He got dressed. He felt agitation at the idea of having to go all the way out to Muguk for his doctor's class but at 4:00 A.M. he slipped on his pants, regardless, and walked outside to the bathroom. He would have to get in a taxi by 4:30; be on the bus by 5:00; and travel an hour and twenty minutes all for a class that lasted less than an hour. The class was composed of psychiatrists, surgeons, and those practicing internal medicine but they were on a soldier's salary and the payment he got for the class was paltry. Still, he said that he would do it. They had lost money for classes they did not receive at Shin Se Gye when he quit there.
Near Muguk, from the bus, he saw farmers of the dawn planting their weedy rice patties by hand. They were dressed in baggy shirts and rolled up pants and pointed straw hats covered their heads. Their long boots were entrenched in mud. According to his romantic perceptions of them, each one was august, unpretentious, and melting into the morning sun. Those rags they wore were more patriotic than flags and more majestic than King Sejong the Great's crown. Once their farms had been irrigated into ponds and frogs croaked within the allure of their enclave they would have sewn not only rice but the continuation of civilization. Their footprints in mud were ephemeral, but they had their eternity in their families. He asked himself what eternity he would have in such a decadent and disconcerted existence that was obsessed by this mixing of people in an emotion of love that brought the selfish and altruistic splashing of the other in one's container and he or she into theirs. Love still was something that he hadn't really experienced and he hadn't experienced it because of his greater obsession with carnal devouring.
What made him attack himself so? It was obvious. As a gay man he reshaped perception in an uncomfortable way (although undoubtedly he was not the first): his life became an admission that there was no operator's manual for any man's life; but when he saw couples with their babies he believed, in contrary to this, that a natural course in a man's life had been severed or abducted from him and so life became all the more confusing. He could not do otherwise than to feel sad and insecure. It was a loss in his life and he did not deny that it was such. He was not really envious when he saw them. It made him pleased to see them even though in such occurrences he felt empty and stunted at best.
It made him sick to think that—oh, the same old disconcerted thoughts spun around and around in his head like when a bad tune by its prevalence repeats itself over and over in the tape recorder of the psyche and the repetition feels like drudgery. It made him sick to think that he had caused a woman to conceive and then had not been forceful enough with his will to ensure that the child would be born—no, that was just a fantasy albeit a partially believed one. Really he had insisted on the abortion but as time went on the perception changed with the neurons and the desire to have a good self-image. But this was the past: immobile, irrelevant, and except for occasional lesions that opened up the bleeding of memory, forgotten by all. The future was anxiousness where hopes of happiness were thoughtlessly draped against despair.
In the doctors' class, held at Dr. Lee's breakfast table, he brought up articles and political cartoons for discussions. Everything from the continuing menace of Saddam Husein, incursions into the demilitarized zone by North Korea, the Yonsei University student demonstrations, the convictions of the ex-presidents, and all of the most newsworthy of the world's unhappy events were there for the probing. But today, upon leaving, he remembered an article he had forgotten to bring to them: the Taliban's restraint of war ravaged widows from work. The doctors liked such things. As Dr. Lee had pointed out, even happenings in the most remote parts of the world often spread amuck like an oil spill in a global community. He remembered having forgotten this article when he was walking out the door and then it slid from and fell off his memory altogether.
After walking to the Muguk bus depot he had second thoughts about going back to Chongju. He got in a taxicab. That was the easy part. He said, "Anyong Hashimnika?" and then probed his mind. "Odie ka?," (where you go?) asked the taxi driver sharply. The word, "kang," meant river and "mul" meant water. What, he thought to himself, was the word for lake? "Kun mul? (big water)…no, that would never work!" Somehow he found it and got out a coherent sentence. The taxi took him there leaving him on the shoulder of the road. He got out. The highway that was the main road of the town was sandwiched between a bluff and a lake reflecting the marginal space of the Korean landscape. There were no classes for a while and the day was there to celebrate like the disrobing and denuding of a goddess—or in his case, a god. Sang Huin pulled off his shirt and rolled up his slacks. He sat down under a small pavilion. Near it weeds grew. He plucked one and put it into his mouth. He chewed it and sprawled himself on the bench thinking himself as a more worldly version of Huckleberry Finn. Looking down at the waters and the small fishing crafts that were tied to a few docks at a distance, he thought about the Korean landscape in general images: the croaking of frogs in the irrigated rice fields near the apartment that he once had in Umsong; the farmers ("nongmin") who would insert each individual plant as painstakingly as a plastic surgeon grated each item of hair. In galoshes, they would trudge into the depths of mud to sow, reap, and thresh the rice. The moon above the empty Umsong stadium was a lambent glow over the rice and gave a slight visibility to the forest that interconnected a nearby field to the stadium. None of it was all that spectacular when compared to the variety and splendor of the vast country, America, that was and wasn't his country; but still it was new and he sometimes liked it.
Then, in full broadness, he saw Gabriele. There she was in a tight t-shirt and wholly jeans. Hail beat upon the tin can of a trailer where she lived with an infant and a cat. The hail seemed to her like the bullets that she imagined from the distant war that America wedged against Iraq. Then he saw the antithesis of this: big diamond earrings dangling from her lobes and that she wore the most expensive fashions of the elite that gave her broad and muscular German frame elegance as she got ready to take her son to galleries, temporary exhibits, and then to have him sit alone in a corner at these art parties where cheques were often signed. He saw him sitting in those strangers' homes as Sang Huin himself had sat on the bleachers during his sister's basketball games. He saw him taking umbrage with the gods (the sun god in particular if He existed) for they had bore him in the suffocation of her gray colors that sprayed out onto the world like a mist that none of his friends went through. For them it was sunny picnics of complete families, weenie roasts, and marshmallow burnings over bonfires. And there she was again a younger entity, youth asphyxiating in the dust storm of talcum powder that, in her trailer, she swept across the hills of his buttocks, wishing to walk across hills and depart from family. . He felt her true, committed, objection to everything in her big lonely home and with everything consisting of so much it stayed latent in the confines of her leaden eyes. He pulled out a notebook and sketched her different varieties. Underneath her image, he began to cluster a second draft of words and notes. He didn't know what he was doing.
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.