Chapter Sixteen
"He enjoys the pleasure. He is the man. The pleasure becomes the man. She is wedged there in the sharp gravel of the alley littered with her videos. It is good that she is there with the earth also digging in carbon to carbon. Face juxtaposed to the trashcans, and mouth gagged with his strong hand that she fears (hands that could twist a head and break a neck, and those that in younger days and as a smaller size, had in fact snapped off the heads of crawdads) she is paralyzed. She is obsequious to him, the man. Who would dispute the naturalness of a woman being there for a man's pleasures? Who would dispute the docile make of a woman to be ravaged? He thinks that even with married couples the relationship is probably conceived by desperate thrusts in a hole- thrusts of pleasure; thrusts against being denizen to one's isolated sphere; thrusts against maternal domination when one was a boy; thrusts to have some form of intimacy not related to the misinterpretations of language; thrusts against loneliness; thrusts like the hands of a thrill seeking, dice rolling gambler who enjoys the uncertainty on whether or not a conception would take place; thrusts as copulative sports; thrusts to relieve tension; and thrusts of aggression against the abstraction of nature that could efface the memory of a man at any moment in sudden death. If family matters like the intimacies of a man and his wife are restrained expressions of a man's subconscious wishes, who could say that he is unnatural? Rape, not just sex, is what he knows a man to really long for. It is as Genghis Khan believed: 'To kill the villagers, rape their women, burn their villages, and run off with their horses—this is the good life.'"
Sang Huin crumbled up the sheet of paper. Words were trapping him in their clutter. He tried to use their thrust to be because they were all there was; and yet as he tried to steer himself in them they were often nothing but bumper cars obstructing his every move or regular cars piling onto each other in a crash. He wanted to raze these walls of wrecked cars. Nathaniel would not know of Genghis Khan. Besides, interesting as the thoughts might be, they weren't applicable to Nathaniel unless he were to rewrite one of the earlier chapters. How could he be raping the woman when he, Sang Huin, had written him in his car, repressing his savage impulses like a good social creature? Also if he, Sang Huin, were to interpolate such ideas, he told himself, he would be like all those other writers who took pride in writing their salacious pieces. From the point of instigating pain on the giver of life and the bloody cut of the umbilical cord soon came the knowledge of mortality in the death of pets and vicissitudes and the ephemeral nature of all things in childhood friendships thwarted by the mutability of its members. Its hormonal promptings to socialize more for meat to satisfy hungers, the voracious appetite for human flesh, fornications to maximize its pleasures and gain its intimacies, its ambitions toward money, power and status within this ticking of limited time, the deaths of family members, its own gauche stumbling attempts at family as an auxiliary and then an outright replacement for the deterioration of this first family, and it (equally so in so-called saints and laymen) was graphic. It was salacious. It was violent. It was the desperation of one in mortality who wanted something for his short time on the planet. And of art, what was it actually? It was not so much a reflection of the self in still waters as a reflection of something deeper sensed in the rhythms of the falling rain and the movements of fictional others in plotless lives plodding along as his was. As another graphic creation appealing to the hedonistic pleasure receptors of the brain he would have more readers if the violence were to extremes. Still, did he really want to write something that others might imitate unwisely? He laughed. This was a frivolous concern when he knew that nothing he might write would be publishable.
And yet macabre as it was, he wanted to know the reason for his sister's death through his creations. He still wanted to know what had brought her to that park, if it had been her boss who had done this to her or a serial killer, and the motivation. One could read profiles of serial killers on the Internet. He had done so; but even if a serial killer had done this not all of them were the same. He did not want a generalization full of inaccuracies. He wanted to know the real person and what had caused him to act as he did. He wanted to know of deep repentance, and deep psychological travail on the part of the man- whoever this man was. Earlier he had been so certain that the accused had perpetrated the act but then a jury had acquitted this person or quasi-person and as time went on he did not know anything.
He went back to the making of kimchee maundoo. The flour had already been made into dough that he had cut into pieces. Now he inserted the cooked pork and the kimchee and pinched the dough of these cabbage dumplings into shape. He boiled a little bit of hot water in his rice cooker and set them in there to steam. He felt so restless. He wanted to be raptured from lonely nights that followed hard work in this convenience store or for Seong Seob to call. Every time he now called his friend's cellular telephone number there was no answer. Seong Seob had a program that would instantaneously change letters into sound every time the computer dialed into a server but every time he e- mailed him there was no response. "So little did one know a person," he thought. Three days had gone by and he did not know of any altercation that could have caused this absconding. His mind was vertiginous. There was nothing worse than an inexplicable rupture of a friendship, he thought to himself; and yet he knew that this was not so. North Korean children were starving to death in a faltering totalitarian regime and here he was playing in his personal life, and in so doing, getting hurt. There were a lot worse things but a lot of good too. There was good everywhere. It was in the atoms themselves: in the steam rising above the rice cooker or the feel of the hot pipes under the floor, which warmed his bare feet in the cold room. Man might miss the mark of kindness but sometimes man tried for kindness since kindness was in the atoms although self-preservation was in the selfish genes. This good was readily visible in simple pleasures when one was sagacious enough to appreciate them like a child. But Seong Seob would not leave his mind. What could have happened? Was this friend hit by a car? After all, he was blind. Sung Huin did not know any of his friends or relatives, so there was no one to call. Did this friend become busy? Did Seong Seob decide that the relationship was not for him? Had he, Sung Huin, personally said anything at all to cause this? He reexamined their last conversations. The only thing he could remember was that he mentioned to Seong Seob his own need to make more friends, but that wasn't meant to negate the friendship that he had. He didn't know. He turned on the television to obstruct his thoughts.
"Oh, no," thought Sang Huin. His customers had talked about buildings on fire in New York. He had been so busy all night that their words and horrified expressions hadn't penetrated him. Moslems (the speculation was Al Queida) had flown two jets into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The American military channel was showing CNN coverage of people jumping out of hundred story windows. Their bodies were flailing against the winds as if they were having second thoughts. He sat down on the edge of his bed. The quandaries of his personal life vanished and he became numb. He kept saying to himself, "Oh, my. This is the empirical evidence that there is no god." Solipsistic for a second, he then thought, "It is as if God is proving to me that he doesn't exist-that I am right in what I recorded in the Gabriele and Lily chapter." The incident itself shouldn't have been altogether shocking. America was an arrogant country. It thought that it was the godly power that was allowed to prosper while God subjected heathen people to dire circumstances. America felt it was entitled to bully all nations and befriend Israel beyond human decency to keep the Christian constituents, brethren of Israel, happy. Its political engagements were for its own economic and military hegemony instead of fairness and the greater good. It would be understandable, he thought, how the Moslems might think of this as a reckoning of justice. In ways it was no surprise. The real surprise was that there was no large palm of God out there hovering like a cloud capturing these falling people within it. What was incredible was that the power that would make a universe couldn't capture a few humans into its clouds like nets. Numb, he knew without thinking of himself that this numbness would continue on for many weeks and, to less extreme levels, for months and years. It was an eternal sting. When he did look at his manuscript again to expound upon it he thought, "Gabriele, sitting in the living room and waiting for a customer, jotted down some notes about how to live godly in a godless universe. However, at present her time to really write it was being usurped by Adagio." Then he deleted it.