"And become pregnant?"
"I don't think so. I don't know at this point." He yawned. "I wouldn't know what to do with that. I need some believable drama in it." And yet he felt that there was no drama within his own life. Giving private lessons to children he didn't particularly care for, his days were missionless clutter that exhausted what little extroverted characteristics were within him; and coming home to Seong Seob with a lack of sexual variety in that domain was flattening him in the malaise of inordinate boredom. He was certain that there was no drama in his life; and yet paradoxically he knew that drama was inherent even in rocks that weathered away in time. Drama was change and it was in all things. If drama were in the rocks, it too was there in a simple life. His was laden in resentment over the idea of returning home to this blind lover who couldn't see that the two of them living together was inhibiting the progress of his manuscript. "Any ideas," he asked.
"She could have a baby and then throw him in a well."
"Why? What well? I don't want to write unbelievable melodrama."
"It's not unbelievable. It happened?"
"Huh?"
"To me. Postpartum depression. I'm told that a few weeks after my brother was born my mother became depressed. She wouldn't eat very much. She wouldn't leave her room except to go to the temple. One day she wanted to go to the temple and she couldn't find my brother's shoes. When the servants couldn't find them either, she dismissed the servants. She told them to not come back. When they were gone she made a bath for my brother and drowned him. My family says that maybe I fought back and it was too much trouble for her in the bathtub. Anyhow, she decided to drive me to an old contaminated well on my grandmother's estate, pried the boards loose that covered what was left of it, and dumped me in. There wasn't much water in it so I didn't drown, but I lost my eyesight. " Sang Huin felt an empathy as deep as the gods while he listened to the wind howling through the crack of the window. It was a barely audible murmuring of ineffable pain. It was palaver but it called to him somehow, pushing him from his malaise to the malaise of it all.
Chapter Twenty-Four
She could guess that the quick entrance into the trailer park, if it were such, was a reaction to her, the nefarious whore, whom he had ridden in sync to a female's need for pleasure many years earlier. Maybe as an afterthought to the decision of allowing his son to go off with Nathaniel, Rick's father recognized the address his son had gone to. If that were the case she supposed that she was in some way culpable for him driving quickly, if it were indeed done quickly, to remove his son. The inescapable fact zipped her up into its body bag: the removal had lead to the neighbor girl's ill fate and early demise.
She wasn't sure who was to blame. Perhaps it was fate itself. She parsed this concept of fate. She asked herself what it was and it seemed to her that in most situations it was the selfishness of myriad individuals who, together at a convergence, unintentionally brought about another person's harm. She rued over the unfairness of those who thrived for a time and those who seemed bound to perish from their inception. She could become engrossed in her own quasi-pleasant little world and not think about the bigger picture. By comparison to many others suffering from starvation, disease, war, and menial labor her life was that of a contumacious child who refused to leave the amusement park for fear of no longer having such a dizzy perspective of it all. She could become a bit religious (anything from a witch to a Christian) and further the vertigo. Within the lotusland of America, so removed from intense pain and hunger, she could hide to have a brighter perspective where some god or another was still keeping the whole creation, if not each and every individual, safely in his pocket. She did not, however, want self-deception. As much as she was able to do so, she wanted to know reality. Justice was equity but equity was not in the natural order and so the natural order was unjust. What justice there was existed as the creation of man; and so, in ways, society was more righteous than the natural order.