That’s when I would throw a bomb into her life.

For the sake of a future with Umma and him and me, for the life that remained for all of us ahead, I had to be brave. Let’s open the door and go outside. Yes, let’s close our eyes and jump into the darkness.

After accompanying my mother in the ambulance that transported her to Asan Hospital for her surgery, I went back to her hospice room to clean it up a bit. There was a photograph lying on her nightstand. The Polaroid of him and me.

I picked up the photo. My sloppy habits (and my old, stretched-out leather wallet) must’ve made me drop this photograph somewhere. Had my mother picked it up and put it on the nightstand, or had it been the caretaker? It surely was my mother. Who knows when I had dropped it, but to put a photo where I’m standing arm in arm with a man right where I would immediately see it, just on the day she was going into surgery, and then disappearing into the OR without a word—this was very much the kind of stunt my mother would pull.

She had always been that kind of person. Someone who knew everything, who saw through everything.

Even during the Asian financial crisis, when my father disappeared after bringing our household to ruin, Umma had seen through everything. “Son, we’re going to go catch Father together.” She and I got into her little red car and arrived at a rent-subsidized neighborhood in Incheon. There were so many spiderwebs in the stairways and corridors that we were flailing against them with our whole bodies by the time we pounded on the door of room 302. We knocked for a long time—I thought the apartment would shatter from the thumping—but there was no answer. After peering inside the window in the corridor for ages, trying to catch Father (and the Other Woman) in the act, we decided to return to the car. And just as we had turned the car around and were about to head home, we found Father in the empty lot behind the apartment building.

—Umma, look.

Father was playing badminton with a petite, middle-aged woman. They looked totally different from how I imagined them. There was something similar about the way they looked. Like two puzzle pieces, a perfect fit for each other. Father’s face had an expression of calm that I had never seen during his whole life with Umma. An outsider who didn’t understand the situation would’ve taken my mother and me for debt collectors come to make life hell for an innocent, ordinary couple. I will never forget Umma’s face as she gazed upon the pair. That look she had, as if the whole world had stopped turning, surely could not be explained by any of Spinoza’s forty-eight emotions. Its subtleties of feeling, brought on by that strange calm that Father and the Other Woman seemed to share, could not be simplified into concepts like despair or suffering. That feeling of pressing down on something that threatens to boil over or explode—it was the first time I learned of such emotions.