Chapter Four
Having had no book to sink into when he arrived at an apartment in Umsong months earlier, he (this new arrival from America) must have seemed like a bird trying to build a nest with two or three sticks. It had been an insane episode for the scrutiny of his roommate-coworkers: the way he had organized and reorganized his few things in the loosely partitioned area of the living room and how he had been so reluctant to speak. Hadn't he, in his disconnection, looked like a man suffering from some neuron-entangled nervousness, heavy neurosis, or a bad prion making the holes in his head to match the holes of his being.
His sister had been raped and mutilated. At least that was the theory-as much as one could assess from skeletal remains. The prosecution wanted to horrify the jury with photographs. Maybe they had succeeded inordinately disconcerting the jury so that it couldn't ascertain the facts and probabilities. The only measurable impact that he knew of were ramifications of deep, paralyzing shadows that the three of them fell into—so far and so eternal had been the abyss. "Were the perpetrators human or hominids? If they were human, what did that say about being human?" It had been their first unshared question easily sensed in the eyes of each other. "Are all Americans like this?" they had all silently thought. No one would have said such a thing. "Was all humanity this way?" It was in their eyes—that and the wish to escape the species. They were there: in this word "hell" that all had talked of and few had ever gone into. Hell was full meaninglessness and savagery without rationale and with a judicial system forcing the mutilated further into unprecedented horrors.
Pusillanimous and cowering in fetal positions within themselves, limping around the days with perfunctory and lifeless movements, his father had nonetheless spoken of "getting on" with things although he couldn't define what one was supposed to get on with or what was worthy of getting on to. They all could perceive the horror of everybody and everything so no matter what they did—even killing themselves—it would all be equivalent to meaningless and savagery.
It was good to have this hour of complete silence near the lake without any sound but the rushing of cars, which also came in inundated waves, peaked, and died. Still, one would have to hear a language sooner or later. At times if only he could have a silence, a respite, from his thoughts to go with his free time to think his recovery would be expedited. He thought of his sister. She had kept her Korean. Occasionally, even as a teenager, she would mutter off some idea in Korean to which his mother returned some reply. He had always felt jealous of this secret language and here he was in Korea but the language was still a secret to him.