He had been president of the humanities college student council. Now that I knew, it amazed me how the words “student council president” explained so much about him. The way he kept striding forward as if someone were after him, his constantly paranoid attitude, his tendency of letting others speak before saying one final thing as if he were the leader making a decision. He had been part of the leftover student activist generation of the mid-nineties and after graduation had briefly dipped his toes in the labor movement. The Misun-Hyosun incident demonstrations had also been during his time, as well as protests against the abolishment of the National Security Act and the anti–Chosun Daily movement, which caused him to be arrested a few times. His back and neck, he claimed, had never been the same since.

When he got down to the details, it turned out he had spent maybe seventy-two hours behind bars over four stays, he was never tortured, and all that happened there was some lying around in a cell with a heated floor. A bit of a stretch to say you got a lifelong condition from that—maybe your back pain is just from bad posture? These were the thoughts I didn’t speak aloud.

The endless recounting of little incidents he experienced in the student movement made me feel drowsy and adrift. I listened to how he got a new tattoo every time he left lockup, and how he covered each tattoo whenever he had some new epiphany. Only half listening, I searched on my phone for information about the student council at his university and learned it had once been infamous for being hardline left-wing nationalist. I suppressed a smile at the eighties cliché of it all—listening to a former student council president reminisce about his activist days while we lay together in a basement apartment in the afterglow of sex.

—So I only use iPhones now. Not even the CIA can hack them.

His iPhone 4 looked tiny in his hand. He talked about how obsessive he was about security because he had been on the police blacklist during his peak activist years and his phone had been tapped and he himself followed. At that point in the story I thought, What is this bullshit? and realized he and I had never communicated through Korean messaging apps like KakaoTalk but only through iMessenger. Messaging apps with offshore servers, apparently, were safer.

—I’m anxious these days because I keep thinking someone is watching me.

I tried hard to keep a straight face.

—You still think there are people following you?

—Even at this very moment, there are people being wiretapped. And people who are killed for being activists.

—Well, yes. I know people are dying right this minute, people who are fighting for justice. I know that much.