Someone Like Yoo

X

Chapter X: The Goddess of Fate Brought Me Taehee

I hear silence in the dark. I hear silence when Taehee and I is in the middle of a fight and we're both heaving breaths, exhausted from the tension and nonsense debates. I hear silence in hospital rooms. I hear silence when the night is near and I've lost my way back home. I hear silence in my own bedroom when Auntie is already asleep and I'm all alone, lying on my bed with my own thoughts. I hear silence and I fear it. Silence is the sound of abandonment.

Starting from Deokhwa in the tea shop and ending with me in the emergency room, yesterday was pure chaos. The name Eun-tak is still in my head, gnawing and clawing at my thoughts, and I've been trying to put my fingers around it but I can't seem to remember anything at all except that it was only a familiar sound in my lips. I spent the night fighting the silence and only slept a wink.

"Rae-yeon-ssi," a man's voice calls me from afar. "Can you run to the third floor and pick these books up for me?" I did not look up from the computer and only muttered a "nae" as a response.

For three Sundays a month, I do my work immersions at the university library arranging books according to Dewey decimals and finishing inventories in the History section. It's a dull task, but I didn't have any choice. It was the only slot left for a third-year AB History student that Mr. Byun had offered. On the plus side, it's the only way I can distract myself from the recurring thoughts of yesterday's catastrophes. Today is my eleventh day of job training and I have exactly twenty-four more hours for the semester.

Mr. Byun waved a small piece of paper in front of my face, blocking the computer screen. The sudden movement almost made jump up from the office chair. "Yah, what's so nice about that logbook that you couldn't even take your eyes off of it?" He hit my forehead with a pen before he moved beside me to angle his eyes to the screen. "You haven't even started logging a book into the system yet. Yah!"

Mr. Byun Jae Yong, head professor of the Philosophy Department, specializing in Korean Mythology, somewhere in his early forties, loves to wear patterned neckties that will surely catch every student's attention in class, loves to talk about the different deities even outside his time, brings his lunch box every day that he says his wife prepares, always seen reading a book. He's been a good mentor to me since the past two semesters and often a father figure. "Sorry," I mumbled to him, bowing lightly.

"Aigoo, your eyes are red already. How long have you been staring at the file? Did you even sleep well last night?" He scratched his head, sighing, and handed me the small piece of paper he's been waving for the past minute. "Here. Moving around can help you go back to your senses."

It was a list of Dewey decimal codes and alongside them were their titles. I look up to Mr. Byun, silently screaming "Seriously?" He picked up the signal real fast and patted my back until I stood up from the chair. "Come on, get your ass moving."

Third floor is the Archives and Rare Books Collection, which is usually empty and only the same few faces come and go, most of them coming from the graduate school. The only way up are the four sets of winding stairs from each corner of the library. Mr. Byun's desk is located at the south wing so I went to the nearest and slowly climbed up. When I got there, only four people are in the east wing side of the floor: two professors huddled over a huge textbook and a couple reading I don't know what beside a bookshelf.

The first book in Mr. Byun's list is 270.47, The History of Samshin Halmeonis. I almost gasped. I could either run back down to the ground floor, slam my hands on Mr. Byun's desk, say "I know a whole damn lot about samshin halmeonis" and leave the laborious task of hunting the books or obey Mr. Byun and not have him ask me why I know a whole damn lot about samshin halmeonis. I chose the latter. I should be minding my own business anyway.