# Episode 4: See the Sky About to Rain
Senior Noh, whom Joo-young met at his first job, was more than ten years older than him, but they had a lot in common. Maybe that was why, when the IMF crisis hit, they were both among the very first to get fired from the company, without either one being ahead of the other. After becoming a freelancer with nothing better to do, Joo-young wandered from one company to the next, peeking in here and there with a begging can hanging from the tip of a spear, when Senior Noh contacted him.
“Aw, why are you going around like that? Come here. This place is really great.”
Senior Noh, who had found a position at another company, was calling Joo-young over. After meeting again, the two began having far more drinking sessions than before, and that was because Senior Noh had begun drinking far more than before.
One day, while drinking with Joo-young, Senior Noh suddenly grabbed him and said they should go see a friend. The place they visited together, more by force than by choice, was a rustic house in a rustic neighborhood near Cheongpyeong. Senior Noh’s friend greeted the two of them in a rustic little back room tucked into one corner of the yard. It was a rustic night.
Signals curlin' on an open plain~ rollin' down the track again~
The two middle-aged men standing before Joo-young now were Senior Noh and Senior Noh’s friend, Jung-sam, from that rustic night.
The back room seemed to be stuck in the 1970s. Even through the several layers of blankets spread across the floor, enough to make him wonder whether some kind of cooling system was running underneath it, a chill rose from below. A low desk, old books crammed into a bookshelf that was embarrassing to even call furniture, a fairly dense collection of LPs beside the stereo—though almost all of them were bootlegs—and the occasional sound of a train drifting in through the tall, narrow window: things like that kept time inside the back room trapped in the 1970s.
Joo-young, returned to his early thirties, slipped a hand into his jacket pocket. He felt the pendant. ‘So I was still carrying this around at this point...’
He still couldn’t remember, but he thought this was the kind of night when he could press one of the pendant’s gems. It was exactly the sort of wonderful moment he had encountered in life, one he absolutely wanted to experience again, just as the strange man had said.
“Don’t just drink makgeolli. Eat some ramen, too.”
Jung-sam was worried about how much Senior Noh was drinking.
“Yeah, aw~ This wild-chive ramen is incredible!”
A ramen pot and makgeolli sat on the low folding table in front of the three men. The ramen, cooked with wild chives Jung-sam had picked himself, was truly something special. Joo-young tried making ramen with wild chives several times afterward, but it never tasted the same as it did that night.
“Hey, keep this up and you’ll become an alcoholic.”
Jung-sam added to his concern as he watched Senior Noh stop stirring the noodles after only a few passes with his chopsticks and return to drinking makgeolli, despite having just declared the ramen incredible.
“No, no~ I’m a lightweight, so I couldn’t even become an alcoholic. It’s people who can really hold their liquor who become alcoholics.”
That was what Senior Noh always said during this period whenever someone expressed concern about his drinking.
‘Give me a break, Senior. You end up dying of alcoholism.’
It was something Joo-young could only say to himself. Senior Noh’s heavy drinking grew more and more intense, until less than ten years after this night, he burned himself out and went dark. As if he had burned himself white.
“Joo-young, why have you been so quiet? Are you depressed?”
“No, it’s just... I like the music.”
It was true that he liked the music. Neil Young’s song, along with the distinctive static of the bootleg recording, filled the room with a rich atmosphere and helped create the colors of the 1970s. But of course, Senior Noh was the reason his heart felt so heavy. More than ten years earlier, after receiving the sudden news of Senior Noh’s death, attending the funeral, and returning to his everyday life, Joo-young had felt that the world before his eyes—without the slightest visible difference from before—was somehow a different world.
Some are bound for happiness~ some are bound to glory~
Suddenly, Joo-young wanted to save Senior Noh. He wanted to find out whether changes made in the past could alter the existing reality. If he could create some kind of change during this time rewind and alter the reality in which Senior Noh died, it would be more than worth trying. But then again, however, how in the world was he supposed to change the tracks of a train headed toward its predetermined end?
Some are bound to live with less~ who can tell your story~