“After they left, the darkness closed in around us. The faint afterglow that had lingered in the western sky dissolved slowly into the surrounding blackness. I moved quickly up to the top of the tower of bodies, anchoring myself to that final man to watch a pale light seep through wisps of grey cloud, a shroud for the half-moon. The leaves and branches of the thicket intersected that light, their shadows throwing patterns on the dead faces like ghastly tattoos.
It must have been about midnight when I felt it touch me; that breath-soft slip of incorporeal something, that faceless shadow, lacking even language, now, to give it body. I waited for a while in doubt and ignorance, of who it was, of how to communicate with it. No one had ever taught me how to address a person’s soul.
And perhaps, or so it seemed, my companion was equally baffled. Without the familiar bulwark of language, still we sensed, as a physical force, our existence in the mind of the other. When, eventually, I felt him sigh away, his resignation, his abandonment, left me alone again.
The night deepened, became threaded through with a string of similar occurrences. My shadow’s edges became aware of a quiet touch; the presence of another soul. We would lose ourselves in wondering who the other was, without hands, feet, face, tongue, our shadows touching but never quite mingling. Sad flames licking up against a smooth wall of glass, only to wordlessly slide away, outdone by whatever barrier was there. Every time I felt a shadow slip from me,I looked up at the night sky. How I wanted to believe that cloud-wrapped half- moon was watching over me, an eye bright with intelligence. In reality nothing more than a huge, desolate lump of rock, utterly inert.
It was as that strange, vivid night was drawing to a close, as the faint blue light of dawn had begun to seep into the sky’s black ink, that I suddenly thought of you, Dong-ho. Yes, you’d been there with me, that day. Until something like a cold cudgel had suddenly slammed into my side. Until I collapsed like a rag doll. Until my arms flung themselves up in mute alarm, amid the cacophony of footsteps drumming against the tarmac, earsplitting gunfire. Until I felt the warm spread of my own blood moving up over my shoulder, the back of my neck. Until then, you were with me.”
Page 52 features a wide array of descriptive writing. We see this in the lines “After they left, the darkness closed in around us”. We are able to completely understand the immersion of darkness leaving these dead people alone. This creates the feeling of unknowingness and emptiness of the unknown as humans, we are able to understand the feeling of the unknown in darkness. “That faceless shadow, lacking even language, now to give it body”. This line shows the emptiness, but curiosity Jeong-Dae feels as a dead person in the ‘after life’.
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