Four days until the summons.
I drew the symbol on my palm with a pen. A circle. A line branching outward. The split ends curved back inward. I’d traced it thirty times on the bus, so I could draw it with my eyes closed.
The path out and the path in were the same line.
I’d only ever taken things in. Grabbed them, swallowed them, pressed them into the wall. I’d never thought about how they might get back out.
The old man had asked how many. I’d been living with an unknown number inside me for two years.
Two in the morning. I flipped the switch and sat on the bed.
I closed my eyes and went down inside. A path had opened up after that night I’d spent three days sick. It was like a staircase.
There was a wall. Black tree rings. I felt them one layer at a time with my fingertips. Most of it was just yin energy, melted into the wall. But some layers had knots in them. Lumps that hadn’t quite melted. Some the size of a fingernail, some the size of a fist.
I touched the smallest one.
It smelled like instant ramen seasoning. A tiny rented room.
I placed the knot inside the circle and pushed it outward along the line.
The knot came loose from the wall. And something came in. It wasn’t yin energy.
A cramped room. There was barely a foot between the bed and the desk. An electric kettle boiled. Someone peeled back half the lid of a cup of instant ramen and filled it to the line inside. They held the lid down with chopsticks. Three minutes. Someone coughed on the other side of the wall. The phone didn’t ring. Not today. Not yesterday, either.
I was hungry. But it wasn’t my hunger.
Something hot ran from my nose.
I peeled things away one by one. The room. The sound of the kettle. The cough. At the end, only the phone was left. The phone that never rang. That was the hardest thing to pull free. It was what the person had held on to the longest.
Like opening my fingers one at a time, I let it go.
The line curved back inward. Only the yin energy returned along the path in. No smell. No room. It seeped into the place where the knot had been. The layer’s grain smoothed out.
Whatever had gone out didn’t go anywhere. It scattered like dust in the fluorescent light.
I opened my eyes. Four o’clock. A coin-sized bloodstain had spread across my pillowcase.
One.
The second night, there were two from underground parking garages and three from an abandoned hospital.
One was a thumb gripping a car key. Pressing the remote to make sure the car was locked, turning around, then pressing it again. Beep. Beep. I peeled that thumb away. Another was a patrol log. A pen that had written “Nothing unusual” for three years. I peeled away the pen.
There was a song I’d been humming while brushing my teeth lately. I didn’t know where I’d heard it. When I peeled away the third knot from the abandoned hospital, the song was there. An IV line. The parking lot outside the window. A door no one came through, even after visiting hours ended. It was a song the person had sung alone.
The next morning, I brushed my teeth. The space in front of the mirror was quiet.
I spat out the foam. Then I stared into the mirror for a long time. It was my face.
The third night, I peeled away the remaining six minor spirits and the Grade Five spirit in the alley. The Grade Five spirit was a bus stop bench. Knees that didn’t get up even after the last bus had passed. It took an hour to straighten those knees. When I did, my own knees ached.
The factory was last.
The Grade Three spirit wasn’t a knot but a net. Just as it had spread across the steel frame, it spread across my wall. If I tugged at one strand, another tightened. What was caught inside wasn’t a memory, but a sentence. I haven’t clocked out yet. I haven’t clocked out yet. I haven’t yet.
I clenched my teeth. My jaw made a cracking sound.
The person who hadn’t clocked out was the one who said it. I’d never even clocked in.
I pulled the strands free one at a time. The last one came loose at five in the morning. Where the net had been, another layer of wall rose up. Inside the original wall. Its grain ran in the opposite direction. If the outer wall had been built upward, the inner one curved around the circle.
There were two walls now.
Two remained.
One was just below my heart. Jangmuk. It was different from the other knots. It wasn’t attached to the wall—the wall had grown around Jangmuk. When I touched it with my fingertips, I smelled rusty iron. And my hand knew the half-turn.
I couldn’t see where Jangmuk ended and I began. I didn’t know what might come off with it if I peeled it away.
I withdrew my hand. Not yet.
The other one was even lower. The sixteenth. The one I couldn’t remember where I’d picked up.
It was small. The size of a grain of rice. Smooth. I’d come down here plenty of times over the past two years, but I’d never seen it. It had been hidden behind Jangmuk.
I touched it with my fingertip.
It was cold. Not the chill from a refrigerator. The cold of opening a stainless-steel drawer. And a smell. Disinfectant.
I pulled my hand away.
Jangmuk had been the first one in the boiler room. That was what I thought.
Six in the morning. From the pipes in the utility room came that clank, clank, clank again.
My hand twitched first. Toward the third joint. Toward the half-turn.
I put my hand in my pocket.
I went into the living room and picked up the phone. Beside the refrigerator, my grandmother had stuck up a note with the management office’s number in her handwriting.
“This is apartment 302. The boiler’s making noise again.”
They said they’d come by at nine.
I hung up. In my pocket, I opened and closed my hand. It was my hand. A hand that knew nothing about boilers.
Is what’s inside you yours?
It’s mine. I’m not its.
But as for that grain-of-rice-sized thing at the very bottom, I still couldn’t give an answer.
One day until the summons.