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."