Free I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young-Ha Kim Page B

Anyway, be careful. A lot of people got screwed when they started hanging out with her."
    Even before the curator's warning, an instinctive sense of precaution was growing inside C. He hadn't forgotten that the things he was attracted to were usually the very
same ones that pushed him into an abyss. Mounted butterflies were the first things that gripped his fascination. He was still captivated by his old fantasy where the butterflies came alive, flying around with pins rammed through their bodies.

    But why did he push sharp pins through his most treasured possession? How did he do it at such a young age, when he wouldn't have been able to do it now? Had he been seduced by butterflies or the act of capture?
    In any case, one spring day, all the butterflies burned to ash. The fire that burst forth from the kitchen devastated the entire house in a matter of seconds, and C, coming home from school, sobbed, mourning his butterflies. His mother tried to soothe him by telling him,
C, we can always build a new house.
C cried harder.

    When K arrived at Judith's apartment, he found that every trace of her had been erased. Someone had already moved in. K sat in his Stella TX, parked in the lot in front of the building, and listlessly listened to the radio. The conversation he had with his brother that morning had been unpleasant. C had reacted as nonchalantly as if he were hearing about an incident written in the newspaper. C had slept with Judith. Didn't that count for something? K couldn't understand his brother. A week ago Judith swallowed sleeping pills, turned on the gas, and committed suicide. It had been five months since he'd seen her, and she left like that, without contacting him.
    What had happened between Judith and C? The only thing K knew was that C also had no idea that Se-yeon died.

    K started the car. He smelled a faint acrid smell, like the engine oil burning, but didn't pay much attention. He didn't know where he was going even when he took a ticket from the Gungnae tollbooth on the Seoul-Busan Highway. As soon as K's taxi went through the tollbooth, it roared up to the speed limit and beyond. He weaved through the cars emerging from the tollbooths and went into the left lane, feeling his body being pulled back. Unlike other times, the sensation was foreign and made him feel lonely. He pressed his foot on the gas.
    K inserted in the tape deck a cassette tape he'd bought a few days before from a street vendor and turned up the volume as high as it would go. The speakers screeched, the high notes warped. K opened all four windows. He couldn't think through the sound of the cars whizzing by and the distorted noise from his speakers. He sped to Busan and returned to Seoul, making the trip twice. His eyes became bloodshot. Though he tried to fall asleep on the shoulder a few times, sleep never came over him.

    C's studio wasn't ready to film Mimi's performance. C hurriedly checked the lighting and set up his two camcorders. On the floor, he spread a large canvas that had been leaning against the wall, and then mixed paint. When the paint was ready, Mimi took off her robe, hung it up neatly, and walked over to the canvas, naked. The white canvas was
blank. She studied the canvas and the camcorders. Then she squatted and examined the surface of the canvas. She smiled slightly, pleased with the rough texture.

    White canvas. Someone once theorized that primitive man started to create art because of a fear hidden deeply within the human soul. The mere existence of a white blank wall is terrifying. That's why children scribble on walls and scratch the surface of new, shiny cars with knives. Frightened of an empty room without any furniture and paintings, people fill it up and refill it again. A late-night phone call, where you only hear the caller breathing, brings insomnia with its emptiness, its absence of conversation.
    The theory that art originated from fear interested C when he first started to paint. It was a small