Lighthouse Village

On Christmas Eve, a black SUV screeched to a stop in front of the pharmacy, and the driver walked inside. I was just about to dig into my ramen. It was three in the afternoon, but it was my lunch break. I forced myself to get up.

"Hey. I have a question," the man said, taking off his Ray-Ban sunglasses.

I reluctantly put my chopsticks down. Hurry up, man, I thought.

"How do you get to Lighthouse Village? I don't see any signs for it." He gestured toward the intersection.

I glanced at his big, powerful SUV. What was it, a Chevy?

"Hey! Did you hear me? Where's Lighthouse Village?"

"Don't you have GPS?"

"I'm asking since the GPS can't find it," the man snapped, clearly irritated.

"How would I know if the GPS doesn't?" I said, equally irritated.

The man left in a huff and gunned his SUV across the intersection.

I turned back to my lunch. Lighthouse Village was what the locals called Sinsong-ri. He should have turned left at the intersection, not gone straight through. I knew, because that was where I lived.

The village wasn't on any map; it was as though it was so insignificant that it wasn't worth calling out. According to Mr. Ahn, it was the tiniest village on Hwawon Peninsula. My boss, the owner of the pharmacy, said it was a dismal, out-of-the-way place that was impossible to get to. The village's so-called youth club president referred to it as the edge of the world. It was true that the place was remote-you had to drive down an unpopulated stretch along the coast for about ten miles before you spotted it. The lighthouse from which it had gotten its name stood at the end of the jagged, beak-shaped cliff that jutted over the sea. Rocky mounds rose from the water and a long, tall ridge enclosed the village from behind.

When we first moved here, I'd gone up to the top of the ridge with Mr. Ahn. From there, you could see the other side of the mountain, a treeless wasteland as vast as the sea. The government had purchased the land for a tourism complex, but so far nothing had come of it. I'd heard that it had been covered with sorghum once, with a small village at the far edge. It was the kids of that long-gone village who had come up with the local name for ours.

With only twelve residents remaining, our town was also facing extinction. That number included Mr. Ahn and me; everyone called us "the little ones" because the average age of the residents was nearly seventy. Most were sweet potato farmers; although we lived in a coastal town, everyone was far too old to fish. Sometimes they were able to cajole us "little ones" into catching something. The last baby born in the village was now sixty-one years old-the youth club president. He owned the sole motorboat in the village and rented us one of the rooms in his lodging house; he also rented out to scuba divers who came to explore the underwater cliff off the coast. That was why Mr. Ahn and I had first come here, before deciding to stay on. Perhaps the man in the Chevy had been lured by the underwater cliff, too, though I hoped that wasn't the case.

Even though Mr. Ahn was only thirty-nine, his hair was already thinning, and he had long white hairs sprouting from his eyebrows. His performance was pathetic at our version of Ironman, which we held every day. We would take the youth club president's boat to the rock island not far off the coast and anchor it. First, we swam around the island. Then we swept the ridge of the...