that he was not the one moving at all, but rather, he was being dragged by time, which was getting tired of him. He was not completely out of sight yet.
        I left the socks hanging on the rim of the laundry basket and wandered back and forth between the living room and the kitchen like a caged animal. I didn't feel like cleaning the floor, washing the dishes, or doing the laundry. I wanted to go back to sleep. When I close my eyelids, I shut out the whole world. I wanted to go someplace else.
        I can sleep soundly anytime, without worrying about the socks rolling on the floor near the bathroom like balls of horse manure, or the green onion from breakfast drying out on the kitchen counter, or the dishes starting to smell bad in the sink, or the spots on the laundry drying in the laundry basket. As I took off all my clothes and crawled into bed and under the covers, the curtain was still closed, and the dark bed seemed to be welcoming me as it rippled under my body weight. I covered my face lightly with the sheet, as if it were made of foam.
        Sleep . . . a sweet temptation, a snow-white bandage covering a wound, the love of my life, and masturbation, which brings a stream of tears to my eyes at last. . . , hmmm. After starting to rise into the air little by little and then dropping several times, finally, like an airplane that had thrown its passengers, seats, flight attendants, and even its parachutes out of the windows, I burst into an anonymous cloud. Into a little-known cloud, a cloud filled with visions of the future just starting to form, into a world without mirrors, into a world without memories, far out into a world without any meaning. . . .
        The phone rang and interrupted my sleep. The ringing of the phone was building up inside my head like the pieces of a broken spring. The inside of my head felt like the torn stuffing of a sofa cushion. I curled up. It was probably the man with the goat. Why on earth did that man insist on leaving his goat with me? Goat, goat, goat. . . . If only I could reach out my arm and jerk out the phone cord all at once in the same motion, like a chameleon hunting for food stretches out its arrow-like tongue to catch its prey. . . . The phone rang and stopped ringing several times.
        "You were sleeping, weren't you?" It was Jeong-Yeon.
        "Uh-huh. So, it was you. The inside of my head is smoking because of your call. What have you been doing?" I asked her, pushing my eyelids hard.
        "Nothing really . . . washing the dishes, cleaning, doing the laundry, scrubbing the balcony. . . ." She answered hesitantly in a low, emotionless voice.
        "Well, at least you've been doing something."
        "Hey Mi-So, can you come to my house this afternoon? Mun-Ju, Jae-Kyeong, and Mi-Hwa are coming, too."
        "What's going on?" Judging by her unexcited tone, I guessed it was not a special occasion, like someone's birthday or anniversary.
        "Hyeon-Su is coming to my house this afternoon."
        ". . . ."
        The name, Hyeon-Su, suddenly jerked me completely awake with the cold wind raised by her gray sleeve. I'd never actually seen her wearing her Buddhist nun's gray robe, but I could imagine it clearly as if I had. I sometimes heard news about her through Jeong-Yeon and had asked Jeong-Yeon to try to arrange a chance for me to see her sometime, and now it seemed that the time had finally come.
        "When is she coming?"
        "She just said this afternoon. If you come here and chat, she'll probably be here by 3 or 4 o'clock, I suppose."
        "Did she tell you where she's living now?"
        "A small temple in Kangweon Province, she said."
        It was the late fall of our senior year in college. It was around midnight, and we were all at a discotheque. When I think of Hyeon-Su, I always think of her in the same place. When Hyeon-Su didn't come back for a long time after she went to the rest room, I went to check on her and found her drunk, squatting on the floor, washing her handkerchief in the toilet. She was crying like an old bear that had been through all kinds of hardships as she squatted there washing her handkerchief with the fly of her blue jeans unzipped. She was barely twenty-three years old. She had never had her hair permed, and she had never had a boyfriend. She had never worn make-up, and she had never worn a mini skirt. She wore short-sleeved T-shirts in summer, long-sleeved T-shirts in fall, sweaters over T-shirts in winter, and just took off the sweaters in spring. And cheap jeans during all four seasons. . . . When did I see her really smile? Her smile was empty, always the same empty smile.
        Did she have any kind of dream, I wondered, and what kind of dream would make her cry like a bear? She was murmuring to herself as she came out of the rest room. "Where will I go after I graduate . . . where will I go. . . ? Just like the rest of us, Hyeon-Su was afraid of graduating. She was a scholarship student for four years, but she couldn't afford to go to graduate school. In the second spring after our graduation, Hyeon-Su suddenly became a Buddhist nun. She wasn't able to find a job until then.
        Since then, about ten years have passed, and we're all thirty-two years old now. Among the nine of us, only one is still working at a job related to our major. Most of us took jobs for a while, even though they just involved doing routine work. But the companies didn't pay salaries on time, or they closed up, or the bosses made strange requests. Or even if those kinds of things didn't happen, after they had a child or two, they got tired of working and quit their jobs anyway. Four of us, including Hyeon-Su, are still single, and five of us are married. Four out of the five who are married have two children each, and I'm the fifth with one child. Maybe the four who have two children now will each have one more later, because they all have either two daughters or two sons. And, well, that's it. I'm sure we've all done our best at living, even though we don't have great lives. We've all embraced our lives tightly with both arm, as if trying to hold the cracks together, so that at least we can live without shame and without being talked about by other people.

        As soon as I hung up after talking to Jeong-Yeon, the phone rang again.
        "Hello?" It was the man with the goat. His voice was a lot more tense than at other times.
        "Sorry . . . but my father's health has gotten worse suddenly. Please look after my goat. If you can do it for just four days, it will be long enough. The doctor said my father needs to go to a university hospital for an examination, but after that he can get his treatment here."
        It was the same as always, but his voice, which had a bit of a nasal quality, sounded so familiar. It made me feel like he already knew me and was only pretending to be a stranger, which have me a chill.
        "Please stop this right now, all right? I know you're in a desperate situation, but I already told you this is an apartment." I explained it to him very clearly to make sure he understood everything, as though I were pulling out his hairs one at a time.
        "I live in an apartment, too." The man spoke in a clear, steady tone.
        "Of course you can stand it because it's your own problem. We can't have it here in our apartment."
        Still holding the receiver in my hand, I unplugged the phone cord. The man had been calling me once every three or four days for the past two months.
        Goat. . . ? I flopped down on the sofa. Not that I had anything against goats. On the contrary, you could say I missed goats, just like I missed my hometown. There were many goats in the mountains and fields where I grew up. My image of the animal, black as ebony, is one of sadness, like the silent existence of someone who keeps everything inside. And yet for some unknown reason, one of lightness. . . . They used to tie the black goats up at the edge of streams or in the middle of fields where they stood like pieces of charcoal without a bit of shade. They looked very peaceful in a strange sort of way, as if the hot sunlight might set their bodies on fire. . . . The goats, when they were tied up and had to sleep out in the fields at night, looked so permanent to me, just like the mountains, streams, or trees which had accepted their fate of remaining in the same spot forever. I had a strange feeling that goats tied up quietly like that in the dark knew everything about the world. But even though I like goats and even miss them, I still couldn't accept the man's request to take care of his goat.
        Fortunately, I didn't have any children coming for private lessons that day. I called the art institute where my daughter was studying and asked them to bring her home on the bus in the evening, and then I left home early. As I started down the stairs, I heard the woman who lives on the second floor screaming.
        "You, go away! Go away! Why are you asking me to give you food?"
        The woman was beating on the chest of a young man who was holding a black umbrella. I couldn't get past the young man's big, fully open umbrella, so I stopped on the stairs.
        "Ah, Yeong-Jae's mother, help me push this man away. He keeps ringing my doorbell and asking me to give him some food. Why isn't the security guard here yet?"
        The young man turned his face toward me slowly and looked at me. And then he suddenly opened his mouth wide. Without thinking, I looked into the young man's mouth. I was shocked by the fact that his teeth were so white and straight, like the inside of a perfectly developed gourd. The young man lived on the third floor of the apartment building opposite ours, and his parents used to own a restaurant somewhere. I heard his father used to be a professional soldier, and some women whispered that he looked very suspicious, like a North Korean spy. That apartment, which we could see into because it was across from ours, was one where there often used to be disturbances at night. One night, in the middle of the night, the neighboring apartments shook with the sound of people running around from room to room in the dark, things flying through the air and breaking, things crashing to the floor from cupboards, and a long electrifying scream that could have been that of either a man or a woman. About three months ago, I couldn't stand it anymore and called the police. That seemed to have worked, because after the night the police showed up at their apartment with the sirens blasting, there weren't any more disturbances.
        It looked like the apartment was empty during the day. There was a rumor that the young man walked around with his black umbrella wide open, ringing anybody's doorbell, asking for food, and arguing with housewives who were home alone. Some said he was crazy because he was abused by his father, some said it was because he was too smart and studied too hard at a prestigious university, and some said he had been like that since he was born. Without the black umbrella, the young man was pretty good looking. He had a very clean-cut, handsome forehead and clear eyes. In fact, I saw him many times studying at his desk when he wasn't holding his umbrella. He would sit bent over his desk in the same position in his small room on the third floor for hours at a time. Since the window of his room was almost always open except when it was raining, I could easily see into it from our living room.
        When the young man stepped back a little for a moment, I hurried down the stairs.
        "Oh, get away from here. What kind of person are you? Even if you are my neighbor, if you keep this up, I'll call the police."
        The second-floor woman was screaming. It was 1:15 in the afternoon. The sunlight was falling heavily like pieces of a broken brick.
        Only Jeong-Yeon and her daughter were home at Jeong-Yeon's apartment. Jeong-Yeon and her daughter's shoes were lying neatly on the polished tile floor just inside the door. The blue-striped curtains matched the covers on the arms of the sofa and the kitchen table cloth giving the apartment a fresh feeling. Her daughter was taking a nap on a bamboo mat on the living room floor with only her tummy covered with a milk-colored towel, and goldfish were swimming peacefully in a pleasant-looking aquarium. Meditation music filled the room.
        "It's prenatal care music, isn't it?"
        Jeong-Yeon nodded and turned the stereo volume down a little.
        "You got a haircut!"
        It would have seemed very strange if I had seen her on the street. It might feel like I had seen an old classmate pass by in a taxi while I was walking, or like I had seen an old classmate walking on the street as I passed by in a taxi. . . . I felt like I had to admit that she and I had become women who were nearly thirty-three years old, which is something we only used to hear about. It was a feeling of not being able to breathe freely, like breathing with some needles stuck in my throat.
        "Yeah, I wanted to look neat. I look older, don't I?"
        "Yes, but your face looks better. It looks healthier. Isn't anybody else here yet?"
        "They'll be here soon enough."
        Jeong-Yeon's expression showed a hint of loneliness. My eyes wandered to the laundry rack on the balcony where the freshly-washed laundry and a pair of white sneakers were drying, and then over the ceramic vases that were carelessly placed around the living room.
        "Did you talk to Hyeon-Su directly?"
        "Uh-huh. She said she was coming to visit her family and would stop by here for a little while."
        "She should have gone to graduate school."
        "Her family's financial situation wasn't so good then."
        "When we were in college, even earning money from tutoring was illegal. It really was the dark ages. . . . How are you?
        "I'm all right. I didn't have very much morning sickness this time. I'll make some tea."
        "Don't do that. I'll have some later with the others."
        Jeong-Yeon and I looked into each other's eyes for a moment. The faucet in the kitchen was dripping loudly. The shiny countertop was completely dry, and there wasn't even one glass left out. It looked like the kitchen of someone away on a long trip.
        "This is a quiet time of day. What do you usually do? After you finish cleaning the house like this?"
        "Nothing much . . . I don't do anything. I can't." Jeong-Yeon sighed deeply as if she thought of herself as a dried-up vegetable.
        "After putting the baby to sleep and I'm squatting down on the living room floor by myself, I feel like I'm waiting for something to happen. Hoping for someone to come. . . . Hoping for someone to come and look around the house and tell me that I've done enough already, that I can stop, and to put an end to all this repetition. . . .
        My eyes were on Jeong-Yeon's chest because I couldn't look into her eyes.
        "The complete end, I mean."
        "What you're talking about is death. What else could come to you and tell you that it's all over?"
        "Right, that's right. But I'm still waiting. I don¡¯t feel that it has to be death. I'm just waiting."
        "There is no way to end it. We have to consider this repetition to be a trivial thing. We need something more important to do than this. I don't think we were put on this world to do the same housework two or three times a day until our eyes glaze over and our fingers wear out and we feel nothing but the nausea inside our heads. If we push the repetition into the background of our lives and look for the passion inside of us instead, and if we try to discover our own precious stones hidden inside life's repetition, can't life be like a mystery?"
        Jeong-Yeon smiled a lonesome smile.
        "You're still the same. You're still full of self-awareness." Jeong-Yeon's eyes were looking past me into the distance.
        "Self-awareness?"
        "Mi-So, you haven't changed a bit inside since you were twenty." Jeong-Yeon spoke with affection in her voice, but was hiding her deepest feelings.
        "Women like you are rare. . . . You're still a dreamer."
        I smiled uncomfortably because of the expression on Jeong-Yeon's face. "Am I that hopeless?"
        "It's just that it's unrealistic. Don't you think the whole idea of a housewife talking about her ego or her dreams is somehow inappropriate? If you don't forget about all that, you won't be able to stand it."
        "You're right. It's a symptom of being abnormal. That's why my so-called dream has taken on such a strange shape. I have to admit, it someone asked me what my dream is right now, I'd look really foolish. It would be like a strange man in my bed asking me, 'Where is your erogenous zone?'"
        Jeong-Yeon giggled.
        "But then, that could be fun, too, don't you think?"
        Jeong-Yeon made an expression that showed she was shocked by my joke.
        "You'd better stop that. You can't say things like that."
        "You can never tell until you start to live with someone. You're supposed to make your dreams come true together. I don't even know myself. I don't know if I can call it a dream, or if it's just nonsense. My dream has a strong smell of failure. . . . Anyway, if I just disappear some day, you can think, 'Oh well, that hopeless egoist must have finally accomplished her dream'."
        "By the way, Jeong-Yeon."
        Jeong-Yeon, who was once an extreme idealist, stared at me curiously. I blinked a few times and started to talk reluctantly. Hesitating by blinking my eyes is something I do when I'm embarrassed.
        "If someone asked you to take care of his goat for four days, what would you do?"
        I could see a glow of interest in Jeong-Yeon's eyes, and her face started to sparkle.
        "What are you talking about?"
        "Don¡¯t you know what a goat is? Since about three months ago, a man has been calling me every two or three days. He keeps asking me to take care of his goat. He's kept it up for two months. Anyway, he says the goat is inhabited by his step-mother's spirit. He says his step-mother passed away and became a goat."
        Jeong-Yeon made a face that showed she was stunned to hear that.
        "Strange story, isn't it? But it's true. The man and his father believe it's so. They say when they had the sashipkujae [a memorial service on the forty-ninth day after a person's death] for the woman, the goat came crawling out of the grave. Of course, I don't believe it. When the two of them were bowing in front of the grave, a goat that was separated from its herd must have passed by the back of the tomb. The problem is that the man's old father believes so much that his wife's spirit is inside the goat. He thinks the goat is more important than his own life. Now he's sick and has to go to Seoul National University Hospital for some test, but he can't go because he can't find any place for the goat to stay."
        Jeong-Yeon was barely able to hide her startled expression when she spoke.
        "That's exactly you. Things like that happen to you because it fits you perfectly. An egoist and a goat which is the sanctum of a dead woman's soul . . . a perfect match. That kind of thing is your destiny. Yeomso ['goat'] and Mi-So, that sounds great." Jeong-Yeon laughed when she finished speaking.
        "Do you believe what they say, that the woman's soul is inside the goat?"
        "It might not be her soul, but they really believe it, right? The old man thinks that the goat is more important than his own life, you said."
        "Yes, that's a fact. I don't know why the man is asking me to do a thing like that for him. But he says I sound like someone he knew in the past. And I have the same kind of feeling, too. I mean I have the feeling that I've met the man before."
        "Maybe he has a younger brother or an older brother that you knew." Jeong-Yeon's expression changed, and she looked serious.
        "Having a strange man suddenly ask you to take care of his goat one day isn't the only strange thing in the world. When you think about it, life itself is very strange." Jeong-Yeon was muttering in a low voice as if she were talking to herself.
        "When you're in your apartment on a quiet afternoon, and you can see into all the other apartments that look like chicken coops that are divided only by thin walls, that should make you feel a lot worse than when you hear some strange story. Each apartment has an adult woman in it, cooking for a man, cleaning, giving the man sex when he comes home at night, going to visit the man's family for a jesa [a memorial ceremony held on the anniversary of a relative's death]. . . . And the woman gives birth to a child or two, the man complains that he can't even die because he has to support his wife and children, the hypocritical woman spends five years or ten years in that chicken coop taking care of the children by herself. . . . Then one morning the woman gets up and realizes that her feet have forgotten how to walk out forever.
        Jeong-Yeon exhaled as if her breathing passages were blocked.
        "The thing I hate about it the most is that the women in the apartments are so obviously delighted to be there. It reminds me of the very odd smiles of women who display themselves in windows in red-light districts."
        "Right, right, exactly."
        We finally agreed on something. The baby woke up, and as Jeong-Yeon was picking her up, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to take care of the goat for four days. The sanctum of a soul and an egoist could make a good pair. Why did the man ask me, of all people, to take care of his goat? What if it wasn't the man who wanted to ask me to do it, what if it was the goat itself that wanted to be with me for four days? Yes, it must be the goat that insists so stubbornly on being with me. Just like the day I realized the fact that I was not the one looking at the clouds, but that the clouds were looking at me. Suddenly I felt like I really wanted to see the goat.
        Jae-Kyeong and Mun-Ju came together in Mun-Ju's car, and Mi-Hwa came by herself. When the laughter died down and the routine conversation was over, I could see the strained expressions surface on my friends' faces for just a moment before they were able to hide them again, Jae-Kyeong because of her unfaithful husband, Mun-Ju because of her mother-in-law's continuing complaints about her pitiful dowry, her troublemaking brother-in-law, and the son she had yet to give birth to, and Mi-Hwa because her husband was so fastidious. Unhappy faces are of all kinds and descriptions, but a happy face, which is what we all wanted, always looks the same, which made our lives seem all the more audacious when we got together. Everyone's face looked tense as we checked our watches repeatedly and thought about Hyeon-Su.
        "Dowry. Sexual inequality. In-laws."
        Everybody looked at Mun-Ju when she said that.
        "Things that should disappear, did you forget?"
        "Wow, that's too much!"
        Everyone burst out laughing at the same time.
        About ten years ago, when we had time between classes that were spaced out like a seven-year-old's teeth, we used to sit side by side on benches on the campus and play a game that still seemed relevant to our present lives.
        Jeong-Yeon's playful eyes sparkled as she continued. "Periods. Polluted city water. . . . Violence."
        At that time, Mun-Ju often named her German drama class, Jeong-Yeon used to name a certain male student who followed her all the time and the President's last name, as if his disappearance would solve all of the social problems and get rid of the student demonstrations at the same time. She would hold her breath for a long time and then whisper the latter's name as she exhaled. Mr. So-and-so. . . . Then we would giggle uncontrollably as if she had said the dirtiest word there was. Mi-Hwa, who was in love with a soldier at the time, name the military. Jae-Kyeong, who didn't have any particular complaints, named the curfew. And the curfew was actually abolished one day. We laughed our heads off at that mystery. What did I name. . . ? I probably often named the ban on private tutoring. I considered having a tutoring job a more romantic dream than being a college student. I still remember, however, I never really showed my inner emotions to my friends when I played the game. Maybe the others didn't either. It was just a game for killing time.
        "Unemployed people. Holidays. Gambling."
        "Rigid thinking. Alcohol. Fastidious people."
        After Jae-Kyeong and Mi-Hwa had had their chances, it was my turn. "Rape. Television. Housewives."
        "Housewives?" Everyone looked at me.
        "I think the first woman to become a housewife must have been a prisoner of war. One P.O.W. gave birth to another P.O.W. who gave birth to another P.O.W. and so on."
        Jeong-Yeon sighed. "Well, that would produce a lot of unemployed people."
        "Obviously, housewives are already treated as if they're unemployed. The reality is that they don't have any real income, and when a housewife is hurt in a car accident, she gets the same compensation as someone with no job."
        I had made my firm declaration. Hyeon-Su didn't come. It was 5 o'clock, and we were sitting around the living room, eating grapes, and watching the time pass as we waited for Hyun-Su.
        "How could Hyun-Su make such a ridiculous decision? How could she just abandon her destiny? Why didn't she wish for something, or for something to disappear, like we did, instead of throwing her life away. . . ?" Mi-Hwa asked, as she continued peeling grapes and Hyeon-Su still didn't show up.
        "I understand her. What if someone is at a dead end or at the edge of a cliff? Some people just plop down and spend their whole lives right there. But some step out and fall down into the abyss. They're the ones who follow their hearts. Maybe that abyss is really a higher place . . . a place as high as the clouds."
        "But isn't spending your whole life at the edge of the cliff just another way of falling?" Jeong-Yeon objected strongly to what I had said.
        "If the person is satisfied with that situation, then it's fine. If the person has no delusions or fear of falling, if the person's not blinded by confusion and fantasy. But anything or anyone who is clinging to the edge of a cliff must always be afraid, don't you think? So it must be hard to stay calm, to take care of yourself, or to keep your innocence."
        I was reminded of a goat again . . . a goat as silent as the night at the top of a tower and black as ink. If someone is silent and pure and seems to know all about life which is woven with more things that don't really exist than with reality, that might be one stage of the blue abyss.

        "Your advertisement appeared again."
        I blinked my eyes for a moment, barely able to respond. "You mean they printed my phone number again?"
        "That's right."
        "That can't be. I didn't place another ad."
        "If you take care of it for just four day, it will be enough. Because of the goat, my father hasn't been able to go to the hospital for his tests yet. Since the goat has been living in an apartment for the past six months. . . ."
        I moved the receiver away from my ear. I had been expecting another call from the man with the goat, but when it came after four days, I was confused. And I was even more confused when he mentioned another ad in the paper. . . .
        Without much thought, I'd placed an ad in an advertising paper about three months ago to try to find some students for private tutoring. I thought it would be the simplest way to advertise. If I had been more experienced, or a little more cautious, I wouldn't have used the advertising paper. Anyway, he was the first person who called me because of the ad.

        His high-pitched voice, with a nasal quality mixed in now and then, made me feel that I was talking with someone I'd already met at some time in the past. It still made me feel that way, and it gave me chills. At first, he introduced himself as another English teacher who was working at a private language institute. But right after he said that, he asked me if I could take care of his goat for a while. So I said to myself, "Oh, my god," and while he was still talking, I hung up the phone very quietly. It was then I realized that I had caused trouble for myself by carelessly allowing my phone number to be printed in the advertising paper. As soon as I hung up the phone, it rang again. It wasn't the man with the goat this time, though.
        "This is a hospital. Wouldn't you like to work here part-time in the afternoons?"
        It was a man with a strange accent that reminded me of a drill, and he had a very unnatural voice that made me feel that he might be smashing his lips against a wall, or that his mouth might be twisted up toward one ear. I was struck dumb. I didn't dare say anything when I heard his heavy breathing over the phone. I didn't want to antagonize him.
        "In my advertisement, I made it clear that I want to tutor middle school students." I couldn't hide my emotions because I was disgusted and infuriated by his preposterous offer, as well as by his voice.
        "It isn't that dirty of a job." The man said the words slowly in that disgusting voice of his.
        A chill ran down my spine. I hung up the phone, almost dropping it. Even though he had said that it wasn't a dirty job, an image was running through my mind of all kinds of horrible things that had fallen into dirty water and were struggling to get out. I felt like the man's twisted face was peeking at me from a hiding place inside my living room wall. The next call was from someone who had a voice like a baby. He mumbled so quietly that I had to ask him to repeat himself many times. "Excuse me? What did you say?" The voice was asking me if I wanted to tutor some students. When I said yes, the voice hesitated as if it were some kind of insect oozing slime to attract another insect, and then he asked me if I was a college student. As I kept repeating, "Excuse me? What was that?" I suddenly realized the voice was that of an adolescent boy. I couldn't stand to listen to his wet, fishy, dirty voice when it struck me that his underwear was probably already wet from his short conversation with me. "You should know I'm a married woman!" I yelled and threw down the phone. Then I pulled out the phone cord. I felt like I had swallowed a lot of insects. I felt like the bugs were piling up in my colon and wiggling through my bowels.
        I held the receiver close to my ear again. The man with the goat was still on the line. I quietly put the phone back down. I urgently looked through my pocket notebook to find the phone number of the advertising agency. Why did they run my ad again when I didn't ask them to? I wasn't sure if I had written down the number in my notebook or not. The phone rang again.
        "Don't you want to work part-time in a hospital in the afternoons?" My god! It was the man with the accent that sounded like a drill and the voice that sounded like his face was smashed against something.
        "It isn't that dirty of a job, you know. . . ." The man was whispering with his mouth that seemed to be pressed against something or twisted in some way. He seemed to be laughing at me as I imagined him swinging his huge antennae as he sat curled up inside the wall. The sound of the man's breathing flowed through the phone line into the receiver.
        Passing through my ear now were all of the anonymous men I had encountered in my entire life, those waiting behind me when I used pay phones, those who waited with me for green lights to cross the street, those who walked up stairs with me. Men who had faced me in elevators, men who started their cars at the same time at red lights, men at highway restaurants, behind windows at city hall, at banks, at drug stores. . . . Images of all those strange men were passing through my ear mixed with the man's heavy breathing.
        Their anonymous, wandering eyes, shoulders bent as if they couldn't wait to get away, the tips of their black shoes toeing the floor, the backs of their dark, short necks reminding me of dead animals, hands extracted from their pants pockets that were unexpectedly too white and either too plump or too small, the backs of their crude bodies that made me wonder if all men were dwarves, their sick heads all covered with the same short, black hair, greasy stains on their rounded stomachs, the impression of unconscious hunger, saturated with the smell of cigarettes. . . . The sound of the man's breathing was gradually getting louder. What the hell was he doing?
        I hung up the phone. The inside of my brain was numb, as if I had just awakened from a dream. What was going on? It was still noon and the sun was shining brightly outside. The shouts of children chimed clearly like the sound of a xylophone. I felt that I had just had a strange dream.
        The advertising company admitted their mistake and apologized, but I gave them a hard time anyway because I had some doubt that they were telling the truth. Maybe they just ran any old ad when they had space to fill up. But I couldn't just keep repeating myself on the phone. They sounded like they were just waiting for me to get tired of listening to myself speak.
        "Just don't ever let anything like this happen again."
        As soon as I hung up, the phone rang again, and I ended up speaking to the adolescent boy with the weird voice one more time. The little bastard didn't change his approach by even one word from the time before. I felt like I was going to throw up. I ran into the bathroom and lifted the toilet seat. Suddenly, I imagined that all of the excrement from my own body and from my family's bodies was somewhere deep inside the toilet. I struggled to control my queasiness for a moment and then finally vomited my bluish gastric juices on the bathroom floor. I started scrubbing the toilet bowl violently with the brush. Then I rinsed the bowl and washed and shook the brush. Our fates on this earth aren't really very different in the end. We all clean up our messes to hide them from other people.
        I was exhausted. I lay down on the floor in front of the bathroom door and closed my eyes. My body felt like a cabinet with its doors open, exposing everything inside. It was very quiet. I took a deep breath to return to consciousness and suddenly opened my eyes. I could just make out my arms lying on the floor in front of me like a shriveling balloon.
        There was the very familiar living room. There was a patch of sunlight reflecting on the wall like a screen for a slide projector. The white lace curtains were being blown around by a gentle breeze in the sunlight. Even if my phone number did appear again in the advertising paper after three months, they all called me at the same time, with the same voices, the same scenarios, the same begging, the same offers, the same questions, as if they all met together in advance to plan it. Isn't that just too strange to ignore? What was the connection among them and between them and me that made that happen? People who have the same capacity for solitude, people who have the same capacity for dreams, people who have the same capacity for fate. . . .
        Someday if I go to a bank or a bookstore and the building explodes and I'm killed, someday if a crazy driver suddenly runs over me and kills me as I'm walking on the sidewalk, someday if there are three or four other people killed along with me in an accident like that, the other people killed might be them. The point of intersection for that sort of thing is already determined in the everyday life that awaits us, but it still has to happen to crash us together like that because of the extreme loneliness. . . .
        The phone rang again. I stared at the phone suspiciously. It was the man who wanted me to take care of his goat. The man, who seemed like someone I already knew, started the goat story all over again in his usual tone, which sounded like he was setting a trap. Why did this man want me to take care of his goat of all things? Maybe it was because I didn't call him a crazy son of a bitch from the beginning, but simply explained that I couldn't do it because I lived in an apartment?
        "You mean you really can't find anyone to take care of just one goat for such a short time?"
        "No, I can't. I'm really desperate. They all say they have reasons that they can't take care of a goat."
        That made sense somehow. Anyone could find himself in a situation like that at least one time in his life. A desperate situation when nobody's there for you to take care of your goat, even if it is just one stupid goat. . . . As a matter of fact, I had been considering the possibility of actually taking the job.
        "All right, bring the goat," I said cheerfully, and then I told him the name of the apartment complex, the building number, and the apartment number. I often feel light-hearted. I suddenly felt light-hearted when I took my job, when I got married, when I had my baby, and even when I quit my job. It's as if suddenly deciding to feel light-hearted was a way to go beyond the problems, or a way of accepting the problems. If I didn't have those moments when I ignored the problems rather than taking them seriously, nothing much would have happened in my life.
        I didn't even know things like how big the goat was, whether it was difficult to handle, how it went to the bathroom, what it ate, or if it cried at night. I didn't think that those were important things to consider at that point. Whether I would take the goat or not was the important issue. Whether I had decided one hundred percent to accept the goat or not, that was the only problem.

        My daughter went to take her piano lesson after lunch. Looking out the window from the balcony, I could see her walking with the neighbor boy who lived downstairs. They both had the same bag hanging from their shoulders. The boy said something to my daughter and stomped his foot on the ground, and she squealed with laughter. The children disappeared gradually around the corner of the apartment building, like little boats struggling to keep their heads above the water. I dropped my head and started to clean the dust piled up on the window sill.
        The rag got so black and my gloveless hands got so dirty that I couldn't stand it anymore. I could feel the dust in my mouth. I bent over a plastic wash tub on the bathroom floor, washing the rag. The water in the wash tub turned jet black. I stared blankly into the water and dipped in my hand.

        "Teacher, we won't be able to come to study tomorrow." The four boys sitting at the round table looked at me confidently.
        "Why?"
        "We're going to catch a whale."
        "A whale?"
        The boys looked at each other and then looked at me again. Maybe it was a new attraction at a local amusement park? Or maybe it was a computer game? No. Maybe it was the name of an after-school program. Well, the government had announced a ban on whaling, and there was always a demand for prohibited items. Now that it was banned, people might miss the primitive act of whaling, and that might have made people start things like that. Whales. Whales are mammals. By the way, why did whales go to the ocean. . . ? The boys were smiling and looking at each other. In their smiles, there was a subtle shyness suggesting that they were sharing a secret.
        "Pokyeong. [Pokyeong is a homonym that means either 'whale' or 'circumcision' in Korean.] Oh my goodness!" It took a moment for me to get back my dignified teacher's face after the fog had finally lifted.
        "Are you all going to have it done at the same time?"
        "Yes!" They all screamed together, their faces showing how happy they were that I finally understood.
        "Aren't you afraid?"
        "We're afraid. But we have to do it to become men. After this class, we're going to visit a boy who caught a whale yesterday. He's promised to give us all the details about how the doctor did the operation and how much it hurt."
        I gave them a two-day vacation to go whaling. The boys' faces were shining, as if they had really decided to catch a whale.
        The doorbell rang just as the boys were getting ready to leave. The goat had to come eventually. I had the feeling that my whole body was sinking. I didn't want to open the door, so I just sat there holding a pencil in my mouth. There was a pause, and then the doorbell rang again, and another pause, and it rang again. "Teacher, someone's at the door," the boys yelled. And then the goat started bleating from the other side of the wall. The goat had really come. I stood up quickly and opened the door before the woman from across the hall could open her door and come out to see it.
        The goat looked like a mysterious black lump. But it looked beautiful and dignified. I stared at it quietly, as if it were the answer to someone's prayers. Its horns thrust uniformly out of its head as if someone had pulled them out, and its long flat ears spread out horizontally from the sides of its face like wings. There were no pupils in its yellow eyes, just black lines that looked like they were drawn there in charcoal. Its hair was black and shiny like ebony. The man who was holding the goat was small overall, with indistinct facial features like a Chinese man, and his skin was a very pale white. I had never seen him before. He didn't look like anybody I'd ever met, and he didn't even have any memorable features. Indeed, I'd never seen anyone who was so characterless.
        "Isn't there any food for the goat?" I could barely ask the question, the strange expression on my face an unavoidable one.
        He looked at me as if he couldn't understand, but started to speak slowly after a little while. "Well . . . there isn't any food, but it eats just about anything. After you finish the job, I'll reimburse you for the food, too."
        No food but people's food? It sounded so ridiculous that I just looked at the goat again. Fortunately, the goat had a bridle. The boys came to the door and stood in a circle looking at the goat.
        "It's a goat!" The boys were whispering to each other, trying to control their excitement, as if they had said, "It's a flying saucer!"
        The man looked at the boys and spoke quickly. "I knew you would agree to take care of it. I felt it. Your voice sounded very familiar, like someone I've met before. I tried to remember who you were, but I couldn't. Now that I see you in person, I know I've never met you before." His face reddened quickly as he talked.
        "I'll come back in four days. Thank you very much."
        Even after he had thanked me, he stood there absent-mindedly as if he had lost his wallet or something, and then he bowed to me politely and left.
        I locked the door and turned around, trying to remember if I had seen him before or if I knew anybody who looked like him. Just then, something else happened. The goat lifted its tail, its anus opened wide like a sliced pomegranate, and something that looked like a lot of black beans started coming out. Oh, my! The boys were screaming and laughing loudly, holding their bellies.
        "Teacher, the goat dropped some beans. About fourteen beans fell out. . . ."
        I was so embarrassed that I didn't know whether to laugh or be serious.
        I sent the boys home, and then I put several layers of newspapers on the balcony floor, placed some red bricks on the edges and in the center of the paper, and tied the goat to the railing. The goat looked at me with its mysterious eyes as I stood in the living room. It moved its long eyes slightly. . . . I wondered how I was going to explain this situation to my husband, since I couldn't even understand completely how it had happened myself. The lights in the apartment building across from ours started to come on one by one. The goat, with its front feet on a brick and back legs stretched out all the way so that its back was curved, was looking outside through the window screen. Although it was only standing on one brick, its appearance gave me the impression of wild dignity, as if it were standing on top of a rugged mountain.
        The unrealistically long summer day was continuing outside like a bright light reflected from a mirror. It wasn't getting dark quickly enough. It was getting noisier on the playground outside my kitchen window. Some children who had had an early dinner were outside playing basketball, bouncing it, shooting it toward the basket, jumping high in the air. My lace curtains were puffed up like sails of a sailboat by the hot, humid evening breeze. The breeze filled my apartment with a slightly stale smell.
        My daughter came home as I was preparing dinner. I could feel some sand on the living room floor that she must have tracked in. She took a long time washing her hands, face, and feet. She had already changed into her pajamas before she discovered the goat on her way to the living room to watch TV.
        She tilted her head to one side and said, "That's a goat!" Did you buy it? I really wanted a dog . . . but a goat is all right, I guess."
        If only my husband had a similar reaction, there would be no problem. . . . But the goat had already defecated twice and urinated once. My daughter brought some of her own cookies from her room to feed the goat. But the goat wasn't interested. When she stood up quickly, the goat was startled and ran into the corner. I tried to give it some shredded lettuce and cucumber, which were all the fresh vegetables I had. The goat sniffed them, but didn't eat them. At my daughter's suggestion, I offered the goat some crab meat and some ham. It wasn't interested. Then I gave Th. goat some uncooked instant noodles. The goat ate them quickly. So I tried to give it some more noodles, but it wasn't interested. The goat wouldn't eat bread or anchovies either. As my daughter and I kept trying to tempt the goat with different kinds of foods, a pot of hot pepper stew I was cooking on the gas stove burned. A nasty smell filled the air.
        "What's that smell?" The smell of the burned hot pepper stew had not completely disappeared yet.
        My husband, with his face distorted, was still holding the door open when he arrived home at 11 o'clock.
        He still hadn't noticed the goat. He kept asking me about the smell in the air. I almost blurted out, "It's a goat."
        "I burned a pot of stew." I answered with as little emotion in my voice as possible, because there was a much bigger surprise in store for him.
        That night, my husband's reaction was simple. Without a word, he pushed the goat halfway down the stairs, and then came back inside and went into the bathroom to take a shower. I walked the goat around our apartment building a few times, and then tied it to a paulownia tree growing in an out-of-the-way spot between the senior citizens' recreation building and the playground. That seemed like a good place to hide the goat for the night because it was away from the street lights and it was separated from the playground by a row of spindle trees.
        After I had tied up the goat and started to walk back along the narrow passage between the senior citizens' building and the playground, the goat began bleating, high-pitched and sorrowful, sounding as if it were trying to send some sort of signal to someone far away. "Baaaaa. . . . Baaaaa. . . ." That worried me, so I stopped and turned around to look.
        The spindle trees around the paulownia tree where the goat was tied were vibrating noisily from the goat's bleating. It reminded me of the shiver that had passed through my body when my husband had reacted to the goat by untying it without a word, pushing it out of the apartment, and slamming the door. I had felt a sudden and violent impulse to lunge toward my husband and crash my body into his. What I really wanted at the time was that I could smash against him so hard that it would tear open my own stomach so that I could escape this world forever. . . . That night, my husband ate his late dinner while he watched "The 24 Hour News," with the fan, or course, pointed toward him. Then he watched a video tape, holding a can of beer and rubbing his feet together, before finally going to bed at 2 o'clock in the morning.

        As soon as my husband's car left the parking lot, I ran down the stairs and went to where I had hidden the goat behind the senior citizens' building. The goat had its leash wound around the base of the tree so that it had nearly hanged itself. It couldn't even move. At that time of the morning, there weren't many people around, except for a few older people who were on their way to fill plastic bottles with spring water. Luckily, I was able to drag the goat home without meeting anybody along the way. Since I felt that I had completed an important task, I relaxed and drank a cup of coffee as I watched a morning talk show on TV. The goat must have eaten some leave during the night, because it seemed to be gently chewing its cud. The goat and I occasionally made eye contact and stared at each other for a while. I waved at it and went closer to touch its horns, but the goat didn't seem to have any interest in establishing a good relationship with me, but just stood there looking stubbornly dignified.
        As I took the cabbage leaves out of the kitchen sink and started moving the dirty dishes from the kitchen table to the sink, I could hear a loud vibrating sound in the distance. "Vroom. Vroom."
        The maintenance men had been noisily mowing the grass all day the day before. . . .
        The noise was coming from far away, but it was a lot stronger than the noise from the day before. As I dipped my hands carefully into the dish water, the loud vibrations seemed to be getting closer and closer and coming from all directions at once.
        I looked out of the balcony window, cautiously stretching my neck out as far as I could. Some of the women from my building had spread mats on the lawn in the shade of the opposite building, with their fans, hats, water bottles, and bags of snacks arranged around them as if they were planning to camp there for two or three days. Next to them, their children were riding bicycles or roller skating on the pavement between the two apartment buildings. Some young men wearing gas masks with tanks on their backs were moving in and out among the trees. They were already very close.
        "The Exterminators Will Come Today." There must have been a sign in red letter giving the exact date and time on the glass door leading to the hallway of the apartment. I didn't even notice it when I brought the goat back. Sometimes this sort of thing happens as a consequence of living without having any interchange with neighbors. I put the dishes that were still on the kitchen counter inside the cupboard, moved the plants scattered around the apartment to the balcony, covered the TV, stereo, and other things in the living room with newspapers, and hid our valuables under some blankets in the closet. Then I looked at the goat tied up on the balcony. I felt that I had reached a moment of truth. I would have to take the goat outside, past all the neighbor women, and find a place to kill at least three hours. I really wished I could just wrap the goat in a blanket and hide it in the closet.
        The noise and vibration, which was shaking the entire apartment building and had been getting closer and closer as it moved up the building a floor at a time, stopped in front of my door. When I opened the door, there was a young man standing there dressed like one of the characters in the movie Ghost Busters. He certainly looked surprised, too, when he saw me standing there with the goat. When the goat and I suddenly came out of the building together, the women sitting on the mats all stared at us.
        "What's the goat for?" asked the woman who lived in the apartment just below ours, opening her eyes wide and raising her eyebrows. I just smiled sweetly. There was a small blanket folded into a square on one of the mats, and next to the blanket, there were some Korean playing cards. After they washed the dishes in the morning, the neighborhood housewives gathered there to play cards. They said it was the best way to spend the day while taking care of their children. They played cards as they waited for another day to go by, waited for another month to go by, waited for another year to go by, waited for their children to grow up, waited for their sick mothers-in-law to die, waited for their sisters-in-law to get married, waited for their husbands to get promoted, waited for their monthly payments to end, waited for their installment savings plans to grow so that they could move to bigger apartments, waited for their unfaithful husbands to get old, hoping to fill up the dry, boring time, which made the soles of their feet crack without reason. They took out their spare change and played cards, jingling their coins together to help another day melt away, chatting about the same things they had chatted about the day before. . . . They were like unfortunate extras in a play, just waiting off-stage for long periods of time. They were getting older watching others perform, playing games and getting older. I don't like games. The only reality of games is that they swallow time.
        I greeted them with a nod and walked away quickly before they asked any more questions, as if I had somewhere I need to go right away. I probably couldn't go home for at least three hours. I could have pretended to know those neighborhood women I had seen many times in nearby stores, at the market, or while filling a bottle with spring water near the apartment complex, but I just walked past them without looking at them and with no expression on my face. They stopped and turned around to look at me as I walked past them with the goat.
        "Is she going to make medicine form that goat, I wonder?"
        The goat walked ahead of me until we reached the playground, and then it suddenly stopped and tried to go into the playground. I pulled the rope hard. The goat bit off some leaves from the hedge and chewed them calmly. The sunlight was very hot even in the morning. I pulled my baseball cap down over my head. It was then that I realized that I had been wearing the same clothes for three days straight, a pair of beige cotton pants with the knees now badly stretched out, a sleeveless white shirt, and a pair of flat black sneakers. All I had in my pocket was one 500-won coin [about U.S. 55 cents]. I pulled on the rope with all of my strength, leaning back as if I were involved in a game of tug-of-war. As the bridle tightened around its neck, the goat suddenly gave in and started to follow me quietly.
        We passed the playground and the dry spring water facilities and headed for a little store near the back gate of the apartment complex. I picked up three different advertising papers, and then bought a cup of coffee from a vending machine. I tied the goat to a maple tree at the edge of a flower garden and sat down in the shade to browse through the papers. The goat aimlessly sampled some of the grass and foxtails.
        "House in the countryside. 220-pyeong lot [1 pyeong equals 3.3 square meters], 25-pyeong floor space, 3 bedrooms, modern remodeled kitchen, 500 meters from the ocean."
        "Old house on a hill overlooking a valley. 80-pyeong lot, 700-pyeong farm, farm can be used for lot, good view, near a pond."
        "House next to a river. 210-pyeong lot, 25-pyeong floor space, 50-pyeong farm, good view."
        I tore out the ads with the phone numbers one-by-one and put them in my pocket.
        I left our apartment complex and started to walk along a stream that flowed between two other apartment complexes. The sunlight was hot. It was 11 o'clock on a July morning. Even the shadow of the fence by the stream seemed to be trying to crawl under the bottom of the fence to hide. I looked around, but I couldn't find any shade. It was a desolate scene, like dry starched laundry. . . .  On both sides of the stream, tall grass and summer weeds were tangled together creating a thick undergrowth. Dark, bubbling sewer water was running through the stream. Broken balls and plastic bottles floated unsteadily on the surface of the shallow water.
        As I walked along the stream to the street, I passed an abandoned refrigerator with its door open, a broken umbrella, a plastic doll without its arms or legs, a baseball glove, a backpack. . . . There was even a tricycle, a torn potato sack, and a small cupboard lying on the bank of the stream. My uncovered shoulders were burned and painful. I could barely keep my eyes open as I walked unsteadily like a sick person on a long journey, looking for a shady spot. The goat followed me silently, occasionally feeding on the tall grass along the bank of the stream. After crossing three more bridges, feeling thirsty, we came to a small church which seemed to have been recently built. It still smelled like wet cement. It had a cool, fresh smell.
        I tied the goat to one of the legs of a fake wood table under the fake vined canopy in the church's garden and sat down on a fake wood bench. The goat, which had been following me quietly, now started to bleat. "Baaaaa. . . ." Nobody came around for a while. The weather vane on the roof of the church never moved. I was so sleepy that I couldn't stop yawning.
        A woman with a bundle on her head came into my drowsy consciousness. She had short permed hair with the wave starting to loosen, she was wearing a blue cotton T-shirt and a white pleated skirt with an elastic waistband, and on her bare feet was a pair of plastic slippers. She walked into the shade of the hedge next to the front door of the church where she lowered her bundle and sat down. She seemed to be about forty years old, but she moved easily, like a little girl jumping rope. Soon after that, a man with a sunburned face came and sat down next to the woman in the shade of the hedge. When the woman suddenly turned her back to the man, he rose halfway and moved in front of her. The woman tried to turn away again, but the man was holding and caressing her hands as he spoke to her.
        The man and the woman with the bundle sitting in the shade of the hedge did not seem to be a married couple. I wondered what reasons caused the woman to leave home with such a small bundle and wearing such casual clothes. Was it a case of a poor woman running away with her boss? Maybe their secret romance became known, so they ran away hastily the night before and arrived at this strange place now at noon on the following day. Maybe he was a neighbor, the superintendent of her apartment building, a co-worker, a friend of her husband, or the husband of a friend. From the look of the woman's strong arms, they could have worked together doing wallpapering or painting. Maybe they would start their new life together by opening the small bundle in this strange place. Then they would rent a room and start to buy pots and pans, a few dishes and cups, and some bedding. And then they would eventually go out to find jobs, buy some new knives and a cutting board, put up a clothesline. . . . It wouldn't be too difficult.
        Now they were talking calmly. The woman was resting her chin on her knees and nodding her small head repeatedly. While I was watching them through the heat waves rising from the ground, I became so sleepy that I couldn't stand it anymore. My cheeks were streaked with tears from constant yawning. I wanted to sleep where I was, but the distance between the cement table and the bench, both permanently attached to the ground, was too far. I fell into a deep sleep with my chest bent and my face resting awkwardly on my arms on the table. The goat bleated. "Baaaaa. . . ." Just as I was falling asleep, I felt one drop of cold water.
        It rained in my dream, and I could hear goats bleating in a dark forest.
        "I am a man who drives goats." A man with a huge bell hanging around his neck approached me, with the bell jingling away.
        "Time is unlimited, but the true essence of time is as hard to find as a tooth in a pile of sand. I know what you want."
        I had a bell around my neck, too. We were walking down a dark mountain trail, driving a herd of goats. The bodies of the goats had disappeared in the dark, with only the blue luster of their mysterious eyes swaying back and forth in the air. There were large arrowroot leaves swinging along the edge of the trail next to the blue luster, all mixed with raindrops. I could make out the dim lights of a village further down the mountain through the wet, thick fog.
        "Goats are wild animals. Even if you leave them to sleep outdoors at the edge of a cliff by the sea, they'll be fine. But they should not be left out in the rain to get wet. They're horrified of rainy days. Goats are most afraid of getting wet, just like other wandering creatures are. Butterflies which cross mountains, spores which float across rivers, flocks of birds that cross oceans, spirits which rise up to the rooftops of existence, and you. . . .  Think about it. The wet forest, the wet dark forest, wet from rain. You've been tolerating it for too long."
        The goats filled the mountain trail with the swaying blue luster of their eyes, and they were bleating loudly because of their fear of getting wet.
        After school, the children all rushed out into the street and stopped there with their lips tightly pressed together. They all looked tired, and a little sad. I moved my eyes away from the children and lifted my head, looking at the dark tunnel where five balls were spinning around because they couldn't pass over it.  A volleyball, a soccer ball, a basketball, a tennis ball, and a beach ball. . . . They were floating side by side in a line, spinning around and around.
        The signal changed to green and the children all started running together, and then, there my daughter was in the crowd. I looked at her with surprise. That child, who seemed to have grown during even only half a day, resembled me a lot more than I had thought. I'd sometimes felt that there was no connection between us, that we were like two boats floating separately. She grew when I wasn't with her. There was no stopping it. No matter what I did, she would eventually follow her own destiny.
        I stared desolately over the distance between her and me. As she came closer, I could see that her bangs were clinging to her forehead, wet with sweat. Her face was red as an apple from the heat. I brushed the hair off of her forehead, pressed her face hard with the palm of my hand, and let go. While I was taking her backpack from her, she giggled.
        "Mommy, you have red lines on your face."
        "Do they look bad?"
        "Uh-huh, they look bad. They look like cuts. How did you get them?"
        "I got cut. . . ."
        "But you look really important with the goat, Mommy."
        "Important?"
        "Uh-huh. You look like someone who left ninety-nine sheep and wandered around looking for one lost sheep."
        I giggled.
        "Mommy, there was a second grade girl crying in the hallway today. So I asked her why she was crying. She said her teacher shook her by the ear and pinched the inside of her arm really hard because she didn't do a good job cleaning the classroom."
        She had a worried expression on her face as she spoke, but soon her eyes were sparkling again and she started running.
        "We have vacation from tomorrow. . . . We have vacation from tomorrow. During vacation, I'm going to go to Grandma's house. . . ," she yelled, and then ran to one of the machines outside the store near the back gate of our apartment, put in a coin, and turned the handle. Her face was even redder after running.
        A small clear plastic container dropped out of the machine. There was a cheap ring and a piece of paper with the word "blank" printed on it inside. She said, "Shoot, no luck," then went into the store and came out a little while later with a "Jaws" flavored ice bar in her mouth.
        "Mommy, last time I won some chocolate."
        I almost said, "That's junk food," but I didn't. I remembered the many low-quality foods I used to eat when I was growing up. The shabby taste of low-quality foods which came with the food shortages. When she opened her mouth and smiled, I could see her blood-colored tongue. With every move I made as I walked, I could hear rustling sounds made by the ads in my pocket that I had torn from the advertising papers. Anyway, since the sun was so hot, it was better to run.
        "A shark!"
        I started running, dragging the goat, and my daughter giggled loudly and started running to catch up with me. While I was running and laughing, I was suddenly shocked to hear the sound of heavy footsteps right behind us. There was someone else running right behind my daughter. It was a young man holding a black umbrella. When had he started to follow us? He was running after us, smiling with his mouth wide open, his black umbrella pointed straight up toward the sizzling sky. The sunlight poured down like fire. I was going to stop running because it seemed like a very strange thing to be doing then. But I couldn't get the goat to stop once it started running. The leash tightened, and I was pulled along awkwardly. The goat was very strong. The memory of the day I had last seen the young man came back to me.
        It had snowed constantly through the night. That morning, the snow was lying quietly in still piles, but every once in a while when the wind blew, white whirlwinds swirled in the little plaza between our apartment buildings. I looked out the window as I did the dishes and wiped the floor with a rag. There really aren't many chances in our lives to laugh for no reason. As I stood near the window looking at the snow outside, I blew soap bubbles into the air and laughed quietly to myself. I cleaned the bathroom, and folded the laundry. . . . Just then, a young man disturbed the quiet scene by walking across the empty playground.
        He was holding a black umbrella in one hand and swinging a swing back and forth with the other. Snow piled up on the swing and fell off as it moved. The young man turned his head and laughed. He climbed the steps of the sliding board and slid down through the snow, laughing loudly all the way. He walked across the lawn and disappeared behind a wall, and then reappeared, shaking the branches of the trees. Snow piled up on top of the black umbrella. I giggled as I dunked a cookie into a cup of coffee. I thought about inviting him in so that we could dunk our cookies into our coffee together and discuss what the newscasts had called an unusually large snowfall for so far south and so early in the season. Or maybe I would join him under his umbrella for a walk, touching the snow on the tree branches together. I wanted to experience joy that came for no particular reason and consider together a world that had suddenly started to sparkle. For the first time, his black umbrella didn't seem so strange at all.
        I ran as fast as I did in my dreams. And I ran aimlessly here and there, just as I did in my dreams. In the middle of a sizzling hot day, a black goat, a woman driving the goat, a little girl, and a young man holding a black umbrella over his head, all running together. . . . Fortunately, except for a few grade schoolers who paused on their way home from school to watch us go by, there weren't many people on the streets to see us.

        "House next to a river.  210-pyeong lot, 25-pyeong floor space, 50-pyeong farm, good view."
        I took the ad from my pocket and dialed the number.
        "When you say next to a river, does that mean that the house and the river are right next to each other?"
        "What?"
        Each time I asked a question, the man at the other end of the line didn't understand.  He sounded like he might be in his mid-fifties, with a hoarse, alcohol-soaked voice.
        "It's next to a river all right."
        "I want to know if the river is right next to the house."
        "It is."
        "Which side of the house is next to the river?"
        "The field just beyond our backyard runs right down to the river.  The house is up pretty high, though, so you don’t have to worry about flooding."
        "What kind of house is it?"
        "It's a western-style house with a flat roof.  It's a real modern design.  It's got a bathroom, too."
        I was a little disappointed.  I like houses with pitched roofs, even if the roof is just made of tin.
        "I see, what color is it?"
        "You sure ask a lot of questions.  It's white."
        "Are there any other houses near it?"
        "What?  What's that?"
        His voice was getting louder, and I could tell he was about to lose his temper.  Most of the people I talked to got angry at about this point in the conversation.  And then they yelled at me and hung up.  "Hey, come and see it for yourself.  How can you expect me to sit here and explain every single detail to you over the phone?"
        Even though I was a little nervous that that might happen, I didn't let up.
        "There's a house next door."
        "Is it very close?"
        "Well, not really, it's pretty far away."
        I wanted to ask him what kind of trees were planted around the house, what he grew on the farm, if people came there to fish on holidays, how wide the river was, if there was a bridge across the river nearby, and if there were any boats on the river, but I controlled myself, instead telling him that I wanted to see the house in person on the following Sunday, and after getting detailed directions, I said good-bye and hung up.
        Of course, I had never even once actually visited any of the houses from the ads.  Inquiring about houses here and there was purely a hobby.  After I hung up the phone, I looked out the window and drew a white house with a 210-pyeong lot and 25-pyeong of floor space in my imagination on the wall of the opposite apartment building.  As usual, there would be poplar trees standing on the river bank.  There would be a long, narrow field of reeds growing between the river and the raised embankment, and a goat would be tied up at the river bank.  There would be a field of peanuts, potatoes, watermelons, grapes, or something else nearby.  It would be the harvest season for the watermelons and the potatoes.  I still remember the excitement I felt the day I dug my first potato.  That memory of the first time I dug potatoes jumped into my head from the place deep inside me where it had been buried. . . .  I drew a circle on the ad and placed it in a ceramic pot, and then I took another ad out of my pocket and was about to unfold it, when the doorbell rang.  It wasn't time for my daughter to come home from her lesson yet.
        When I opened the door, there stood the young man with the black umbrella.  I stared at him, and he smiled at me.  He had had his hair cut really short.  Someone, maybe a relative, had done a lousy job on the haircut.
        "Please close your umbrella and come in."
        He entered without closing the umbrella.  The umbrella was still hot from being opened outside in the heat.  I closed the door.
        "You can close your umbrella now."
        "No, I can't."
        His pronunciation was not very clear.
        "Why not?  It's not raining or snowing."
        The young man took off his shoes, still holding the open umbrella, and went to the balcony where he started walking backward between the two clotheslines.  The goat stood up quickly and bleated in his direction, shaking its long ears.
        "Shall we give it some food?"
        The young man opened his mouth wide for a moment in what had become a familiar expression and shook his head.
        I asked him to sit on the sofa and then brought him some coffee and cookies.
        "It's John Lennon."  The song, "Imagine," was playing on an FM radio station.
        The young man, who didn't seem to have much of an appetite, sat there quietly.  I felt a little uncomfortable.
        "Do you like John Lennon?"
        "No," he answered, and then shook his head for a long time.
        "I don't like anything."  He shook his head again.
        "I like goats.  I took it for a walk at night.  Every night. . . .  One night, the goat cried a lot.  Once it got tangled up around the tree with its front feet off the ground, and it was crying.  People woke up and were looking out their windows.  So I took the goat for a walk to calm it down."
        My eyes widened and I stared at him while he told me that.  The goat looked at him and bleated.  The young man was embarrassed and his face reddened.
        "Thank you.  It's no wonder it hasn't been difficult for me to take care of the goat. . . .  Thank you very much."
        The left side of my head felt as if it were filled with a hot, spicy steam, which ran down my forehead and filled my nose.  I felt as if I were the goat crying in the middle of the night, and I was overcome with a sad feeling of familiarity.  I took one of the young man's hands and held it tightly.  His hands were large.  He sat there awkwardly with his back straight, looking down at our hands.
        "I like the goat, but I like you more than the goat."  The young man slowly placed his other hand on top of my hands.
        "I can see you from my window.  I've often watched you.  You just live.  You just sit there with a faraway look.  You always go out alone.  You don't meet other people, you don't wear make-up, you don't wear pretty clothes, you don't laugh, and you don't decorate your apartment.  You have some kind of earnest desire, just like the goat.  Why do you spend your time endlessly doing nothing?"
        The young man had insight into my true character.  But was I just wasting my time?  How could he possibly understand that the days that came one after another, whether I wanted them to or not, were as hard to face as the job of trying to move a mountain with a shovel?  My face reddened.  When I tried to pull my hands away from his, he held onto them tightly, lowered his head slowly, and pressed his lips against the depressions between my fingers.  I felt as if some sort of lump had moved silently from the space between my fingers into my chest.  From the bottom of my heart, a sadness welled up inside me like an attack of dizziness.
        "You are beautiful.  I really mean it.  I know how to tell when someone is beautiful.  Beauty isn't something physical, but has to do with the essence of a person."
        The young man said this with a rather unsteady voice, and then he let go of my hands.  He touched the goat's horns, raised him umbrella, put on his shoes, and went down the stairs.  He seemed to have completely forgotten to say good-bye.  I ran out onto the balcony and looked down.  After a little while, I could see the young man entering the door of his apartment building.  From above, I could only see his legs, because the rest of his body was hidden under the black umbrella.
        The umbrella looked huge, as if it were a roof.  Somehow, I could understand then why he always walked around with that open umbrella.  Maybe the deficient part of me is somehow just like that umbrella. . . .  I opened my hand and looked closely at the spots the young man's lips had touched.  It was not an arrogant action.  He kissed not my body, but my essence.  I looked in the mirror, touching one part of my body after another.  I did it in a soft and lonely way, like a cat licking its fur simply because it has nothing else to do. . . .  Like a heavy drop of sadness accumulated from reading, a tear fell on the back of my hand.  The surprising fact was that I had been neglecting myself in conspiracy with my husband.  My fingers, my knees, my back, my ears, my breasts, my armpits. . . .  Why didn't those things have any meaning to me except for the value my husband placed upon them?  How could I have forgotten about them for such a long time?  Above all, didn't those things belong to me?

        I gathered up the newspapers covered with black bean-like droppings and spread fresh newspapers on the floor of the balcony.  The goat ate almost nothing.  It stood next to me lightly, as if it were made of black paper, empty inside.  The goat really must have been kept in an apartment before, because it almost never cried.  I reached out my hand and gingerly touched the goat's neatly arranged horns.  Humans must never have had horns.  A strange, frightening feeling passed through my fingertips.  It felt like something was piercing my skin . . . something wild.
        I hadn't really believed the man from the beginning, but the goat was just a goat.  A goat doesn't want to associate with anyone.  The only thing a goat longs for is to be with other goats in a forest.  The goat ate hardly any rice, vegetables, instant noodles, or cookies.  Deep inside its body was a trapped longing for arrowroots buried in the forest, tree stumps, and fields of green grass.
        It had already been five days, but the owner of the goat hadn't contacted me.  The day before, the lady who lived right below us had complained about my keeping the goat.  She said she could smell it downstairs.  I pleaded with her to be patient, and told her I would get rid of it within a day or so.  She agreed, but only because we were neighbors.  If it went on for a few more days, though, she might report it to the manager.  Sometimes that made me feel very uncomfortable.
        I took out the Beatles record with the song "Imagine" on it, something I hadn't done for a long time, and four baby cockroaches tumbled out of the vinyl cover.  Then the phone rang.  It just kept ringing.  I unplugged the phone and looked down at the empty spot on the floor where the cockroaches had been.  Suddenly I realized that the person who was trying to call me might be the owner of the goat.  I rocked up and down on the balls of my feet, . . . filthy, lukewarm horror.  I stood there trying to think of a way to kill those cockroaches, my mind working hard on a plan for their annihilation.  Maybe I could move all of the records forward and suck up their entire nest with the vacuum cleaner.  And then I could run quickly into the bathroom and drop the cockroaches in the bathtub.  Since sucking them into the vacuum cleaner would only wound them, I'd have to finish them off by drowning them.  But if I wanted to do it that way, I'd have to fill the tub with water first.  But how would I dispose of their drowned bodies?
        After I had made all of the preparations to carry out my plan, I moved all the records out of the way, but there weren't any cockroaches there, not even one.  They're very sensitive.  Maybe something deep inside me would have kept me from doing it anyway.  Even if I had managed to corner them somewhere. . . .  Those bugs could go anywhere they wanted, with their backs shining in the dark.  I just stood there sadly looking up and down the walls, my will to fight exhausted.

        "I smell something really strange."
        My husband came home sometime after midnight, and after rattling around in the kitchen and washing noisily in the bathroom, he got into bed and started running his hands over my half-awake body.  I could feel myself closing up to him like a wilted cabbage.  And whenever he put his head close to my face, I noticed a terrible, filthy smell.
        "What smell?"
        "Oh, this . . . what's that smell. . . ?  I can't stand it . . . yech."
        I was about one-third asleep, so I could barely mumble, as if I had a long piece of thread tangled up inside my throat.
        "What smell are you talking about?"
        "From your hair.  Burnt stew . . . that's what it smells like."
        "What kind of talk is that?  What makes you say my hair smells like burnt stew?"
        "It really smells. . . ."
        "Stop.  Go back to sleep, sleep, hm. . . ."
        He lay on top of me and pressed his lips against the back of my ear.  The smell filled my nose so that I couldn't breathe.
        "Ahhh. . . ."
        I tried to push him off of me, and when that didn't work, I started hitting him hard with my fist.
        "What's wrong with this woman?"
        "Get your hair away from me!  I can't stand it."
        He took his lips away from my neck.  And then he slapped me on the cheek.
        "Bitch!  You think I'm dirty?"
        When I opened my eyes, I could see his naked upper body in the dim light.
        "Get off me."
        "You're really dirty.  You smell like goat and goat urine, you know.  I'm sick and tired of it.  The whole place smells like stinking goat piss!"
        After screaming this toward the ceiling, he got off me.
        I felt so light.  I curled up slowly and turned toward the wall.  My husband angrily kicked off the blanket and lit a cigarette.  The inside of my head felt as if it were quietly filling with water.
        When was the last time I'd had a fight with my husband?  When was it?  The last time we put our pride and self-respect aside and went all out at each other. . . .  I could hear the goat bleating.  It was crying desperately.  Why hadn't the owner come back for it?  Maybe his father died?  Even so, why didn't he at least call. . . ?  My husband seemed to be asleep, lying motionless on his side.  I held my breath and slipped quietly out of bed.
        As I turned the corner to the back of the apartment building, the goat started bleating again.  It was jumping up and down, a violent blue luster in its eyes.  With every jump, its feet hit the ground with the sound of a horse's hooves.  It would run in one direction until the rope tightened around its neck, and then run back in the other direction, trying to loosen the rope.  The paulownia tree that the goat was tied to looked as if it were in danger of being uprooted.  I didn't know what to do, so I just followed it back and forth, blinking my eyes.  The thought suddenly occurred to me that this was a critical moment.  The neighbors would probably be sticking their heads out of their windows to complain soon.
        "Uh, let me take care of the goat. . . ."
        It was the young man with the black umbrella.  With the dark, clear sky and the stars as a background, he looked even more grotesque than usual standing there with his umbrella.
        "It will calm down if I take it for a walk by the stream"
        He placed his umbrella on the ground carefully and started untying the rope from the tree.  The knot was tight because of the goat's violent struggle.
        "Why do you have this goat?"
        I hesitated to give him an answer.  The young man looked back at me.
        "The goat wants to go to the forest."
        "Why do you always carry that umbrella. . . ?"
        When I asked him that, the young man looked at me as if he thought I should have already known the answer.
        "This umbrella is my forest.  I carry my forest around with me.  I only pay attention to things that pass under my forest.  Once in a while, even some people pass under this dry umbrella.  Just like you, your daughter, and your goat.  I can't bear to face this world without my umbrella.  It's so chaotic, unpleasant. . . .  My heartbeat goes wild.  It's horrible."
        If the goat had wanted to come to me just then, I would have understood the reason.  The goat was there to reflect the face of another goat, one that was buried deep inside of me as if it were inside a sealed well, by simply showing me the simple truth that a goat was just a goat.  The young man walked away with the goat, his umbrella pointed straight up at the night sky, without asking me to go along.  His appearance as he gradually disappeared from my sight with his black umbrella was that of a gentle raven about to take flight at any moment.  Maybe the word "dream" is really just another name for his small forest.  But without that small metaphorical forest of his, how and for how long could he possibly bear the bitterness of this world, the confusion and violence of this world, the uneasiness and meaningless rigidity. . . ?
        My husband and I had boarded and were on our way, facing each other from our blue flannel-covered seats.  "Chug-chug, chug-chug. . . ."  The train was moving through the bright sunlight we could see outside the windows.  There was an old man holding a black plastic bag sitting next to me, and a young woman was sitting next to him.  The woman's hair was short, very thin, straw-colored and nearly transparent, like a baby spider.  She was wearing heavy make-up, which just seemed to emphasize the fact that she was very young.  Her indistinct lips were almost beige in color.  Her body looked very heavy.  Full breasts, wide hips, huge thighs, long and thick fingers. . . .
        My husband was holding an open newspaper.  The old man sitting next to me was crumpling his black plastic bag.  My husband was gradually moving the newspaper in the direction of the woman.  My eyes happened to fall on the paper's "Wise Saying for the Day":  "Capacity is infinite, the flow of time is endless, and fate is always changing, circulating without end and without beginning.--Chuangtzu."  But the true essence of time is as hard to find as a tooth in a pile of sand.  Like a tooth in a pile of sand. . . .  When I looked up, my husband and the woman were hidden behind the newspaper.  The crumpling sound of the black plastic bag was beginning to annoy me.  The newspaper was moving from side to side, making a rustling sound.  The woman giggled in an exaggerated way.  It sounded like an old wooden door opening.  It sounded like someone stepping on an old wooden floor.  Why does the old man keep crumpling that black plastic bag. . . ?  One of the woman's huge thighs came into view from behind the newspaper.  My husband's hand was attached to it.
        Without moving from my seat, I swung my arm through the air like a steel club and snatched away the newspaper.  My husband was squeezing the woman's exposed breasts tightly, and his lips were buried deep in her cleavage.
        I tried to clench my fist to hit them, but I couldn't control my fingers and I couldn't reach them with my arm.  I could barely manage to swing my stiff arm with my fingers wide open harmlessly through the air like a lead pipe.  The woman giggled.  Capacity is infinite, the flow of time is endless, and fate is always changing, circulating without end and without beginning.  "Chuangtzu". . . , the old man went on crumpling his plastic bag.

        A dim light was still on in the bedroom.  My husband was lying with his lips tightly pressed together as if he were pretending to be asleep.  I woke him up, and he leaned against the head of the bed.  Then I slapped him on the cheek three times.  He opened his eyes wide.  Rather than anger, his eyes were filled with questions and fear.  He glared at me for a little while, and then picked up his pillow and left the room.  He wasn't prepared to set his pride and self-respect aside to get involved in a fight any more than I was.  My body was drenched with sweat.
        On a rainy spring afternoon last year, my husband went to see a French movie with a certain woman.  I should have found out more about that woman.  Why didn't I make a little more effort to find out more about the single woman who worked in the office next to my husband's and whom my husband had lunch with every day for six months?  I could have dropped by her office secretly.  Why didn't I do that, so that I wouldn't keep seeing all of these different kinds of women in my dreams. . . ?
        Around that time, my husband often came home very late, and I often found him standing on the balcony late at night.  He often sighed, and would sometimes become very talkative, which wasn't like him at all, and start talking nonsense as soon as he walked in the door after work.  What he said didn't make any sense, but he would just go on talking. . . .  The next day, I would find his wet shirt inside the empty washing machine.  One day, I realized that this was happening every Friday.  For some reason, my husband would come home after midnight every Friday and quietly wash the shoulders or the chest and the sleeves or the cuffs of his shirt and put it in the washing machine with the collar still dirty.
        And in the spring of that year, my husband had already seen the movie that I had hinted I wanted to see on my birthday . . . with another woman who wanted to see that movie.  And on my birthday, he took me to a theater to see an American movie about the Vietnam War.  As we watched the movie, he squirmed noisily in the small, uncomfortable seat and complained several times about having to come to a theater to see a movie that we could have watched at home on video.
        The next day I went to see the French movie by myself.  The movie had already started when I entered the theater, and as I groped for my seat in the dark, I could only see about twelve or thirteen heads rising above the backs of the other seats.  I sat at the left end of an empty row.  The muffled sound of a plastic bag. . . .  A man sitting in the back moved to the seat at the far right end of my row.  On the screen, Catherine Deneuve, whom I had not seen in a movie since I saw her in Les Parapluies de Sherbourg, was involved in a love scene with a young man with long blond hair.  The man making the muffled sound with the plastic bag started moving toward me one seat at a time.  Faster than I would have thought possible, the man moved into the seat next to me and without hesitating put his hand on the inside of my thigh.  No doubt it was a seedy, filthy, little hand.  I ran outside, bumping against seats in the dark.  When I opened the theater door with its sound-proof cushion, for some reason, all I could think of was how much the theater smelled like gooey, melted ice cream.  The cold, damp smell of moldy paper. . . .  The street was as bright as if it had been bleached.  People were talking in low voices as if they were half asleep, and the cars were passing silently as if they were half floating in the air.  It was all so tranquil, like a dream.
        My husband watched the movie that I told him I wanted to see on my birthday with another woman.  On the day I found that out of all days, a woman pushed her two children from the top of a five-storey apartment building and then jumped herself, crushing her skull.  Her husband had been living with a young woman who worked in his office for the last six months.
        I couldn't find out everything about what my husband had done, and I couldn't forgive him either.  My only thought was that I wouldn't push my child from the top of a building and I wouldn't kill myself.  I couldn't get furious and get a divorce either.  But what was I afraid of?  Why was I so tolerant?  I didn't really want to know the truth, so I just left it at that.  I had dreams about that woman.  About the face of that woman, a woman I had never seen before, or maybe, a woman I had seen somewhere at least once. . . .
        My husband said that there had never really been anything between them and that he wasn't seeing her anymore, but I didn't really believe him.  I made an effort to trust him, but I couldn't.  And although it was not always on Friday--sometimes it was Tuesday, Thursday, or another day--he still came home late like before.  And whether he came home early or whether he came home late, I didn't even try to trust my husband anymore.  The sacred bond of our marriage was completely destroyed.  We can live without love, without trust . . . like a dried out thorn, like a well with a cracked bottom, like a cold tombstone on a cold day.  But what is the meaning of a life like that?  Why do the unimportant things control the important things and cruelly separate our arms and legs, our hearts and ears, our mouths and lips like this?
        It was March of this year, the morning of my husband's thirty-fifth birthday.  I shook his back to wake him up, and as he was turning over, he mumbled, "I want to run and smash myself into something really hard and die."
        When I heard him say that, I suddenly felt a dull pain in my side, as if I had been beaten black and blue.  Maybe he really did want to run full speed and smash into something and die.  Maybe my husband really did want to just read books in a prison cell.  Maybe my husband was dying to live with the woman who worked in the office next to his.  What was the reason for my husband not to do one of those things . . . in this life with nothing to hold on to?  As it stood, if I found out he was dead one day, would I shed many tears. . . ?  Considering the indifference with which I treated my husband while I was alive, even if I cried a pond full of tears, it wouldn't be enough to wash away the regret.  However, as long as we lived together, I still wouldn't be able to overcome the feeling of malice I had for him.  It seemed like those were the roles we had to play and the only possible lines between us.  Like a dry river that gets wider and wider every day, a couple's weariness and indifference that get deeper and deeper every day. . . .

        "The largest and most impressive animal on earth, the largest specimen more than thirty-five times as big as an elephant, intelligent as a clever dog, its hot breath rises quickly in a cloud of vapor.  And its life span is around one hundred years."
        While I chopped potatoes into thin strips on a cutting board, my daughter was reading a book about whales in a loud voice.
        "Mommy, whales used to be four-legged land animals, but they went into the ocean forty million years ago.  Their front legs became their front fins, and their back legs changed into their tail fins.  Unlike other fish, their breath is warm."
        "Really?  How could the breathe in the water at first?"
        Why would whales with warm breath, nipples, and four legs go into the ocean. . . ?
        "They must have practiced a lot.  Just like we learn to swim by drinking a lot of water.  But Mommy, why did they go into the ocean?"
        The ocean must be the whales' forest.  A huge forest more than twice as big as the land. . . ."
        I stopped chopping and stared at the goat in surprise as if the goat had just answered the question.  My daughter stopped talking, too, and looked up at me and then looked at the goat.  The goat looked back at us blankly.
        In front of us, the waves pushed toward us and the white foam rose.
        "Isn't it hard to learn to swim?"
        "My teacher gave me some advice.  If you make up your mind that you're going to drink some water in the pool, it gets easier after that."
        ". . . ."
        Painful teardrops were building up on my eyelashes like sharp blades of grass.  I forced my eyes open and went back to chopping the potatoes.  The emotions swirling deep inside me felt as if they would overwhelm me.  I didn't know why, but it seemed hopeless.  Like a torn ball spinning helplessly behind an obstruction in a stream, I just kept packing and unpacking my bag.  In the end, I thought I would never be able to get away from this place.
        I woke up frightened in the middle of the night.  The clock, which was glowing blue like the eyes of a goat, indicated it was 2:45.  In my sleep, I thought I heard a scream that sounded like the wall tearing away.  My leg was numb, but I got out of bed with difficulty and turned off the fan anyway.  As I was doing that, I noticed the irregular sound of raindrops falling on the leaves of the trees.  Before I went to sleep the room had been as hot as a sauna, but now it was cool even with the fan off.  All of a sudden, it occurred to me that it had been ten days since the goat arrived, and the goat had eaten nothing I'd offered it since it ate a few instant noodles the first day.
        I went over to the window and looked outside.  The wet tree leaves were shining and moving in the light of the street lamps.  It sounded like someone might be screaming in distress, and it sounded like the goat might be crying.  But when I held my breath to listen more closely, in the sound of the rain there was a regular, penetrating silence, like beads being strung on a strong thread.  Thick streaks of rain fell through the open window and bounced off my face.  Only later did I realize that the rain coming in the window had also formed a puddle under my feet.
        Maybe the goat would be frightened by the rain.  Maybe the goat was crying pitifully.  I threw on the T-shirt and blue jeans that I had worn earlier and went out of the room.  Sound was still coming from the TV screen in the living room.  My husband was asleep on the sofa, lying face down, wearing an undershirt and a pair of shorts.  The white lace curtains on the balcony were wet and fluttering in the wind.  My husband's hair was also getting wet from the raindrops that occasionally splashed in.  I turned off the TV and closed the balcony windows.  I returned to the bedroom to get a blanket for my husband, and when I opened the closet door, my suitcase fell out.  A few days before, I had stopped in the middle of chopping potatoes, gone into the room, and packed it.  I sat there for a while with my hand on the suitcase, and then stood up lightly, as if I were a feather.  I covered my husband's back with a blanket, closed the window in my daughter's room, and after putting on my raincoat, I picked up the suitcase.
        I opened the apartment door and groped my way down the dark stairs.  I nearly stumbled several times.  I ran fast, brushing against the wet hedges as I went, but the goat was not under the paulownia tree behind the senior citizens' building.  The leaves of the paulownia tree were shaking violently in the wind, and large raindrops kept falling noisily against my raincoat.  I just stood there absent-mindedly for a little while, and then I thought of the young man and started walking slowly.  I stood inside the apartment building entrance both to avoid the rain and so that I could see up to the young man's apartment, and from there, I could see that his third-floor apartment was brightly lit.  But the goat's cries seemed to be coming from the apartment on the left end of the fifth floor.  I kept hearing the goat's bleating coming from the fifth-floor apartment, which had the lights on in every room--the bedrooms, the living room, and even the kitchen.
        "Ahhh. . . ."
        A woman's long scream tore through the wet night sky.
        "Help. . . ."
        "Ahhh. . . ."
        And the sound of the goat crying again. . . .  Now that I thought about it, it didn't seem like the crying of the goat at all, but the moaning of a woman instead.  As beads of rain ran down the glass like a curtain, the sounds continued of things falling to the floor and breaking, a woman screaming, and noisy bickering.  The lights came on in the apartment next door and in the opposite apartment, and then the lights went on and off in other apartments around them.  The sound of a faraway siren gradually came closer and closer until it finally turned the corner and stopped in the little plaza in front of where I was standing.
        I was a little surprised to see that it was an ambulance.  Three men got out.  They pointed at the entrance of the opposite apartment building and had a short discussion, and then they picked up a heavy-looking stretcher and went into the brightly-lit apartment.
        As soon as they disappeared, a white car came into the plaza.  The people who got out of the car were the family who lived in the apartment right below us.  The woman was holding a small child in her arms, and the man had a larger child on his back.  The woman was surprised to see me and stopped walking in front of me.
        "Oh my, what are you doing here?"
        "Nothing . . . since it's raining."
        The woman, who seemed to have just awakened from sleeping in the car, was scowling with a face that looked like a stale loaf of bread.  As the man from the second floor went up the stairs, he flipped on the lights and the stairs suddenly became bright.  I nervously remembered the suitcase on the floor behind me.
        Moreover, I was wearing a raincoat that was already wet.
        "Gee . . . we went to the country for a jesa [a memorial ceremony held on the anniversary of a relative's death] and just got back.  The weather is like this on this day every year!  I can't take it anymore.  What do we get in return. . . ?  It looks like the young man on the third floor must have collapsed again, doesn't it?  That's a really strange disease he has.  He always starts having fits around this time of the year.  The commotion must have woken everybody up.  They should have some kind of basic psychological screening test for people who live here.  What kind of place would admit a person like that, with all the trouble. . . ?"
        The woman from the second floor glanced briefly at the suitcase behind my legs.
        "Aren't you going in now?  It's late. . . ."
        The woman from the second floor looked over my raincoat and wet hair as I stood there without answering her, paused a moment, and then bundled up her baby and went up the stairs.  Maybe it would be the following day or the day after that, or maybe it would be a week or so later, but I was sure the woman would later report that she had seen me standing suspiciously in the building entrance that rainy night.  I was sure she would talk about the suitcase, the raincoat, the wet hair, and the pants with the stretched out knees of the upstairs woman who disappeared. . . .
        Through the window on the stairs, I could see the three men coming out of the young man's apartment on the third floor.
        The came out carrying the stretcher.  I got as close as I could to the rear door of the ambulance.  The young man seemed to be exhausted, lying on the stretcher with his eyes closed.
        Raindrops the size of large chunks of salt were falling sharply on the young man's forehead.
        "Look at me, look at me."
        Before the young man could open his eyes, he was pushed inside the ambulance.
        "Look at me!"
        As I was trying to ask him where the goat was, I felt something heavy bump against my leg.
        It was the goat.  The goat must have been inside with the young man, since it wasn't wet at all.  I took the goat by the bridle and went back to the entrance of the apartment to get out of the rain.  The goat started bleating as it watched the rain fall.  It stuck out its front legs stubbornly, crying louder and louder, and stroking its horns or rubbing its neck were of no use.  I didn't know what to do.
        The ambulance shrieked several times and then sped away.  I held tight to the goat that was trying to run away and looked up at the young man's still brightly-lit apartment.  The fact that I could still occasionally catch a glimpse of someone in the window of the young man's room bothered me.  A little while later, the window jerked open, and a man threw out a fully opened black umbrella.  It was the young man's small forest.  The small forest seemed to float in the air for a while, but then it tilted to one side and fell to the grass below.  The open umbrella wobbled a few times in the wind and then began rolling away.  It seemed like it was being blown a long way away.
        I picked up my suitcase and, dragging the goat behind me, started to follow the umbrella.  The wind blew the umbrella past the low hill on the other side of the road.  After missing several chances to catch the umbrella because of the goat which had priorities different from mine, I was finally just able to grab the umbrella on the steps of the sliding board in the playground.  The umbrella was rusted, so I couldn't get it to close.
        After hesitating briefly, I slowly lifted the umbrella over my head.  The rain water that had collected inside the umbrella trickled down on my already wet hair.
 The apartment building, which was now dark, stood there looking very flat, like a huge wall.  It was easy to find our apartment.  The light was on in the living room, a dim glow seemed to be flowing along the outside gutters.  It was the apartment where a man with rain water-soaked hair that looked like a plastic bottle that had washed up on a beach was lying face down on a sofa.  It was the apartment where a sad dream was about to overflow and soak through a little girl's sleepy eyes, the apartment where the damage had already been done a long time ago, and where in the morning, when they opened their eyes, they would silently realize that a woman had disappeared.  I could not go on forever with my boat tied at the edge of a precipice, looking down into the abyss.  At a certain moment, when I found myself at the end of the road, I had no choice but to close both of my eyes and both of my ears and make the sudden jump forward in the direction of my true self.
        Anyone who has made the jump will understand.  Greater than the reality within the abyss that lies between things that exist and things that do not exist, even greater than the reality of reality itself, there is a stronger bridge of clouds, a light bridge of clouds that is like a cloud heading into its own forest. . . .
        After some time had passed, he would do something, too.  He could hide himself away and read books as if someone had locked him up, or he could drive his car at full speed, crash into something, and die.
        He could try living with the woman from the office next to his, or he could suddenly just go away.  Or he could try doing something else . . . whatever that might be.
        I turned and started walking.  Suddenly, the sound of the falling rain grew louder.  We were passing under some very tall sycamore trees.  The goat seemed to be sending a signal to a faraway place with the blue glow of its eyes and was crying in a loud voice, "Baaaaa . . . baaaaa."  The wide leaves at the ends of the branches of the sycamore trees swooped down as if they would touch my head, and then suddenly poured raindrops on my face on their way back up.  The wind was blowing the rain hard and fast.