Human Acts

How is it, she wonders, that a face can so effectively conceal what lies behind it? How is not indelibly marked by such callousness, brutality, murderousness?

I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them: why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?

The building where we’d been kept was the new lecture hall, just behind the sports ground where me and my friends had used to play football at the weekends.

It didn’t seem like an army place, just an ordinary hall like you’d find in any public building.

Over the ten years you’ve been working at your current job, the killings that you spend your days archiving have all been slow and drawn out

That was the source of the sound.

Drops of water steadily tapping down, blotted by the papered floor.

It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.

Of course, he and I were close in some senses, but think about it; how close could we really have been? Yes, we relied on each other, but we also wanted to smash each other’s face in. To erase each other’s very existence. To thrust each other permanently out of sight.

efore, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.

At that moment, I realized what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.