Sang Huin (Shawn most of the time to Seong Seob) grabbed his blind friend by the arm and awkwardly yanked him nudgingly to the child's bed. It was a cocky American gesture with the sotto voce of one insinuating by touch an inhibition to touch at all. The tepid force of this gesture was, in part, of someone who had been abandoned inexplicably before. Seong Seob had felt Shawn's awkward half-hearted attachment and reticence for a year now. He couldn't blame him since he realized his part in bringing it about. He had thought that living together would smooth over everything and felt dismayed that a year later Sang Huin still touched and spoke to him with the uncertainty of the two belonging to each other. And yet in bed it was compensated by desperate and passionate thumping which was the best kind of love making there was. Seong Seob needed to feel that another person hungered for him for this was the contract. This was the binding of love. It was a covenant with this relationship-being that virtually all people deemed as higher than themselves. It was a belonging that all humans sought.
Sang Huin's mind questioned the legitimacy of human feelings and the meaning of others' presence in his life, which without exception seemed so fleeting. His mind was in a torture chamber of its own making. He yearned for harder realities outside of one's experiences and yet finding none he did not retreat to the limits of his feelings and the input he got from his senses. Headstrong, he believed that there had to be something that he was missing and so he went on searching like a madman batted about in erratic thoughts.
"I wonder when he will leave again," he thought. "I wonder what little thing will be too much for him and cause him to hide like a coward never to return again. Will I get a hateful text message on my cellular telephone? Will this be how it will go awry? It's bound to go bad. Everything changes. How can a relationship change to be closer than what it started out initially?" Although the present often stood free without a guard, within the infliction of memory it roamed no further than the prison gate that its imagination conjured up from past ruins.
And yet the ruminator that this "Shawn" was, he was still the product of his culture that was not too keen on ruminations. One's culture was prevalent in every thought even within an introvert like himself. Culture was a cookie cutter pressing out shape in the amorphous dough of one's thoughts. It was the re-legitimization of Marx. It was as Aristotle stated ambiguously as form shaping matter. It was the American in him that had cajoled and coerced Seong Seob to the hospital against his will according to the characteristics of his nationality even if it had been done diffidently.
"I sarem i irum Seong Seob imnida. I sarem i Seong Seob imnida." He paused and turned to the older Seong Seob. "Go ahead. You've been introduced. You both are each other. Ask him how he is. I can't speak Korean as you well know every minute of everyday." The older Seong Seob laughed and then began to flutter within the native language that animated him most. Sang Huin watched as the three creatures (his friend, the mother, and her son who was also named Seong Seob) expressed their color and movement in Hanguk-mal. He felt as if he were in a flower market instead of a hospital. Flowers encompassed the boy in all directions. Sang Huin remembered being sick himself and hearing the cryptic language that his mother and sister spoken around him. That cryptic language was now there in the confines of the walls of this hospital room and unable to escape it he felt as if he were a minority within it. It was the ethereal language that had soared his family above and away from his terrestrial boundaries.
Sang Huin thought about that time at the English winter camp when he first met this now hospitalized boy, Seong Seob. Everything proceeded fine for a few days and then one night Seong Seob scathed his knees in play and suddenly pulled off his pants in front of the school children and staff. The boy exposed his vulnerabilities. He showed the flimsy mortal creature of man for what he was. Horror and tempestuous hatred toward the mincing of one's boyhood innocence was in his animated eyes and it mixed into his cries of despair. Five seconds earlier he had been running and wrestling with the other boys and then with a little pain and the rolling of a small stream of blood came the memories of being run over by a truck and all of its ensuing surgeries.
Saeng Seob had not wanted to come; and even in the hospital room he and the dog wanted to stay aloof. Despite his more gregarious tendencies and his smile so wide to compensate for the lack of expression in his sunglass-confined orbs, Seong Seob and his dog stood away from the railing of the bed. The dog perceived its master's nasocomial fears but instead of looking at the atmosphere as something that might alert its senses, its face, every few moments, made movements toward the door not much different than the master. It had led the way through outpatient units of hospitals before. It knew its master's aversion to places of suffering and could sense the gloom that pervaded all rooms and corridors in a hospital. The surgeries on Seong Seob's eyes had been performed when he was a boy to no avail. The dog had escorted the master from the ages of 12 to 15 on subsequent visits that procured nothing but the dread of hospitals.
The fear of hospitals seemed to be a fear of death. Even a cockroach was afraid of death and so to be afraid of such a thing, thought Sang Huin, was natural. And yet death itself was natural. It might well be liberation instead of annihilation. It seemed absurd to prejudge such a natural occurrence that living creatures knew nothing about. It might be as beautiful as all the flowers that surrounded the bed of the boy, Seong Seob, who was playing with the board game that he had unwrapped and opened from the box. What did a cockroach know? For it perceived nothing outside of its own physical survival. What did a dog know? For it perceived hospitals as containers of human suffering instead of deliverance from illness?
Sang Huin understood that Seong Seob was pursing a relationship that was more than a bit at odds with the world in even the most libertine culture. He also acknowledged that Saeng Seob was visiting a suffering boy whom he wanted to run away from. Sang Huin could not do much of anything to fill in the crevices of time and in awkward moments of not knowing what to say he just stood there uncomfortably but with a degree of appreciation for Seong Seob. Sang Huin had empathy as deep as the gods.