The wind blowing up from below the cliff felt a little colder. Once the initial shock had subsided somewhat, Joo-young realized he needed to think more clearly. Before long, that clear-headed judgment began to whisper.
This was a place he'd never been before in his life. Even if he couldn't remember when or where he'd lost it, there was no way he could have lost it somewhere he'd never visited. Besides, the gem set in the pendant he was holding was green. It was obviously a completely different object from the pendant in his memories. He wasn't seriously going to believe that nonsense about the red gem turning yellow and then green, was he?
Now that was some clear-headed judgment! Joo-young found himself nodding. But then he heard a whisper in a raspy voice.
Whether it was nonsense that red turned yellow and then green, and whether this was the pendant from his memories or not—there was a very simple way to find out, wasn't there?
The logic was unappealing, but impossible to refute. Fine. It probably wasn't, but what the hell—he might as well check. Joo-young pressed firmly on one of the green gems in the pendant he held. He didn't know why, but he even firmly closed his eyes. Despite sincerely believing it was all nonsense, his heartbeat gradually quickened.
“Whoa~ It really turned yellow!” “Seriously?” “Hey, hey, what kind of scam are you trying to pull this time?”
They were Nam-il, Hyung-su, Jong-hyun, and his classmates. The friends he had always hung out and drunk with were right before his eyes. As they had looked in college. Still unable to believe it was real, Joo-young looked around. He was definitely inside the campus bar in front of the Political Science and Economics back gate, where he had often gone during his freshman year. Joo-young shot to his feet.
The person in the mirror was his twenty-year-old self.
Joo-young was staring so blankly at his reflection that one student washing his hands after using the bathroom kept stealing suspicious glances at him. He was so happy to see himself that he thought he might actually cry. He had never dreamed that meeting his younger self again would make him this happy. Young, innocent, and pure, twenty-year-old Joo-young seemed to shine even in the grimy mirror. When the student, who had even witnessed Joo-young lovingly caressing his own cheek, fled the bathroom, a surge of emotion hit him—followed by a rush of guilt. Hadn't he ruined such a radiant youth completely?
“What are you doing?”
Jong-hyun walked into the bathroom, tossing out the question in his usual bored tone. (An unfortunate side effect of narrowing the pitch range of Gyeongsang-do speech through the Seoul-dialect patch.)
“What do you mean, what am I doing...?”
Mumbling evasively, Joo-young left the bathroom and slowly took a long, deep breath. He remembered everything: coming here with these friends after summer vacation ended; telling them about the pendant he had received from a strange man while they talked about what they had done over break; pressing the pendant's gem when his friends badgered him to try it; and the red gem really turning yellow, leaving everyone amazed. There was no other way to interpret it. Everything the strange man had said was true. Because he had pressed the gem as a test here more than thirty years ago, he had returned to the time point that had been registered. Oh my God!
“This looks like the color changes depending on the temperature...” “Hey, hey, hand it over.”
Joo-young hurried back to the table, snatched the pendant from Nam-il's hand, and ignored Hyung-su's suggestion that they sell it to pay for their drinks if it was worth anything. As soon as Jong-hyun returned from the bathroom, Joo-young picked up the glass of makgeolli in front of him.
“Anyway, it's good to see you. Let's have a drink!”
Everyone raised their glasses in perfect unison, like a choreographed dance, and knocked them back with a loud gulp.
“Ahh~”
The distinctive aroma of bootleg makgeolli stabbed deep through his nostrils and all the way to his hypothalamus. Joo-young felt anew that this was definitely reality. It was amazing. It was also amazing that a soul in its mid-fifties could inhabit a twenty-year-old body without feeling the slightest bit out of place. Who would have thought he'd learn through experience that the saying was true—that even when the body grows old, the heart stays the same?
The drinking session was genuinely exhilarating. His mind was in his fifties, making him overjoyed to see friends he hadn't seen in more than thirty years, while his body was twenty, so no matter how much he poured down, he remained fresh and lively. It couldn't have been better. Joo-young became the complete twenty-year-old Ki Joo-young, burning through a twenty-year-old night with his twenty-year-old friends just as he had at twenty.
When he opened his eyes, he saw a tacky ceiling covered in wallpaper. Feeling a heavy headache, Joo-young absentmindedly closed his eyes again—then startled awake and turned his head. Hyung-su and Jong-hyun were sleeping in a tangled heap on the bedding. This was their rented room in front of the school gate, where Joo-young would sometimes crash after drinking until the buses stopped running. He slipped a hand into his pants pocket and felt the star-shaped pendant. Outside the window, dawn was beginning to brighten the sky.
After confirming that the dreamlike night before had not been a dream, Joo-young slowly sat up and leaned his back against the tacky wallpaper. A pack of Baeksol cigarettes caught his eye on the floor. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, despite being the same man who had quit smoking five years ago and gone around bragging that quitting had been one of the best things he'd ever done.
“Fwooo...”
It felt good. His life had been a dead end anyway. He'd been driving toward a cliff with no option but to reverse, even though reversing was impossible—but something out of a third-rate novel had actually happened, and he had gone back to being twenty. No, this wasn't merely reversing. He had to see it as going back to before he had even gotten into the car.
It suddenly occurred to him that if he went to the house in Geumho-dong where he had lived at twenty, his parents would be there too. Without a doubt, his old home, which had vanished without a trace in redevelopment, and his parents, who had both passed away by the time his mother died six years ago, would still be alive and well in that place back then. He wanted to go right away. But the hangover was too fierce to manage a trip of a little over an hour with two bus transfers, so Joo-young stubbed out the cigarette, adjusted the angle of his back until it was horizontal again, and slipped back under the bedding.
It was cozy. A smile spread across his face on its own. It was a warmth he hadn't felt in an awfully long time—the kind of comfort possible only when hope for a dazzling future lay dormant inside you, like a caterpillar in its cocoon. Joo-young drifted gently off to sleep.