Right before the bus came to a stop, he fell into a dream where there was a dust storm in Pyongyang. He ran through one dong (neighborhood) to another lost, looking for distinguishable signs, shapes in buildings, and widths of streets. Everything from the thin dust-sheathed roads to the hangul (Korean language) on the signs, looked as identical as the occasional mom and pop stores and it was all indistinguishable from what he saw minutes and hours earlier. He ran into no one since the streets were empty. Then he became careful of where he stepped. "The dust storm," he argued, "could have slid land mines up from the thirty eighth parallel." The more he thought about it the more nervous he became and the more hurried. When he became breathless, he sat on a rock and drank the last of his bottled water. The taste of sauerkraut and hot dogs was in his thoughts and the boiling, bubbling surge of his saliva but he would have eaten kimchee or someone's dog being as hungry as he was. It became fully dark and he would have known entire blackness were it not for the speckling of stars, the moon, and a fire at a distance. He walked over to the fire. He saw four whores seated around a bonfire. He recognized different buildings, and the curves of the street near a hard dirt tennis court. This was Ne Doc Dong. "Do you want me," said one, "or do you want another?" Sang Huin's face turned a bright red like it did with drinking a bottle of beer. He smiled and looked toward the sidewalk in his embarrassment. He said, "No, I wouldn't; but would you have a brother?"
When he arrived in Chongju from the desolation of what was in between Seoul and it, the population and activity of this small city recreated an insatiable yearning for Seoul, which to him was a storehouse of all extraordinary venues to the mind (encounters both sexual and cultural). Large buildings were like the small mountains of Umsong with a topping of cloud on a rainy day—monuments of beauty welcoming him to its domain that edified and exhilarated his appetites and his love. The mountains, until recently, transported his imagination to green blankets of waving rice, and from there to farmers' markets and rural parades celebrating the farmer, the daily appreciation of the faces he saw, and the monotonous sounds of "Hello" from children and high school students who knew of him. Those students always made him seem retarded when he couldn't communicate to their Korean rambling but when he spoke to them in English with the same stream of words they became giddy and the outcome was usually a positive one from his perspective. That was before he decided to sue his boss for the 10 million won that was owed to him. At that time he lost faith in the man's decency and began to find the countryside monotonous even though the continual exposure to greenery and remoteness had been healing to his soul.
He left the bus in Chongju (where he was more or less residing) and walked to the bathhouse called a mokotong. The day was fiercely hot and he wondered if it would be better to jump on a city bus since he had experienced heat exhaustion a week earlier and had to be put on an IV to replenish his system. He pulled out some bottled water and crackers for countering any remaining potassium deficiency. He needed a walk and was not willing to be impeded by a weakly cowardice in broken manhood that was contrary to his muscular form. He passed coffee shops, Samsung stores, a convenience store called Lawsons, and one called Best Store. Even though he could read some of the signs in Hangul he did not know what he was reading for the most part. He wished that his family had taught him his native language. Here he often felt like a handicapped moron. If he were an Anglo-Saxon, a blue-eyed Miguk sarem English teacher, spending 6 months in the host country without learning much of anything about the Korean language, it wouldn't have been even a minor offense. To most he was a retarded Hanguk sarem. He chuckled and then smiled at the faces he took in.
He waited at a red light with other pedestrians. He sifted out bodies and faces. For a few seconds he appreciated the old and the young whom he saw. It was an unselfish sensation. It was spiritual and he liked it. Then he lusted after the young men. He had hardly looked at them lustfully while in America. Occasionally Korean women also got his attention but not as much as American women. He had trouble believing that such predilections were a summary of a man. In fact they seemed to him a cathartic release of energy that blocked manhood if manhood was gaining equilibrium when coming up from the punches or finding a positive expression of himself and the world, and even a pride in both, within adversities. Since he quit his job following the suit and the loss of Sung Ki from his life he went to Seoul often more for sex than anything else. How easy it was. All he had to do was put his eyes on someone at a bar called "Trance," around Pagoda Park, or at the movie theatre behind it and off they went to his hotel room. What was it? A strong yearning for his native land and the man he might have been had he not been replanted in America, an over-identification with his own sex, or fragmentation from violence that had disgorged a close family and made him distrustful of those bindings and obligations that could go awry. He did not know. He did not know that it mattered. Anyhow, here his lusts were pursued cathartically in part and lovingly in that addictive clinging in part but always he was falling free and naked into their pools of sensation.
He did not think that he was all that bored. He had around fifteen hours of classes a week and was able, with that, to gain a salary commensurate to what he should have received monthly from his former employer. It turned out to be perfectly legal. After all, he was a Korean citizen, albeit one on a traveler's visa, and so he did not have to work for anyone but himself. He didn't have to do all that much but be able to speak English. He went to museums in Seoul on his free time even though the experience was a bit redundant since there weren't enough temporary exhibitions to entertain and enlighten him for long. The period after sex cloyed empty into the night like a finished game of solitaire. He knew that reality whenever he chose to engage in it and yet he did it nonetheless. He wanted an exchange of higher and lower energies (or at least thought he did), but men throughout the world were afraid of anything but the latter. Reality was as it dictated: and for the most part he did not want to make a seedy experience into something transformational by exchanging names and telephone numbers, and making subsequent calls although that was what he secretly wished-the tattered man that he was.
He entered the mokotong. He picked up a key, a toothbrush, and a razor at the counter. He took off his shoes and left them with the worker who deposited them into a small shoe locker; and then he went to his clothes locker. He took off all of his clothes except for his underwear. He locked them in. Then he went to the toilet. He put on the typical bathroom slippers made of plastic that were used in toilets because they were often wet and dirty. He went back, after urinating, and reopened his locker. He took off his underwear and deposited it there. He had become so socialized to the need of a beeper (not that he ever got any calls apart from students needing to re-change their hours of study) that he hated to keep it there suffocating under his socks. It was an inanimate object but, instrument that it was, it was a source for possible connectedness. Like a child, in his more subconscious thoughts, it was his friend. Still, Koreans, as addicted as they were to pagers and the new popularity of cellular telephones, could not easily dangle them from their penises at a mokotong. He locked the locker and felt "Honja" ("alone). Even among large groups of people he was alone. When he went to restaurants he was usually "honja," and had to declare it. When he studied Korean, read great literature, went to a museum, saw a video at the video pang, or went to a mokotang he was alone and often questioning how anything could be enjoyable in such remoteness. There was pain in it but like any adaptive mammal choosing one lesser pain to the greater one (in his case choosing the aloneness of his thoughts to the sociability of the masses) there were times when he wasn't even aware of how alone he really was. Everything was measured by its impact on others but the pre-adolescent, found buried deep in the man, could always play alone. When violence was really known and the world was conclusively bad in one's perspective one could go at it alone.
In the shower he used a type of dual washcloth connected together like a mitten. He put his hand inside of it and used its abrasive side to scour his body. He tried not to stare at all of the bodies doing the same. He spent just a few minutes in a whirlpool because of the intensity of the heat and then dived into the extremely cold waters of the pool. His heart raced and coldness tingled through his body. Koreans believed in the salubrious qualities of ginseng, dog meat, and sudden exposure to extreme heat and cold. Besides him, there were only two boys and a young man with a rubber ball within the cold pool, but only he swam circularly enjoying the solitude as much as one could. Every now and then, by his lack of focus, he swallowed water in his lust for a man or two lying on the edge of the pool where the heat of the whirlpools in the adjacent room entered and hypnotized them dozingly. He concentrated on the steam that rose above his head, exhausted itself on the mirrors, the waves that he had created which massaged his psyche in sight, feel and sound, and the three figures that enjoyed the water with him at a distance.
It had been disconnection that had brought him here to the mokotong, as it had to Seoul or even to South Korea itself. People had come and gone out of his life in such a storm, and he was in an existence floundering on something without a stable foundation. It was a miracle, to him, that he had been able to finish his studies at the University of Houston following his sister's death. Back then while students paraded themselves in the insouciance of sociable gestures reflecting their sexual rhythms he had dangled alone like a skeleton in a neurosurgeon's office. He liked the flexibility of his schedule here in Korea. He needed plenty of free time to think his weird thoughts and reconstruct himself as long as his thoughts did not collapse onto him, burying him alive.
At the least provocation, in late August, he began to come to her, his favorite city, lost and uncertain with eyes somewhat wild and fearful but yearning and believing in Seoul's power to provide him with experiences that would thrust him into a better knowledge of himself and the world. She would reflect onto him a more refined and loving being (or, at a lower stage, a loved one since he knew that it might be true that he was one of those tattered souls who weren't needing to learn how to be loving at this point but just needing to feel loved).
Four or five times around the pool were enough to tire him to a respite of ten minutes sitting on its edge and contemplating the movements of the people around him. Their forms transcribed into ideas concerning what he thought their lives might be like; and from there, feeling and the musical notes encroached from distant spaces within his imagination.