Chapter Thirty-Five
When considering how marginally educated he was ("bare-assed with a tie within this professional world of masters and doctors" as the words of such deliberations), Sang Huin would succumb to the undertow and founder in the myriad oceanic fathoms of the lugubrious self. Each of those times descending deep in this silent abyss, he would remember those times of being in his parents' garage. There as a boy with his broken bicycle, he, the maladroit, could only fumble a feigned semblance of competence with the alien tools of his father's screwdriver and wrench. Mixed in smells of oil stained concrete there would be a feeling of ineptitude slowly trickling through him like the numbing poison of hemlock. Then there would come those excoriations of his father telling him that his inability to fix things made him good for nothing and this poison would dart through the ventricles of his heart and finish what the subtleties of drowning in oily, nebulous despair could not immediately do. Now, as back then, he believed that the comments of him being good for nothing were true even if now the negative judgment calls were for a litany of other unrelated issues.
Lackadaisical or indifferent (the intense, wanton drifter never even insouciant when going on rendezvous with his true decadent cravings), the hours of his days were often extended no further than going from one private lesson to another, to one gay sauna or another, and then back home to Saeng Seob within a somewhat hidden malaise. Still they were nexuses; and as fulsomely inconsequential as they might seem to others if they were able to peer into his sordid domain and not be repulsed by these orgies on tatami mats, still they were human connections; and it was human connections that were a man's life raft and dinghy when floating in the empty effluvia of self, water, space, and time. For they who were endowed with the ability to see ideas, sense an endeavor within them, and not only know a reality beyond the personal domain but experience a personal genius in the mission of transferring ideas to the world, they were their own buoyancy. And although Sang Huin could see that truth he was not of such an excellent make. His destiny would not be like those who were truly happy, they who knew felicity in themselves and that the outside world was inconsequential.
In meaning-seeking respites no different than at any other time of his Korean sojourn, he dabbled and danced with his Gabriele and, from buses, taxis, and subways, read the news about the U.S.A. (now in the thickets of guerrilla attacks from these liberated Iraqis who loathed the American intruders and devastators). He contemplated Americans' free expression of violent inclinations in movies, books, and life — violent inclinations clearly within the self or at least in himself, and dwelled in a lonely neediness that was still motivating him to seek out others in a neediness more akin to ductility than deference.
He got a part-time job as a sales representative at Rosemary Cosmetics since his mind still yearned to give the amorphous blob contained therein form, purpose, vocation, and meaning which still eluded him. His life in its quest for meaning was like the Bush administration's groping for these weapons of mass destruction to disprove the obvious: that Bush's hallucinated epiphany was similar to the sun stroked and deranged Akhenaten. As this "Shawn" needed secular meaning not in the material world, they needed to believe that the bushes were God's executioners in Iraq and elsewhere.
Like all dirty bluish-white collared Koreans in search of a vocation as well as a job, he wanted to work for a big firm: the bigger the company the less small he would seem to others and himself. This was a typical East Asian reaction; and the concept that a man was no more than who he associated himself with was applicable even to one like Sang Huin ("Shawn"), as queer as he was. Rosemary Cosmetics was no Samsung in size nor did it have much merit in global commerce; but this was his only opportunity at present and from it he hoped it would be his mold making him into something solid and patterned or at least not a deciduous, tenuous leaf tossed erratically with every breeze. He wanted to be connected and to no longer be tortured by those discombobulated seconds when his self did not register itself— a time (in his case usually on the bus between private lessons) when one's consciousness had a rupture, thoughts seemed even more evanescent, remembered heads of the people of the past (including his deceased father and sister) got tangled up on the wrong bodies or the features of those faces became effaced or alloyed with others' features, and not having the destination of meaning, the self thus tripped over itself directionlessly.
But a week into contacting long-term overseas customers to advertise new cosmetics, reestablish relationships by offering a substantial supply of free samples, and processing orders on the telephone in a rather menial position that had no guarantee of leading to something bigger he became less hopeful. Early into the job he knew that he was just one more cog in one more machine. Early into the job he knew that it would not make him into this vague, nebulous concept of a man that he only half-sensed even if fully and wistfully desired; so he was lost now as he was lost then. But, fortunately for him he was not entirely lost—almost entirely lost and ineluctably if not indelibly so but not entirely lost in the complex labyrinth of the thickets of darkness that was in society and nature as well as one's human nature.
He had his hallowed hobbies which always kept him from wanting to slit his wrist—solitary hobbies that in one form or another had saved the oversensitive boy who had felt that his father was afraid of one-on- one contact with him just as they saved him now. Now the cello was abandoned for the melancholic sounds of the shokohachi but Gabriele remained steadfast. She was his attempt to find simple and innocuous pleasure and lasting truths that were not in sordid and temporarily enflaming raptures of ecstasy. She was his higher consciousness, his higher authority.
Sang Huin was a city boy designed for Seoul. He liked seeing dual soldiers guarding each portal of every underpass; the dark green military buses that waited in Chongno Sam Ga, at Yongsei University, and no doubt in countless sectors of this sprawling mega city; he liked the drama of tall skyscrapers undaunted by besieging clouds, traffic rushing here and there as if to foment the provincial sleepiness of Hanguk society, the variety of people he would encounter in what was on whole a rather homogenous group of kimchee-eating, child-rearing, follow-the- leader advocates, and especially passing belatedly through the remnants of tear gas that had been targeted on boisterous anti-US troop demonstrations. He liked window shopping through stores that had Buddhist icons; the sexy galaxy of city lights scintillating like stars; being in a city where differences were as inconspicuous as rolling pebbles in an avalanche; the random subway passengers who sometimes, after buying their tickets, would see him using an English map and ask him in English if he were lost; the exhilaration of speaking in English with a probable chance that someone in the immediate area would understand him; and the many American alternatives to Korean restaurants (shiktangs). He liked buying groceries—those few he got—beneath department stores; purchasing expensive clothes for Seong Seob who still resonated as his makeshift family even if he could not relate to him any more than anyone else; the big supply of English books in various bookstores; sex and deodorant. The sex was self- explanatory: he had a true weakness to touch beautiful things the way he used to stroke the legged panty-hose of his grandmother when sitting on her lap so as to feel the friction and static against his fingers. As much as he not only wanted to end his promiscuity but sever sexuality completely for the rationale that pleasure bonding was a selfish love that stunted his ability to care for someone altruistically, he was unable or unwilling to do it. The touch, smell, and taste of human flesh were inordinate delights that bypassed his abstemious and acetic intentions. And as for deodorant, he, a Korean, did not sweat much, but he, an American, needed it to feel as if he were not entirely naked. In Seoul, at least, deodorant was not impossible to find.
Maybe having lived in Umsong for half a year contributed to his metropolitan enthusiasm since there he was miserable with a malaise ameliorated a little only on rare occasions of discovering M&M chocolate candies, pancake mixes, Fruit Loops, and Fruit-of-the-Looms on store shelves. His stay in Umsong had been like a fearful boy scout in a tent on a camping expedition—a child looking at black clouds from his small portal, and wishing to again restake his homestead in the less ominous domain of his parents' back yard. Still, the isolation had its beauty: mountainous green hills near lush, green rice fields, and some good times such as when he and Yang Kwam made their way down a trail in the forest and then spent the night at the Umsong Stadium sleeping on the vast green Astroturf in the midst of empty yellow seats and stars.
For some brief minutes one Saturday after waking in darkness Sang Huin did not know where he was at. He could not get his baring. He was still in the dream remake of an incident that happened to him immediately before he began to write Gabriele—a haunting memory in a dreamonized state. It was not unlike others he had experienced such as those of his mother's aloneness when going from the need to water one plant and then the next (an idea extrapolated consciously and repressed to his subconscious from the letters she sent to him), or dragging his sister by the hair and into a forest so that he could stand there and watch as she was gang raped to death. Dreams were, of many things, seeing the self's place in the environment and judging of itself as one cloud or part of the function of a group of clouds.
The dream of his sister was a major literal distortion of the reality it was based upon, but that was not the case with this one that he had just awakened from. It, like the plant-watering dream, had more of a literal base. It pertained to the Korean girlfriend whom he was involved with when he first came to Chongju. In the dream, as in reality, she said, "You can get a good job teaching at a private high school—I don't understand why you won't. If you do this, then with your money and my money we could have a good life together. We could make a family." He sensed that she would use him the way any woman studded pregnancies from infatuated man for children who would be her, the woman's, happiness. He sensed how a male slave was compelled to toil as a provider to an early demise because of the allure of a woman; and then he told her, "Living petty selfish lives tree hunting, investing money, house remodeling, complaining about taxes and the kids' dental bills. No thanks." It was the first time a thought so critical of his parents had materialized in his mind from all those repressed feelings that had been smashed under filial respect in accordance with Korean etiquette. If it weren't for this calculating feminine conniving, the thought of a normal life with her would have seemed at certain moments as pleasurable as having one's tongue slicing through ice cream. The sensation of eating the vanilla of a woman's cold skin might have obfuscated the knowledge of the forthcoming tonsillectomy. Her eyes were drawing him in. They were like the placid Great Lakes at night and they sparkled like the surface of the waters at the occasional passing of boats. The light from the traffic was her scheming thoughts. "I'm going to have your baby," she averred as if this solidified the relationship. "Abort it," he demanded. He hadn't been effete on that real occasion but the dream that awakened him had a more masculine firmness of will that was not his own; and hers was a mellifluous, inveigling sound surreal and harmonious as waves brushing against the beach. "Abort it!" he reiterated, "or I'll - - "
Not able to shake off the dream for a few minutes it was as if he were a very old and one night the sleep that was supposed to sort his thoughts, feelings, and sensory details into files of meaning and dates of occurrence had been ransacked and here he was on his hands and knees groping about the room trying to pick up scattered paper that had once been the files of himself. It was as if he were crawling around scavenging for bits of himself, not heeding the horrified calls of his old wife who nervously maundered her concerns to him from the bed.
People had come and gone incessantly from his life (the most important being his sister—taken from him by American violence not the least of which was his own). Recently Sang Ki and Yang Kwam vanished from his life; but in all, these phantoms appeared and disappeared without rhyme or reason like the changeable fish in the small aquarium belonging to Seong Seob's cousin—there at a given time and then gone. He sat up in his bed only to become instantaneously albeit vaguely cognizant that he was at home in Seoul even if he was not really sure what home was. He stared at that body next to him. It was the same body that was always there. In ways this gentle and cautious being of a few mundane habits was so known and yet it was alien in most respects. Sometimes he thought that Saeng Seob elected to be part of this relationship and sometimes it seemed as if this friend thought of himself as a victimized participant. The latter could be sensed there amidst tacit clues: a despondent sigh, a pleasant tone of voice belied by pressed angry lips, indifference to sexual pursuits, or rehashing his wish to study English literature in America if only he had the money to do it. The tacit, when discerned, was Saeng Seob's coming to terms with antithetical summations of the relationship. The compromise was a suggestion that when choosing between two disagreeable choices he preferred an unconventional relationship with Sang Huin to the weathering of belittling comments from the cousin. It wasn't much of a compliment for in all it was a complement that this relationship existed for whatever time it might last and nothing more than this. Also Saeng Seob's tepidity did not exactly engender within Sang Huin the wish to possess another: this "virtue" that was monogamy.
The water of his saliva — warm, wet, and active — barely squeezed down the empty hollows of a constricted area of his parched throat. He put on his bathrobe and went to the bathroom sink. He sipped some bottled water that was on the counter and splashed cold water across his face. He looked at his handsome face in the mirror. It was so fervid in its seriousness and intensity. Anything that bright had to go out fast. The idea of getting to be an old gay man like a crumbled old leaf scooting around aimlessly in the breezes was a thought hideous enough to trigger off random suicidal aspirations. He doubted that any man's life near completion constituted much but to be an old faggot without family and rootedness seemed to him a horror that he did not want to imagine. He was young now but he knew that the jesters of the years stuck their tongues out at mortality and ran off quickly to hide someplace. His childhood had absconded this way.
He remembered wishing to cut his wrist during the trial of his sister's murderer. The unwitting accomplice that he was, his body (even more then now) had ached in burdensome guilt. Now, with hindsight, he firmly believed that she would have run back to the power and virility of this successful, married man no matter what he would have done. Back then she plead for a sanctuary from the one who owned her in the pleasure of love; but even if he had locked her in her room, instead of dragging her back to him, on her own she would have gone to the greed, lust, and ambition that were her interpretation of the American dream. He knew this at the trial but it did not mitigate his guilt. Back then the horror, the senselessness, the rape and the slaughtering that were alleged but unproven with the rotting and effacing of time, the acquittal, and the general emptiness carried him off to a horror and disconcerted void worse than death. It was a disconcerted space of months as a walking mannequin with that one keen perception of seeing how the darkness of selfishness and destruction were there in all human pursuits. He walked around the living room. He looked at the clock. It was now 5:30. He stared out of the window onto the traffic of Seoul. He hoped that Seong Seob did not hate his life with him. He prayed that he didn't. There was no indication that he did although he was not blind to Sang Huin's promiscuity. Maybe, he thought, he should release Seong Seob: first experiences did not make any man entrapped in an embedded pattern. What they had was innocuous to him but to pursue it any further might distort the man that Seong Seob might become. Sang Huin sighed and went back to their bedroom. His fingers slid through a lock of hair on his friend's head. After much effort he went to sleep.
There in his dreams was this Yang Lin/Shang Ah/"Lucky" character (He never knew what his name really was) whom he had met that time in Seoul. In ways it was him, that one who wanted to become a woman and had been envious of a bride posing for pictures at Toksugum Palace in the Chongno Sam-ga area of Seoul, but his features were more spread out, his nose more like a pig, and he had a dark brown Southeast Asian pigment. He was an emaciated "money boy" with a book bag swung onto a bony shoulder; and he was wearing torn jeans, a grey t-shirt and the rife stink of his rotting skin. He saw him but in Gabriele's eyes. He accosted her timidly as she was drawing the reflection of Wat Phra Kaeo (the Grand Palace): its golden cupolas, stupas, and high triangular roofs shimmering silver in a fountain that pigeons were using as a bath. She knew his and her plight instantly: suffering was there, pulling decades from his skin and misery was intruding on her contemplation of beauty. It was often that way for artists, for the jungle, beautiful as it might seem from the external view of its thickets, was a truculent horror for those with no special skills or who possessed unappreciated uniqueness; and she smiled painfully at ineluctable fate with its ensuing moral obligations. She asked if he would allow her to sketch him and he agreed. He said that he had been living on the streets for one year; that his mother and brother were living in Rattchaburi; that his father died when he was nine years old; that sleeping on the streets was "danger"; and that sometimes "nice" people would talk with him when he walked around the park, but not often.
This was all she knew of him from dearth, shaky, timid words of clogged superfluous emotion and the deep swallows of his saliva. She fed him and this ductile creature began to follow her from a distance after they said their goodbyes as if repudiating the meaning of the word lest it be too disconcerting. She had guessed that it would probably be as this. Repressing her contempt for Catholicism, she took him to St. Joseph's High School on Convent Road and the scrutinizing hope-builder of a nun there referred her to the Holy Redeemers and the hope-builder of a priest there re-inquisitioned him and told her to come the following day at 2:00 when the St. Vincent volunteers would arrive. The priest was unwilling to even give him a corner of a room for some hours leading to the interview so after taking him to Big C to buy him some clothes she then took him to her hotel room for she did not want to lose him to the streets. She mothered him to compensate for the lack of mothering she had done with her own son. He gave her the gesture of the "wai" [wh-I] and stammered his gentle "thank you very much" with every glass of water that she poured for him, the soap and towel which she handed to him, and the cushions and blankets that she laid out for him. The St. Vincent De Paul volunteers re-reinquisitioned him at the church but through polite reticence, a taciturn distrust of social services, or saturnine despondency from so much time alone on the streets he continued his polite statements that he didn't want any help. But she insisted that he did and went with him two hours through congested traffic, the bane of Bangkok, to this referral. When the Maryknoll brothers in the migrant workers' office reneged on their promise, they went the two hour ride back from whence they came even though she just wanted to reject the fragile creature into the thickets of buses, cars, motorcycles, tuc tucs, buses, and the heavy black trails of carbon monoxide. Tired and sick from a migraine, she returned to the priest at Holy Redeemer who had indifferently volleyed her to the St. Vincent charities. In the priest's office at the rectory she was supercilious and fulminated her derision of those whose organizational name was a misnomer, they whose congregations were foreign capitalists whom the church establishment would never alienate, and they, these emissaries of the Pope, whose ideas of human worth was just the mimicking of their donors. She felt anguish for this Thai boy and all of the myriad throwaways of the planet who were volleyed here and there indiscriminately and if she had been more like a woman she would have cried even if the anguish was beyond tears. She decided to redeem him herself with her consistent presence even if he was AIDS ridden (a distinct possibility), their conversation was palaver (a certainty), and even if she had to stay in Bangkok another month or two for his sake (an inevitability). But one day at the swimming pool he stood there looking wistfully at those his age without stepping into the water. She saw what she had seen when she sketched him that day at the Grand Palace. Then, his wistful stare was directed toward untainted soccer players engaged, as boys, in simple pleasures which he would never be able to partake in. He twitched and stammered out to her that he needed drugs, men, and money, that the bruise on his arm wasn't really from a dog as if she had believed that it was, and that she should let him go. Fervent vacuums of passion were sucking him into the black hole within but when he packed his things he wouldn't leave. He just sat there on the floor near some rolled-up blankets in incessant dazed ambivalence until she at last told him to unpack. The next morning, from being weakened by the evening's migraine or from the restoration of common sense, she was insistent that he go begging like a monk and leave her alone. He kow- towed to her myriad times, began to cry, and said that she was too good for him. He averred that he would not return. She told him that was fine and that she wished him good luck but when he was gone she blamed herself for not giving him a few days of complete sanctuary from the streets. That evening, after a passing thunderstorm, he knocked and anxiously slid a card under the door. When she opened the door the elevator door had closed.
When he woke up again he could hear the gusts of wind and the movement of traffic through the open window. There were the smells of dogs beneath the tattered screen—the living as opposed to the cooked version thought by Koreans to rejuvenate the body as much as ginseng. There was also that peculiar amalgamation of odors which was of evaporating urine-on-sidewalk particles, and the faint exhaust of cars. There was the light of early morning and it all excited him. He became conscious of the slight snoring of his special friend and he knew that this sound was beautiful because he cared about him for otherwise it would have been an unbearable annoyance.
In mid-afternoon they went swimming. He watched Saeng Seob's dives which were more complex and aesthetic than any he would have been able to do. They were Saeng Seob's one action of bold maneuvers that always renewed Sang Huin's interest in him for creatures of motion like himself, he knew, could only admire base kinetic movements of the outside world. Movement outside moved the being within: fervid movement that flourished pleasurably in one's loins, harmonized with hormones amuck in the bloodstream, and revived dopamine that was to be as lightning through neurons and pleasure receptors of the brain.
When they returned the mail had come. The envelope of one letter had been forwarded from Chongju to Umsong and then Umsong to Seoul. It was from his mother who kept forgetting his address just as she forgot that he was living with a man to have a semblance of family the best that he was able to do. She wrote that she called the office of Shin Se Gue in Chongju but the telephone line was disconnected. He knew that she was not thinking either that it had moved to Umsong or that he was now in Seoul. Small ideas seemed to easily blow from the posting on the surface of her memory. She was suppressed in busy habitual action in which thoughts would have trouble permeating through her hardened, desiccated surface. Her daughter and concept of the world at large had been mauled by the hungers of the night so of course she was not alive - -just a hollow ambulatory thing like the swift moving cockroach. There was no real content in the letter apart from the lack of content itself: a patio table and a hummingbird feeder that she had bought, the wallpapering of another room for the umpteenth time, trees, roses, and tree roses which she had planted. He kept folding, unfolding, and refolding the empty envelope into and from smaller rectangles, felt warm and flushed, and could only think how there were not any relatives for the two of them apart from each other. There never would be more than this; and there would be nothing at all of family with her passing. In a flare of emotions that were sensitive but callow he wanted to "go home"- -to abandon every reality that he knew here by jumping through a child's portal.
He couldn't think what to say when he tried to write back to her so he went with Saeng Seob and his dog for a walk. In a park at dusk they heard the sounds of birds and crickets and they felt the majestically warm day trail and descend into a gentle cloak of coolness.
"Did you write your mother?" asked Saeng Seob.
"Didn't know what to say. I'll mail a traditional Korean doll to her or something. Where would I find something like that?"
"Wouldn't know," said Saeng Seob. The world was America now so why would he.
"Something. It doesn't matter what it is. Some type of clutter— things: she likes that sort of thing."