Chapter 8 – Mino

When I got back from the studio, Jennie was in the living room watching TV. Pretty intently, by the look of things. “Hey, I’m home,” I said, but her eyes were glued to the 75-inch screen.

She mumbled, “welcome back.”

We’d bought the TV on an installment plan. Right now, I could see vast dusty plains rolling across the screen.

“What are you watching?”

“Television,” was Jennie’s instant reply. Apparently she wasn’t being deliberately obnoxious, so I just shrugged my shoulders and decided to take her answer at face value. I changed out of my work clothes and cleaned my shoes, then went into the bathroom to freshen up. By the time I got back to the living room, the program was over. 

“What would you like for dinner?” I called out, rummaging through the refrigerator. Anything, she answered distractedly, as if her mind was still lost somewhere inside the TV set. There was still some meat leftover from the hamburgers we’d had the day before, so I decided to use it to make some meatballs. Egg and meatball soup.

“So what was the program about?” I asked, choosing my words more carefully this time.

“It was a documentary. On wildlife,” Jennie explained. “There was this gazelle that had some disease and it kept going round in circles until it dropped dead. And then they showed this baby elephant that tripped over its own trunk and fell down. Zebras mating, a pack of hyenas eating a gnu.” I could hear the excitement in her voice as she went on. “Apparently a gnu can smell the rain from 50 kilometers away. But they’re weak. And they have so many enemies. Lions and hyenas and cheetahs. Lots of animals kill gnus every day.” 

Jennie told me all about the gnus while I got dinner ready. She wasn’t skimping on any details now. I was treated to a particularly graphic description of how the gnus had been killed and eaten. How quickly the hyenas tore apart their prey, how greedy the vultures were. They even picked out the meat from between the ribs, she reported.

“Even the baby lions!” She said. “Their little noses were all covered in blood. They stick their whole head in and just gobble it up.”

I looked from the neat line of freshly prepared meatballs to Jennie’s face and said nothing.

During dinner, Jennie stills seemed distracted. (In the end, the meal was a simple one of egg soup and sautéed mushrooms.) The images had obviously had a big impact on her. 

“You want to go out somewhere tomorrow?” I said, in an attempt to haul her back to reality. “How about a drive out of the city? It’s been so long since we did anything like that.”

Jennie said she’d promised to go see Chaeyoung. It was already a week since that day at the amusement park and she still owed Chaeyoung an explanation. 

“Do you want me to come with you?”

Jennie shook her head. “I won’t be long. Besides, it’s Sunday. Your big clean-up day.”

Clean-up! Ah, how appealing that concept was. All that dust piled up behind the shoe closet, the mold in between the tiles in the bathroom… I was like a man primed for battle. 

After dinner, Jennie made tea for three. One cup for me, one for herself, and one for the yucca elephantipes. 

“Have you ever heard of the silver lions?” Jennie said as she poured rum into the tea.

“Is this another of your blood-and-guts nature stories?” I asked.

“No,” Jennie frowned. “No, it’s a legend.”

“Oh, a legend?” That was a relief. I took a sip of the rum tea. 

“Tell me about it,” I said. “What’s the story?”

The legend according to Jennie went like this: once every generation, large numbers of white lions are born in different places around the world, all at the same time. Their coats are so light in color that the other lions refuse to accept them, and before long they disappear from the pride.

Jennie went on:

“But really they’re magic lions, you see. They leave the pride and go off to live in a group by themselves. They don’t eat meat; they’re herbivorous. And then, nobody really knows for sure why, but they all die young. They’re not very strong, to begin with, and they never really eat much, so they die off really easily. From the heat or the cold, even. They live up in the rocks and when you see their manes blowing in the wind, they look more silver than white. It’s supposed to be very beautiful.”

Jennie was telling me all this without any obvious emotion. Herbivorous lions that die from the heat? I’d never heard of anything like it. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Jennie looked me in the face and said, “sometimes you guys kind of remind me of the silver lions.”

I was confused. “You guys?” Meaning me, Jiwon, Seunghoon, Jinwoo, Jihoon, and Jiho?” I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Jennie downed what was left of her rum tea, presumably stone cold by now, and then poured the other cup into the plant’s pot.

“Jiwon-oppa’s tree likes its tea with one cube of sugar and half a tea-spoonful of rum,” she said. 

The next morning Jennie left the house at around ten and I got straight to work on the cleaning, a Childish Gambino album playing in the background. I scrubbed the floor and then rinsed everything down with a mop. I was just wondering whether to clean the windows too when the phone rang. It was my father. He said he was calling from the station.

‘Mind if I stop by? I won’t stay long. No, that’s okay, I already ate. What, you haven’t had lunch yet? It’s 14:30 already.”

“Is Mom with you?”

“No, just me. Is Jennie home?”

“She’s out. If you’d told us you were coming, we’d have made sure we were both here.”

“Oh, it’s not worth making a fuss over a visit from me,” he said and laughed awkwardly. 

Jennie got back as soon as I hung up. “Present for you,” she said, holding out a plastic bag. Inside was a goldfish. Apparently there had been some kind of pop-up flower market near Chaeyoung’s place, and there’d been a stall set up selling goldfish.

“Wow, this takes me back.” 

Jennie seemed to be big on living things these days. She took a packet of fish food from her skirt pocket and put it down on the table. 

“My father called to say he’s coming over,” I said as I transferred the goldfish into a bowl. 

“When?” Jennie asked, surprised. I looked at my watch. Another five or six minutes, I told her. Back in a sec, she said, heading toward the front door. She put her shoes back on and opened the door again. 

“Where’re you going?”

“To get something to have with the tea.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said.

Jennie shook her head. “Chaeyoung told me I should. When people come over, you have to have something to give them. That’s the kind of thing that would never occur to me. Like when your parents came over before, all we had was tea and things that I like, like cucumbers and tomatoes and cheese.”

“That’s all right. Don’t worry about it.”

“And that’s not all,” Jennie said firmly.