Chapter Eighteen
Within the relationship he had not even been tempted to wander in the labyrinths of dark hallways of bathhouses in the hope of stumbling across that perfect form. There had been less discontent even if the passionate response had been the same. The suicidal risk-taker drawn to darkness, that relinquishing to the self-consumption of shadows, had been somewhat tamed. But now with this partner gone Sang Huin's mind was slipping back into decadence. Meandering and not feeling that the ground one walked on was the least bit stable, desperate yearnings prompted him to find pleasure and hope in appetites that swelled as obsessions, burst, and were quickly gone no different than the instinctual promptings that were within the dumbest of animals. He hadn't yet gone back to his desperate habits of bathhouses and the R- rated petting in the gay movie theatres of conservative Soul but he could still sense himself slipping away.
To have the monogamous prototype of a gay couple for others to emulate there needed to be something giving it at least the suggestion or illusion of stable ground. And yet there was no higher entity to suggest such a bonding. There were no symbolic marriage certificates suggesting that society and the creator of the universe gave their implicit endorsement of such mergers to which logic would say that they would be no more preoccupied with than a man the mating habits of a rat in a city park. Also, within this alternative channel of one's sexual energy there were no children to rear, not that children remained such forever. Instead, for one who was gay there were only appetites and one's erratic but less illusionary emotional responses as the substance of a relationship. These were one's only sense of being in a gay relationship and as such they were the only compasses to find one's way around. In some ways it was worse than a bathhouse labyrinth of complete darkness for being in a relationship of this nature was not walking around lost and trying to find the perfect form. It was being disgorged in passionate love for another human being and only this—this spray of molecules, which lasted as long as the spray. That is not to say that heterosexual couples did not experience the sense that these foundations of relationships, family, and reality could never be shaken. They too were sentient beings. They too knew that they were constructing homes in the San Andreas Fault Line. The shaking was quite palpable but what could they do other than pretend that what they were creating was forever? They too felt the rumblings of the separating earth that they stood on. Had it not been signatures on tenuous pieces of paper and the responsibilities of children who again would not be such forever more of them, thought Sang Huin, would feel as he did. What he was experiencing, he told himself, was the exemplification of the human condition itself and so he comforted himself that he was not strange.
One evening on his free day when the cello would not play for him anything other than just notes and Gabriele was nothing but words of clutter like the dirty socks he seemed to strew across his room, he tried to avoid the callings of desperation and the wish to escape his lonely malaise by changing a few florescent light bulbs that had been flickering in the convenience store. He was changing the second bulb on the ladder, absconding from his temptations to go to a sauna, when he heard a flurry of tapping as if the limbs of a tree were knocking against a window. It was a tapping or a light knocking. He got down from the ladder and followed it into his room. He opened the door and there was Saeng Seob. Sang Huin's bereaved mind had already buried him as one more corpse of friendship that had amassed in a huge burial hill since early childhood. He did not know what to say.
"Can I come in?" asked Seong Seob.
"You came all the way here by yourself?" asked Sang Huin.
"I'm blind but I'm not ignorant of how to tell a taxi driver an address," said
Saeng Seob.
"Sure, come in," said Sang Huin indifferently. He paused. "Where have you been? I didn't know what happened to you. I didn't know if you were hurt. I didn't have a telephone number to call anyone and ask about you. I didn't-"
"I was busy," said Saeng Seob.
Sang Huin thought about leaving this idea alone. He thought about just letting such a topic of discourse die there without comment. The wisp of air and the positioning of the tongue to begin, "So, what do you want with me" was at the roof of his mouth.
"Maybe we should move in together," said Saeng Seob.
"Here?" asked Sang Huin.
"I don't know. Somewhere."
"My job here means that I have to live here alone."
"You have a college education from America. You shouldn't be wasting yourself working at a convenience store. Go back to what you were doing before. I can get you private lessons. It is Seoul. There is gold in them there hills."
Sang Huin laughed. He felt at home within this American Hillbilly colloquialism. "All right," he said; and so this was what they did. They stayed together that night and then looked for an apartment the next morning. And then a year passed in living together: Seong Seob finding jobs for him as one might find errands for schoolboys. There wasn't gold in the hills but there was plenty of silver and paper to come into such wealthy homes bringing to families and sometimes their businesses pure American English in the mouth of a Korean. And each morning, exuded from the little time not consumed in a personal life, a quasi-professional life, sleep, and various bodily mandates, he worked on Gabriele. He found it interesting that their two worlds were now converging in the respect that she was taking care of a baby at the time of the first Gulf War with Iraq and he seemed to be living at the inception of the second one that had even more of a chance of exploding into something quite large and horrid within the presence or ghost of Osama Bin Laden.
One day they went to visit a boy of one of those families, who also had the name of Seong Seob. He was suffering at Soul's Yonsei University Hospital. The boy's mother, who was in the hallway, grabbed Sang Huin's hand and enthusiastically took him into the room. The boy's legs and feet were in casts and elevated. His face, bored and withdrawn, brightened slightly as he said his first English word of the visit: "Toy." Sang Huin laughed as he walked further into the room presenting the board game to the boy. The hospital room looked almost the same as an American hospital room except that there were four beds; no curtain partitions; and cushioned benches next to each bed.
There were not many differences between American and Korean lifestyles from what he could see. Korea was like living in the Ozarks with high hills everywhere. He had lived in both Missouri and Texas depending on the needs of his father's work. They had homes in both places. Both countries seemed to be arrogant and fortified within their cultural expressions. One certainly could never part a Korean from his kimchee. Here women strapped babies behind their backs but even in a rural town like Umsong many carried cellular telephones in their purses. Pagers were only slowly becoming obsolete. Koreans' love of making their country into a high tech Mecca was only secondary to their continued devotion to their obsolete pagers. When a college student's pager vibrated with activity he or she would still run into a coffee shop to call his or her friend on the table phones and wait for that person there. There were video pangs (VCR rooms); table tennis rooms; noripangs (Karaoke singing rooms); outdoor vendors and restaurants; crippled singing beggars and vendors who crawled down pedestrian streets like worms as they pushed their carts that blared traditional music from small speakers, and sang into microphones; more mom and pop stores on each block than one could count; and tight department stores with small supermarkets underneath.
One could find in Chongju a McDonalds with an Internet caf? underneath, Pizza Hut, and Baskin-Robbins Ice cream shops. One could always find M&M chocolate candies and shirts displaying American university logos. One could find American and Hong Kong movies, which intrigued Koreans with their violence. Koreans lived under the insecurities of North Korea and their students always found a subject for protest but the country did not foment and fray in violence.
Sang Huin did not know why he was thinking this. He had always hated Chongju and Umsong in particular. And yet rural scenes (like the traveling markets in Umsong) were sort of sweet and real. The only vestige rural traditions in Seoul were the traditional weddings at the Korean Folk Village and traditional dancers no longer on the street corners but contained in a theatre.
He thought about once when he and Yang Kwam were shopping for clothes in Itaewan Dong of Seoul on that same street where he worked at a convenience store. It was raining and cold and his sickness was getting worse. Yang Kwam was wearing a shirt with the American flag on it. Dizzy and disoriented, Sang Huin had followed that American flag in subways, underground transfer corridors, exits, and sidewalks. He was acting the same way now only he wasn't sick. He was following Seong Seob into a relationship blindly to have concrete experiences and happiness that could only be obtained in shared experiences.
Sang Huin (Shawn most of the time to Seong Seob) grabbed his blind friend by the arm and awkwardly yanked him nudgingly to the child's bed. It was a cocky American gesture with the sotto voce of one insinuating by touch an inhibition to touch at all. The tepid force of this gesture was, in part, of someone who had been abandoned inexplicably before. Seong Seob had felt Shawn's awkward half-hearted attachment and reticence for a year now. He couldn't blame him since he realized his part in bringing it about. He had thought that living together would smooth over everything and felt dismayed that a year later Sang Huin still touched and spoke to him with the uncertainty of the two belonging to each other. And yet in bed it was compensated by desperate and passionate thumping which was the best kind of love making there was. Seong Seob needed to feel that another person hungered for him for this was the contract. This was the binding of love. It was a covenant with this relationship-being that virtually all people deemed as higher than themselves. It was a belonging that all humans sought.
Sang Huin's mind questioned the legitimacy of human feelings and the meaning of others' presence in his life, which without exception seemed so fleeting. His mind was in a torture chamber of its own making. He yearned for harder realities outside of one's experiences and yet finding none he did not retreat to the limits of his feelings and the input he got from his senses. Headstrong, he believed that there had to be something that he was missing and so he went on searching like a madman batted about in erratic thoughts.
"I wonder when he will leave again," he thought. "I wonder what little thing will be too much for him and cause him to hide like a coward never to return again. Will I get a hateful text message on my cellular telephone? Will this be how it will go awry? It's bound to go bad. Everything changes. How can a relationship change to be closer than what it started out initially?" Although the present often stood free without a guard, within the infliction of memory it roamed no further than the prison gate that its imagination conjured up from past ruins.
And yet the ruminator that this "Shawn" was, he was still the product of his culture that was not too keen on ruminations. One's culture was prevalent in every thought even within an introvert like himself. Culture was a cookie cutter pressing out shape in the amorphous dough of one's thoughts. It was the re-legitimization of Marx. It was as Aristotle stated ambiguously as form shaping matter. It was the American in him that had cajoled and coerced Seong Seob to the hospital against his will according to the characteristics of his nationality even if it had been done diffidently.
"I sarem i irum Seong Seob imnida. I sarem i Seong Seob imnida." He paused and turned to the older Seong Seob. "Go ahead. You've been introduced. You both are each other. Ask him how he is. I can't speak Korean as you well know every minute of everyday." The older Seong Seob laughed and then began to flutter within the native language that animated him most. Sang Huin watched as the three creatures (his friend, the mother, and her son who was also named Seong Seob) expressed their color and movement in Hanguk-mal. He felt as if he were in a flower market instead of a hospital. Flowers encompassed the boy in all directions. Sang Huin remembered being sick himself and hearing the cryptic language that his mother and sister spoken around him. That cryptic language was now there in the confines of the walls of this hospital room and unable to escape it he felt as if he were a minority within it. It was the ethereal language that had soared his family above and away from his terrestrial boundaries.
Sang Huin thought about that time at the English winter camp when he first met this now hospitalized boy, Seong Seob. Everything proceeded fine for a few days and then one night Seong Seob scathed his knees in play and suddenly pulled off his pants in front of the school children and staff. The boy exposed his vulnerabilities. He showed the flimsy mortal creature of man for what he was. Horror and tempestuous hatred toward the mincing of one's boyhood innocence was in his animated eyes and it mixed into his cries of despair. Five seconds earlier he had been running and wrestling with the other boys and then with a little pain and the rolling of a small stream of blood came the memories of being run over by a truck and all of its ensuing surgeries.
Saeng Seob had not wanted to come; and even in the hospital room he and the dog wanted to stay aloof. Despite his more gregarious tendencies and his smile so wide to compensate for the lack of expression in his sunglass-confined orbs, Seong Seob and his dog stood away from the railing of the bed. The dog perceived its master's nasocomial fears but instead of looking at the atmosphere as something that might alert its senses, its face, every few moments, made movements toward the door not much different than the master. It had led the way through outpatient units of hospitals before. It knew its master's aversion to places of suffering and could sense the gloom that pervaded all rooms and corridors in a hospital. The surgeries on Seong Seob's eyes had been performed when he was a boy to no avail. The dog had escorted the master from the ages of 12 to 15 on subsequent visits that procured nothing but the dread of hospitals.
The fear of hospitals seemed to be a fear of death. Even a cockroach was afraid of death and so to be afraid of such a thing, thought Sang Huin, was natural. And yet death itself was natural. It might well be liberation instead of annihilation. It seemed absurd to prejudge such a natural occurrence that living creatures knew nothing about. It might be as beautiful as all the flowers that surrounded the bed of the boy, Seong Seob, who was playing with the board game that he had unwrapped and opened from the box. What did a cockroach know? For it perceived nothing outside of its own physical survival. What did a dog know? For it perceived hospitals as containers of human suffering instead of deliverance from illness?
Sang Huin understood that Seong Seob was pursing a relationship that was more than a bit at odds with the world in even the most libertine culture. He also acknowledged that Saeng Seob was visiting a suffering boy whom he wanted to run away from. Sang Huin could not do much of anything to fill in the crevices of time and in awkward moments of not knowing what to say he just stood there uncomfortably but with a degree of appreciation for Seong Seob. Sang Huin had empathy as deep as the gods.