Around the end of that fall, I once met up with him when he came north of the Han River to hand over a manuscript edit he’d been working on. We fought a bit while drinking at a cheap pub near Hongik University when he commented that my inability to show restraint when it came to alcohol reminded him of someone—probably his umma. Tired of every topic of conversation being twisted back to his student activist days or his mother, I shot back that his inability to allow anything else but himself to be the center of attention was a sign of his having a mother complex. He retaliated by saying I had the same issue. Like any other accusation that wasn’t completely wrong, the words left hurtful wounds, which in turn spiraled into a huge argument. The nice evening of drinking I had anticipated turned into a long fight in which we said things we shouldn’t have said. Getting up from the bar with hurt feelings on both sides, we went out to the street to catch a cab. People were walking about with horrifically blood-splattered faces. Some were in superhero costumes and others were dressed as military officers. Halloween. Damn it, I thought. It’s bad enough that the night is ruined, it’ll be murder trying to catch a taxi now. He said, looking like he’d just eaten something rotten, that he was against Halloween because it was a holiday of the American Empire. He lectured on against accepting foreign customs without properly knowing what their origins were. I was so sick of him that I kept my mouth shut.

We were winding our way through the revelers, who were having much more fun than we were, when someone grabbed my arm. A zombie asked me if I could take a photo of him and his friends. Responding with a smile, I took a picture on his Polaroid camera of him posing with a Count Dracula and a Wonder Woman. He offered to take a photo of us as well and asked us to stand together. I slipped my arm under his and he stood there, stiff as a board. There we are to this day, awkwardly arm in arm. As soon as the photo was taken, he extracted his arm and took a step away from me. I asked him if he wanted the Polaroid they gave us, but he shook his head, hard. I slipped the little photo deep into my wallet.

That was the first and last photo we took together.

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