The ceiling was pale and institutional and wrong.
Ji-ho registered this before he registered anything else — the specific quality of the plaster, the long fluorescent tube in its yellowed casing, the water stain in the upper left corner that had been there since, he was fairly certain, the late nineties and had never been addressed. He registered all of this the way you register a sound before you understand what made it: first the fact, then the slow assembly of its meaning.
Then the chalk smell arrived.
It came before he had fully opened his eyes, before he had properly accounted for his own position in the world — that particular dry-powder smell of a classroom that has been a classroom for thirty years and has no intention of being anything else. It was the smell of every afternoon he had spent in a room like this one, and it was wrong, because he had not been in a room like this one since he was nineteen, and he was twenty-six, and he had been on an expressway in the rain approximately thirty seconds ago.
He opened his eyes the rest of the way.
Wooden desks. Thirty of them, in six rows, the grain of the wood worn pale at the corners from years of hands and elbows and the particular restless energy of teenagers who would rather be anywhere else. A green blackboard at the front of the room, half-covered in Chinese characters he recognized from a period in his life he had successfully moved past. Windows on the left side, admitting the specific pale light of a Seoul afternoon in a month he had not yet determined. Rows of faces — twenty, approximately — all turned toward him with the expression of teenagers watching someone else be in trouble, which was the same expression teenagers had worn since the invention of classrooms and showed no signs of evolving.
At the front of the room: a voice.
"—would appreciate an explanation for why you are asleep in my classroom, Mr. Kang, since the rest of your classmates have managed, with some difficulty, to remain conscious—"
The clock on the wall above the blackboard said 2:00 PM.
Ji-ho looked at it. The red second hand was moving. The number meant something — he could feel the something gathering at the edge of his thinking, taking on shape and weight — but he was not yet ready to let it arrive.
"Mr. Kang."
He looked at the teacher.
Professor Bao Jun-seo was fifty-three years old, or he had been fifty-three years old when Ji-ho last saw him, which had been at his retirement ceremony in 2023 at which Ji-ho had not been present because he had been in a deposition. Bao Jun-seo was standing at the front of the room with his hands clasped behind his back, wearing his grey cardigan, wearing his glasses with the small crack in the left lens that he had never had repaired, carrying — in the left breast pocket, exactly where it had always been — his folded piece of paper, the one he brought to every class and occasionally consulted and never fully explained. He was alive. He was here. He was currently furious.
This was all accurate. Ji-ho had not known, until this moment, that he had remembered it so precisely.
Some of the students had begun to laugh, in the particular muffled way of teenagers who are enjoying someone else's misfortune and are not yet certain they are allowed to show it openly. Someone behind Ji-ho said something he didn't catch, which produced more laughter, and a boy two rows over was grinning in a way that Ji-ho recognized — not the person, but the expression, the universal expression of someone grateful that the teacher's attention is elsewhere.
"Are you unwell, Mr. Kang?" Bao Jun-seo said, with the tone of a man who did not particularly care whether the answer was yes or no, but was documenting his concern for the record.
Ji-ho did not answer.
He was looking at his desk.
There was a scratch on the upper right corner — a thin line, three centimeters, not made by accident. Made with a nail, specifically with the edge of the nail he had broken at the bus stop that morning and not had time to file down, on a day when Bao Jun-seo's lecture on the administrative structure of the Ming dynasty had entered its forty-fifth minute and Ji-ho had needed something to do with his hands. He had made the scratch in November of 2019. He had never thought about it again.
He looked at it now for several seconds.
The details that had been accumulating since he opened his eyes — the ceiling, the chalk, the desks, the clock at 2:00 PM, the green blackboard, the folded paper in the professor's pocket — arranged themselves, with the orderly finality of evidence reaching a verdict, into a shape he had been avoiding since the fluorescent light.
Hansol High School. Seoul. November, 2019.
He was nineteen years old, or rather, he was in a body that was nineteen years old, and he had been, until very recently, on an expressway in 2026, and there had been a car from the adjacent lane, and glass, and a silver light from his coat pocket that had not been dramatic at all, and now he was here.
Ji-ho was a lawyer. He had spent four years learning that a conclusion, however obvious, was worth nothing until it could be proven. Feeling that something was true was not the same as knowing it. And there was, he observed, one available method of verification within immediate reach.
Professor Bao Jun-seo was standing three meters away, still waiting for an explanation, still alive, his cheek fully present and accessible.
Ji-ho stood up.
He crossed the three meters with the purposeful economy of a man who has identified his next action and is executing it correctly. Bao Jun-seo's expression shifted — from irritation to something more uncertain, the look of a teacher recalibrating — and then Ji-ho reached out and pinched the professor's cheek between his thumb and forefinger.
Not impulsively. With precision. The measured grip of someone verifying a hypothesis.
The room went very quiet.
Bao Jun-seo's eyes, behind the cracked glasses, went through several stages in rapid succession: confusion, incomprehension, a half-second of pure blank astonishment, and then — arriving like weather — fury.
The class broke.
Twenty teenagers, none of whom had expected this to be the afternoon they witnessed it, erupted in the specific laughter of people who cannot believe what they have just seen. It was loud and then louder and then, as Bao Jun-seo's face progressed through its colors, it began to curdle at the edges — some of them going quiet as they realized the joke had become something larger and less comfortable than a joke.
"What," said Bao Jun-seo, at a register that was technically still a speaking voice, "do you think you are—"
Ji-ho was not listening.
He had stepped back and was looking at his hands.
He turned them over. Both sides. The back first, then the palms, then the back again — the slow, methodical examination of someone who has asked a question and is reading the answer. The hands were small. The skin was unlined, unmarked, without the particular quality that desk work and document handling and six years of a life put into the hands of a person over time. The knuckle of his right index finger did not have the small callus from where his pen rested. The left thumb did not have the pale scar from the letter opener incident of 2022. These were not his hands. They were completely, entirely, inarguably his hands. They were nineteen years old.
Behind him, the classroom noise continued — the teacher's voice rising, a few students still laughing, most of them now watching in the particular confused silence of twenty people who do not know what they are witnessing and are waiting to be told how to feel about it.
Ji-ho heard none of it.
He looked at his hands for another long moment. He turned them over one more time.
Then he screamed.
It was not loud, exactly. It was not theatrical. It was the specific, involuntary sound of a man who has just received proof he did not want and cannot argue with — a short, sharp sound that had nothing to do with the pinch, which was already four seconds in the past, and everything to do with the hands, which were still there, still nineteen, still irrefutably real.
The classroom went fully silent.
Twenty faces stared at him. Bao Jun-seo stared at him. The clock on the wall continued its motion, indifferent, the red second hand moving at its ordinary pace through an afternoon that had stopped being ordinary some time ago.
Ji-ho lowered his hands.
He stood in the silence and looked at nothing in particular.
---
*(Professor Bao Jun-seo later filed a report with the school principal in which he noted, with the careful language of a man documenting something he could not adequately explain, that the student had screamed after the pinch — not during it. He described this as 'disturbing behavior that warrants further investigation.' The investigation did not occur. The report was filed. It remains.)*