9Ep.. Someone to Say His Name

Yerin pushed open the door of the consultancy at three in the afternoon. Still in her school uniform, she sat down in the same chair she had sat in yesterday.

Sea looked up from her notebook. And asked, very politely.

"…What can I do for you?"

Yerin's fingers closed around the pleats of her skirt.

"…Ma'am. I came yesterday too. And the day before."

Sea didn't smile. Without smiling, she turned the pages of the notebook on her lap. It was dense with her own handwriting. Client statement — a girl in her class is being erased. From photographs, from rosters, from people's memories. Two days' worth of records. The dates, the times, all in that neat script she always used. Only the spaces where a name should have gone were blank, both times. The client's name. And the girl's.

For the first time, Sea's voice wavered, barely.

"…This. Who is this about?"

"Park Seojin." Yerin barely got it out. "She sits next to me. She's gone from the photos, gone from the rosters. I'm the only one who remembers her now."

Doha was watching Yerin's face just then. She didn't cry. Instead she looked down at the back of her own hand. As if checking that it was still there.

"Jang Sea." Doha said it low. "You wrote that two days ago. This student's name is Kang Yerin. She's sitting right in front of you."

"…Then why don't I remember any of it."

"Same as yesterday. Same as the day before." He fidgeted with his sleeve. "I figured you just hadn't slept. Until I saw the notebook."

Yerin asked, very small.

"Mister… can you see me?"

"I can."

"Then why can't she—"

"Because what's being erased is a register." Doha said. "Photos. Attendance sheets. The list in people's heads. I'm not on any register. There's no name of mine to erase."

It was only after he said it that he understood what he'd said.

Sea didn't argue. That was the stranger thing. She closed the notebook, then read one of her own sentences aloud. Twice. With the face of someone for whom reading it brought nothing back.

"I don't remember. But my handwriting is right here." She pressed a thumb into the corner of the page. "Both of those can't be true."

"Both of them are true. Your memory was erased. That doesn't mean it didn't happen to you."

"Then why are you untouched."

Instead of answering, Doha thought of the documents she had fanned across this table days ago. The blanks on his background check. Seven years of nothing.

"I'm not even on the paperwork." He shrugged. "Only time it pays off. Being dead."

Sea didn't laugh. She picked up her recorder, then set it back down. Then she turned her chair to face him head-on. What came out of her was something she had never once said, not since her forensic-lab years.

"I can't trust my own memory." She looked straight at him. "So I'll trust what you say. I'll assume you're right, and calculate from there."

It wasn't faith. She still believed in nothing. She had simply decided to treat her own senses as a contaminated instrument, and picked another instrument to use instead. It just happened to be Doha.

The school after last period was oddly quiet. Sea hung a visitor's pass around her neck and walked through the gate. Yerin had called ahead to the front office.

"If what gets erased is a name that's spoken." She didn't slow down. "Then a name nobody ever spoke should still be there."

"And where would you find that."

"Pre-digital records." She was already walking toward the library. "Anything on a server keeps getting called. Every search, every printout. But paper nobody opens is just paper."

"All this for the name of a kid who died two years ago."

"It's the only place left to look." She stopped walking for the first time. "The articles, the memorial board, the blank page in the yearbook — it's all 'the deceased,' 'the student,' 'a second-year boy.' Everything but the name. At the family's request, it says."

The discard boxes behind the library smelled of mold. Bundles of paper cards, from before the school computerized its lending. Sea tossed him a pair of gloves.

"…Pretty sure I don't need these."

"It contaminates the evidence. Dead or not, you've still got hands."

Doha pulled on the gloves and held the box steady. Sea turned the cards over one by one. Second year, class three. The dead boy's class.

And at the twenty-third card, her hand stopped.

The last checkout date was that month, two years ago. Three days before the boy died. At the bottom of the card, in the borrower's line, was handwriting pressed so hard with a ballpoint that the paper was scored through to the back. **Bae Gihoon.**

"This boy's name disappeared twice." Her voice dropped. "Once his family covered it. Then the other side wiped what was left. Which is why there's only one place it survives. Paper nobody opened."

"Two years, and nobody said his name."

"Not once." She held the card up to the light. "He wrote this himself. The last paper where he wrote his own name, in his own hand."

They went in through the back gate, timed to the night-study hours. Yerin had left it open for them.

When he pushed the classroom door, the smell came out first. Rain-wet earth. And antiseptic. Doha stopped breathing at the threshold. It was not a welcome smell. It could never be one.

The back seat by the window. A seat nobody had taken in two years.

It was sitting there. A figure in a school uniform. A white name tag pinned at the chest, and on it, in someone else's handwriting: Park Seojin.

"…Park Seojin." Doha's voice went stiff. "That's the name Yerin's been saying for three days straight. And that thing is sitting there wearing it."

"Someone else's name."

"A kid whose name was taken, borrowing someone else's." He didn't take his eyes off the figure. "One name can't hold two people. So Seojin gets pushed out."

"And Yerin?"

"Because she's the one who kept saying that name."

He took a step closer. Steadied his voice. And called.

"Bae Gihoon."

Nothing happened.

The classroom stayed as it was. The lights, the air, the boy. Doha endured the silence a long moment. He had thought finding the name was all it took. He'd spent half a day in a moldy box. For those three syllables and nothing else.

Then the figure slowly raised its head. Where a face should have been, it was smeared, blurred. The voice came from very far away.

*You don't know me.*

Doha had nothing to say back.

*Knowing a name isn't the same as being called by someone who knew you.*

Sea didn't hear the voice. She only saw Doha's back go rigid, and saw that he didn't step away. She took out her notebook.

"What did it say."

"…It has to be someone who knew him."

"Someone who knew him."

"Someone who knew his name for two years and never once said it."

What Sea dug through until two in the morning wasn't a person but search results. She pushed the screen toward Doha, one page at a time. The face holding the microphone was always the same one. Seo Yeonu, who lost his friend— his name came first in every headline.

"The account is literally called 'Those Who Remember Him.'" She scrolled. "Of four hundred posts, three hundred ninety are this man's diary. How hard today was for him. I read all four hundred. The boy's name never appears once."

Sea pulled up one more page. An article about the funeral. Then she pointed it out, flatly.

"Even in the article about his own funeral, there's no photo of him."

Doha looked at the screen for a long time. The dead boy was a supporting role even in his own death. Everything left in the search bar was the name of the living. For a moment, his own name — seven years of it blank — laid itself over the screen.

Sea scrolled all the way to the bottom. The handful of posts from the account's first week were riddled with typos and had no likes at all. Those had seemed real. Over the two hundred or so that followed, he had learned to write well.

"…So the thing in the classroom isn't the only one who stole a name."

Seo Yeonu was twenty, sitting in a café by his university with a laptop open for exam season. When Doha said the name, he didn't even look surprised.

"Oh, that." He took out one earbud. "People still ask me about it sometimes."

"In two years, you never once said Bae Gihoon's name."

Yeonu's hand stopped at the edge of his laptop. Then he looked up. It was the face of someone who felt wronged. That was what chilled Doha.

"…Am I supposed to apologize?" He laughed. Not a laugh — the shape of one. "I'm the one who remembered him. When nobody else would. Everyone forgot in two months. I was the only one left. If I hadn't done even that, he'd have been nothing at all."

Sea started to say something. Doha raised a hand and stopped her.

He didn't press him. Instead he pulled out the chair across from him and sat down. And talked about himself.

"On paper, I don't exist." He turned the cup in his hands. "Mine's a name nobody says. No bank account, no hospital record, no mail. I know what that's like."

"…What's that got to do with me."

"When nobody calls you." Doha looked at him. "You go away. Slowly."

Yeonu shut the laptop. His hands were a little quick as he packed his bag.

"I have an exam."

He turned to go. Just before the door closed, his phone buzzed shortly in his pocket. One notification. And then another.

That night, Sea refreshed the account and counted. Posts tagging Yeonu's name were vanishing, one line at a time. Thirty-seven that night alone. By the next morning, a hundred and twelve.

"Why now. He was fine for two years."

Doha looked at the screen. The answer came late.

"…This afternoon, I said that name in front of him."

Even the name he had stolen was being taken back.

Yeonu showed up at the classroom two nights later. He came through the back gate Yerin had told him about. It wasn't the face of a man who'd come to apologize. It was the face of a man who'd come because he was afraid.

"My name is… disappearing." He stood there gripping his phone. "My friends can't find the posts they tagged me in. Yesterday my TA asked me my name twice."

"Is that why you came?"

"…Yes."

"That's enough." Doha stepped aside. "The reason you come to do the right thing doesn't have to be a good one."

Yeonu stood before the empty seat. The figure sat as it had been, head lowered. The other person's name was still there on the tag.

His mouth opened and closed, twice. Nothing came out, like a man with something lodged in his throat. This was a man who had been fluent in front of microphones for two years.

And then, for the first time in two years, he said something true.

"I'm sorry." His voice cracked. "I knew your name… and I never once said it."

The air in the classroom grew very slightly heavier.

"…Bae Gihoon."

The figure raised its head.

The borrowed name on the tag blurred, the way ink blurs in water. Other letters surfaced in its place. That handwriting — the ballpoint pressed so hard it scored through to the back of the page. Three syllables.

It looked down at its own name tag. And read it aloud, slowly, like someone reading it for the first time.

*Bae. Gi. Hoon.*

And then it scattered.

Where only an empty chair remained, Doha knelt and ran his hand along the underside of the desk. Something caught at his fingertips. A black ring, blurred as if with water. Without a word, he took out his phone and photographed it.

That night, in the car back from the school, Doha's phone rang. **Number withheld.**

Sea hit record instantly. Her hands were fast. Doha put it on speaker.

A long hiss, like rain. And out of it came a voice, enunciating with great care.

*"Jang. Se. A."*

It was a roll call. The cadence of someone reading from a register.

The call cut off. Sea reached over and stopped the recorder. Then she rewound it, right there. Played it three times. That stretch alone — precisely that stretch — was white noise.

She said nothing. She only went back, from that day on, to pressing record at every moment.

Back at the consultancy that same night, Doha laid three photographs out on the table.

The water stain at Mingyu's doorway. The doorframe in the emptied apartment. And the one from under the desk of that empty seat in the classroom. All three the same shape. A single black ring, blurred with water.

Sea opened her notebook over them. She stripped the feeling out of it and drew a table.

"The sites where you said you smelled it. Mingyu's apartment."

"Not the apartment." He stopped her pen. "From the thing that came out of it and followed me. That corridor in the redevelopment block. That classroom."

Sea struck out her line twice and rewrote it as he said. In the next column she wrote where the knots had turned up. Mingyu's doorway. The apartment doorframe. Under the classroom desk.

"Three. Three." She put the pen down. "No exceptions."

Doha looked at the table.

Where the smell was, there was a knot. And knots did not tie themselves. The teacher had said so, peering at that single thread on his handkerchief. This didn't happen on its own. Someone grew it.

Which meant the smell did not come from the hauntings. It came from the places where someone had tied a knot and fed it.

Doha didn't roll up his sleeve. He didn't need to. That smell had been soaked into his pillow for seven years. Since the night he first caught it on the figure trailing Mingyu — no, from long before that — it had simply been his own smell. Until a moment ago.

Sea looked at him. His hand had stopped over the table. The fourth row was empty.

"…What is it."

Doha couldn't take his eyes off the empty row. What he hadn't known all this time wasn't the smell. It was what the smell meant.

"…Then what about me."

His voice cracked.

"Who grew me?"

Sea didn't answer. She left the fourth row empty and drew a single question mark beside it. In ten years of expert reports, she had never once used that symbol.

The next morning Yerin woke in her own classroom. Seojin was sitting beside her, asking why she hadn't texted back yesterday. Neither of them knew how far gone they had been.

Yeonu was not forgiven. No one thanked him. What he got was quiet. Even after the tags came back — the quiet of no one calling his name for anything in particular.

Three days later, the consultancy.

Sea stopped mid-motion, setting down the coffee. Doha's collar had fallen open a little.

"…There."

"What."

"The back of your neck."

Doha reached back and felt his nape. Nothing there to feel. He looked around for a mirror, then gave up. A mirror wouldn't show him that spot either.

"It's a mark. Same color as the one on your hand." Her voice was low. "When did it appear."

Doha opened his mouth to count the days. Then stopped. Somewhere in the counting, his fingers snagged.

"…I don't know." He said it slowly. "The counting doesn't work. Somewhere around twenty… a whole year is missing. That one year."

Sea picked up her pen. And wrote that down—under the question mark beside the empty fourth row.

It was a place his own eyes could never reach. First the wrist, then the forearm, then the back of the hand. Now it was climbing up behind him.

Then the door opened. It was Yerin. She'd come to say hello, she said, waving the bag in her hand.

"Ma'am, thank you so much for everything." She smiled at Sea. Then she looked at Doha, standing beside her. A glance. Then she looked again.

"Um… who are you?"

The room went quiet.

Doha's mouth opened halfway. He had been about to give his name. He swallowed it.

The black hair tie turned once on Yerin's wrist. She remembered the name she had won back. What she had lost instead was him.

"You said there was no name of yours to erase." She looked at him. Her voice was very low.

"…There isn't." He couldn't take his eyes off Yerin. "So instead of the name, it seems they're erasing me."

The erasure, this time, had crossed over onto him.

The boy who got his name back scattered, and the one who began to be erased in exchange was not the man who never called him — but the man who saw him.