Payback

t/n: thank you to those who have sent me kofis!! and thank you to those for leaving comments :’)

As soon as I made my way down to the floor where they were waiting, the soda uncle saw me and shouted. 

“Gasp! What’s wrong with your face?!”

“…Because of a madman.”

The uncle mumbled trying to understand my statement, and his eyes grew bigger.

“Madman? In the company? At this late hour?” 

Even the boy opened his eyes wide like an old man and was shocked, and questions poured out. I eventually changed the subject first due to the burdensome gaze of the two.

“Are you going to sign a contract with me?”

“Huh? Oh, what you need to do with me is not a contract, but a promise for now. The actual contract is with the company, and you have to pass the interview… No, if you really want to do it, listen to me first and decide.”

Then he started to scare me.

“You will never survive in this field if you’re not determined. In order to succeed in the fast way like you want, you have to be especially determined to go through all sorts of things. This field is a complete survival of the fittest, so they do dirty things that you can’t even imagine, such as even stealing small roles. Even if you are lucky to get a role through hard work, it is common for the role to change just the day before the shoot. If you’re weak against failure or setbacks, it’s better not to start at all.”

“I got it.”

“It’s not just that. It’s common to be betrayed by someone you trust, and even do dirty things… If you want to find a sponsor, you need to be prepared to suck on the genitals of a 70-year-old old man. Are you really going to do it?”

“Manager-nim.” 

When I called him, I looked at his eyes full of worries.

“I’m not that naive or a nice person.”

“But, still…”

“I just need you to help me the way you usually do. I’ll do the rest of the dirty and tough work.” 

Looking at me still for a long time, he asked me quietly.

“What on earth did Myeongshin do?”

“…”

I hesitated for a moment. He was a good person, I could feel that he was really concerned for me. I knew I shouldn’t be carried away by my revenge, but I probably wouldn’t get another opportunity again. That thought pushed away some of my guilt, and I opened my mouth. 

“Similar to what happened to you, CEO-nim.” I added as if it was nothing special. “Just paying back what I went through.”

Then I got up from my seat and pointed at the clock hanging on the wall.

“I want to go back to sleep, I have to go to work.”

The two of them also quickly got up from their seats. 

“Sorry for keeping you up late. I don’t usually stay this late, if I knew this would happen, I should have ordered bossam, or these days McDonald’s is the best.”

As my mind and body were getting too exhausted to keep up with this conversation, the manager’s phone rang. He picked it up and started with an apology. A gracious silence came and I hurriedly waited for the elevator to come. However, the voice of the manager answering the phone was strange.

“Chief Park, you called me at this late hour! What’s the m- Ah, you had to work overtime until this hour. You’ve worked hard. Ah- Are you crying? Eh? You want to quit your job because of your superiors?… Ah, you’re just joking. Haha~ It sounded as if you were serious… I’m sorry. By the way, what- Yes, that’s right. Ah! Tomorrow? But… Eh? Y-you don’t know if Director Yoon is turning up?! Ah, I understand.”

He nodded his head as he answered the phone with a bewildered look. 

“I’ll take him there tomorrow.”

As soon as the uncle hung up, the elevator arrived with a ‘ding~’, but I couldn’t get in right away. Because the manager was holding onto my hand tightly.

“W-what to do? You have an interview tomorrow!”

——— 

I think it was a long day. As usual, I woke up at 6 and went to work. Nothing has changed, but a lot of things have happened. It was as if the past five years’ worth of events accumulated into one day. The road in front of the building was deserted because it was past 2 a.m. The black gravel and white lines informed me that it was only a road for cars. The road tempted me to cross it. The darkness and empty space of the night sometimes create illusions. Everything has stopped. The feeling of a still moment was as cool as the night air.

“You must be tired.” A voice brought me back to reality.

The boy was waiting with me in front of the building with the car the manager told him to bring. As I answered ‘not really’, I realised I wasn’t really tired and I wasn’t sleepy either.

“You said you do deliveries, right?” 

I nodded.

“Wah, but I can’t see you as a delivery man. You seemed to have an unyielding personality for some reason, so manager-nim and I even suspected that you might be a gangster. Hahaha… Um, were you a gangster?”

“No.”

“Of course…” 

“I did something similar.”

“…”

“P’w xlvvlcu.”

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“By the way, how old are you? I think you are older than me.”

“26.” 

“As expected. I’m 21 years old. I’m a second-year student in theater and film. Ah right, what’s your name?”

He made a fuss, saying he didn’t ask the most important thing, but a sudden roar swallowed up his voice.

Vrrooommmm~~~!!!

As I heard the sound of a car engine that was loud enough to tilt the earth’s axis, a sports car came out of the underground parking lot of the building. It was clear that the car was not the manager’s car we were waiting for. Not only was it an expensive foreign car, but it whizzed past us violently. As the noise left behind by the car faded away like a cloud of smoke, I heard a small murmur next to me. 

“It’s Yoohan hyung’s car.”

After looking at the direction where the car had disappeared, he turned his head to look at me and shrugged.

“Yoohan hyung is rather greedy about cars. He seems to think it is more prideful to drive a car, rather than being a celebrity that he’s aiming for. He bought a new foreign car when he changed his agency to this place. The funny thing is that the price of the car is the same as the amount of money he stole from manager-nim. Tsk, the more I think about it, the more pissed off I get.”

He stared at the end of the empty road where the car has now disappeared. I also followed and asked. 

“Who is it?”

“Huh?”

“Who is the celebrity he is aiming for?”

When asked, he tilted his head and listed off the names of several celebrities. Most of them seemed to be quite famous, since even their names were somewhat familiar to me. An explanation that supported my thoughts came out right away. 

“They are all top artists that only take leading roles. And they all belong to Dream. Yoohan’s special skill is to use a person as a model and create the same image. What’s interesting is that when he comes out on TV on a regular program rather than a drama, he mimics the expressions and tones that he had practised, as if he was that person themselves. I can never do such a tiring thing. I can’t believe that he’s acting even when he’s not.”

He shook his head and suddenly asked a question as if he remembered.

“Right, name! You have to tell me your name. My name is Lee Hansoo.”

“…” 

“Um, your name…”

“Lee Yoohan.”

“Ah, Yooh… huh? Um… so, Yoohan-hyung’s name…”

He panicked and pointed his hand at the road where the car disappeared. 

“The names are the same. No, that’s just Yoohan-hyung’s stage name… Eh, didn’t you say you knew each other before?”

Just as I was thinking it’d be annoying to answer, fortunately, an old car that seemed to belong to the manager approached us just in time.

Vroom~

The manager, who pulled over with the sound of an old engine, eagerly lowered the window and beckoned to us. 

“Hey, you guys get in the car.”

“Manager-nim!”

Hansoo ran to the open window, looked at me and spoke, embarrassed.

“Did you know? His name is… Lee Yoohan.” 

“Ah, is that so? It’s… a good name.”

Like the boy, he had a stiff look on his face. He cleared his throat after staring at me for a long time.

“Well, you can use an alias… Hm, but you’re older than Hansoo, right? Then, Hansoo can call you hyung.”

He spoke in a light tone as if trying to shift the atmosphere. Hansoo quickly responded. 

“That’s true. Can I call you hyung?”

“No.”

“Sorry?”

“I don’t like it. Don’t call me hyung.” 

I firmly refused and walked toward the car and opened the back door. I could feel the eyes of the two staring at me, but I deliberately got in the car without making eye contact. I closed my eyes and after a while, the car began to move, perhaps because he gave up on talking to me. Sleepiness came as if to end a long day.

“Since this is a big agency, there are many people who come here to become celebrities. The acting academy also sends out a profile every month. There are so many that you can’t meet them one by one. Like me, managers scout people on the street. However, since the person in charge cannot meet the people who get scouted like that every time, they conduct interviews two or three times a month to meet them all at once. The interview is only for those who passed the first round, which is the review of profile pictures.

Of course, the interview is brutal and most people fail. But still, Yoohan… Hmm, it’s great that you’re having an unplanned one-person interview right now! I don’t know how that happened either. Ah, of course, I told him in advance that I had scouted you, but I didn’t know he would contact me separately just because of that. Isn’t this very nerve-wrecking? I thought maybe he wants to trust my perception and have an interview… if that’s the case, he could be testing me…”

The manager worried for a long time and then requested me to meet him after work to practice for the interview. We had to meet again after midnight, but it wasn’t difficult for me to hold out. I slept for only 3 hours and went to work, but I didn’t feel sleepy or tired until the delivery was completed. I wasn’t really worried about the interview tomorrow either. It was because the conversation I had with the sales office manager in the morning strangely did not leave my mind. 

“You’re quitting?”

When I answered yes, he immediately started worrying.

“Ah! Since you work for two people’s worth, that means I’ll have to find two more people! No, even worse than that, if I have to train newbies…”

What was surprising was that he was more concerned about the potential new employees rather than stopping me. Don’t you usually stop them from quitting first? As I thought about it casually, he then stopped pulling his hair and sighed loudly. 

“But I need you to stay until a new person comes in? Hm?”

I nodded and asked without realizing it.

“Why aren’t you stopping me?”

He paused. Then, his answer was unexpected. 

“I thought you’d leave anytime.”

“…”

“Yoohan, although you’ve never mentioned it before, how should I say… you work too hard. In more than 3 years of working here, you’ve never been on vacation, you don’t mind working on holidays, and you’ve been doing double deliveries from the beginning. Sometimes some people do it like you because they need money, but you’re a little different.”

“What’s the difference?” 

When asked, he mumbled “Well… ” and scratched his head.

“It’s just like, a person whose purpose is to do this work in itself. Then at some point, I felt like you were going to leave as if nothing had happened.”

“…”

“Aren’t you looking a little anxious? If you hadn’t left, maybe I would have kicked you out.” 

He smiled jokingly and added a question.

“Have you got anything else to do?”

“Yes.”

“It’s good to have something you want to do. You’ll be good at anything.” 

He smiled, complimented me, and patted me on the back, saying to get back to work. After work, I realised why the manager’s words remained in my mind when I went back to see the manager after midnight. The words he used were awkward enough to annoy me. “Something I wanted to do”. I couldn’t afford to have such a thing. I couldn’t possess that desire either.

We only saw each other at night, the manager who greeted me with a smile took me to the basement of the building. He led me to a small empty room among the rows of rooms that looked like a dance practice room. It was night, but in the other room, there were quite a few people practicing late at night, and the lights were on and there was music softly playing. As I entered the practice room with the mirror wall in front, he led me to the front of the mirror.

“Tomorrow is the interview, so you can’t practice acting in just a few hours, but I think you shouldn’t look awkward at least.”

As I stared at the words that needed explanation, he noticed and said several things about the interview. 

“I’ve only seen it a few times, but at first, a line of applicants are asked a variety of questions one after another. If you give an incorrect answer or if they find any flaws, they’ll tell them to go out the door immediately. In interviews, I usually see things like special talents that the applicants have prepared, but they just throw away what they have prepared for months after a few questions. Well, the person in charge says that after a few words, they get a feeling right away, so there’s nothing more to say.”

He stopped talking and lowered his voice with sullen eyes.

“There are a lot of people who want to become celebrities like this. Everyone prepares for a long time and works hard. So, you have to throw away the idea that you will easily become a celebrity. Even if you are lucky and talented, you should never be complacent. Because luck or talent without effort will all run out someday.”

“I know. I’ll end it before my luck or talent runs out.” 

“End… So you’re saying you’re going to quit when your revenge is over?”

“Yes.”

“…”

“Manager-nim, let me be clear again. I’m trying to get revenge. This is my goal.” 

So, if you don’t like it now, turn around. I thought he would have figured out the meaning of these words. He looked down at his hands with a mixed expression on his face.

“Right. I need something too. Like you said, I should earn money for the children’s school fees. Actually, I got fired from my job today.”

It was expected, but I didn’t say anything. He must have thought I was feeling awkward, so he patted my arm with a smile, as if telling me not to worry.

“So I can work as much as I want just for you. Well, let’s work hard. And you never know, if you work hard, your purpose might change to acting itself.” 

He chuckled, and suddenly asked with a straight face.

“Do you want to do something other than an actor?”

“I don’t have anything I want to do, my goal is to be an actor.”

“Is that so? Yoohan- I mean, because Myeongshin is an actor?” 

Nodding my head, I asked what I was curious about; a drama that is said to be airing next year that Myeongshin showed interest in. When I said the title, the manager immediately gave me an answer.

“It’s a grand project. The original book is already a huge bestseller, the movie version that was released last year was also very successful. So when the drama comes out, popularity is guaranteed. What about the drama?”

“It seems that Myeongshin is aiming for the main role.”

At my words, his expression slightly distorted. 

“He doesn’t have the capacity to play that role yet. Myeongshin usually does light trends, so his image doesn’t fit. Come to think of it, he’s trying to change his image these days. Is it because of this?”

He tilted his head, muttered, and asked.

“How did you know that?””

Instead of answering, I changed the subject. 

“Because of that drama, he’s targeting Director Yoon to be his sponsor. What’s the connection?”

“D-d-director Yoon?!!!”

His eyes opened wide like a cartoon character. He must have been really surprised that he held his breath for a while, and asked again if I was sure it was Director Yoon. I nodded.

“My god… No matter how fast you want to reach stardom with a sponsor, you have to know how to distinguish people. What do you mean Director Yoon…” 

He shook his head and voiced his concern.

“If you get caught up in the wrong thing, even if you are a top star, Director Yoon has the ability to make someone fall into a ditch. That fellow has no fear.”

Even though he had been ruined by Myeongshin before, he still voiced out his worries. Perhaps he still had some affections. He sighed and lowered his eyes for a moment, then looked back at me.

“There are many reasons for trying to get Director Yoon as a sponsor. One, he holds the true power of the company, wouldn’t one get full support from the company if they get his help? This is one of the few places that can put pressure on broadcasting stations. There is also a rumor that he is also involved in the production of dramas. Well, thanks to that, Director Yoon is the first thing that rookies who want to rise are aiming for. But that man…” 

The manager shook his head.

“No, he’s definitely not an easy person. He’s very competent, and seeing that he made huge profits while working for a movie investment company of the same type in the United States for several years, I think his ability to pick out the box office hits is excellent. Even after moving here, the artists have been shuffled extensively. Anyway, the first month did really well. If the company doesn’t push them, then the actors are done for. Well, so Myeongshin may be aiming for something… Hm, if it’s the lead role in that drama, it’s probably because the copyright is at stake.”

“A copyright?”

“Our company owns the rights to the drama of that work. So, it’s a standard fact that Dream is responsible for all the main roles, including the main character. It’s in the planning stage now, so filming is probably going to begin next year. But if you ask me…” 

“…”

“If you’re aiming for the same role as Myeongshin as revenge, I’ll just smile and listen to you, but I’m absolutely opposed to having Director Yoon as a sponsor.”

“I’m not thinking about having him as my sponsor. Although I need it.”

He furrowed his eyebrows, not knowing what I meant, but he had nothing more to say. Because even I didn’t have a concrete plan on what to do. 

“What should I do now?”

When I changed the subject, he made me come closer to the mirror with a solemn expression. And he made me take a closer look at my face.

“I’m going to have you practice a few interviews. Answer while I ask and see how your expression changes through the mirror. Shouldn’t you know what your face looks like?”

As he spoke, I stared at the person in the mirror. A slightly thin, expressionless face. My lips are swollen and covered with a scab. It has been a while since I’ve taken a closer look at myself. That face was so unfamiliar that it felt like I was looking at someone else. 

“If you have more time, it would be nice to practice the skills that you will show during the interview, but since it’s today… For now, let’s just master not getting panicked by the questions and do a few simple lines.”

Lines, as in acting? I looked at him in confusion and he shrugged his shoulders.

“Of course, you’ve never acted before, so it’s a little worrying. But it’s okay. If you can’t say the lines, you can just show your true self. Still, it’s good to be prepared. Well, it might be hard to even say simple lines…”

“I’ve read lines before.” 

“Hm?”

What are you talking about? The uncle stared at me as I repeated.

“I’ve read lines.”

I never thought the day would come when my past cohabitation with Myeongshin would be helpful. Why not? He was the one who wanted to be an actor, and I just helped him memorize the lines with a lazy face while I read the lines of the other party. At first, I just read it as if I were reading a Korean book. However, he became active and talkative when practicing acting, and he was dissatisfied with my response. 

“Hey, read it as though it’s real. When I act, you should respond to it and have fun like the person in the script!”

“What? You’re embarrassed? Haha, it’s really funny to hear that from you, who’s famous for not being bashful. So there’s something you can’t do too~”

I was choked up by his provocative words so I read the lines more ridiculously on purpose. And the more exaggerated I read, the more excited he was and read his lines. What seemed tedious and annoying at first had almost become a daily routine every evening. We giggled and drank together and eventually had fun. It was a memory from long ago and has faded now, but it helped me read some of the lines of the script given by the manager. At least, I didn’t feel awkward.

Leaving the manager looking surprised, I didn’t go home at dawn and instead headed to the internet cafe. 

I put in the CD I had gotten from the manager and put on headphones. I had asked him to record the acting of an actor he was in charge of to show me. The CD played automatically on the monitor, and a person acting appeared. A man who was whispering sweet words with a gentle smile. I picked a one-minute scene from the CD and watched it over and over without a break until dawn. When I left the internet cafe, I felt like I was Myeongshin in that drama.