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.