I woke up in the darkness.
"Huh?"
And suddenly, I tilted my head. Something was off. My eyes opened more easily than usual. Usually, waking up was hell, but today, my mind snapped back unusually fast, and I couldn't help but wonder.
'Didn't I drink a lot and fall asleep yesterday?'
My eyes opened easily, and my body felt as light as a feather. It was strange. I groped around.
I felt the wall. As I moved, something clattered down.
"Damn it."
What in the world is going on? I definitely fell asleep on the basement sofa last night, so why did I wake up in this cramped space? There were two possibilities: either I crawled here myself, or I was kidnapped by an obsessed fan of Deadman's Heaven with twisted sexual desires towards me, which would be horrifying.
While repeating the worst jokes I could think of in my mind to shake off the listlessness that had persisted since yesterday, I sat up without even getting back to square one. I felt something falling off my body and banged on the wall, which turned out to be thinner than I thought. Pushing against it, light streamed in.
"Ugh...?!"
A groan escaped me.
Blinded by the brilliant light, it took me a while to gather my senses. I groped the floor with my arms and finally crawled out of the narrow space. Barely managing to stand, my eyes adjusted to the light, and I couldn't help but widen them when I looked around.
"What on earth is this?"
The space buried in my distant memories unfolded before me.
Furniture and a floor made of dark wood. A brown and red checkered rug and a single bed. A bookshelf full of books was displayed on one side of the room, and next to it, a CRT television that looked like it belonged in a museum.
I knew this place.
It was my room before I went to college.
Could it really be that my fervent psycho fan recreated my 1980s room?
Feeling chills all over my body, I hastily opened the door and rushed out. I went down the stairs to find a living room, exactly as I remembered, which creeped me out even more.
Overall beige tones, with floral patterns on fabric or leather on mahogany furniture.
"Calm down, Hanshin. Stay calm."
There were several possibilities.
It might also be a broadcast event. I hadn't yet revealed my face publicly, but I had discussed with the publishing house about revealing my identity and starting to act as a full-time influencer author aligned with the broadcast of the Deadman's Heaven drama.
Maybe that was what was happening.
"A psycho fan would be much worse than that."
Just then, it happened.
"Shin?"
At the sound of someone calling me, I turned around and screamed.
"Holy mother...!"
These guys even recruited my deceased mother!!
I stepped back in shock, and the recruited (?) mother frowned at me.
"Watch your language, Shin. Even I know that's a very bad word."
"Who are you?"
"Has this boy not fully woken up yet? Get ready for school!"
"Did someone ask you to do this? Or is it a broadcast? It's not funny, let's just stop this."
"Huh."
The woman in her late thirties sighed at my serious response and raised her hand.
Crack!
"Ouch?!"
A sharp pain surged across my back!
"What nonsense is this for someone who's entering high school today! Hurry up, go wash up and come out!!"
"Ah, ouch, ouch! Wait! Just a minute!"
The combo of a smack on the back and a tug on the ear was one of my mother's finishing moves. Dragged along half-crying from the intense pain, I couldn't shake off the feeling that something was bizarre. My childhood, which no one knew about, was unfolding in perfect detail right before my eyes.
"Is there such a broadcast? No, no. Could there be such a perverted murderer?"
Confused, I was dragged helplessly into the bathroom.
"Ugh..."
After rubbing my sore earlobe, I looked up and was shocked.
"What is this?"
In the mirror, it wasn't the current me, but the me from the past.
Skin without a single wrinkle, taut and youthful. Black hair of a decent length.
I met eyes with pupils clear and shining without any redness. Unknowingly, I raised my hand and noticed the absence of the chronic pain in my shoulders due to forward head posture, and how smoothly my body moved, as if it had been oiled.
Amazed by my own youthful body, I jumped around and twisted my body here and there, enjoying the agility, and soon burst out laughing.
"Shit, broadcasts these days are really something."
Then, it just came out.
"There's no way."
Was this a dream? No, it wasn't. My earlobes still felt numb.
This was reality.
From what my mother said, I inferred the current situation.
"High school entrance day?"
September 8, 1980.
Just before turning sixteen, I had entered a public high school named Central City Valley High School. And this day marked just over a year since my father had passed away.
Was I really back in that time?
It was unbelievable. How could such a thing be possible?
With trembling hands, I washed my face and brushed my teeth.
My teeth were spotlessly clean, no cavities. Feeling the cold water run over my skin, I became more alert, remembered an old habit, and went back to my room to change clothes. As I faced my room from the 1980s again, slowly the old memories began to resurface.
During my middle and high school days, I often holed up in the closet.
It was the perfect place to secretly read the genre novels that my mother disliked. For me, a model student who only went between home and school, reading genre novels after completing the day's routine was an escape from the harsh realities.
But those memories from the 1980s, when revisited as an adult, felt entirely different.
"That's right."
I smiled bitterly.
Casually walking past the magazines scattered all over the floor, I pulled out a checkered shirt and cotton pants from the closet and put them on. Then I walked down the stairs and stared blankly at my mother's back in the kitchen.
"It must be real."
If I really had returned to the past, then the mother in front of me was also real.
"Shin. You stayed up all night reading those weird magazines again, didn't you?"
"Ah."
As my mother served the food she had been cooking and scolded me, I was momentarily at a loss for words. The person I remembered having passed away long ago had reappeared before me in her younger form.
A strange feeling that I couldn't even begin to describe swirled in my chest.
But my mother, unaware of my state, continued speaking.
"Are you not going to keep the promise you made with mom?"
What promise had I made with my mother at that time?
"You said you wouldn't read those magazines after midnight?"
"…Ah, that."
"The pastor called it the devil’s book, but mom compromised because you liked it so much?"
"I'm sorry. It was just too interesting."
"I hope you'll be more careful next time. Now, come eat your breakfast."
The table was set with food.
Bacon and scrambled eggs, bread, and butter.
It was a simple meal.
Not long after my father passed away, we switched to American meals. Korean food was almost a luxury in America during the 1980s, and we had become too poor to afford it.
The family's finances had greatly suffered due to my father’s death.
And once we got used to it, even after our life improved, we never really went back to eating proper Korean meals.
Yet, this food was special to me.
It was my mother's home-cooked meal.
"I'll eat well."
"Don’t leave any."
Following my mother’s gesture, I sat down and slowly began to eat.
It was neither a broadcast nor a psycho fan. It was perfect reality.
Otherwise, this situation couldn't be explained.
The taste of bacon slightly crisped at the edges. Stories that could only be known by the real mother.
"Yeah, that’s how it was."
In the 1980s, genre novels were treated much like how television was in the 1990s, games in the 2000s, or smartphones in the 2010s. It was something adults couldn't understand, and kids were crazy about it. At places like schools and churches, they were almost treated as creations of Satan.
My mother was one of them.
A devout believer, my mother took the Korean church pastor's word as gospel and tried to stop me from reading genre novel magazines. However, even I, a well-behaved model student, resisted my mother's discipline, and eventually, we set rules that allowed me to continue reading genre novels.
I liked novels that much back then.
It made sense.
I always found reality stifling.
Back then, novels were what liberated me more than anything else.
That's why, when I read those novels again as an adult, I couldn't help but be disappointed.
They were filled with all the stereotypes about Asians that I had experienced in reality.
***
After breakfast, I caught the bus to school in front of my house.
The bus I must have taken hundreds of times until I got my driver’s license at 17.
Scenes passed by like a panorama.
Bridges made of intertwined steel. Smoke billowed from factory chimneys in the distance. On the streets, people danced to large cassette players or spent their time skateboarding.
I remembered the 1980s through to the 1990s as a time when content in America saw the most development. Back then, the "presidents" of America were Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan. Ah, and also Steven Spielberg, John Carmack, and finally, Bill Gates.
The window was open, letting in a cool breeze.
As I watched the people on the street, I thought to myself,
"Through my eyes, it all looks quite quaint."
Neon-colored T-shirts. High-waisted denim pants.
Men shaved the sides of their heads and grew out the back. Women maximized the volume of their hair.
This was the era when I lived as a boy.
Before smartphones, even cellphones, kids from more affluent homes used walkie-talkies. Everyone believed the stories on television were real, and they cheered at movies filled with cheap special effects. On weekends, we gathered in a friend’s basement to play D&D. It was a magical time.
It was just before society would shift, heralding a new era.
I continued to dredge up memories as I went along.
I arrived at school.
Central City Valley High School had good security, a high educational standard, and a decent level of racial diversity, so I remembered how my mother had jumped for joy when I was accepted.
It was the first time she had truly smiled since my father had passed away.
As it was the first day of school, students grouped by race. This tendency for people to cluster by race hadn’t changed much in the future, but I was still surprised by how much they seemed to guard against each other.
There was no formal entrance ceremony, and instead, after a school tour led by a senior student, I immediately returned home. In the past, I would have gone to help at the Korean store my mother ran after my father's passing, but today I definitely wanted to clear my head.
"Alright."
I went into my room and started to organize the magazines strewn all over the floor.
One, two, after collecting them, it turned out to be about thirty. I debated whether to shelve them or throw them away, but without realizing, I pulled out the top one and casually flipped through the pages.
"Just my luck, this one shows up."
I casually recognized it as "Conan the Barbarian."
The Conan the Barbarian series was one of the most popular sword and sorcery novels of the 1980s.
My eyes inadvertently read a passage.
[Barbarian Conan was attacked by the minions of Conqueror Zan.
He bellowed mightily,
'Behold my shining sword!'
As he lifted his sword, it shimmered with radiance.
Zan's minions trembled in terror.
But more terrifying than Conan's massive muscular body and his sword was the fear and loyalty they felt towards their master, Zan.
The minions screamed and charged, and Conan bravely faced them with his shining sword, slicing through them.
The shining sword cracked open the skull of the foremost enemy.
The skull shattered, spewing brain and eyeballs.
Bathing in the spilled blood was the glory of a warrior. Conan was exhilarated, and clear sweat trickled down his fiery red muscular chest.
'Oh My......!'
The face of the Whore-Queen watching him blushed red.
She felt a burning sensation in her groin, not because of the deadly venereal disease she intended to use to harm Conan, but because of her awe of his endless masculinity.
However, Conan paid no attention to such things. To him, women were merely objects of exploitation.
After defeating dozens of enemies, Conan roared mightily.
'Uoooooooohhhhh-!!'
"Holy mother."
-To be continued.]
After reading the novel, I was momentarily speechless, blinking blankly.
What exactly was the 1980s like?