Without much regard as to where he should sit, he just sat. It was a more
remote spot in Seoul Grand Park that seemed to be directly under a kite slapped
by distant winds. For he who sought to circumvent the scrutiny of others to
pursue his strange stern ruminations his only wish was to be seated in
solitude; and not having it, he accepted a more remote variation. Frustrated by
his writing and unable to believe that he was doing anything but spinning
around in his head, he tried to relax in the sunlight and within a Valium of
smells such as the very dirt and weeds beneath him. He stared at the kite and
the peculiar shaped clouds emerging into the sky until becoming bored with
both, he turned to the ground. Withdrawn into nature and himself, he felt his
energy and peace of mind begin to replenish. It fluttered weakly as the gray
moth that he was watching; and it seemed to him that this spasm of optimism was
as lithe as a soul was capable of being were one to have such a thing instead
of damnable memories and words like walls in a maze of the mind which deluded
one into thinking that he was advancing to someplace or another.
He imagined himself at a convocation of words in which he designated where each
word should sit within the weeds and clumps of dirt. He imagined that when he
did not like their arrangement, or their bickering amongst themselves, each
obsequious word eagerly got up and changed to a different seat of his choosing
with the snap of his fingers unlike their real obstinate and disgruntled
nature; and when he said their names numerically according to their rows an
invocation of truth would ensue. The guidebook, written by the subconscious,
would have enough veracity to be a prototype for they who also squatted on the
outskirts of normal existence, or at least a means for him to lose himself --if
not find himself—there, within his prose.
Writing granted a purpose, a connection beyond breeding to defy death for he
who would never breed, he who would never be enslaved for ephemeral "family"
and provide for children who were only a woman's pleasure—he who for not
breeding had life and breath relegated to blowing dirt.
The word, "friendship" sat down beside him when the futile meeting was
disbanded and all words were sent home; and as it sat there, it transformed
itself into human form.
"Are you familiar with Camille Saint-Saens — his Macabre Dance?" said the word.
It was Kim Yang Kwam, the friend who had labeled him as dirty and had abandoned
him for that one touch, that one weak moment of wanting to celebrate the beauty
of the friendship and the beauty of the man to its fruition. The two were in
the bedroom of that apartment in Umsong as they had been before, and Yang Kwam
was pulling out a CD from its plastic holder.
"Yes, lovely. I don't have any from that composer. Let's hear it. He is one of
my favorites, you know. Well, you don't know. That is why it is so special.
What are the chances of you liking it, liking the cello above other
instruments, favoring your philosophic ponderings above everything, and now
telling me that you are okay with me being gay."
"I'm here for you, Shawn."
"I'm living with someone now — maybe not long. He vitiates his mind with a
Braille version of comics. They have Braille comics, you know. I mean, that is
his business but he is so reticent to talk with anyone and I can't reach him
much of the time. He is blind and seems content to cower himself in a corner
someplace, pleased to have made it through another day — well, not always. I
met him in a concert hall. I thought he liked classical music. I guess he does
but not as much. He turns on too much pop music. I don't like it. It gives me
headaches."
"It isn't important."
"Strange that I should be here without him."
"We are where we want to be in all things."
"There was another thing I was scared to tell you. I'm not sure how — listen, I
killed my sister, my father hung himself, and I was struck down into such a
depression like being slapped into a tsunami. Ever since this I've been
drifting into the Pacific like a corpse."
"You want to eat salami?"
"No, are you listening to me?"
Yang Kwam chuckled. Then he looked at Sang Huin with intense confidence that
refracted into the latter's perceptions as compassion. "I know that you did not
do anything like this. You are a good person. You couldn't do something like
that."
"They look on me as if I did kill her, as if I don't feel guilty enough without
that. Well…I mean Dad is dead now so--anyhow, he looked at me like I murdered
her. They both did really…not really like a murderer but guilty of
manslaughter, which I guess in a way I am."
"How people look at you is not something that you can control. It resides in
them—when not true, it is a need to construct the world a certain way to remove
guilt or pain by projecting it on others. Your family did not get the murderer
and they blame you. Families often split up under such pressure."
"I took her there."
"You didn't know that he would kill her. Guilty of being too Puritanical or too
Korean, yes, but that is all."
"I want you as my best friend forever." There, the daydream, the word, the
connection vanished.
It seemed to him that every few minutes or so there were passersby (usually as
couples if not larger groups with civilization, merger, such an acute hunger in
these pathetic lonely herds) who were more scrutinizing than all the others.
These passersby saw the stationary posture of his body bereft of orders from
the brain for substantial movement, and in instantaneous judgment calls, they
believed, he supposed, that his mind was seemingly crazy or dysfunctional. They
construed him, or he believed that they construed him, as dirty,
unintelligible, and untoward. To them he was a homeless eyesore, a madman even
if he looked benign from a distance. After all, seated alone in a fetal
position as he was on a declivity of a hill sparse of grass, to them, he
believed, this proclivity for disoriented stares into the wind-grazed dirt and
inanimate purposelessness was an egregious aberration of being human. The fact
that no family members were able to keep him restrained in their homes gave
credence to the speculation that his intractability from psychosis had caused
his transience. Not eating one's kimchee, refusing to pour hot water into a
bowl to consume every grain of leftover rice in an insipid soup, or not taking
off one's shoes at the door: these were slight infractions of cultural norms.
The lone dirt-ridden stranger was prodigiously more repugnant than this for
even retards and mild madmen chose to be clean. For one of this ethnicity to
wallow his buttocks on a hill of dirt there could be no other rendered judgment
than that his behavior was tantamount to a rejection of Hanguk civilization
completely, which was indeed, to a Korean, a definite form of madness.
Sang Huin felt their cold Korean scrutiny excoriate him with their looks. The
long glances and brief stares seemed to burn through his flesh in thin, cold
lasers. And yet this Korean man, this American, continued nonetheless to sit on
his hill of dirt all alone and, for the most part, lost in thought. He was
pecking on a tiny virtual keyboard in his Pocket PC while reading aloud that
which he pecked as if he were not an oddity and all others carried out
activities like this.
He read out loud, "He was troubled by that one idea which kept running through
his mind days later: he had given to her a nominal token of Christmas (a
contemptuous one, perhaps, but a present nonetheless)—a plastic bag full of tea
towels, and yet she had not given him anything in return. Still he was pleased
that he had not mentioned anything about it and that his attempts at
indifference had not degenerated in weak sulking.
A day later, no longer caring to wonder, as he had, whether these entitlements
would at last be begrudgingly given to him should the walls of hubris fall from
the scaffolding of his eyes, he was tempted to inveigh her with his contempt
and be at last free; but throughout, he succeeded in occasional smiles and
benign albeit reticent exchanges of ideas when compelled to talk with these
parents (parents, or at any rate imposters claiming to be married, and were for
all he knew). If only, he told himself, he could continue to control those eyes
that he subconsciously wanted to impale into his mother in a long and
unequivocal stare of hate, then he would have self-mastery and power.
Without really thinking about all these specifics so much, he felt the need to
restrain himself to multi-interpretable stares that would be doors of opaque
translucency sealing off the fortress of his ideas while allowing shadows to
permeate outward. Still, keeping the door shut was a hard thing to do."
Thoughts of his own mother kept intruding on Sang Huin's work: the
mother/daughter sorority of Cathy and June (the American names that his mother
and sister gave themselves); cacophonous, cryptic collusion of conversation
that the two Korean sorority sisters had aside with each other in that damnable
Hanguk-mal; the mother who valued her tree planting and property ownership with
her husband as much as these feminine confidences with her daughter while he
was supposed to be quiet as a mouse at home and especially in every public
place so that she would not be ashamed of him; this woman who incessantly took
him to one hospital after another seeking to have more than manageable ailments
and who sat him on bleachers while the family went to June's basketball games.
"June" gave the Korean family a name, and the parents could now talk about
their daughter and be part of the Caucasian club. But sick as he sometimes was,
he gave them nothing and for it they relegated him to shadows — to shadows.
He thought of his childhood asthma. His father had the perception that the
enervating condition of asthma emasculated the son to the point of making him
"good for nothing." It was only a perception but no demon was harder to
exorcise than perception. Philistines had feelings embedded harder than teeth:
prejudices that were both intolerable and inextricable.
But then he checked himself and halted his thoughts about dead people and dead
happenings. His thoughts focused on that journalist whom he had met weeks
earlier at the sports stadium. "This guy could be the perfect one and yet I
have brushed him aside—I don't know why." He pondered some more. "But I am
involved with Saeng Seob and one doesn't just use someone until a better
prospect arrives." This was his argument to himself made more to excuse his
social ineptness than benevolence.
His queer relations were not affable and gay as withdrawn, anti- social, and
hell bound in being bedazzled in shadows as he was. Ensconced cleanly from
mixing thoughts with the physical realm it was shadows of texture he sought in
saunas and the bathroom of the dirty movie theatre near Pagoda Park in Chongno
Sam Ga. Clean of words, no hurt would ensue. The dirty movie theatre showed
only normal R-rated films and sexual activity was restricted to bathroom
stalls. Had it been otherwise it would have even seemed a major aberration to
the queer folk there. The queer folk of Korea were Koreans too and no one was
more conservative with cultural traditions than a Korean. The theatre people
consciously acknowledged sex in the seats as illegal and morally repugnant
albeit reprehensibly desired. "I could never do that to him." His thoughts were
of course about Saeng Seob. "As long as he wants the relationship it will be
there for him. I am many things but —" He was about to think, "but I don't hurt
vulnerable people" but he checked his thoughts with the memory of his sister
and how he had coerced his girlfriend into having an abortion. He told himself
that to claim that he would always be there for the hurting and the vulnerable
lacked veracity.
"He began to have a recurrent nightmare of sorts, replete in twisted skeletal
boughs; and there he saw something like himself in adult form trying to glean
movements of lissome shadows through the crevices around a board that went over
one window. Boards were nailed over all windows and entrances in the condemned
building that had been his home. Still, despite the sunrays of early morning
impaling through the thickets of branches and into his eyes, he could see the
copulative interlinking of shadows distinctly even though he could not see the
forms projecting the shadows because they had long ago turned into wind. He
shot a snowball and a sound of an owl screeching towards the woods flew past
him if not the form of the bird itself. He noted how strange it was that the
only snow was that on the tree and all other parts of his mother's acreage were
part of the verdure of early summer.
'My little comrade,' said the man to the boy although he was not a man any
longer but more like the murky translucency of a fog. As he flew near the tree
what was left of the old leaves rustled and flattened. 'The Bolsheviks have
won. You can go ahead and leave Petrograd and return home to your wives.'
'Comrade,' Nathaniel said, 'I have no wives and I don't want to abandon my
platoon.'
'The war is over. Everyone is dead and gone. They have been so for some time —
for years. You've done a find job, Comrade. Now go in peace.'
'I know who you are but — ' He swallowed deeply. 'I don't know what you are.'
'The opposite of what I was I suppose. When you figure out what life is go 180
degrees counter to it and there you will be at death. It isn't all that much
different — just different corners of the block.'
'Yes, I believe so Comrade Stalin.'
'Comrade Trotsky.'
'Yes, Comrade. Comrade Trotsky. Comrade Trotsky, I fear that the Queen of
Antarctica, angered at my conquering abilities of her homeland, will blockade
all supplies and let me perish out here with no Christmas.'
'Well, Adagio, at last here the two of us are all alone as you have always
wanted it, as you have dreamed it even if it is so late and with a
ghost...quality time we should have had more of if I hadn't been so preoccupied
with trying to understand this marriage of mine with a woman who did not want
to live with me. I think that she wanted me to be closer to you but how she
thought that was possible with a husband and wife having separate lives is
difficult to understand. She is difficult to understand but that is no excuse
for not forgiving her. We all deserve to be forgiven. All humans deserve that,
Adagio. Why can't you forgive her?'
'Because I hate her!'
'Hate? Here you are as a grown man and yet you sit in those branches as if
nothing has changed. A few sharp movements and you will fall off with the limbs
that once cradled the sport of a boy. You spied on us a lot in those branches,
if you remember. But now there is nothing to spy on. The house is old and in
decay. Boards are nailed over the windows. The naked dance of a man with his
wife that you thought was so intriguing has ended. The partners are separated
and have withdrawn--one into old age to begin her own descent to the earth and
me visiting you on top of a tree because of a Siberian wind happening to settle
me here. Nothing is there now so there is nothing to hate. What possibly can
you see up there at this point?'
'I see what I've always seen: shadows. Plenty of shadows—yours, hers, all the
men she was with.' He was meaning love making in its full-animated obscenity of
interlinked private parts and hedonism, the fundamentals of life."
Then in dreams like this he would wake up, think of this all too familiar
presence, and doubt if she were his mother at all. As far as he knew she could
just be an imposter after the other one's disappearance. And on his pillow he
would again think about the flashlight in the cave and the hotdog in the bun
jokes that he was beginning to hear in the locker rooms of adolescent and
pre-adolescent boys. Precocious as he was in firsthand knowledge of some sexual
issues he was still curious about more normal arenas.
Sang Huin told himself that incessantly telling himself things within the
contemplation of his creation was a bit strange; that the facile, tangible
thrusts of decadent titillation that he gained briefly in the shadows of the
dark corridors of saunas instead of more tangible long-term relationships--even
with their intangible emotions and invisible bridges of minds--was stranger
yet; but strangest of all was how instead of being with a girlfriend on a
roller coaster less than a kilometer away, he just stayed on his hill of dirt
like any transient, the luftmensch that he was. He looked at his feet, then the
dark approach of a mass of clouds and the kite. One chose any spot to sit in
based upon comfort and security, and to him remoteness was both. Like his
defunct father, who often sat silently in front of the Weather Channel, using
this favored television station to facilitate a comatose withdraw after his
daughter's death, so he watched the kite which seemed like a piece of himself
drifting further and further into the unobtainable. Its erratic movements and
the emergence of dark clouds with peculiar shapes seemed like a wordless
oracle.
'For six long months she sensed Nathaniel's stares as eerie as a lone plastic
cup rolling on an empty pavement in a breeze; and even when she went to sleep
it was with her, often setting her forehead into a seat as she slept. For her,
sometimes alone in her bed or with her man, it was an absurd and inexplicable
feeling. But it was easy to repudiate the indecipherable. It was easy to be
obtuse while pursuing her work and the occasional sZances with her higher
authority, who often played hide and seek through clouds of the smoke of her
burning weed. Furthermore, hostile glances and reticent words seemed of little
consequence when awakened daily, despite herself, to dwindled resources
dwindling further.
One morning at the dining room table, looking through the newly arrived mail
half blinded in the dappled sunlight, Gabriele saw the numbers of her worsening
fiscal state from a bank statement. The recent payments of her property tax and
the school enrollment were just larger costs of myriad that in all, in time,
would pillage a life; and her mind felt numb in the mundane. Knowing that she
had to do something, she approached the art museum of Albany that afternoon.
The director was willing enough to exhibit a retrospective of her work with a
few new paintings of Sapporo and Tijuana amalgamated into it all. The
isolationist declaring her own frigid country of one, the frigid rationalist
watching the movement of instinctual creatures of romance blowing like bits of
trash caught in vortexes of wind, the nighttime whore advocate as opposed to
the billions of daytime whores who espoused the Puritan work ethic: she was one
of their PT Barnum freaks at the circus museum and the director welcomed back
that which would spark a bit of public intrigue. The museum did not expedite
it. Two months of planning went into the temporary exhibit; and the financial
dilemma that seemed as potentially dire now shot within her more as flares of
panic. What heretofore lacked immediacy became an uppercase word in bold
letters, immediacy, spilling out and hardening as the black ink of the night.
At last it passed. And in the bathroom of a purchaser, at a party in his home,
which had been arranged for the celebration of this singular purchase, the
brief honeymoon period for the artist climaxed with a salient 15-minute
copulation against a wall near the toilet. She needed this release from
worries, this demonic sensation of pleasure that was the eddy contrary to what
was rational. She hoped that it was that, an eddy, but she knew base instincts
were the main force despite all her rational fortifications. From time to time
she needed to stop thinking and to run into the storm, allowing any large gust
to bang her.
"Can I see you again?" her partner, this black stranger, asked. Even now that
their intimacies had come and gone like all specious mad frenzies, like the
mating of dodo birds, she did not know his name, his connection to the
purchaser, or his purpose at the party unless it were in having mounted and
ridden her. Did man have a higher purpose than this? She had her doubts.
"Give me your address. I wanna see you again," he reiterated.
"Maybe in corners like this," she responded coldly. "Beyond that I think my
husband would have problems with it, and most importantly I would."
"You're a sassy one," said this other candyman. "Squeeze a man of his juice and
leave him dry." She knew that she was a sassy squeezer but she was hesitant to
say anything for she wanted him marooned in his own silent realm. This way she
could dress herself in peace and quickly abscond from sleazy predilections and
proclivities that might have made up the baser components of one's nature but
were puny in defining herself. She wanted to return to her paints in the hope
of developing a template that if not mass-produced at least could speed up her
production. The time of prolific painting from ideas sketched for so long had
passed. Now ideas needed to be pinched and coerced to inch forward.
In her ride back home in her Ferrari she postponed the inevitable by driving
further on the interstate than she needed to go. The goddess that she was, she
liked watching things come and go as well as how she felt superior in this
fancy moving shell. She thought of a new argument and she recited it in her
mind. 'I have decided to simplify our lives. What type of an example would I
set if I were to cling to things, to relationships, never knowing myself? Are
all people so at a loss of identity that they grope in front of anything that
has a chance of being less perishable than themselves? It is disgusting.
Anyhow, we need money and I'm selling everything off of value including the
house. We can live in cardboard shacks or tree houses but we don't need this
type of shit cluttering up space and time.' This was what she would say, or
something more simplified that was along these lines."
Frustrated again from not liking his ideas, he forfeited words. Resting on his
hill in the Valium of nature, it was as if he were coming down from all this
spinning around in his own head because of a heaviness of words coalescing and
jelling onto the walls of his brain. It seemed as though the twirling child
were landing dizzy and drunk on life despite his morbid disposition from
memories of family that scooted like a plastic cup blowing on an empty
pavement—abhorrent memories loving and still as a photograph.