Jesus Heaven, Unbelief Hell - Chapter 1

I’m hungry. I’m used to being hungry, so it doesn’t matter.

But I can’t stand being sleepy. Because I am an impatient man. Even if I skip dinner, I search the refrigerator at night. If I’m sleepy, I take a nap even during class. I’d hit even a rich department boss.

And most of all, what I can’t stand is…

“Representative Han, you fucking – !”

Chwaag!

A bunch of documents were now fluttering like cherry blossoms in my front, like the paper firecrackers that had popped on my first birthday.

“You are a fucking Representative, and you do your work like this?”

“I just followed the manual.”

“This fucking bastard is doing this again.”

The Department Manager who didn’t do his work properly, who ate when he was hungry, slept when he was sleepy, and carefully collected his paycheck, jumped up from his seat.

“I fucking told you just to guide him a bit and let the fucker do his job, did I tell you mother to do it yourself?”

“……”

“Fuck you, if you hadn’t tackled the project, the project wouldn’t have gone out of business! Which fucking Representative bastard sends a report directly to the General Manager, damn it!”

“It was a problematic project from the beginning. The source of the transaction’s funds is not clear and the financial statements…”

“Representative Han. Do you know how many months our team spent on that project? Or are all the cubs who grew up without parents so ignorant?”

“……”

“Thanks to our handsome Representative, the Team Leader collapsed from overwork. It would’ve been over after being reviewed by the General Manager and getting the final approval from the top, but you knocked all of it down!!!”

“If it had gone the way it was, the whole team would have been gone, not the project.”

“Hey, you’re really good at running your mouth. So what did you want to actually knock down? Our project? Or our team?”

“The project just needs to be thoroughly prepared from scratch.”

“You don’t even care about our team having to waste time and money there again? Hey, since when did one of our Representatives have so much leadership? You only need to trust one Representative and go! One Representative can make bitcoin go UUUUUUUUUP! !!!!!”[1]

The ashtray that the Manager had thrown at me almost hit my forehead, but I avoided it by twisting my head slightly.

The ashtray barely flew past my temple, smashed into the office wall and shattered. The place was now cluttered with scattered cigarette butts, but the Manager didn’t seem to care.

“Because of you! If it wasn’t for you! Ugh fuck… that’s why I told the HR team that you have to filter out all the young shit-luck[2] bastards from the beginning!”

“Isn’t it fortunate that that shit-luck project didn’t mess everything up?”

Slowly, something seemed to boil inside of me, so I threw out a few words so as not to cause a sudden outbreak.

I am a person who prefers to endure everything. However, there is a reason why I can’t put up with it even though I know I must in this kind of situation.

That’s right.

“Hey, are you crazy? Can’t you understand the situation now? I told you last time. Please don’t throw a tantrum here just because you haven’t been educated at home. If you haven’t learned the simple common sense that you shouldn’t talk back at your elders, keep your mouth shut! Why are you acting like you have to teach me? Can you? Are you my fucking tutor? Are you going to teach me how to shit and wipe my ass?!”

“I was the one who wiped your cheap shit, so why is the Manager angry?”

“… Hey, hey, hey, you have some backbone!”

After all, my heart twisted seeing him overacting while he couldn’t even bend his back properly because of that stomach bulging like a mound.

This is why I couldn’t stand it even if I want to. Because it was always like this.

“Representative Han. If you don’t want to work, just resign. No one will stop you. Rather, you can fill a truck with those who want to blow your head off on the road at night.”

“I think the General Manager will stop me.”

“The Boss isn’t going to stop you. I’ll make a neat resignation form, so just fill it in roughly and pass it to me. No matter how badly you’ve been educated, you can do that by yourself, right?”

“Are you forcing me to retire now?”

“You don’t know the word “recommended resignation”?[3] You ignorant bastard! Even if the Manager covers for you, the Boss won’t let him!”

Only after hearing those words did I get a rough idea of ​​how things were going.

There was a head-on collision between the minority who tried to save this damn company that had been spinned off from a famous Korean conglomerate into an affiliate, and the majority who tried to devour it moderately while harming it moderately.

Haha, there’s no way our Boss, who was pushed out of the line of succession and kicked out as the President of an affiliate company can actually run the company properly.

The General Manager was a veteran in this industry, so they couldn’t even dream of making him move away his desk or resign, but for me who was just a Representative it worked fine.

It was obvious that the reason I was pushed out as a “recommended resignation” rather than a unilateral dismissal was to prevent me from reporting it to the Labour Office as an unfair dismissal.

‘Well, I endured a lot this time.’

After my parents disappeared when I was young, I spent my adolescence moving around the homes of my relatives who swarmed around my parents’ fortune like piranhas.

It took me 3 years to get the rank of Representative at the first job I was lucky enough to get after leaving the military. It was a fairly quick promotion, but there were a lot of roadblocks for no reason.

In particular, people who tried to block my promotion because I looked hateful to my superiors, like the Senior Manager in front of me, who were often jealous of me and downplayed my achievements.

I’ve been at this fucking job for just 3 years, so it’s true that I did well.

I’ll be thirty the day after tomorrow.

There is nothing major to brag about other than that my work hair looks a little better than average.

In the end, I’ve always had an intolerant personality.

Anyway, it’s not my fault that it happened this way. It’s God’s fault for creating such a fucking world.

“Okay. It feels like I’m just lying down and receiving my resignation letter after wiping other people’s shit, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Huh, really, you can’t forget to run your mouth even when you’re leaving. I’m saying this because I’m genuinely concerned, but are you going to explode outside later?”

“If you run into me outside, it’s the Manager who will have to guard your mouth, so why are you worried about me?”

“……”

“I hope we do not meet in the future. Please deposit this month’s salary and severance pay on time. If you do not want to see calls from the Labour Office.”

I threw the resignation letter I had prepared in front of him.

It was a resignation letter that I’d always carried with me.

“Orphans always have shameful conduct.”

Before I left the office with my personal belongings, I clenched my fists at the words of the Manager, but I didn’t swing them.

It’s not because I was worrying about hitting someone or going to jail.

I desperately put up with others’ provocations, fearing that I would keep swinging my fists until I literally stopped breathing, or that my hands would have taken someone’s life when I regained my temper at some point.

It was like that when I was in school and also when I was in the military, so at least you shouldn’t make such a mess at work.

I didn’t even have a job anymore, so it didn’t matter.

‘I want to rest.’

I was hungry, tired, and even cursed at on an empty stomach.

Normally, after finishing overtime work, I would go to a soup restaurant near my company and go home after soothing my stomach with hot bean sprouts soup.

Today, for some reason, I didn’t even crave bean sprout soup from Mrs. Kim Mal-ja, who was always kind to me. I just wanted to go home and sleep like I’m dead. Sleep enough to really die.

Unlike others, I’d worked overtime as usual, and the sun was still shining because I was about to come out of the office in the morning when our old fossil Manager confronted me.

As always, the fumes emitted by vehicles crossing the centre of the city engulfed the lungs, and fine dust from the roads pricked my stiff eyes.

Come to think of it, this city had always been like this.

During the day, it showed an orderly appearance like an educational broadcast program that tries to show only the good side of things, but at night it showed off its promiscuity and obscenity.

I could see this city only just transformed its appearance from night to day. Nothing actually changed.

In the back-alley corners where people’s eyes couldn’t reach, there were always dirty, sticky, ugly and inconsequential people rolling around.

They were the kings of the night. Contrary to me, who was a slave of the night, they were a group of unfettered romantics who enjoyed the darkness of the night while doing whatever they wanted.

Suddenly, I had a strong longing to become like that.

But I am good at distinguishing between desire and impulse.

Desire is a primordial physiological phenomenon, but impulse is just a drug that torments me without reason.

There is a clear difference between simply cherishing a desire to hold a woman and engaging in illegal prostitution.

I have endured until now so that I don’t bridge that narrow gap as much as possible.

At school, I ran into the gang of delinquents who insulted my family so I crushed their faces while my body was shattered, and in the military, I swung the butt of my gun in response to the family insults consistently thrown by the commander.

It was the result of not being able to overcome the simple impulse to kill those who insulted my parents, beyond the desire to see them again.

So, I make a thorough distinction between desire and impulse. If I can’t tell them apart, either I die or the other person dies.

“I’ve got the peace of a river… I’ve got the peace of a river… overflowing.”

The hymn that I had been accustomed to since I was a child because of my mother, which I used to sing when I was angry, until blood dripped from my clenched palms, reflexively came out.

I laugh at the selfishness of a God who always wants me to praise and worship only Himself, without giving me a river of peace or a spring of joy.

Is it because I nodded off every time in church? Is it because of all those times I pretended to lip sync while in the choir? Is it because I left all of those Bible jigsaw puzzles untouched?

Are you now retaliating against me this way?

Have you ever wondered how an eight-year-old kid can live a fucking life after you threw him into the fucking world and got rid of his parents?

Maybe Santa Claus, who hasn’t come to visit me since I was eight, or my parents who have never contacted me since, would have wanted me to be as cool as those lower-class people cavorting in the back-alley corners.

“Huu.”

I rummaged through my pockets, ripped open the medicine bag, and swallowed the pills along with the fishy taste of blood in my throat.

It’s not just my bad habit of not being able to hold back my anger, no. It’s a drug I’ve been taking for the past few years to stop my impulse, which has now become a chronic disease.

Just how effective this is has been proven today, since that old fossil Manager’s face was not crushed.

I’m getting better. I’m getting better. I can be proud.

I am now ready to reunite with my parents.

Beep!

As I opened the front door of the youth rental housing where I lived, I was greeted by the heavily subdued air.

The only thing in the house where a man lived alone was a work table, a PC, and the basic home appliances pre-prepared for rental housing.

I threw my clothes in the washing machine and lay flat on the mattress. If you lay on the mattress and looked up, you could see a small cross hanging on the wall.

I no longer go to church or use a Bible, but for some reason I have always carried at least one cross with me since becoming independent.

I didn’t need someone to mentally lean on. Rather, I needed an object to resent and express my anger, so I just put it in a place where I could see it clearly.

Jesus Christ, nailed to the cross and carved with a groaning face.

How painful was the cross? Would blood have gushed out of his palms like mine, resenting the one who was his Father, and lamenting the course of his whole damn life?

“But you eventually returned to your Father’s arms.”

I stared at the cross hanging on the wall until my tired eyelids drooped down.

Jesus, you are just a fraud.

Editor’s Notes:

[1] 코인 가즈아아아아아아아 (lit. coin GAZAAA…) – slang, coin is usually short for cryptocurrency while Gaza is a slang for things (stock, sports bets, crypto etc) rising up.

[2] 싹수 노란 (lit. yellow sprout) – 싹수 means luck or fortune, so 싹수 노란 literally means somebody who has shitty luck. This is how an adult might swear at a delinquent child.

[3] 권고사직이라는 (recommended resignation) means that the workplace recommends the worker to leave and issues a letter of resignation based on the worker’s own unforced opinion.