I’D ALREADY BEEN WAITING for an hour at the health center. In the end, I’d made an appointment for my mother myself. A nurse came to tell me the doctor was running late and my mother still needed more tests. I decided to go for a walk around the area.

I hardly ever came to this part of town. Construction work, huts, builders, cranes, sand, concrete. And the bridge where they’d filmed the famous scene from First Love, the one with the actor on the embankment. The boat they’d used was moored right in front of me. Filled with stuffed animals and bouquets of last summer’s flowers. Faded, rotting, imprisoned in ice. A gust of wind rocked the boat. Mournful creaking sounds.

I walked on, past the displays of fish tanks. Two tanks stacked one on top of the other. Long-tailed fish in the lower one. In the top one, crabs piled up as if ready to be tinned. Jiggling passively in the jet-stream, too weak to gouge out their neighbors’ eyes. One of them braced itself against another and managed to get to the rim of the tank, where it stayed, balanced, until a gush of water propelled it back down, and through to the tank beneath. The fish started swimming in rapid circles. The crab landed upside down, struggled in slow motion to get back on its legs and failed, piercing the ventral fin of one of the fish in the struggle, tearing it to pieces, bit by bit. Without its fin, the fish began swimming lopsidedly until it sank, crazed, to the bottom of the tank.

At the other end of the street, the hotel modeled on an Indian palace, pink and golden. Two girls in the doorway, displaying their curves. Leather shorts, ripped tights.

Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited.

That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.

My mother was diagnosed with a chill, nothing more.

I DIDN’T TELL Park I was going to Naksan with Kerrand. He’d been there once before, at the beginning of his stay. He wanted to buy some more incense. We had two hours, I had to be back in time to make dinner. The bus drove along the coast. Kerrand was sitting next to me. I’d been avoiding him since the night I’d worried he’d heard me in bed. But now he seemed lost in the book he was reading, the one I’d seen in his suitcase. I tried to read over his shoulder.

“I really like this author,” he said, looking up. “Do you know him?”

“No, will you read me some?”

He cleared his throat.

“I don’t like reading aloud.”

I’d already closed my eyes. He started reading, enunciating his words carefully. It was too complicated. I focused on following the inflections of his voice. He sounded different, further away, a distant echo from a body left on the other side of the world.