"Yeah, maybe I will."
"Good. How much is it?"
"Seven dollars. Should I cu-cu-cu-come inside?"
"No one comes inside me, buddy. Wait there." She took her pizza and slammed the door shut. When she returned to the door she only slid a ten-dollar bill beneath it and fastened more of the locks.
Chapter 45
Conclusion of Sang Huin
Beyond his dabbled research on the subject, Sang Huin did not know much about Jakarta …th its Rupiah coins as light as a child's play money; female mendicants ever so often dancing seductively into the open doors of tiny shack restaurants as their partners carried speakers and collected the money that only rarely was given for these dances of desperation and futility; guitar mendicants (usually children or teenagers performing in stalled buses); Suharto's penchant for small gardens of ostentatious statues to beautify Jakarta still his legacy; women free to let their long hair flow or to constrain it under hijabs and jilbabs; blue bird/ white bird/black bird taxis; oblong orange tuc tucs swarming the streets like cockroaches; Wartel phone cafes on every corner for those without phones; photocopy shops for so many businesses without photocopy machines; green and white city buses as uncomfortable as a back of a pickup truck; graffiti on doors of businesses such as that of "Fuck The System" somewhere between the train station and Jalan Jaksa (Jaksa Road); 40 percent unemployment with panhandlers, newspaper boys, and money boys on every street; train personnel giving out free condoms to all of its customers; trains going through the middle of Jakarta linking its disparate groups to other cities of Java — each with its own provincial language; the provincial languages, Javanese, and Indonesian all spoken in Java; those calls to prayer from distant mosques reverberating sotto voce as slightly discordant echoes of the nearby mosque; that orphic song of a nearby mosque thundering its plaintive notes; commerce and human activity stunned and mesmerized by wailing notes ubiquitous to the human heart and experience but still continuous; and the cacophonous cries of competing street merchants and entrepreneurs all amalgamated into one chorus.
Sang Huin was not quite sure whether or not he had written his conclusion. It was an open question whether chapters on Gabriele's life in Jakarta would add much to the book. Regardless of having finished it or not, he would no doubt be writing on something or another in the immediate future if nothing but the unpublished musical notes of chamber music for the cello. For not having connections of family dwarf his imagination in financial and emotional obligations, his world was less myopic and this play with ideas was still rich within him. It seemed to him that the fecundity of homosexuals in the meaningful production of ideas came about from not lodging a foundation of family within the sturdy earth. Instead, homosexuals blew with the top soil and ideas shifted along with this drifting in the pensive ponderings of the ephemeral nature of reality. He thought that it was true enough but his reason for formulating the idea was more from a wish to see a positive within this solitary blowing that became him than a belief so much in its veracity.
The antithesis of this, a woman, was a summation of an obsession with stability and the characteristics of prostitution that entailed. At least it seemed to him as such. Each woman was slightly different but in general they married to have that exhilaration of raising little children and property to put their nests on. To have this they would do anything: live years of indifference to a man and hide the rift in meretricious tree planting with him; overmedicate a boy and tell him what to do in all things; ignore that boy's need for a father to suffocate him in her own need to nurture little beings to feel useful and loved; and then suddenly ignore him when it is clear that the years had.mutated him into ugly opinionated manhood. Landscape obsessions were his mother's substitute for lack of stimulating conversation with a spouse but she got some satisfaction in her active sorority with a daughter. Still both were exponentially more important to her than him and yet both were deceased.
It was with a sense of relief that one day he found actual content in a letter that his mother sent to him which went beyond planting roses and water aerobics. It was a need to reconnect and his heart warmed like a child being given a Valentine's Day card. He bought a plane ticket to St. Louis, at his mother's quasi-request, which would allow him to see her once again and to escape the imbroglio that he currently found himself in with a girlfriend, a boyfriend, and bafflement what to do with any of it. The only thing so far to come out of these dates with the convenience store girl at coffee shops and cinemas in Seoul were her suspicious looks for of all these months that he would he not invite her to his apartment or introduce her to his friends; and this incessant returning home late without any inclination to touch his boyfriend exacerbated that one's suspicions of disloyalty and infidelity. Absconding into a plane seemed a natural course.