"You want to eat salami?"
"No, are you listening to me?"
Yang Kwam chuckled. Then he looked at Sang Huin with intense confidence that refracted into the latter's perceptions as compassion. "I know that you did not do anything like this. You are a good person. You couldn't do something like that."
"They look on me as if I did kill her, as if I don't feel guilty enough without that. Well…I mean Dad is dead now so—anyhow, he looked at me like I murdered her. They both did really…not really like a murderer but guilty of manslaughter, which I guess in a way I am."
"How people look at you is not something that you can control. It resides in them—when not true, it is a need to construct the world a certain way to remove guilt or pain by projecting it on others. Your family did not get the murderer and they blame you. Families often split up under such pressure."
"I took her there."
"You didn't know that he would kill her. Guilty of being too Puritanical or too
Korean, yes, but that is all."
"I want you as my best friend forever." There, the daydream, the word, the connection vanished.
It seemed to him that every few minutes or so there were passersby (usually as couples if not larger groups with civilization, merger, such an acute hunger in these pathetic lonely herds) who were more scrutinizing than all the others. These passersby saw the stationary posture of his body bereft of orders from the brain for substantial movement, and in instantaneous judgment calls, they believed, he supposed, that his mind was seemingly crazy or dysfunctional. They construed him, or he believed that they construed him, as dirty, unintelligible, and untoward. To them he was a homeless eyesore, a madman even if he looked benign from a distance. After all, seated alone in a fetal position as he was on a declivity of a hill sparse of grass, to them, he believed, this proclivity for disoriented stares into the wind-grazed dirt and inanimate purposelessness was an egregious aberration of being human. The fact that no family members were able to keep him restrained in their homes gave credence to the speculation that his intractability from psychosis had caused his transience. Not eating one's kimchee, refusing to pour hot water into a bowl to consume every grain of leftover rice in an insipid soup, or not taking off one's shoes at the door: these were slight infractions of cultural norms. The lone dirt-ridden stranger was prodigiously more repugnant than this for even retards and mild madmen chose to be clean. For one of this ethnicity to wallow his buttocks on a hill of dirt there could be no other rendered judgment than that his behavior was tantamount to a rejection of Hanguk civilization completely, which was indeed, to a Korean, a definite form of madness.
Sang Huin felt their cold Korean scrutiny excoriate him with their looks. The long glances and brief stares seemed to burn through his flesh in thin, cold lasers. And yet this Korean man, this American, continued nonetheless to sit on his hill of dirt all alone and, for the most part, lost in thought. He was pecking on a tiny virtual keyboard in his Pocket PC while reading aloud that which he pecked as if he were not an oddity and all others carried out activities like this.