The street has regained its vitality now that school is in session. I walk past the seasonally exotic decor of a new café, past a group of college students looking at all the vendor carts with their various accessories, and arrive at a scrap metal shop in the back of a building. I ask for a crowbar, but the old man with a skewed spine gives me a hammer that looks like an ax, which he calls a biru. It’s expensive, but I buy it without hesitation. I pay five hundred won for some metal wire, too. As I leave, I get paranoid that a man with hair gelled and propped up like a rooster’s comb is following me, so I enter the arcade and hide in there for a while.

I go into the café kitchen and get a knife. I walk up to the fourth floor, and the stairs rattle under my feet as though they are actually made of rotting wooden planks. My footsteps—thump, thump—ring loudly. The decal on the window of the billiard parlor, with crossed cues that look like a giant forbidding X, warns me not to proceed. But I continue up the stairs. I’m just trying to open a door, that’s all. I feel it, the compulsion, precognition, even a sense that all this is destined to be. I know I have the right to unlock this door. The right? Am I thinking about ethics right now? Is this act an ethically justified act? Why am I worrying about justice? The image of Raskolnikov killing the hag appears in my vision. This is what I get for my bad taste in books. The so-called Western canon only encourages my paranoia.

I open the door to the vestibule. Another door presents itself. My hand holding the knife trembles. The skin on the back of my hand looks rough, and the veins are popping out—it looks like a hag’s hand. It’s so quiet. I bend the wire and push it into the keyhole, barely larger than a needle’s eye. It doesn’t open, even as I struggle to poke and jiggle the doorknob. I push in the knife at the gap between the door and the threshold and twist it. The knife blade comes out gnarled. I don’t know what to do with my biru. Why can’t I make this hole do what I want? I stab the hole again and again. Open, open, goddamn it! Cold sweat bubbles up on my skin and trickles down. At any moment Sungyun could leap out of nowhere and grab my neck, yet the door refuses to open.