Chapter 8

Gemstone

PD Park came up to the second floor of the PC bang forty minutes late.

Plaid button-down, hiking vest, a bag with a 6mm camcorder slung over his shoulder. His hair looked like it had gone two days unwashed, and he had a convenience store coffee in his hand. His face was ten years younger than the one Doyun had seen at every drinking session for a decade in his past life, but just as tired.

PD Park did a lap around the four dusty pool tables, looked at Doyun sitting on top of one of them, and then at Taeha playing a phone game on the sofa in the corner.

"...This is the company?"

"Not a company yet. We register tomorrow."

"It's a pool hall."

"It was a pool hall."

PD Park sighed and set his camcorder bag down on one of the tables. Dust puffed up.

"Doyun, right? Tell me again what you said on the phone. Twenty—no, seventeen days from now, 4 p.m., the Sillim-dong intersection. Something's coming out of there?"

"A hole. Like Seongsu-dong. But a little bigger."

"How would you know that?"

Instead of answering, Doyun held out his phone. The video of the bus stop at Sillim Station Exit 4. The one the student had shot and uploaded had now passed 2.3 million views. In the corner of the frame, you could see a man in a suit and a young guy in a hoodie sitting on the steps in front of the pharmacy.

"That's me. And that's him."

PD Park zoomed in on the face of the man in the suit, then looked up at Doyun. As if he still didn't buy it, he checked the screen one more time.

"...You were sitting there before the hole opened."

"Yep."

"And you put up cones. Those 'drama shoot' people were you? The forums went nuts. Nobody could figure out what drama it was."

"That was me."

PD Park handed the phone back and took a sip of his coffee. He didn't say anything for a while.

"Mangwon Reservoir three days ago too?"

"...You know about that?"

"I know someone in the district office press room. The pumping station caretaker talked about a guy in a reflective vest. Said a government official came and had them fill out forms."

Doyun scratched the back of his head and laughed. PD Park didn't laugh.

"Doyun, I'm forty this year. I just lost two shows. If my contract doesn't get renewed next month, I'm done too. That's why I came to hear this crazy talk. But if I take a camera out on some crazy talk and nothing happens, I'm really done. The equipment rental's coming out of my pocket, too."

"I know."

"So I'm going to ask you straight."

PD Park put his coffee down.

"Does it make good TV?"

Doyun had heard that question from this man hundreds of times over ten years. At drinking sessions, in waiting rooms, in hallways outside recording studios. Doyun, does it make good TV? Every time, Doyun had said yes, and half the time it did and half the time it didn't.

This time, he didn't need to lie.

"It does."

The terms were simple. PD Park would own the broadcast rights to anything he shot. In exchange, Taeha's face and name would only go out as far as Taeha agreed to. And on the day, PD Park would stay off the street and shoot from the second-floor window of the PC bang.

"You've got to be on site to get the shot. What am I going to get from the second floor?"

"If you're on site, you'll get hurt."

"...It's that dangerous?"

"Bigger than the Sillim Station rats."

PD Park walked over to the window and looked down at the intersection. The soup restaurant, the phone store, the crosswalk, the traffic light. An ordinary intersection on a weekday afternoon. From the second-floor window, you could take in the whole thing at a glance.

"...Good angle."

PD Park muttered it. Then he turned around and looked at Taeha on the sofa.

"He's the one fighting?"

"Yep."

"With what?"

Doyun pulled the aluminum bat out from under the pool table. The bat he'd used at Mangwon Reservoir. Dented here and there.

PD Park's face hardened.

"...A bat?"

"Yep."

"Doyun. I'm a PD. You know what it looks like if I film someone beating a monster with a bat? A gangster movie. A neighborhood thug fight. The news can't use it. People won't root for that."

Doyun looked down at the bat. PD Park was right. In ten years of managing, he'd seen a group's whole image flip over a single stage outfit more times than he could count. But it had never occurred to him to think that way about Hunter gear.

"...Then what should he hold?"

"A sword. Something like a sword. Something where people take one look and go, 'Ah, that's someone who fights.'"

On the sofa, Taeha looked up. On his phone game screen, a character was swinging a sword.

"...If it's a sword, I'm kind of good."

The next morning, Doyun went with Oh Malsun to the tax office next to the district office. The second Oh Malsun pulled a number ticket in the civil service room, she started talking down to the clerk at the window, and the clerk was strangely docile about it. It was the blunt talk of someone who'd done business in this neighborhood for twenty-eight years.

"What're we callin' it?"

Oh Malsun asked as she filled out the form. Doyun's pen stopped. He hadn't thought of anything. The names of the companies he'd worked for in his past life drifted through his head. Every one of them had gone under.

"...Gemstone."

"Gemstone?"

"A rough stone. Before it's cut. Before it turns into a jewel."

Oh Malsun stared at him a long while.

"You gonna sell rocks?"

"People. People nobody's noticed yet."

"So, rocks. What's the difference."

She said nothing more and wrote Gemstone neatly in the business name box. At the industry box next to it, her hand stopped.

"Industry?"

"...Management."

"Managin' what?"

"Hunters."

The clerk at the window looked up. Then he peered at his monitor for a long while. He scrolled up and down through the list of industry codes and shook his head.

"There's no code for Hunter management."

"Then what do we put?"

"...Let's do entertainment management. Isn't it basically the same thing?"

That made Doyun laugh. Isn't it basically the same thing. Ten years from now, this industry would be a market ten times bigger than entertainment management. Right now, it didn't even have an industry code.

The business registration certificate came out. Business name: Gemstone. Representative: Han Doyun. Industry: Entertainment Management. Capital: 30 million won. Address: 2nd floor, Malsun PC Bang building, Sillim-dong, Gwanak-gu, Seoul.

Oh Malsun took the certificate and studied it for a long while. Then she held it out to Doyun.

"Don't lose it. Worth more'n your kidneys."

That evening, Doyun knocked on the door of a kendo dojang at the end of a Sillim-dong alley. The master was an old man close to seventy, and the dojang had only three students. Ever since the Seongsu-dong news, he said, parents had stopped sending their kids.

"Could I buy a wooden sword?"

"What for?"

"To make good TV."

The master didn't understand that, but he gave Doyun the sturdiest of the wooden swords hanging on the dojang wall. Carved from oak, worn glossy from years of hands. He said he wouldn't take money for it. Instead, his grandson loved Hunter videos, so if they ever got famous, could he get an autograph?

Doyun wrote it down in the "Promises" section on the last page of his notebook. Kendo master's grandson—one autograph.

When he got back to the PC bang, Taeha was waiting in the pool hall on the second floor. Doyun held out the wooden sword. Taeha took it.

It was different from how he held the bat. The way his fingers wrapped the grip, the angle his wrist bent. Exactly the way a game character held a sword. Taeha cut the air once with the wooden sword. It made a sound like wind.

PD Park, holding the camcorder by the window, hit the record button without thinking.

"...That's good TV."

☾