She nodded. "I know that but I'm not noteworthy." Even though she proudly scorned this bit of voyerism, she again felt relieved that there wasn't more.
She could imagine him having asked her how she supported herself and her child financially. This question would have forced her to explain how she had considered all prostitution that every human did in life and had chosen the physical version to be the most honorable. It would have brought her such sadistic pleasure to watch him squirm around in iconoclastic ideas the way a convict had to adapt to prison or a mouth to the wiggling substance of hideous tasting Jello. Fortunately for both of them, he did not ask. She got up from her seat thinking how ignorant he was of the earliest essays and arguments about education. Even centuries ago intellectuals believed that education should not be indoctrination or to learn a practical skill, but exposure to important ideas that would help to guide an individual's perceptions. "Well, Mr. Quest, it's been a pleasure," she said as she shook his hand. "Just remember that if you soften Recla's approach toward Nathaniel I can't exactly guarantee what he will say to her at all times but I can guarantee that the vowels and syllables he uses will be benign. They will be creative and not hateful. Please talk to this easily offended teacher and remind her not to put him in with the coats anymore. That is if she wants to not deal with me in any other way than with a smile on my face and cheese and crackers in my hands."
Chapter Twenty-Two
He had assumed the continuum of excitement in the exotic anomaly of living together with a man. In the first month of living with Seong Seob he believed (as much as his ruminations allowed) that a union with a man would be perennial splendor. Back then he thought it would be more emotionally and intellectually superior to what his parents felt toward each other. There would be no transfer of a wife's affections to the children; and not having shared property, lackadaisical rose, shrub, and tree plantings and the conversations thereof would not bury him alive in a landslide of the mundane.
One night in particular Sang Huin was bored with love making toward his friend. Love was yearning for what one lacked and now, with all this time of having him, he could not sense that wish to possess what he had months earlier obtained. And yet like all other times they nonetheless climaxed to sleep the way one might eat some leftover pie to wash a pan.
Somewhere into 2:00 in the morning the ghost of his sister, Jun Jin, eclipsed over his brain and he woke in the shadow and heat of its passing. He was thinking of her progressively less all the time. Indeed, she was passing into a realm no different than nameless, traceless ancestors diffusing out and away like the molecules that once composed a mist. But still she did not go easily. If not clasping onto him chokingly as one who, dead, was nonetheless drowning, she would slam him against the internal walls of his brain for trying to relegate her into oblivion. She would definitely not go easily.
He felt a headache and imagined Gabriele's as well. He tried to shrug off both but was only able to dismiss what he imagined hers as being. He looked at the rising and falling of Seong Seob's chest within the silvery tinted shadows of twilight that fell through the curtain of their bedroom. The breathing of this friend was harmonic beauty and, at that moment, he halfway yearned for him.
Evading Gabriele motioning for him in the hallway as if he were supposed to go into the bathroom to help her vomit, he went into the living room and turned on the American military station, AFKN. New divisions of soldiers were being sent to Kuwaiti bases for another confrontation with Iraq. Pyongyang had recently dismissed nuclear monitors. The troops at the Itaewon base and at the DMZ were on a heightened alert to North Korean actions. They were the same old unresolved conflicts. "Feelin' good," said a soldier in military uniform before a television camera. "Feelin' the adrenaline. Glad I'm here to serve American interests and the people of South Korea, practicing war games and the like. I and my unit - all these great men from every division - are ready to go into action any minute we're requested to fight." Peace, thought Sang Huin, was not the natural state. Being titillated by the infinite possibilities in sexual liaisons with strangers and a propensity for violence were both the natural state.
Sang Huin turned on his computer. He could only jot down Nathaniel's thoughts. "The car is hot. He feels the burning sensation of his legs against the upholstery. He likes the heat. It prompts him to not delay by thinking, but just to move quickly. There is something pleasing in the car passing the world as wind. It almost makes him feel that he can pass through anything: through another car, or through the side of an embankment. He does not know where he is going." Sang Huin stopped. He was being taken downstream with his memories. They pulled him into them because they were the substance of who he was. As the founder of philosophy, Thales, stated, everything was made of water.
Sang Huin, this Shawn or Sean depending on how he spelled his nickname, had returned home from one of his last days of his senior year in high school to find his sister, Jun Jin, crying on the bottom step of the staircase. Her eyes were black and swollen and they were as dark as marble. She didn't seem real.