When their clothes were dry Gabriele invited Hilda to go to the movies. There in the darkness of the theatre she felt happy but uncomfortably pinned in by the wistful desire to touch the leathery silk of her friend's skin and this sense that to do so might bring on the demise of the friendship. As strange as this yearning, the fear, and the polarity of these opposites experienced together, was this peculiar sensation of needing to be embraced in the cocoon of Hilda's arms whereby she might, in this unconditional love of compassion and understanding, more smoothly reconnect the ridged pieces of self that she had cobbled together from a fragmented state early in life. She did not know if clasping her hand would endanger the friendship so she sat there and sweated with her hand in between both seats. And yet, strangely somewhere in the middle of the movie she coalesced Gabrielishly. She was restored in shared experience and understanding and this was all that she required.
She had felt similar emotions of physical repugnance toward Michael. Often, in their bed, with the enjoyment of feeling her body again after sex as his motives, she shunned him like a picnic that was infested with ants. The need for autonomy, hegemony, and harmony that comprised self-containment became her.
Still, in the last moments of the movie she curled her hand on her chin, smiled, and absorbed herself in light and sound presented as form. She thought about how Hilda had waited around for her clothes to dry and had helped her put them in the back of her car. The mystery of possibilities and implications to subtle gestures dangled above her like a toy of a musical crib.
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.