Chapter Twenty-Two
He had assumed the continuum of excitement in the exotic anomaly of living together with a man. In the first month of living with Seong Seob he believed (as much as his ruminations allowed) that a union with a man would be perennial splendor. Back then he thought it would be more emotionally and intellectually superior to what his parents felt toward each other. There would be no transfer of a wife's affections to the children; and not having shared property, lackadaisical rose, shrub, and tree plantings and the conversations thereof would not bury him alive in a landslide of the mundane.
One night in particular Sang Huin was bored with love making toward his friend. Love was yearning for what one lacked and now, with all this time of having him, he could not sense that wish to possess what he had months earlier obtained. And yet like all other times they nonetheless climaxed to sleep the way one might eat some leftover pie to wash a pan.
Somewhere into 2:00 in the morning the ghost of his sister, Jun Jin, eclipsed over his brain and he woke in the shadow and heat of its passing. He was thinking of her progressively less all the time. Indeed, she was passing into a realm no different than nameless, traceless ancestors diffusing out and away like the molecules that once composed a mist. But still she did not go easily. If not clasping onto him chokingly as one who, dead, was nonetheless drowning, she would slam him against the internal walls of his brain for trying to relegate her into oblivion. She would definitely not go easily.
He felt a headache and imagined Gabriele's as well. He tried to shrug off both but was only able to dismiss what he imagined hers as being. He looked at the rising and falling of Seong Seob's chest within the silvery tinted shadows of twilight that fell through the curtain of their bedroom. The breathing of this friend was harmonic beauty and, at that moment, he halfway yearned for him.
Evading Gabriele motioning for him in the hallway as if he were supposed to go into the bathroom to help her vomit, he went into the living room and turned on the American military station, AFKN. New divisions of soldiers were being sent to Kuwaiti bases for another confrontation with Iraq. Pyongyang had recently dismissed nuclear monitors. The troops at the Itaewon base and at the DMZ were on a heightened alert to North Korean actions. They were the same old unresolved conflicts. "Feelin' good," said a soldier in military uniform before a television camera. "Feelin' the adrenaline. Glad I'm here to serve American interests and the people of South Korea, practicing war games and the like. I and my unit - all these great men from every division - are ready to go into action any minute we're requested to fight." Peace, thought Sang Huin, was not the natural state. Being titillated by the infinite possibilities in sexual liaisons with strangers and a propensity for violence were both the natural state.
Sang Huin turned on his computer. He could only jot down Nathaniel's thoughts. "The car is hot. He feels the burning sensation of his legs against the upholstery. He likes the heat. It prompts him to not delay by thinking, but just to move quickly. There is something pleasing in the car passing the world as wind. It almost makes him feel that he can pass through anything: through another car, or through the side of an embankment. He does not know where he is going." Sang Huin stopped. He was being taken downstream with his memories. They pulled him into them because they were the substance of who he was. As the founder of philosophy, Thales, stated, everything was made of water.
Sang Huin, this Shawn or Sean depending on how he spelled his nickname, had returned home from one of his last days of his senior year in high school to find his sister, Jun Jin, crying on the bottom step of the staircase. Her eyes were black and swollen and they were as dark as marble. She didn't seem real.
"Who did this to you?" he demanded, although he believed that he knew. He approached her slowly and solemnly. He pulled the strap of his book bag beyond his clavicle and allowed it to slide down his arm. He propped the bag against the side of the first step. It wasted a minute. He wanted to avoid this situation and a protective, invisible wall was around him. He felt as if he were watching a movie of quasi- real beings in an unusually personal situation that was just somewhat believable. He felt that both he and his sister were unreal just like the unreal situation he was facing. He was reluctant to broach the subject and he found his voice faltering when he repeated the question for a second time. The softness of an uncertain voice awakened her from the withdrawal in a capsule of non-being. She responded for she knew uncertainty and to hear it in another being coaxed her to come out of her own protective shell to acknowledge his suffering as well as her own.
"Help me," she said.
"How?" he asked.
"I don't know — I don't — just be with me now…that's all," she whispered. She gave to him what she had: a bit of a morose smile. But, water to cement, his expressions were hardening from it. She could see this and again crawled up into herself. She was languid and bent despite her stiffness but her feet were tilted to the floor and suctioned into the frontal base of the step like an upside down insect. One of her hands had such a firm tightness as if enmeshed in the railing and the other one dangled without movement.
There was a child within him who was uncertain, who would placate and comfort those in distress from the knowledge of distress himself; and thus for a splendid moment he wavered non-judgmentally. And yet it was his father's tone he wanted to emulate. Shawn was now the representative of family with its senior members away at work. He could listen, comfort this stiff battered being who like him was a puppet being pulled from all directions, fragmenting, searching for truth in void, and at a loss with radically different thoughts, feelings, and probable outcomes. And yet there was the tone he started from, a tone he could not diverge from now that his face was stern, the gift was despised, and she, this older sister was absconding into herself once again. He had to stay on one track if he wanted to be a man at all. He reinforced his earlier words, the words of manhood.
"Whoever did this to you — I'll kill him. You tell me now!" He blared his visceral rage. Alien manhood was disgorging out of him like a geyser as it did in all males when forced to forfeit being human for being men. The compounds being disgorged were obdurate, callous, and hard.
"Please don't tell mama or daddy!" she mumbled weakly.
"They'll see! Look at you!"
"I know." She pierced him with being lost. He was lost too but resented having it being mirrored onto him. It wasn't the model for being a man that he could pass onto his sons should he have sons, and he felt that he should have sons no matter what his sexual feelings were.
"What's happened to you?" he asked mildly. "For one year you've been a stranger. I can guess. I'm always left guessing."
"I've been ill — so ill."
"Ill?" He wanted to believe her. Strangely, he wanted to believe in viruses that blackened eyes. He wanted to believe in physical sickness, which often had cures. It wasn't a major divergence: sickness meant being overtaken by a virus that was alien and so with love it could be as unwanted as this. One could be inundated with pleasure- neurotransmitters like anyone whose consciousness succumbs to a knockout gas. This was his subconscious association; and yet consciously he wanted to believe that she was literally ill and despised her for not being so.
"Take my hand. Let's go upstairs."
"I'll die if I go up there."
"No! Mom, Dad, and I will help you to become well…if you're sick." He emphasized "if you're sick" doubtfully. Then he became aware of the fact that he was playing a game the way he had always been led around by childish games when he was a naive and gullible boy. He hated her for making him look foolish once again. "Go up, June!"
"Sang Huin, if I go to my bedroom I'll slit my wrist. I'll jump from the window headfirst. I don't know. I'll end it somehow."
"What are you saying?"
"Feel it!" She put his hand on her lap. "It's alive."
He took back his hand in revulsion of it being placed there. Then his face grimaced.
"You're pregnant with a guy that gives you this!" He lifted her lowered face in his palm. "What's the name of this guy?" he demanded. He knew and it wasn't just a guy whom she had bred with but the adrenaline of being with one who had power, the glitter of being with one who had money and influence, the love of a body, and the friendship with this man who was her boss. She had been seduced by the demonstration that some male birds give to prospective mates when dangling worms from their mouths. It was the American dream. He had always believed that womanhood and prostitution were the same thing. "Release your hand from the railing."
"No, please, I can't go up!"
"Who's to say anything about going up. We're going down, down to him. I'll give you to him since you are his second marriage. He signed it with that thing growing inside you. Maybe you'll be his wife's servant. You're definitely his whore. You've seen this home for the last time."