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by Steven Sills


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Title: Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America

Author: Steven Sills

Release Date: June 25, 2004  [eBook #12733]

Language: English

Character set encoding: Latin1


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOKYO TO TIJUANA: GABRIELE
DEPARTING AMERICA***


Copyright (C) 2004 by Steven Sills.




            Tokyo To Tijuana:  Gabriele Departing America
                           By Steven Sills



                         Book One: Sang Huin

    "It is probable, then, that if a man should arrive in our city, so
     clever as to be able to assume any character and imitate any
     object, and should propose to make a public display of his
     talents and his productions, we shall pay him reverence as a
     sacred, admirable, and charming personage, but we shall tell him
     that in our state there is no one like him, and that our law
     excludes such characters, and we shall send him away to another
     city after pouring perfumed oil upon his head and crowning him
     with woolen fillets; but for ourselves, we shall employ, for the
     sake of our real good, that more austere and less fascinating
     poet and legend-writer, who will imitate for us the style of the
     virtuous man."  Plato (Republic)



Chapter One

At Toksugum Palace in Chongno of Seoul Sang Huin (known by his
friends in the states as Shawn) felt an empathy as deep as the gods; and
the reconstructed walls of ancient buildings that he could see into and
imagine long deceased emperors in coronation ceremonies or reading their
mandates became irrelevant. Yang Lin, parting from their movement toward
the steps that led toward the Royal Museum, began to walk to a distant
place where a woman in a western wedding dress stood at a pond posing
for a picture with her groom. Near earlier buildings Sang Huin had
noticed him looking at them questioningly. He had seen a sad and
innocent yearning in Yang Lin as if, after a long search, that creature
had found his alter ego in the woman and would not let it go.

After five minutes of waiting alone, sitting on those steps and
letting a cigarette dangle limp in a frown, Sang Huin realized that this
new friend of his was not just straying off briefly, so he gradually
went over there in a circuitous and jaunty stroll as if other things had
gained his attention and only by accident was he moving there. Yang Lin
told Sang Huin that he longed for her: longed for himself within her
beautiful clothes, within her commitment, and within her sex. He had
been so sincere. Sang Huin felt a worse form of compassion for him.  It
was sorrow, the enlightening, sweet venom, and it sank into him. It was
deep empathy. It was God. It was definitely something that was not
wanted. It stayed with him on the bus.

On a ride from the Nambu Bus Terminal to Chongju, Sang Huin's sleep
was spastic like a nervous twitch that would every now and then startle
him into wakefulness and he would wonder where he was: Muguk, Chongju,
Seoul, or "Miguk." Sometimes at the primary school in Muguk he would
ask, "Where are you from?"  Then once, in a coaching effort for the
pitch of a complete sentence, he had made the mistake of "Miguk...Miguk"
("America...America") and the class was in an uproar. He thought of this
in one of his startled awakenings. He looked from the window to flat
patches of skimpy forest that most Koreans thought of as so beautiful.
The way was straight, south and barren and made him almost yearn for the
tortuous roads that appeared near Umsong to be rid of scenery so bland.
Although the bus traveled down the highway as a solid, jitterless mass,
he jittered into more drowsiness.  The contents of his head shook and
his mother's voice cried out to him like locusts from the branches of
trees.  There was a hot sticky childish oozing within him. Within dreams
his fortitude was like marshmallows when pulled off of sticks after
roasting in a bonfire.  He heard voices of he and his sister counting 7
o'clock, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock rock. 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, twelve
o'clock rock - Ghosts won't find me.  Ready or not we'll find you.

Then there were those macabre photographs, at the trial in Houston,
of his grown sister's skeleton.  The police had looked for his sister's
body in the park but obviously not thoroughly in the ravine. In one year
they had only searched that park once and in the meantime her body had
decomposed. He dreamed of those photographs of skeletal remains and the
other photographs of more than a few bones that had gone off from the
rest.  They were marred too but by the fangs of dogs or other beasts
dragging them around before dumping them away from the rest of the
remains. He dreamt of these photographs exactly as they appeared from
the slide projector and in that sequence as one of those most godless
days of that long trial when one's whole body trembled in continuum
through bits of the hours with stolid, cadaverous expressions throughout
the ordeal. He assumed his parents had also behaved the same.  Before
the real confirmation of her death, all three had been functioning with
such dead but hopeful words and perfunctory gestures which were then
ripped out of them as the program, memory, and energy cells can be
pulled out of robots and soon they were thrust in their own personal
black abyss with none of the three able to see outside of blackness and
pain as much as they might have wanted to offer solace to each other.

Who could offer solace when the conclusion of life as an evil and
godless place had solidified into consciousness like Death etching her
name in wet cement? Back then, it had been obvious that the trial, a
pantomime of the mute for justice, could never be allocated to the dead
under the best circumstances, and this particular trial was going
nowhere.  The conclusiveness of the evidence and motive had been defaced
with time that had entirely decomposed her form. There had been
theories.  Plenty of circumstantial evidence had been presented.  Her
employer had done it to her as conclusively as a feeling could testify.
Then and now there was plenty of indication that she had been pregnant
with his child. Twenty years ago Sang Huin (Shawn then) had swung a golf
club into her eye and the blood had splattered everywhere.  On that day,
as a boy, he had thought nothing could happen worse than that; but back
then there was blood and back then there was composition.   He woke up
and once again knew that even in sleep there wasn't always repose.
Sometimes, without finding a way of sealing memories in tidy body bags,
one's inner voice was as active in sleep.  He said to himself that he
shouldn't be surprised by such restlessness when life's conundrums were
so horrific.  The passage of a few years, and the passage through a
thousand times of falling asleep could not even restore one's
equilibrium in something so horrific.  He shook off his sleep like a dog
its wetness.  He tried to think of Yang Lin whom he had left: that mild
voice so slow and deliberate in its intensity, the morbid and thoughtful
eyes like an ocean containing its ecosystem, the muscular young body
that had an orange hue like a Chinamen who had sucked up too much sun.

After the revelation he had listened to him repeatedly talk about
wishing that he had been born a woman; and except for once of saying,
"Well...I understand, but" (and stopping not knowing what to throw in as
the "but"), he had been silent with eyes of empathy. It was painful to
see a perspective; and Sang Huin broke out of his skin like a reluctant
and tortured snake but accepting the inevitability. He just stared at
the fountain for many uncomfortable minutes hoping that the mouth of the
fountain could articulate a statement that would solve the situation as
well as ease his discomfort.

At the fountain, in silence, he had thought of rigid Texan horses
and the lazy meditative cows of his home state in warm fields at mid-
afternoon--creatures of the gods with no sense of the vile
practicalities behind their domesticated state. During his times of
stress long ago they had often seemed to Sang Huin as so aesthetic that
one could wish to slip within them for an hour or a bit of the day; and
surely after having done it one might instantaneously wish for the
freedom of whatever was beyond the fence. Maybe, he had thought to
himself, something like this was how Yang Lin felt.

He had suddenly blurted out, "You commented that the pigeons and
the fountain in the pond are beautiful. Maybe they are." He had
hesitated feebly. The coarse words and tone had surprised both of them.
"I hear that doctors can now make a man half pigeon if he dares to have
a mixture of pubic hairs and pubic feathers; or if you prefer a
beautiful fountain-surgery a continual waterfall can come from your
ass." Sang Huin had not known where the words came from. His gentle
imagination had rarely formed such an aggressive flare of thoughts and
yet he had felt that he could not let this stranger--this recent buddy--
this someone he had slept with--save up money on the assumption that he
could be made into a beautiful woman. Twenty years from now he did not
want him to be made into a hybrid mess from a lifetime of painful
surgeries... hormonal confusion...mutilations.

But had he not mutilated four months earlier? A video "pang" girl
[the clerk at the video room where he had watched a movie with his
friend, Yang Kwam] tracked down the friend's license number, and then
the friend's telephone number, and began to inundate him with a flood of
messages. It was quite flattering and Sang Huin finally returned the
calls. He was curious. At that time he wanted a girlfriend. From an
erection, a yearning, an ejaculation, and more than he wished, knowledge
of his own virility by the conception, he proved the very essence of
manhood. She aborted at his request but nature aborted and mutilated:
still-death, genetic defects, and miscarriages. Human beings were rifted
apart from each other by circumstances of separation and death despite
love. The life of a being, itself, was nothing but different
transparencies miscellaneously tossed onto an overhead projector. No, he
thought, maybe that was just his own life. The transparencies of most
humans were in order--the last of which would be old age and decay but
what was written on them was meaningless. His transparency recently had
been to prove his manhood by having sex with a woman and it had all gone
awry.

Sang Huin sighed. He took off his shoes in the bus. He stroked his
feet, in short white sports socks, across the vinyl of the back of the
chair before him as if he were giving a massage to the person seated
there. He needed sex. He needed to lose himself in a pleasure that would
reduce his headache and release him from worries even if it was an
illogical frenzy far removed from reality and only lasted for a few
minutes.

He tried to rest comfortably in his seat, absorbing himself in Time
and Newsweek. Then someone yelped at him in Korean, pushing him out of
his sympathies toward the bondage of the Afghan population under the
theocracy of the Taleban and the tattered infrastructure of the country.
There was no way to catch even a word or two of it and this balding and
middle aged man gave Sang Huin a look as if he had wasted his time
talking to the world's biggest dummy. Sang Huin gave his typical defense
of "Miguk sarem" ("American") which would bring on a confused and
critical look--in this case, it was a closer examination of Sang Huin
and a slanting of the man's face as if he were ready to give Sang Huin a
big fat kiss. Sang Huin picked up his book bag on the spare seat near
the window and sat there.

It was complicated, in a sense. If he had been less temerarious
perhaps to not have the support system of this whole chain--family,
city, state, nation, and racial identification-- might have posed a
problem. To have lived all but the first few years in America, and so
existing as a Korean only by birth and race definitely made him American
in every way but a legal one. Most persons under such a scenario would
have clung to the country that had made up nearly all of his experience.
At least that was what he told himself. Effrontery and cowardice were
two sides of the same coin. He loved his mother and she was alone on the
American continent as he was in Asia. They were indeed alone in the
world.

Even though he cared about family (what was left of it with both
his father and sister now dead) it did not deter him from leaving
America. To be on a traveler's visa with his own Korean passport did,
however, seem to be a bit strange but he could not think of a situation
in life that was not confusing. Relationships were confusing although he
had never possessed one for very long.  When he had the ineluctable
sympathy for another person, it deflated all the romance.  He didn't
mind that so much.  To embark on a deep friendship with strong personal
commitment and devoid of the bouts of infatuation and frenzy like
seasickness seemed the right course; but all partners of the past seemed
to him to have wanted only to cast a romantic aura around him as if
scared to see the real person inside, and scared to look at beings that
were also banal and in continual suffering. Reflexively jumping into
pleasure like a lifebuoy, as a human did, what could one expect?  One
thing was sure: he had experienced a deep pain that his fellow humans
wouldn't even give the briefest of stares if they could avoid it.
Besides, no one wanted his enlightenment that the world was a bad place
when each was trying as best as he could to find an entrance into
Disneyland to which there where no security guards to force a departure.

He searched though his billfold for a calling card. He went to the
front of this high-tech bus and made a call.

"Yoboseyo."

"Yoboseyo. Yang Lin bakwa chuseyo."

Silence.

"Yang Lin or Antonio. Ku nun manhi irum ul cajigo isumnita.
I sarem i wanhamnita." He threw in both names that the little guy went
by and the telephone clicked off.

He called again.

"Yoboseyo."

"Yoboseyo. Yang--"

"What do you want with him?"

"I'd like to talk with your son. I am an acquaintance of his. He
helped me to get to Toksugum Palace. I want to thank him. I'd like to
talk to him again."   Yang Lin had told him that his father suspected
all male callers and that Sang Huin would have to give a defense of his
acquaintanceship but Sang Huin felt awkward in his misrepresentation.
Here he was playing with a man's reality concerning his son. He did not
feel good about himself.

"Well, he isn't here. He's never here!"

The telephone clicked off. Sang Huin felt hurt. He felt a morbid
clarity behind how people always left his life. He thought about what he
"knew" of this Chinese friend, Yang Lin, if he knew anything at all: he
was adopted and lived in America; that those parents died-- his mother
first and then the father in a drunk driving accident; that he was
readopted by Korean parents; that his father despised him and suspected
his son was gay; and that Yang Lin felt that his English level was the
same as his Korean.  Abstract ideas must not have existed in his head at
all. In short, he "knew " very little and the scanty but pathetic
information he received might, for what he knew, have been nothing but a
mendacity. Sang Huin had a great empathy; but now another friendship had
just bit the dust.

Had it been a month ago that Sung Ki had left him. Sung Ki: even now
the name sounded musical.  After the video pang girl's attempt at
marital entrapment, this neighbor boy had been most alluring in their
nightly rendezvous of two months. The sister who fed him rice and Korean
pizza and the father who wanted to introduce him to his native country
by teaching him the sounds of Korean letters were glad to get the
youngest child an English teacher.  Little did they know of the
pleasurable respites from pain Sang Huin was getting in the back
bedroom. Homosexuality was so taboo there that nobody believed in its
existence.  In that respect, free of discrimination, one was free to be
gay in Korea. Then the18 year-old boy was told to meet the masculine and
the vicious just as his country dictated. Right after getting his letter
from the military, Sung Ki laid out Sang Huin's blanket in a different
room. He talked of needing a girlfriend. It hurt; but, Sang Huin
rationalized it was what Sung Ki needed so why shouldn't he talk about
it?  Superiors in the military often beat a man if they felt that he
didn't have a girlfriend evidenced when no letters and photographs were
forthcoming. Then one day he was gone and soon thereafter Sang Huin lost
the address book and key chain from the souvenir shop at the history
museum Sung Ki had given to him. He lost both by leaving them in the
locker at the mokotang (bathhouse ). "We lose our friends," thought Sang
Huin, "and then we lose the things that our friends give to us." It felt
less harsh to make the idea applicable for all mankind.

There had been no real reason for him to go to Seoul this time.
There were no private lessons there. His reactions toward Umsong also
did not have much of a rationale. Occasionally, even when there were no
private lessons in that area he sometimes got up around 4 a.m
nonetheless; took an hour long bus ride to that small town he had once
lived in; walked near bowing rice and corn; crossed the bridge around a
thin circular lake at a small park; and stared at the Korean moon bolted
tightly against the Korean sky. He wanted for the night to capture him
somehow--for a drunk motorcyclist or a lazy trucker to whisk a wild
adventure and physical intimacies upon him and yet, in full wistful
innocence, he equally wanted what he would always go there for: to hear
nothing but birds and a whisk of wind in the tranquility of that sleepy
town in one of its most tranquil hours. Nothing of the former ever
happened and he would always come from the impulse to a feeling of loss.
His impetus to go to Seoul this week had come from a dominant feeling of
disconnection experienced by one who knew the extreme violence of the
world, who knew the madness of hope for anyone, and felt being buried
alive in that one perspective that the world was an evil place-a
perspective that was not ethereal but solid as a coffin even if it did
spill over into other things.  A further disconnection of any
significance would cause such an individual to let a numbness and
deadening of the concept of self to take place. The day before his
fleeing to Seoul, his platonic friendship with Kim Yang Kwam had gone
awry and he found himself floundering in suffocating despair as that
time years earlier at the trial. Yang Kwam was asleep with his hand in
his underwear when Sang Huin awakened. Sang Huin touched him. It was the
end of the closest Korean friendship that had been his life support in
the six months he resided in this foreign country, South Korea, which
was his birth home and the source of his nationality.

Now it was Kim Yang Kwam he kept thinking about in the bus. Sang
Huin was labeled as dirty a few nights ago: the way he walked on the
floor with his shoes instead of taking them off at the door; the half
open window that allowed any insect an easy passage; the fact that he
didn't have any rubbing alcohol to cleanse the mosquito bites that his
friend gained while sleeping in Sang Huin's room; the fattening mess of
pancakes with half burnt ridges in place of rice which Sang Huin
prepared for him despite the criticism; and then came questions about
the nature of his relationship with Sung Ki.

Glancing out of the window, he pulled out a pint of "ooyoo" (milk)
from his sack. His throat was not dry or hurting but for some reason he
felt the need to caress it with what he drank as well as with his
fingertips. He drank his milk, attempted memorizing a few words of
Korean, and then went back to sleep. He had a strange dream of some
inconsequential happening in Seoul. The dream was not much different
than reality. In the dream the subway (Orange Line, number three)
stopped and he noticed a young blind man with a dog getting into one of
the cars. Sang Huin quickly moved toward that door. Then he found
himself walking through one car after another since the blind man and
the dog passed through the inside doors. He woke up and thought of the
dream in the context of himself. He was drawn to beauty and carnal
activity but also to those captive in some imperfection for within them
sensitivity, existential and knowledgeable of suffering, would be
complete. He yearned for the deep intelligence that knew such things.
His imagination swelled with the thought of this individual just as it
had when he actually encountered him in Soul. Sang Huin was always
traveling--especially when he was in the States. He was discontent and
was seeing himself falling further and further away from the normal
path.  He had nothing but a college degree, no specialty, no ambition
for money, he couldn't really think of a field or discipline for
himself, family was a deep life altering wound that made the thought of
gravitating himself around a wife and children unbearable, and even his
hobby of playing a cello was as a musical dilettante. He looked out of
the window and smoothed out his hair. The bus was becoming full now.
Still, no one was standing.

Maybe, he thought, he should have been proud at the restaurant.
Instead, when Yang Kwam said that he never wanted to see him again Sang
Huin said, "I understand," but was thinking "Well, then why are we
eating together?" Yang Kwam's eyes were stern. Indeed, it was the end.
He felt stunned at that table: to lead a person to a restaurant so that
he could not talk to him and then at the inquiry on if he was upset--
Oh, what did it matter? Sang Huin's head hurt thinking about it. He put
his hand on his forehead and looked out of the window. Sang Huin said
nothing to the statement of "Don't ever call me." They both ate sparsely
in thorough silence, Yang Kwam paid the bill, and then he was gone. Sang
Huin's instinct was to follow his former friend to the ends of the earth
on the public bus system and to harass him in the bus by making him feel
miserable for his declaration that he was a dirty person. No, he told
himself, he had handled the situation the best that he could. After
sitting at the table for a while, he had withdrawn to his home
passively. On what seemed like an eternal trip, cramped on a seat in the
bus, disconnection was making his mind jittery, soft, and rolling like a
ball away from him.  He tried sleeping but his mind kept trying to
imagine what really took place between his sister and her boss at the
park if indeed it had been really him at all.  The jury years ago had
not thought of the evidence as being conclusive.  In sentencing a man to
a life of imprisonment it couldn't be done on a feeling.

He felt lost and loose. He still felt stunned. He remembered that he
had only touched him by barely stroking his hair and his hand and then
touching his underwear. It only lasted a minute and then he turned on
his side away from him and his own instincts.  It was an insignificant
minute in one's life and he could not figure out why it became such
evidence of the accuser that he was dirty-the charge of homosexuality
not being directly stated. He asked himself why, even now, he was
staring at moving forest and long stretches of road with this yearning
for love.  He opened another pint of milk. He sipped and then rested its
opening to his bottom lip. Why did human beings end in such closure? Why
did they gain worth and awareness of their being only in personal
interactions? Was he nothing but the composite of other people's
impressions of him? These impressions--these judgments-- could not be
real. They were based on brief outward gestures and the judges had
nothing but their own usual experiences of their petty and selfish lives
to compare others with. In Japan women who left their children locked up
in hot cars were rarely accused of the crime of manslaughter; and in
Korea the handicapped, he had seen, were left to crawl like worms,
pushing their carts and singing their songs as traditional music blared
forth. He died every time he saw one of them. He yearned for the love
and the language where he could befriend someone who was handicapped and
he chastised himself for only being able to lay money in some of their
cans. Once he put his hand into the hair of such a man. He stroked the
hair around his face. The gesture lasted only a couple seconds. The man
screamed out something and a security guard began moving toward them.
Sang Huin placed money in the can and went away. Then he began to
question himself. Maybe it was loneliness that had compelled him to do
that. After all, the action was undoubtedly bizarre in the sense that no
one else did such things.  He was not wearing a monk's robe.  Another
man's fate was none of his business.  This type of action just was not
done; and yet, he was not the same as others. Suffering the paralysis
that would not allow him to make a full smile and finding the eyes x-
rays that could go, for the most part, beyond pleasant countenances to a
suffering innate in other beings, it was no wonder that he was peculiar.
It was no wonder that at Christmas parties or barrooms he sat and drank
in silence feeling like a buffoon for not acting like one. In ways he
was a buffoon: his taciturn ways that thwarted the lighthearted
frivolity of a world conceived out of motion was the substance that
often caused contemptuous laughs.

What did it matter? What did any of his actions towards others
matter?  Everyone came and left him. He was dizzy on a merry-go-round.

"You must all eat," said Sung Ki as he poured water into the
remaining rice in Sang Huin's bowl. He had heard it so many times. How
they had carried on an affair with the sister staying there and the
overnight visits of Sung Ki's father was a mystery.

They had met in the park in Umsong. Sang Huin was memorizing words
in his textbook entitled Let's Speak Korean. Sung Ki spoke something to
him in Korean. "Miguk Sarem imnidad" responded Sang Huin (I am an
American). Sung Ki, accompanied by a high school friend, took him to eat
kimbop (a Korean version of sushi). He spoke in English the entire time
neglecting his school friend from the conversation. After visiting a
couple museums, Sung Ki gave Sang Huin his beeper number. Sang Huin
invited him to a Christmas party held for students at a language
institute but stayed contained to his own students and his new friend,
Sung Ki. That night they slept together; and the boy that had stroked
Sang Huin's leg with his foot when they were eating kimbop wanted to
hold hands while the two of them lay next to each other. Sung Ki, soon
afterwards, began to plan out their time together. Sang Huin did what he
requested: touring the Independence Museum; mountain climbing; free
English lessons, and visits to his Buddhist temple and congregation.
Soon Sang Huin was spending every night at Sung Ki's apartment and a
month later their relationship was a sexual one.

Sang Huin thought about how Sung Ki cleaned the apartment by putting
a wet towel under one of his bare feet and sliding across the floor with
it; how he used to go into the bathroom with his newspaper and would not
come out for over an hour; and that sentence he would always say, "you
must all eat" meaning that every speck of rice left in the bowl should
be mixed with hot water into a soup so that nothing was wasted. On the
day that he learned that Sung Ki was going away he came to his apartment
and asked if there was anything he could do or get him. There wasn't. He
sat on the sofa, cold and pierced, as Sung Ki ignored him, cleaning one
thing or another and then reading something or another. Sung Ki lit a
cigarette and sat on a balcony that overlooked the mountains and rice
patties of Umsong. After a few more moments of silence, Sang Huin went
to him. His voice was shaky like a faltering foundation. He cried.  It
wasn't so much in reference to him as it was his sister.  It was his
first tears for her.  It was in reference to non-ending perpetual loss.
He knew that Sung Ki would construe it as solely for him.  He felt
embarrassed and the embarrassment increased as the two men hugged.  Sung
Ki began to cry. Sang Huin said, "I want to apologize. I'm sorry if I
did something wrong. You wanted a girlfriend and my friendship and I
made you have a boyfriend."

"It's okay. I liked the feeling then." That friendship had bit the
dust.

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.

There had been a time when the whole world seemed to him full of
connections. Perhaps that is what made his childhood memories so
special: as a child he believed that their meaning would go on forever.
The temporary nature of family marshmallow roasts and monopoly games
with his father; tire swings and neighbor's tree houses; bicycle radios
fastened to handlebars; selling snow cones to passing cars; bicycle
routes; meatloaves, potatoes, and onion rings; bi bi bop and kimchi
chige; that trip to Arkansas at a distant relative's house and how he
and his sister had played in the snow with a "cousin" the whole day; his
sister....

Oh, how painful! He didn't want to think of that ever. He wanted to
find the beauty of the present moment. How good it was to stretch out
into motion; to feel the power of his arms; and the embrace of water.

He thought about how on his walk here an ordinary happening had
touched him without even then being aware of it.  A young boy standing
at a curb with other pedestrians waiting for the light to change rocked
a metal, rectangular trash container, which swung back and forth on a
hinge. Sang Huin put his hand on his head in passing; and the world
could not have seemed more rich and connected by this impersonal
incident than if Sung Ki's Buddha had manifested himself supplying
answers to every question that Sang Huin had ever had in his head. This
contentment and absorption in the poetic qualities of the present moment
lasted only that long: a moment. He told himself that he continually
wanted to be in the present moment as fully as this no matter how banal
or what lonely patterns it consisted of.  It was better than searching
through memories of people long gone who had no capability of returning
to him again.

He pulled his dangling legs from the pool. So much came and went. It
was hideous in a way: he could not determine who or what was important.
He wasn't even sure how much people were supposed to mean to him, if
anything at all. Of his friend, Yang Kwam, what importance to the long-
term aspect of his life did this man make?  Disconnection ran amuck
looting the benign corpses of good memories.  After sitting himself on a
bench in front of the pool, a sadness at the loss of his friendship with
Yang Kwam made him feel age that he did not possess.

He watched a couple young men stretch out in motion.  He watched
their splashing, their excitement, and their frenzying limbs with the
awareness that this tousling around had no higher significance.  He got
a vision in his mind.  It was a feeling with musical notes. He got his
underwear and his book bag from the locker and dressed himself
marginally. In the dark sleeping room of the mokotang, where many
businessmen got their only bit of relaxation from the week, he sat in a
reclining chair near the window and began writing down notes but he felt
that he was dabbling.  He deluded himself that an ability to record
notes on a staff would tranform him from an amateur cello performer and
general musical dilettante to a composer.  it was a dream for dreams
meant that he was more than amarginally educated professionless clod
kicked by circumstances to job, residence, and sexual orientation.
Dreams meant that he was more than a mere carbon organism jilted around
by electrical activity in the circuitry within the result of hornomal
activity and the results of genetics.  Dreams deluded him with a sense
of purpose that would be mroe pleasant than reality.

One man's long and thick penis throbbed up and down on its own
volition by the impetus of dreams. Sang Huin tried not to stare but he
could not help it. His eyes, still getting over an eye virus, began to
hurt and he felt tired. He put away his composition and then put his
hands over his eyelids.

He went to sleep. He dreamed of a woman named Gabriele driving down
a country road in Arkansas. She reached for a can of snuff that was on
her dashboard. The roads she chose were random and she kept yearning to
move southwest until she was out of America to that neighboring country
of Mexico so different than the homogonous American model that was rife
the world over.  He saw into her mind and her hopes to cross over the
Mexican border and veer off the main road through adobe hamlets, and
cacti and past Mexican Indians.

When he woke from his epiphany he wasn't sure what to do with it so
he returned to the pool only to find it had been drained. Seven streams
of water gushed from spouts at the bottom of the pool and three young
boys were running around in the collecting waters--one kicking water up
to the lower parts of the mirror that covered the walls.  It all
reminded him of his mother blowing up a plastic pool for he and his
sister and how she ran the hose over to the pool to fill it with water.
He could remember how the two of them had splashed freely inside it for
hours but were so prudishly careful that neighbors hosed off their
grassy feet before entering with them.  He remembered telling one
neighbor boy to get out after he had disregarded the rule, soiling their
clean waters, and when he, "Shawn," wouldn't leave he got out to tell
his mother only to gain the enflaming sting of Texan fire ants on the
souls of his feet. He could remember his screams more than the sting. He
looked toward his reflection on the nearest part of the mirrored wall,
but still steamed, it wasn't there.

His thoughts crumbled like Graham crackers and spilled like pints of
milk that Mrs. Ghrame, the kindergarten teacher, had given to each class
member as they watched Winnie the Pooh and Piglet on television before
being made to sleep on mats for a nap.  He felt lost childhood with so
many forgotten memories sucking him into an invisible vortex of dust. He
was running around with a cowboy hat, a play gun, and a holster.  He was
running around in his own wayward thoughts before adolescence created a
hunger for beautiful bodies and a neediness that he would never be able
to shake.

He jolted up and went where there was more light. He seated himself
on a bench near a row of lockers believing that what he had was some
story unrestrained by notes but when he put the pen to paper notes
exuded there. He sensed the brilliance that came to him and felt awe
toward the paper that could magically reflect the mood and full realm of
his mind. He yearned to embrace his cello and to practice the notes of a
Gabriele symphony that he was composing.


Chapter Two

He dressed himself.  As he put on his socks, he did it with the
mentality of a small child who still felt newness in the sensation.
Sexual glutton of adult games, introvert, a man perpetually weakened and
wary in ways unbecoming to a man, he still was a little wiser than most
on a couple issues.  He was cognizant that as an effect of adolescent
awakenings an adult often was so obsessed with being in the company of
others that finding any degree of happiness could not occur without
them.  He was a lot different in that respect: influences by hormones to
sociability were thwarted by his wariness that gave him back his
childhood innocence.  Although he was an adult he could still play alone
albeit uneasily. Also they, the unwary ones, were so fixated on gaining
bigger and more complex pleasures in their gross gluttony to have
everything before death that the marvel of air rushing into one's lungs
or the feel of a spring breeze brushing against one's face was lost to
them entirely. He wanted the remnant of early childhood--the memories of
strong aromas, sights, and sounds as his senses depicted them-- to live
in him and not be the cause of mourning. He wanted to find the traces of
deceased family in those early days and be able to glance back onto
those tenuous decaying remnants of memory with a sense of happiness at
what was once there. Still, even with the earliest and most benign
memories furthest removed from the tragic end, such a feat was difficult
to master. Everything in the mind of a 5-year-old from the smells of
greased telephone polls to the sounds of the school bus that picked up
his older 7-year-old sister, and everything in the mind of a 10-year-old
from getting his first b-b gun to spending his first time away from
family at a summer camp was like walking barefoot on sharp gravel. This,
however, was better than having his entrails hacked out of him in that
shock of finding his father dangling from a noose in the workroom of his
basement.  Thinking that early memories were even more benign than the
present, he knew that it was only his thinking that made them painful.
He judged that he was the source of his misery and with application he
would find a way to plant himself in their fecund topsoil and burgeon
into the future.  His childhood memories were mostly American in origin
although it was difficult to isolate the Korean episodes from that of
the latter. After the school bus would rush in front of a road near the
trailer park and whisk his sister away, his mother would pursue her
early morning exercises in front of the television and he would emulate
her movements. He remembered loving the thought of catching lightning
bugs like his sister and the neighbor children and his repulsion towards
it when his mother stated that they were "God's little creatures." He
remembered getting lost in a store, feeling tiny among lady mannequins,
and being nearly hit by a car as he played in the street. A man yelled
at his mother for letting her child run around unrestrained in the
streets. Humiliated, she sent him to the bedroom of the trailer. The
radio on the mantle of the bed was playing  "Raindrops keep falling on
my head" and other lugubrious folk melodies. He listened. He cried on
her white blanket as if she had banished him forever. He remembered that
his father came home on that occasion and took him to the Orbit Inn for
a coca cola.  He twirled around on a stool restored to his euphoria as
his father strutted his work talk to men his age seated on other stools.

Walking from the mokotong he thought of a story that he often read
to the children in Kwang Sook's kindergarten in Chongju, a place where
he often worked for a few hours each week.  But his mind distorted it as
the benign and innocuous innocence of childhood is mutilated and the
mutilation calcified by experience.  Seoul Tiger gets on a plane.  He
waves goodbye to his mother and father from the window.  He feels the
plane move and rise in the air.  He shuts his eyes briefly.  Then he
opens them widely in amazement.  Seoul Tiger looks through the window.
He sees a valley of clouds below him.  Then he looks down further and he
sees Sri Lanka.  The plane lands.  Seoul Tiger gets out of the plane.
He gives the deferential slight bow and says hello to Tamil Tiger.
Tamil Tiger picks up his suitcase and takes it to a car.  Tamil Tiger's
mother is in the car.  She says, 'Hello' to Seoul Tiger.  They all go to
the home of Tamil Tiger's family.  Tamil Tiger's mother slaughters a pig
and boils it in her stew while her husband brandishes a machete
playfully.  Then they all eat at the table.  'Do you eat rice?' asks
Seoul Tiger.  'No, I eat unleavened bread,' says Tamil Tiger.  'Here are
some Rotis.'  Tamil Tiger passes him the plate.  The plate has rotis on
it.  Seoul Tiger holds the unleavened bread in his palm wondering how to
eat it.  Then a stew, called a curry, is put upon his plate.  'Do you
eat kimchee?' asks Tamil Tiger. 'What is kimchee?" asks Tamil Tiger.

Again he was bouncing around in a bus without time to rush back
to the yangwam, the room he rented outside of an old woman's home. He
questioned himself on why he had agreed to give private lessons in
various places outside of Chongju.  He answered to himself that the
strung out schedule and the long rides matched his disorganized, wayward
thoughts. It felt comfortable to bounce around in the similar movements
of his circumambulatory personal life.   He hoped that the bus would
arrive in time so that he could eat a meal before going into those
lessons. People in these small towns would not acknowledge his handicap
of linguistic ignorance. They demanded more than his short, concrete,
and ungrammatical utterances. If he had been an Anglo-Saxon he would
have been served in restaurants with simple statements like "Chop che
bop, chushipshio" (chop che bop, please). But in small towns even a
waitress who had experienced him before would come forth with entire
paragraphs to serve onto him and then would stand there bewildered that
paragraphs of reciprocal eloquence would not be returned by someone
clearly of her nationality. At last she would go away and the dinner
would come for the retard. This time, as always, he ate quickly and then
waited for some woman's children to get him at the bus terminal. He did
not know the woman's name even though he taught there and she gave him
money and he did not know her children's names even though he taught
them. They were just his "little tongmuls" (little animals). Sang Huin
did not like the difficulty of memorizing Korean names so he did it
seldom.

Inside the bus station he changed to a different bench. A two or
three year old girl, chastised by her mother, sought refuge between his
legs and would not come out. She closed the legs like an iron gate. The
mother did not seem to demand that she leave the fortress; and he
enjoyed the fact that she seemed to gain comfort from his presence even
though his face expressed the awkwardness of having her there.

He missed childhood. Surely all people did. Was it so awful to admit
this? No one that he had ever known had spoken of his or her loss.
Granted, one could not stay comatose in innocence--the delight of
pulling some trivial plastic or paper objects from cereal boxes;
Halloween costumes; or the Christmas togetherness. The newness of
running around trying to beat the clouds or run barefoot after balls in
the ecstasy of  just being alive ended quickly to girl chases,
obligations, family, and all of such dead weight. He couldn't have
stayed with his mother forever. If he could have remained steady on the
American continent he would have needed more than just her; and so
alone, with a sense that he would never find family or closeness again,
he had ventured here to another continent that was and wasn't his home,
and where he did not speak a language that was and wasn't his. Still,
coming here was not entirely bereft of positive notions. Being an
innocent, a childish perspective prevailed.

He wanted to once again hold something tenuous and fragile in the
palm of his hand as a child would a tinctured caterpillar, the
butterfly.  He wanted to be there with it innocuously in awe of
something that really had no use to him.  He loathed this interaction,
this anathema of the soul so intertwined in insatiable and wanton
selfishness.  He wanted to be Seoul Tiger once again but such was not in
the survivalist impulses of man.  Such was not destiny.  Hadn't there
been numerous times when as a boy he would sit hours with a stray dog
that was needing to claim a gentle master, scared to take it home and
yet, like a true friend, sensitive most to creatures that could not
articulate themselves in any other way than in the eyes.  The eyes, that
dilated neediness to be in the presence of a friend in a hostile world
where being born was not a sanction to live well or live long.  One's
innocence ran by like a shell-shocked soldier; circumventing normal
sexual drive by being gay would not free him to an innocence that was
forlorn.  Now there was just the wistful need for family, children he
helped to say small things, and his strange obsession with empty
physical connections he could depart from easily.  He preferred young
students because they did not make him uncomfortable by pressing the
issue that a man in his early twenties should be planning to have a
family. His private domain consisted of a blessed, taciturn instrument
called a cello that required no words to say something deep. He had
dragged it on the plane and had paid an astronomical fee to get it onto
the airlines. What a burden it had been to him lugging the thing around
and yet, dilettante that he was, he needed some beauty to exude out of
his hardened mud.  He needed reverberating notes to sink into the
plaster cast around his mind, which had the signature of the world as an
evil place upon it , and caress his soft and lonely brain.

Finally, the two or three-year-old parted one of the kneecaps and
the mother pushed candy bribes before her nose to keep her quiet and
contained. Soon they bought a ticket in the Chinchon station and boarded
a bus. All bus terminals in cities under a million people had cement
floors and were dark and dirty like a cellar. Just like he had seen in
myriad other terminals, here a man came along with a plastic watering
bucket with a nozzle used for watering plants. He rinsed the floor with
the water contained in it but did
not follow that with either a mop or a broom. A few minutes later, two
boys came into the terminal. One had a basketball in his hands. The
other one stood a few feet behind him. He looked bored and fat.

"Anyong Haseyo" (Peace you do)

"Anyong Hashimnika, Sonsaeng nim," (Peace you do, teacher), said the
one with the basketball.

"Uri-tul nun taxi ul sayang hata?" (We taxi to use?) He knew it was
as ungrammatical as a pig. He knew that again there would be no taxi.
Again they would be walking.  Still it was his way of saying something.
The one with the basketball who could figure it out shook his head.

They walked down the sidewalks. The two boys lead the way. Sang Huin
felt that the roles had been inverted and he felt a twinge of resentment
that he was a child or a retard in his own native country and that
children were dragging him about. The three of them moved down sidewalks
like window-shopping loiterers looking into every mom and pop store
along the way. "Ilchik tangshin-tul rul basketball ul hayoshimnita
kachi?" (Early you basketball did?) The fat boy nodded his head
silently. The boy knew his genius in interpretive skills.  A sense of
pride exuded over his face in a white light but the flush of expression
was extremely ephemeral. It came upon him and vanished in just a few
seconds.

"Who won?" asked Sang Huin in English.

The fat boy pointed to himself with his thumb. He even smiled for a
second in a sort of bored way.

Then they opened a gate and they went into what looked like a house
only it was separated into two apartments.

Sang Huin used his photograph cards like magic tricks to get them to
practice tenses and syntax. He liked seeing their tiny house and
thinking how his life might have been--for better or for worse--within
the childhood of his race. He loved English as he loved music; and
sometimes he combined the two in such classes, but with a small feeling
of resentment (to which his smile and gentle nature gave no indication)
as if his time was sodden in musical doggerel that defiled him like a
solecism when he might well be playing Haydn and Boccherini.

He wondered about the girl dressed in the dumpy blue skirt of her
school uniform, and the boys in jeans. Were they content to be Koreans
or did they yearn for bigger and better things seduced by the American
culture that came to them through the cinema and the music and through
his presence as well as the English that they studied. If they weren't
content, he thought, it wasn't for him to say they were wrong. It was a
globalized world and America was the power and the standard that was the
impetus for its formation. That was why he was here with his English. He
couldn't have gotten any other job in Korea when he couldn't master the
simplest of sentences in the native language. He didn't like the sour
perceptions that he had of America. It was home. It was still home.

In Umsong, during those times he had waited in the office of the
kindergarten for his class to begin, the children would always see him
through the window. They knew at that point that he didn't speak Korean
and wasn't one of them and for that reason they were attracted to him.
They would bang and climb on the window in their eagerness to be near
him; and some, using a runny nose as an excuse, would be permitted to go
into the hall. To the side of a fish aquarium hung a roll of toilet
tissue. They would wipe their noses and peak into the office. They would
squeal. He liked it. He liked being an American--sometimes.

He looked more intensely at these Chinchon students. Who would they
become? As they begin to feel hormones, the adrenaline of the four-year
high called love, and the frenzy of sex luring them into steady
relationships and accompanying obligations, would they have moments
where they too yearned to be in a hammock under their Grandma Lee's
cherry trees?  In his case he could recall the image of a photograph of
a neighbor his family had labeled as "Grandma" Vera with her black dress
rustling in the wind carrying him in her arms. Would they think upon
theirs-something similar to Vera frying hamburgers on the grill as the
scents of angel-food cakes came from the windows of her kitchen?  He
chastised himself.  He told himself that only broken people looked back
on childish irrelevance. The rest looked to the future in their
insatiable hungers for bigger pleasures and their present connections
that they might use to secure their hedonistic whims.  But he was a
"broken" person and the thought of Vera returned to him.  When he
thought of her intensely the image emblazoned in memory shook him and it
was hard to think that it could not make her alive again. And yet to
have had a connection (and the most unfortunate of lives surely have had
many) would justify everything. A personal contact in the past or when
the wind...or the sun...or the rain touched him, that alone would
justify a life of barren prospects.

"Unto us a child is born. Unto us a child is given."  He thought of
the words of the composer, Handel. Yes, he thought, he had done a
horrible thing by encouraging his girlfriend to abort their child. It
was wrong to have robbed a being of life and any connections the fetus
might have had beyond its own cell divisions.  Secondly, this cynicism
that a woman, spellbound in romance, robbed a man of his sperm to
produce a baby by which to devote herself and obtain a purpose in life
while thrusting him into the financial maintenance of this prize had
caused him to abort major connections in his own life. Now, apart from
his mother, there were no connections.  There were only phantoms of
people flitting through ethereal consciousness, and by coming here to
find his land he had parted from her.  When his sister was murdered, he
was just beginning his studies at the university. When his father
committed suicide, Sang Huin's cadaverous numbness was on fire and he
felt that any trace of himself was being incinerated.  Mentally, he was
running to and fro in the hope of retarding the flames that were eating
him for their fuel. Back then the thought of his father dangling from
the noose recurred to him every few moments. At that time he wanted to
check himself into a hospital for he felt a loss of sanity.  His world
was three dimensional but totally impersonal and wobbling. After months
of virtual silence and the icy stares of his mother through the most
enervated and perfunctory movements of planting flowers and trees no
different than what she had or stripping wallpaper and putting up
patterns that were nearly identical to the old ones, he spent a month in
Galveston.  A month watching waves dash against the shore was enough to
make him see that being one of a billion waves dashed into the sands was
a pattern engrained into life that he must not take personally; and so
he returned to school. By will and discipline in reigning in his
thoughts he made it through college and a year of graduate school.  But
he could not take the stagnation that scholarly pursuits forced him to
endure and became the animated billiard ball being shot from one area of
the table to the next--one part of the country to the next--falling
homeless into dark holes.

Sadness punched him in the stomach. It was enough--"nomu" (too
much). He frowned. He didn't care. Six or seven minutes early--who would
mark the time especially when he traveled such a distance to give them
these lessons. He told them that the session had ended and they got an
envelope of money from their mother, which they brought to him. The
session didn't seem as if it had begun. It all was a vacuum--a void.  He
untied the double knots that were contained on his shoes and put them
on. Korean people were so quick at slipping on shoes, and he assumed
that anytime someone waited for him to leave it was a complete
aggravation for them. His mother had spent so much time teaching him to
tie and then double-tie. He had been such an ignorant and inept child.
The habit was deeply engrained in his psyche. The students stared and
waited at his childish wrestling with his shoes. He knew that he needed
slip-ons that would foster a quick exodus after he had taken them off at
the door.

He stepped out over the crevice of a yard. A light sprinkling or
heavy mist was falling upon him. Past the gate and into the street the
generalized memories of a hundred such days with a hundred similar rains
came to him. Rain was for him only a baptism of emancipation.  From a
glance up at the clouds he was compelled to acknowledge realities
outside his own thoughts--and indeed Sang Huin needed the rain of Noah
to get out of his own ruminations. Yet, a foreigner's experience was
indeed like no others' and he was an introverted being traumatized by
the great chasm of the murder of a sibling and finding the blue dangling
body of his father. At 24, any man's boyhood was buried under only a
shallow layer of dirt and for one with maimed manhood the clay was never
solid, was partially washed away, and boyhood often resurfaced. He was a
runaway from the American experience and his thoughts, when not able to
do it in deeds, almost always ran to Seoul.  The rural areas where he
worked and at one time had lived gave him the solitude and the
meditative power to think his weird thoughts as he tried to reconstruct
his manhood but the problem was that he did it too much. Seoul was
felicity, the exhilarating movements, the museums, the symphonies, and
the sexual bliss.  Within it the hurt was diffused and boyhood was
gagged and he was rarely cognizant of its screams. At the bus station it
began to rain heavily. A few years ago, he thought, the sun had droned
on with the days of the trial and the rare rain had been his only
comfort.

In an hour's time, during the bus ride, each of these students would
be completely gone from his mind exuded like the entangling conundrums
of feeling, ideas, and senses in sleep. If all people were shadows of
this realm in the flickering of light, what solid entity cast the
shadow? Was it God? Was there a god?  If the shadows were more concrete
than the light, what would this say about life? He decided to stop
thinking such things. Myriad complex and morbid thoughts, profound or
inane, would not raise him to a wiser man.  They would just get him
stuck in their muddy ruts.

Back in a bus, he thought about how much of his life was dragged
about in transportation here and there for a Korean buck. He didn't know
anybody in Chongju but a simple advertisement in the paper would have
been enough to solve his dilemma in providing him with private lessons
near his home for needed South Korean Won. Still, if his whole life was
spent in these bus rides, fate was not bad. He could be a starving North
Korean or one of the dead soldiers who got their submarine trapped on a
reef in the South Korean jurisdiction of the ocean and had been hunted
down by the South Korean soldiers. He had a South Korean passport and an
American residency. He was single and free to see the world. He didn't
do that much and had lots of time and some money to spend.

He had little mastery over his thinking. Since he was a creative
person it often went running wild through meadows with the gods. He knew
there was genius to be gained in the company of deities so wild.   He
had left his mother's home and his mother country to find manhood-
perverse, greedy, manhood with its insatiable wants, its selfish
calculating plans, and its grandiose desire to find its own unique
adventures and habits.  She, his mother, would meanwhile be re-planning
and redecorating rooms. He loved her deeply but she was not everything.
He needed more connections to keep himself from rising like a balloon
and going adrift; and lacking them, looking onto his life from the
clouds, he could see the obvious: that this mortal would not be there
when he became much older. For all of his life there was only one claim
to be made and that was upon himself.  In this respect he was quite
American.


Chapter Three

Traditional homes often had extra guesthouses as an extension to the
main unit and it was within this "yogwam" in Chongju that he more or
less had residence. Luckily for him, during summers these outdoor rooms
were not so horrible but in winters the cold snuffed the residents out
of sleep in early mornings as animals from forest fires and the mostly
aged tenants, before finding warmth elsewhere, would individually go to
splash their bodies and faces in a shared bathroom not much different
than the ones bears use in zoos. One low faucet fed the cement creek,
which had a plastic bowl floating in it. No different than one's paws,
the bowl was the means of obtaining a bath.

It was in a bland closet sized room that his cello was in one corner
and he, a laptop computer, a short wave radio, and his stack of clothes
were at the other end. When he arrived there after teaching in Chinchon,
the ride made him feel exhausted; and after an hour of work, his
notebook paper with the Gabriele symphony was under the sweaty socks of
his feet, the Voice of America news broadcast became nothing but static,
and he was asleep.

A person remembers his last dream if awakened in a specific stage of
dreaming, if the mind is devising some way to startle the dreamer into
going to the bathroom, or if the examination of present problems in a
skit becomes violent images running amuck.  Unrepressed wishes, and
rehearsing events before they actually take place to gain some sense of
how to respond before they occur are the ideas most often given for
dreaming but the brain is a revelatory organ not of future events but of
present realities; and so it was with him.

He dreamt it was Buddha's birthday and that Yang Kwam was under a
huge canvas canopy on a university campus where the ground was a hard
sandless desert. Those under the canvas were resting and drinking as the
others played soccer; but Sang Huin was alone on a dry and grassless
bluff that overlooked the activity. He was drifting on and off in sleep;
and although a bit conscious of being alone and feeling reluctant to
have Yang Kwam involved in a host of other lives in his absence, he was
unwilling to tamper with fate or reduce his exposure to the sun, shaped
with divine human limbs like Aten himself, that kept putting him to
sleep.

A man came up to him. He first spoke in Hanguk mal (Korean), but
upon getting no acknowledgment of having been understood, he changed to
English.

"I thought that you surely knew a little Korean. It is my mistake."

Sang Huin sat up.

"Let me introduce myself. My name is Kim Jin Huan. My major is
tourism. I study here at Chongju University and I'm part of the English
club here among other things. I'm very pleased to meet you. You can
teach me lots of things and we can become friends but I can't learn at
this altitude--not even of you. I think it is best to come down below
where the sun is not so hot. You are surely thirsty."

Sang Huin shook his head and laid it back on the big rock that he
used as a pillow.

"I came up here to ask you if you would like to come down and join
everyone else although it was suggested that it would not be an easy
task. Sung Ki  [the dream now made Yang Kwam Sung Ki] was saying that
you like dirt. He said--I don't know why-- that the floor of your
apartment was dirty and that there were lots of mosquitoes there. He
said that is why he tells you to stay with him. He said that I'd have
trouble getting you out of the dirt. I don't know that this is all true
but you surely know by now that dirty rooms, dirty plates, and dirty
dogs--Koreans have no tolerance for these things. You really should not
be lying in the dirt like this. I know you don't know me but that is my
advice." Then he smiled ingenuously.

Sang Huin knew the man's snobbishness showed that he was ignorant of
suffering and deliberately ignored the dirt from whence all carbon
molecules spring into life.  "Koreans--North Koreans or South Koreans?"
asked Sang Huin as he propped part of his upper body with the use of his
elbows.

"South Koreans, of course."

Sang Huin didn't say anything. He was from the greatest and most
powerful nation on the Earth (at least it was at the present date if the
European Union "stayed out of things"-a common idea of his father's that
made him smile) and, in his perceptions, it was being equated with dirt
the way Americans envisioned most all other countries including those in
Western Europe.

"Everyone wants to talk to you in English."

"But I don't want to," said Sang Huin kindly. "I'm tired of saying
little things and hearing little things. I don't mean to be rude."

"Are you happy to lie out here like an animal?"

"Yes. You know..." he paused. He had trouble getting out words that
would refute the visual evidence of him lying in the dirt. Such words
had to be special if they were to vindicate a nation and its people not
to mention himself and all physical evidence. There were no words that
he possessed for such a feat so he reverted to attitudes fixated in his
childhood and thus became childish in the process. "You know, Americans
think that South Korea is a little third world country composed of
nothing but dirty people."

"Is that so? Is that your opinion of your people?"

"No," he said sullenly as he shook his head, not knowing who his
people were.  "I have to think out here in the dirt.  I know it is
strange.  You don't know me.  Of course you think I'm strange.  I just
enjoy seeing insects crawling around in the dirt and the dirt itself-
everything that comes from it is inspirationally calm."  He laughed. "I
guess I like playing in the dirt like a child." He knew that he must be
an amusing caricature for them.

"You don't have to do much. It is kind of hard to fail. Just drink a
beer and ask them little things. 'What is your name? Where do you live?
How many people are in your family?' They can't interact with tape
recorders. Can't you do that?" Sang Huin ignored him.

"Don't you have any goals?"

"No, not really." He sat up as if he were taking a defensive
posture within the limits of his personality. He spoke with mild
sincerity squeezed in with a bit of sarcasm, giving the depths and
secrets of his being in a laconic paragraph to this stranger. "No, I
have come to the conclusion that doing nothing in a bad world is
improving it so I want to contribute in this way. You know, maybe there
are people out there who do nothing but lie around in the dirt.  I don't
know that they are any worse off to be dirty.  I don't know that I'm
better than they are by usually preferring not to act that way. I'm just
another creature out there with microorganisms in my body helping to
clear out my intestines."  He felt his warm burning face. "I guess I am
getting a little sun burnt out here but so far it has been a good
experience." Around him little pieces of trash were dancing around
circuitously. He heard the sound of a vehicle he could not see since it
was at a distance. The world was alive.

"Suit yourself," said the man.

Upon awakening and sitting up in his blanket and futon on the floor,
there was such a clear image erect and tilted in the forefront of his
mind that it almost seemed to be registered in his perceptions as
reality and not a part of his dreams.  It was of a German American woman
in a Volkswagen driving southwest through America's heartland to the
destination of Mexico but driven insatiably to an isolated state as if
the car could take her straight into Antarctica. She, Gabriele, spit her
snuff into an empty beer can as she drove. This odd and unusable vision
was not, to his knowledge, reflective of any psychological state of his
own, and yet it somehow seized him. She was broad and burly, isolated
and insulated but worldly and perceptive. Sang Huin sensed a story
within her. It was not music. She had too many notes. The stagnation of
the room, however, pushed him into the drone of movement and this
movement flattened this vision and made him the doormat under the weight
of the day.

He got dressed. He felt agitation at the idea of having to go all
the way out to Muguk for his doctor's class but at 4:00 A.M. he slipped
on his pants, regardless, and walked outside to the bathroom. He would
have to get in a taxi by 4:30; be on the bus by 5:00; and travel an hour
and twenty minutes all for a class that lasted less than an hour. The
class was composed of psychiatrists, surgeons, and those practicing
internal medicine but they were on a soldier's salary and the payment he
got for the class was paltry. Still, he said that he would do it. They
had lost money for classes they did not receive at Shin Se Gye when he
quit there.

Near Muguk, from the bus, he saw farmers of the dawn planting their
weedy rice patties by hand.  They were dressed in baggy shirts and
rolled up pants and pointed straw hats covered their heads. Their long
boots were entrenched in mud.   According to his romantic perceptions of
them, each one was august, unpretentious, and melting into the morning
sun. Those rags they wore were more patriotic than flags and more
majestic than King Sejong the Great's crown. Once their farms had been
irrigated into ponds and frogs croaked within the allure of their
enclave they would have sewn not only rice but the continuation of
civilization. Their footprints in mud were ephemeral, but they had their
eternity in their families. He asked himself what eternity he would have
in such a decadent and disconcerted existence that was obsessed by this
mixing of people in an emotion of love that brought the selfish and
altruistic splashing of the other in one's container and he or she into
theirs.  Love still was something that he hadn't really experienced and
he hadn't experienced it because of his greater obsession with carnal
devouring.

What made him attack himself so? It was obvious. As a gay man he
reshaped perception in an uncomfortable way (although undoubtedly he was
not the first): his life became an admission that there was no
operator's manual for any man's life; but when he saw couples with their
babies he believed, in contrary to this, that a natural course in a
man's life had been severed or abducted from him and so life became all
the more confusing. He could not do otherwise than to feel sad and
insecure. It was a loss in his life and he did not deny that it was
such. He was not really envious when he saw them. It made him pleased to
see them even though in such occurrences he felt empty and stunted at
best.

It made him sick to think that--oh, the same old disconcerted
thoughts spun around and around in his head like when a bad tune by its
prevalence repeats itself over and over in the tape recorder of the
psyche and the repetition feels like drudgery. It made him sick to think
that he had caused a woman to conceive and then had not been forceful
enough with his will to ensure that the child would be born--no, that
was just a fantasy albeit a partially believed one.  Really he had
insisted on the abortion but as time went on the perception changed with
the neurons and the desire to have a good self-image. But this was the
past: immobile, irrelevant, and except for occasional lesions that
opened up the bleeding of memory, forgotten by all. The future was
anxiousness where hopes of happiness were thoughtlessly draped against
despair.

In the doctors' class, held at Dr. Lee's breakfast table, he brought
up articles and political cartoons for discussions. Everything from the
continuing menace of Saddam Husein, incursions into the demilitarized
zone by North Korea, the Yonsei University student demonstrations, the
convictions of the ex-presidents, and all of the most newsworthy of the
world's unhappy events were there for the probing. But today, upon
leaving, he remembered an article he had forgotten to bring to them: the
Taliban's restraint of war ravaged widows from work. The doctors liked
such things.  As Dr. Lee had pointed out, even happenings in the most
remote parts of the world often spread amuck like an oil spill in a
global community.  He remembered having forgotten this article when he
was walking out the door and then it slid from and fell off his memory
altogether.

After walking to the Muguk bus depot he had second thoughts about
going back to Chongju. He got in a taxicab. That was the easy part. He
said, "Anyong Hashimnika?" and then probed his mind. "Odie ka?," (where
you go?) asked the taxi driver sharply. The word, "kang," meant river
and "mul" meant water. What, he thought to himself, was the word for
lake? "Kun mul? (big water)...no, that would never work!" Somehow he
found it and got out a coherent sentence. The taxi took him there
leaving him on the shoulder of the road. He got out. The highway that
was the main road of the town was sandwiched between a bluff and a lake
reflecting the marginal space of the Korean landscape. There were no
classes for a while and the day was there to celebrate like the
disrobing and denuding of a goddess--or in his case, a god. Sang Huin
pulled off his shirt and rolled up his slacks. He sat down under a small
pavilion. Near it weeds grew. He plucked one and put it into his mouth.
He chewed it and sprawled himself on the bench thinking himself as a
more worldly version of Huckleberry Finn. Looking down at the waters and
the small fishing crafts that were tied to a few docks at a distance, he
thought about the Korean landscape in general images: the croaking of
frogs in the irrigated rice fields near the apartment that he once had
in Umsong; the farmers ("nongmin") who would insert each individual
plant as painstakingly as a plastic surgeon grated each item of hair.
In galoshes, they would trudge into the depths of mud to sow, reap, and
thresh the rice.  The moon above the empty Umsong stadium was a lambent
glow over the rice and gave a slight visibility to the forest that
interconnected a nearby field to the stadium.  None of it was all that
spectacular when compared to the variety and splendor of the vast
country, America, that was and wasn't his country; but still it was new
and he sometimes liked it.

Then, in full broadness, he saw Gabriele. There she was in a tight
t-shirt and wholly jeans. Hail beat upon the tin can of a trailer where
she lived with an infant and a cat. The hail seemed to her like the
bullets that she imagined from the distant war that America wedged
against Iraq. Then he saw the antithesis of this: big diamond earrings
dangling from her lobes and that she wore the most expensive fashions of
the elite that gave her broad and muscular German frame elegance as she
got ready to take her son to galleries, temporary exhibits, and then to
have him sit alone in a corner at these art parties where cheques were
often signed.  He saw him sitting in those strangers' homes as Sang Huin
himself had sat on the bleachers during his sister's basketball games.
He saw him taking umbrage with the gods (the sun god in particular if He
existed) for they had bore him in the suffocation of her gray colors
that sprayed out onto the world like a mist that none of his friends
went through.  For them it was sunny picnics of complete families,
weenie roasts, and marshmallow burnings over bonfires.  And there she
was again a younger entity, youth asphyxiating in the dust storm of
talcum powder that, in her trailer, she swept across the hills of his
buttocks, wishing to walk across hills and depart from family. . He felt
her true, committed, objection to everything in her big lonely home and
with everything consisting of so much it stayed latent in the confines
of her leaden eyes. He pulled out a notebook and sketched her different
varieties. Underneath her image, he began to cluster a second draft of
words and notes.  He didn't know what he was doing.


Chapter Four

Having had no book to sink into when he arrived at an apartment in
Umsong months earlier, he (this new arrival from America) must have
seemed like a bird trying to build a nest with two or three sticks. It
had been an insane episode for the scrutiny of his roommate-coworkers:
the way he had organized and reorganized his few things in the loosely
partitioned area of the living room and how he had been so reluctant to
speak. Hadn't he, in his disconnection, looked like a man suffering from
some neuron-entangled nervousness, heavy neurosis, or a bad prion making
the holes in his head to match the holes of his being.

His sister had been raped and mutilated.  At least that was the
theory-as much as one could assess from skeletal remains. The
prosecution wanted to horrify the jury with photographs.  Maybe they had
succeeded inordinately disconcerting the jury so that it couldn't
ascertain the facts and probabilities. The only measurable impact that
he knew of were ramifications of deep, paralyzing shadows that the three
of them fell into--so far and so eternal had been the abyss. "Were the
perpetrators human or hominids? If they were human, what did that say
about being human?" It had been their first unshared question easily
sensed in the eyes of each other. "Are all Americans like this?" they
had all silently thought. No one would have said such a thing. "Was all
humanity this way?" It was in their eyes--that and the wish to escape
the species. They were there: in this word "hell" that all had talked of
and few had ever gone into. Hell was full meaninglessness and savagery
without rationale and with a judicial system forcing the mutilated
further into unprecedented horrors.

Pusillanimous and cowering in fetal positions within themselves,
limping around the days with perfunctory and lifeless movements, his
father had nonetheless spoken of "getting on" with things although he
couldn't define what one was supposed to get on with or what was worthy
of getting on to. They all could perceive the horror of everybody and
everything so no matter what they did--even killing themselves--it would
all be equivalent to meaningless and savagery.

It was good to have this hour of complete silence near the lake
without any sound but the rushing of cars, which also came in inundated
waves, peaked, and died. Still, one would have to hear a language sooner
or later. At times if only he could have a silence, a respite, from his
thoughts to go with his free time to think his recovery would be
expedited.  He thought of his sister.  She had kept her Korean.
Occasionally, even as a teenager, she would mutter off some idea in
Korean to which his mother returned some reply. He had always felt
jealous of this secret language and here he was in Korea but the
language was still a secret to him.


Chapter Five

The social creature that even he was, if he were not to hear a voice
for long even those boats in the lake would have been a discomfiting
image--interspersing his conceptualization of them in depersonalized
momentum. He wanted to call Kwang Sook to hear her voice but also to
cancel his classes. He didn't need so much money. His former boss had
deposited some of the owed money after the issue had gone to the
Department of Labor. He wanted to go back to Seoul but classes were his
equanimity. They personalized his world in a professional and impersonal
manner that gave him fortitude to float through the expanse of his
existential turns where it seemed that there were no other sailors.

Maybe, he thought to himself, he would go into a video pang later
and let drama absorb him in a personal intimacy with a fictional entity
of depth and substance. He had no misgivings. His life was a stunted
one. Still, back in Chongju, he made the call and cancelled his classes.
Then, near the bus terminal, he went to a restaurant. He ordered some
bogum bop, a thick mixture of rice and vegetables that one mixed into a
thick brown gravy that stood off aside on the plate and the appetizer of
kimchee maundu. Alone, eating and reading a Newsweek he pulled out of
his bag, he began to wonder of the lives of those that owned or managed
the restaurant. Their area was shielded only behind sliding doors.
Behind the tables and the chairs, their living area consisted of just
one space. A girl came out and he could see within it clothes drying on
a plastic rack and a small television that was on the floor. Then a man
came out with a baby in his arms. He wore an undershirt and boxer
underwear. The women cooked. Then, after they served Sang Huin a second
helping of kimchee maundoo, they put breakfast on a table for the
family. They all ate together. Like Yang Lin at Toksugum Palace seeing
newlyweds and the wife he should have been, Sang Huin saw his alter ego
in the man. His life was probably limited.  A wife and children pinned
him into a small existence with family commotion and responsibilities.
It floated in non-ambitious swaying like a plastic boat on ripples in a
bathtub. It probably droned on in its unaware and insignificant tedium
through the years, but it had its connections.


Chapter Six

Attempting to thwart his primitive hungers for sex and socialization
(synonymous words of civilization's shaping, but base nonetheless), and
sensing the true vacuous abyss that would exist without learning or
creating, he went into a park that was near the bus station. There, he
worked on his amorphously wordy musical composition that was a bit of
everything and nothing. Still, he told himself that this potpourri was
worthwhile even though really he had his misgivings about it. He told
himself that he needed to test the musical aspects of it on his cello
later that day when he returned to the yogwam.  It was a plan of a
return "home"(whatever that word meant) and a means to contravene his
deviance to Seoul.  It was a self-created urgency to repress his sexual
obsessions and to clothe the animalistic movements and hunger of his
naked soul. To his delight, from previous recitals of Hayden at the
yogwam, it would probably bring to his door an audience of elderly
tenants and one of his more fulfilling connections.

He came upon a crowd of people clustered around an elderly man. The
man was a governmental employee paid as a teacher of Korean traditional
dance. He was promoting the program by a slow and illustrious dance. He
wore the traditional hanbok of the paji and chogori. Sang Huin was
inveigled by the dance but the sun god was putting him to sleep and 15
minutes into the performance he was on a park bench fast asleep. When he
awoke, the crowd that had gathered around the dancer and the dancer
himself were no longer there.  Just as Sang Huin, the boy, had skipped
around the kindergarten teacher's desk, sat down to drink his chocolate
milk with his Graham crackers, and found himself a grown man listening
to a university professor's lecture on biology, so the sunlight of this
day's slight 2:00 descent vaporized the people he had been witnessing no
differently than it had vaporized the dinosaurs myriad afternoons of
myriad centuries ago or the body of his sister that had decomposed in a
park.  It had all gone-gone but where it had gone he couldn't say.

Like a 5 year old, he rubbed his eyes to wake up.  Following an
instinctive response that was a yearning overwhelming his common sense,
he felt the impulse to stretch forth toward Seoul: toward adventure in
the masses and bathing the rational mind in sensual massage. He wanted
meretricious sex. Young men encroached on his mind in droves. Maybe this
obsession, if it were such, was from an inability to communicate in any
other way. He did not mind--well, he did, but what could he do, he
argued, when the irrationality of pleasure seeking sedated one as he
journeyed around alone on the rugged terrain of the Earth. He did not
believe in much platonic constraint. When his hormones were boiling to
overflow he "hauled [his] ass" to Seoul. There, a theatre existed for
meeting and touching men near Chongno Samga Road and he had been told
that there was a gay Turkish bath in the area of Myong Dong. Too much
creative energy would be depleted if he were to lasso the wild bore for
long. Too much craziness would go into creating sense in insensible
passions. Wasn't marriage created to give sense to such passions? Hadn't
this lifetime contract that his parents signed in their marital vows
caught two of life's myriad souls in the idea that they could defy a
changing universe and be as non-changeable as rocks? Hadn't their
confinement of each other in this materialistic American dream become
the incommunicable cries of two strangers tied back to back by weeds
from their many parcels of land after all substantial conversation had
been exhausted? Yet, his liaisons were not exactly more viable versions
of relationships. He did not want to talk to these men nor, as he knew,
would they to him. Ideally he did; but it was just a fleeting expression
or whim.  Reality sang another tune.  There was this day's ticket to a
symphony in Seoul that Kwang Sook had given to him because she couldn't
go.  He had taken it.  He loved symphonies and there were parts of this
day when he told himself that he would go to Seoul for that purpose.
Really, however, he wouldn't have bothered at all had it not been for
the urges of his body anxiously nudging him northward.

He bought another ticket to Seoul and drank milk he obtained from
the bus station vendor while waiting for his designated departure.  The
noxious smell of bus exhausts filled the open cavities of the bus
station. A torn back on a plastic seat seemed to snag his shirt more
than once like a cat's claws.  The wait was not long since a half hour
later he was part of a line to get on board.  This particular flatulent
bus seemed to say his name, Sang Huin, as a feces colored gas, carbon,
exuded from its rear.  Strange ideas like the talking bus and the
clawing chair, in the back regions of the mind, were only experienced by
the lonely and the isolated.  He knew this.  Those who were isolated
were such out of their contempt for the sadistic and hedonistic impulses
that were hidden in smiles.  They were such to protect their own
ingenuous vulnerabilities despite being sociable human creatures; and
they weren't always so firmly in their right minds. The landscape seen
from the moving bus was unremarkable but still the beauty that was there
dazed him into self-reflections. More than the physical response what
did he crave? To be loved and to love was like a dog chasing its tail;
and if his tail were long enough he would have it in the mouth.  He
would have it there in his mouth if the mouth liked the taste of the
tail and the tail the feel of the mouth.  Foolish as he was going to
Seoul once again for his fun, he wasn't a fool.  Most people obeyed
their sexual inclinations as if they were great oracles of wisdom that
would broaden them beyond the limits of themselves in such a primitive
interaction. He couldn't say that he wasn't as they were, but unlike
them, he knew that the whole thing was a mirage for those who couldn't
or didn't know how to build worlds within themselves.  A Newsweek
article had proven to his satisfaction that love was not a splendid
thing.  It was just a four-year addiction at best. The article had
theorized that primitive man needed to stay with the woman long enough
to help with the child's welfare by feeding the creature and its mother
during those years when the baby encumbered the woman from hunting on
her own. He didn't need more than that.

In Kwang Sook's school, Sang Huin had asked the children to draw
verbs next to a series of words they found from his handout. When this
was finished, he would read sentences with those vocabulary words like
"A tall boy hits a ball in the air."     "How many people are there?"
"There is one person," they would say.  "What does he do?"  "He hits?"
"What does he hit?"  "He hits a ball."  "Where is the ball?"  "It is in
the sky."  "What does he look like?"  "He is tall." The younger ones
were so competitive with each other in the games he devised for them as
if beating others in the game of survival were entrenched in human
curiosities.

They had also done English exercises together on the roof where he
had been the military sergeant giving peremptory whims and they had to
jump, run, go to the right, go to the left, etc. at his command.

The boys had been especially fond of him chasing them around trying
to eat them on the roof as he sang, "This is the way we kill a pig, kill
a pig, kill a pig. This is the way we kill a pig so early in the
morning."  This play-acting and making the brutal world seem as nothing
but an innocuous frivolity caused them to squeal like piglets. It was
insignificant wrestling around with the children in a job that did not
take too much talent or knowledge but it was a silly example of love.
He wanted to give that spark of imagination and knowledge just because
it seemed right to give it. Weren't more altruistic connections really
what life was about? And yet if this were the true form of love, he
often asked himself, wouldn't it be so fulfilling that he would give
himself to it completely?

When he arrived at the express bus terminal, he took the subway to
Chongno. Near Pagoda Park, he went to Hardee's . The break from Hanguk
food (particularly kimchee) he found nourishing to his imagination that
craved variety. He wanted to be a vegetarian but at times he thought
that he almost lapped up the grease like a starving dog. When he
finished, he found himself on one of his first safaris to a gay sauna.
He was still unsure how to get there and so he looked down at the
"chito" (map) a fellow hunter at the theatre had drawn for him on the
back cover of his "Expatriate In Korea" resource book one time when he
was at the theater.

Once there, he took off his shoes at the front desk and collected a
key and a toothbrush. Then he went upstairs. After his shower, a brief
phase in the hot whirlpool, and a second cool shower, he put on a robe
from those that were on hangers and went to a hallway of rooms where
orgies were in progress. Some men in the hallway wandered from room to
room, selective of that which most excited them on the tatami mats of
the floors. Others joined shadows of faintly visible figures groping
around in a state of almost complete darkness. For him only lighter
rooms were an option since less illusionary beings were the only meat
and grease he could stomach.  With the barrage of his passions released
in one of those rooms, he became a perfect receiver of transmission.
There was no interference from either psyche or physique. He relaxed on
one of the leather sofas in the lounge with other smokers and those limp
individuals in between engagements. Visions came unto him and he almost
felt holy writing out aspects of Gabriele's life within the fog of his
smoke. Naked bodies in contrast to his, that was now clothed in
underwear, did not distract him. In the next room men bathed themselves
in the whirlpool or heated themselves in the sauna and behind him were
others engaging in what he had done. If human beings were only shadows
passing in and out of memory, which was nothing but the night sky for
such ghosts, what then, he asked himself, were one's dreams? The
fantasies and emotion propelled thought; and thought propelled action.
Surely action was more real and tangible than the hopes and dreams and
yet how could it be such if dreams and emotion conceived action.

Ideas of Gabriele grasped him as if she were more real than he was.
Pages of words created themselves on his lap while above the couch was a
television showing a drama of an ancient Korean period linked with
reverberating melancholic Buddhist melodies. Toward 6 o'clock, he was
still there--and for his excesses his underwear was stolen off of his
body when he was performing on someone else.  He wasn't sure exactly how
it happened. His head hurt; and he felt a nausea concerning his life. He
left wishing that he were ten again gaining the rapture of a millefleur
morning of dandelions patterned into a greener fabric of grass after the
evening's rain and exploring a more oceanic landscape with his sister as
they splashed through an alien terrain in their rain boots. He wished
for the time when she existed long before her attraction to older
married men like her boss-long before her attraction to men at all. He
reassured himself that he wasn't completely bad, that he was a caring
person who did not harm others even with the knowledge that there was no
real right or wrong on the planet, and that innocence hadn't left him
entirely.  He told himself that he was innocent in many ways, if not an
outright fool, since he had shown himself to be kind and easily taken
advantage of in business (he would have continued to tolerate only
getting two-thirds of his salary so that the other teachers would get
paid had it not been for the fact that he stopped paying his secretaries
as well and began to rehire new ones when the old ones quit).  When he
arrived in Chongno Samga again his pain did not abate. He went to a
pharmacy. The woman at the pharmacy was a grandmotherly type and a
little boy sat on a stool in front of him. She asked what he wanted. He
told her in his babyish Korean. She asked how many aspirin he wanted. He
told her six. She asked him other things. He told her that he was an
American and could not say much anything in Korean. When he was leaving
the boy told him, "Good-by" in English. The Grandmother laughed warmly.
Sang Huin felt pleasure from this little minute of his life as if all
sweet and little moments were not gone altogether; and his nausea from
believing that all human beings perceived each other as a voracious
fulfilling of appetites diminished.

From the cannibalism of sexual excess, he ate a salad at Wendy's
restaurant  despite its exorbitant price and the one plate serving rule.
It was a nice respite from eating too much of the dumpling snack of
kimchee maundoo. The thought of eating meat did not agree with him.  He
shoved down some aspirin with his chocolate frosty and stared out of the
window.  It was past 6:30 and this area of Chongno Samga was already
riveting in  youthful crowds.  In a few hours young men would bee
vomiting on the sidewalk for their alcoholic excess as he had done on
Uchiro Samga after coming out of the sauna. He hurryingly got a yogwam.
He turned on AFKN, the American military channel and saw a bit of a
movie on Franklin Delano Roosevelt while he pulled out a suit jacket and
a tie that he had folded away in his book bag.  Then he got into a taxi
and went to the Sejong Cultural Center. His seat was located in the
middle of the auditorium.  As he sat down his cigarettes fell out of his
front pocket and as he picked them up he noticed the blind man he had
seen before in the subway seated with his dog in the same row. Time had
made him think that the person had just been a flitting fantasy but
there he was.  It was a basic instinct of the lonely human psyche to
wish for meaning and connection in such events as if God would move
heaven and hell to give him a companion. He put the cigarettes into the
slit of his pack and then glanced over to his left in the hope that no
one had noticed his clumsiness.  A man that looked like his sister's
boss was seated next to him.  It was a slight resemblance but still it
horrified him.  When that "thing" had been declared "not guilty" in
reference to his sister's murder despite all the evidence that the
prosecution had brought forward, he had fainted for a few seconds.
Then, in a slow dizziness, some feelings had assembled themselves and
then he had begun to think that he wanted death; and then he had just
wanted out of America.


Chapter 7

During an intermission, while others were leaving, the stranger got
up and left with his dog. Sang Huin, on impulse, followed. Without
yearning for a cigarette, he lit one in the lobby and waited at the
entry of the bathroom.  If he were troubled by the peculiarity of his
actions, he was only marginally reassured by the fact that they were not
witnessed.  His actions seemed that of a stalker although this seeming,
this appearance, was only ruminated on by himself.  His motives,
however, were nebulous in this desire; and this inability to understand
why he was seeking this individual was a troubling factor.  It was the
impulsiveness of one lacking social skills who suddenly drives up to a
school playground to form intimacies, discards the body in abhorrence
and disbelief over being the perpetrator of the crime, and in a half
hour finds himself to be a pedophile and a murderer.  And yet he wasn't
stalking a child but a man and he wasn't running on the energy of sexual
conquest and hate, but just running away from loneliness. If this
innocuous action were stalking, all humans, he told himself, were
stalkers.  Without question, he was so desperate to disrupt his
isolation like the pensive ruminations of a mute circus gypsy alone in
the back of his tent.  He was so anxious to escape his incommunicable
thoughts through friendship, or the hope of it, that he was ready to
shoot it out randomly to whomever caught his eye.  Many selfish whims
constituted an attraction, but he told himself that this was not the
making of a stalker.  Then the stranger and his dog came out.

"Anyong hashimnika," greeted Sang Huin as he touched the man's arm
so that he would know he was addressing him.

"Anyong haseyo" (informal: peace, you do).  They spoke loudly
because of the noise of the crowds loitering and coming and going from
the restrooms.

"Yongo mal ha su isumnika?"

"Yes, I can speak English. Can I help you?"

It was interesting for him to be thought of as an American
instantaneously. Sang Huin found it refreshing to not have someone give
him that surprise and grimace for being a Korean without a language.

"No. Good symphony. Do you like Rimsky?"

"Rimsky-Korsakov.  Yes, not all of the music is Rimsky's but they
were playing music from that composer earlier. He is Russian, one of the
best, I think."  Sang Huin smiled at the acquaintance and then realized
that his smile wouldn't pierce through the sunglasses.  Unable to let
his benign nature penetrate through the plastic, he again thought of
himself as somewhat equivalent to a stalker.  He felt nervous.

""Would you like a cigarette? We've got ten minutes." He thought of
the words and instruments which human beings employed to break from
their innate states of emptiness; and the connections sought from
attractions that would be forsaken if the experiences seemed shallow and
there was an assumption that no major connections would evolve from
them.

Sang Huin crunched the pack for a bit of noise and the stranger
took one of the cigarettes which he then aimed toward the hiss of the
emerging flame that Sang Huin provided with the click of his lighter.
The blind man inhaled a couple times but then coughed in perpetual
rhythms like the beats of a drum.  The seeing-eye dog gnarled its mouth
the best it was able to do and growled importunely.  "He doesn't like,"
said the blind man barely able to get out his idea from his stanched
breath. Sang Huin thought of Sungki's syntax which also lacked object
pronouns in "You must all eat."

"Is there an ashtray? I'll put this out.  I'm sorry I wasted it,"
said the blind man.

"No problem," said Sang Huin as he took the cigarette and smashed
it into an ashtray a few feet away and then walked back to where he was.
"I feel a bit foolish." He chortled for a couple of seconds nervously.
"I was seated alone, really, not liking that feeling as much as I
thought I would; and then I noticed you. I've seen you before on a
subway: you and your dog.  It was a few days ago. You got out shortly
after I did in Tonggyo-dong."

"Do you stay in a hotel in that area?"

"No, but a few times when there were demonstrations at Yongsei
University I went there and watched the police and the tear gas from the
fourth floor of a building that has a pastry shop. I guess that is a bit
strange, huh?" The stranger filled air and space with a feigned smile
and a nod, not knowing what to say.  "No; I live in Chongju," continued
Sang Huin, "but I come to Seoul as often as I can. I'm American. At
least I say I am.  My friends call me Shawn in America but my friends
here call me by my real name, Beck Sang Huin."  He knew that he didn't
really have friends in either place.

"Saeng Sob," said the acquaintance.  They shook hands although both
were doubtful that they could concatenate a conversation.  When the man
said his name, Saeng Seob, Sang Huin thought of the boy in Kwang Sook's
school who also had this name. He was in his class; but Kwang Sook said
that the last year he had to drop out of her school completely after
going through more surgeries from being hit by a truck.  That accident
had happened a year earlier. Even during the brief months Sang Huin was
familiar with him there was yet another surgery for his legs and feet.
Sang Huin brought him toys every few days. During this time he hated
having the poor boy languish in the bed--skin from his buttocks used to
supplement the thin blackish skin of his legs and the pins in his toes.
It was the least he could do.

Hadn't there been a time when he and his sister were driven to the
home of their Grandma Vera and rather than connecting to her chose to
run across the street to a nearby park and feel alive with the swing
against the winds as their parents socialized? Hadn't there been a time
when he knew the brilliance of grass poking through the crevices of his
bare feet? Then puberty came and there was an aching need for other
people. The aching was incessant.

"I guess you are here with friends and family.  I should let you get
back to them and the performance."

"We're here alone," said Saeng Sob, " but I guess we should go back
in before the second part begins."  Sang Huin did not know if he was
included in the conceptualization of "we."

"Do you live in Tonggyo-dong?," asked Sang Huin creating a mental
barricade to stop the closure.

" No, but I work and study at the university." He paused and then
filled in the silence. "My cousin is a dean in the mathematics
department. I work part-time at Yongsei as his receptionist so that is
probably why you saw us there," said the man speaking of himself in
plurality.

"And you take classes?" asked Sang Huin.

"Sometimes," said Saeng  Sob.

"Maybe we can get something to eat after the performance if you
aren't busy," said Sang Huin.

"Maybe.  They're probably ready to start." Sang Huin and the blind
Saeng Seob returned to their seats.

Then, after the performance, he cornered him in the ambiguity of a
"maybe" which a strong will could distort to affirmation. Such
enthusiasm could not easily be negated especially if it came from an
American and soon he was with the blind Seong Seob  answering questions
about his life in the US and eating some cold noodles in soup that was
as flavorless as water. The meal tasted like a cold and bland version of
Ramen noodles  ("Ramyen" in Korean) but he was told that it was not
Ramyen.  He didn't like the food and yet his closed lips twitched up
smilingly as if the opposite were true.  Deferential deception seemed
the most cordial solution.  Through children observing it in his society
in various forms it was passed down through the generations by
imitation.  And as humans had and in interactions proliferated these
tactics of coexistence to the young that were successful enough to keep
the species, so far, from self-destruction, what
did he in his short life know that was a better substitute?  In
reinventing etiquette, it was hard to know if the new behavior was
better or worse than the old one in the abstract.  The only measurement
would be the reaction of others.  To eat and smile while hating what was
being eaten and to succeed at it pleased him. It made him feel that he
was a decent person.   In that minute it picked him up on a wave of
optimism that distracted the lonely, mundane, and stunted life that he
chartered for himself.  Sang Huin spoke frankly about why he had come to
Korea.  He had been so lost after his sister's death, his father's
suicide, and the exacerbated disconnection from the robotic and
perfunctory movements and rambling of his mother month after month.  He
had to break away and become acquainted with his heritage the way Seong
Seob, as much as he was capable of, had to flee from the cousin and then
him, as perverted as he was, to end those 20+ years of disparaged
containment.  Both had to chart independent lives exempt of family and
without the possibility of ever having one; but really was that so bad -
to be ungrounded and to float on winds of circumstance.  In the right
perspective it was liberation.

Sang Huin wondered what this name, Seng Seob, meant (not that he
knew the meaning of his own) and why he was so excited to be with him.
They agreed that they would just be together for an hour.  That hour
became two and then it was the rest of the evening.  They drank soju, a
mild equivalent of sake.  Late into the evening Sang Huin had the waiter
calculate the tab and then suggested that they continue drinking
elsewhere.  Both were drunk at this time and drunkenness was making them
thirsty.  He and Saeng Sob returned to the yogwam with a case of beer
they purchased at a convenience store.

They slept together. Naked and awakening from sleep, Sang Huin
listened to the breathing of his friend. For the first time since his
sister's death he did not feel alone. Later on in the morning when the
light began to shine into the room he continued his prose, every now and
then looking at the presence that slept there as well as the imposition
of his dog.



                              Book Two:

                  The Book of Gabriele and Sang Huin



      "Thought is the idea of extension and extension the
      embodiment of thought" --Baruch Spinzoa


      "Mind+entity=truth  Sensory perception+things=opinion"
     --Parmenides


Chapter Eight

Hunched over a TV tray, with the baby locked into her lap in one
hand and snuff locked into a cheek, she wrote her story. Occasionally
she would write while dribbling brown into the open portal of her empty
beer can. She needed her portals for they led her, like a child, into
animistic realms far from the mundane of soiled diapers or the powdering
of a bottom as repulsive, to her, as perfume scented women.  She was
dressed in nothing but a dark bathrobe of a bosky fabric and like a
soldier in military fatigues, she blended in with the subdued light of a
tepid morning, which stumbled onto the floor of her trailer like a
collapsing drunk.  Every few moments while she wrote, her thoughts
became distracted by the hail that besieged the roof and walls or by the
screams of the baby which made her glower whenever he spat out his
pacifier to become the self-centered squealer that she knew to be the
base nature propelling human actions and society's disarray.  Richard
Dawkins' idea that one was born selfish but did not have to stay that
way was an adage that, with the energy she had in her glowering eyes,
she wanted to etch onto him if only her eyes were lasers where her
commandments could cauterize the human brain.  It seemed to her that
Jehovah, had he existed, would have glowering eyes no different than
hers and such lasers would have gone simply into the malleable substance
of the human brain instead of searing it into stone. With aversion to
reading anything printed on paper let alone etched in stone so acute it
would be more sensible. Had Piaget really studied beings such as this,
she thought, he would have seen them as the making of Wall Street and
the thunder of armies.  She listened more intensely to the hail that was
like a machine gun with rubber coated pellets.  She imagined herself
riding on a tank through a desert and into Baghdad half-naked and
exposed, waving her red white and blue brassiere from the opened hatch
of the tank.  Yes, she admitted, she needed portals.  She needed her
exits.  She needed a change, a respite, from the monotony of motherhood
that was sinking her into it like a hole.  The baby was a gift, and more
a choice and for these points a sacred responsibility to which, she told
herself, she would rectify past grievances that her parents, and even
Aunt Peggy herself, had done to her.  She would never engage in the
treachery that had flattened her out under its tank when she was so
young (although, she had to admit, the demise of early sensitivities had
made her, in such early childhood, reconstruct a new and indomitable
self). As she thought this she noticed a spider crawling onto her hand,
which held the pen.  When the hurricane of all the air from her lungs
was not enough to release it from her palm, she did not drop the pen.
She decided to look on the intruder as a lecturer on persistency and to
gain inspiration from it. She knew that once she finished writing her
piece, the spider would be smashed, but she believed that the act should
be performed with conscience. Gabriele did not subscribe to the idea of
civilized man that life was ranked into a hierarchy of importance. A
human certainly could not get by without killing, or picking up killed
produce from a grocery shelf, but the idea that there should be a real
distinction between a can of beans and the entrails of a local senator
seemed absurd, although she did not think that being put in an electric
chair for having eaten her local senator ranked very high up there in
the chances of probability.  Yes, she again told herself, the child was
a gift and a responsibility but she would not dote him.  The world
flattered itself that doting mothers carrying their worms to the baby
birds exuded such a profound love by this thoughtless emotional instinct
of proud and adoring pampering.  They thought that pampering the
pleasure-seeking savage was the acme of nurturing motherhood and the
making of good human beings.  She thought to herself that such mindless
bitches, doting as Aunt Peggy had done with her children, were an
embarrassment to this word love.  Love in its purest sense (what little
one was humanly capable of) would be a selfless caring of another
without such instincts to keep one's genes replicating for all eternity.
It was not suffocating one's children in dependency so that one could
have the role of mommy to avoid rolelessness and void.  It was not
needing a child.  Being a doting mother was as far from her
instinctually as those bizarre apathetic ones who could toss a child on
a relative or an ex-husband himself before joining the military.  The
other day, on page 2 of the Ithaca Times she saw that there was an
article on some such oddity although much bigger stories with more
bizarre and sadistic ramifications were buried each day on page 1,999 of
the New York Times. She would always read voraciously and thereby find
their cadavers. "Piaget, Piaget, go away, go away," she mumbled
inaudibly to herself slurring and babbling the consonants and vowels as
if she were now beginning to imitate the language of her son
atavistically.

Her calligraphy was composed of letters that were large, circular,
and loosely connected. The sentences contained at least one or two words
scratched out with others sustained above them. She considered herself a
scholar when it came to writing and so imaginative works, in such a
medium, did not come easily. Still she could not fathom in herself such
a shallow stream of sentiments that would actually cause her to repeat
the words of the lullaby, "Rock a by, baby, in a tree top" nor hum even
the notes of the lullaby symphony of Brahms. For this reason, she
allowed her back to ache and a slow-moving spider to climb along her
hand to finish an alternative lullaby--a truth beyond a myth although
she did not delude herself by thinking it other than her own personal
concoction at a different mythology the way Psalm 104 might have seemed
original long after the Great Hymn of Aten was written in Ancient Egypt.
In constructing another paragraph she began to ask herself whether or
not she had ended the story.  She wasn't sure how one would know about
such things that were so lacking of scientific or mathematic
certainties.  Then she began to wonder if she should have written it
with a zoomorphic emphasis (maybe a bovine God standing there in its
pasture cognizant of nothing, wholly holy in the innocence of stupidity
and lack of aggressive tendencies--great virtues to which no other gods
comported).  She stretched her large muscular framed back; heard a thump
on the bookshelf but, in her state of concentration, she dismissed it;
dropped the baby back into its crib, and took the top of a TV tray off
its legs. In place of the baby, she sat the tray upon her lap providing
a close-up foundation for her manuscript.

The hailstorm that was once like artillery against her flimsy
enclave now seemed a milder sleet tapping and scraping the ceiling and
walls.  This type of weather was a bit like the tapping and scraping of
her cat, Mouse, clinging and banging its body on the screen of the door
in the hope of getting in during the times she threw him out, and she
imagined that it would go on this way 1990 times. She listened intensely
to some of its 1990 scraping taps, tapings of "the year of our lord"
which also happened to be the year of the American war against
Mesopotamia.  The sleet was mixed in the wind; and for those who resided
in warmth and even those who ran through it in the hope of finding
shelter such falling crystal, that was once an ethereal gas, couldn't
have been anything other than splendor.  At least, in a diminished way,
it was for her who could only hear and imagine it within the ruminations
of her cynicism and maternal gloom.

For a couple of distracted seconds she contemplated her isolated
existence in an obscure trailer park in Ithaca, New York within the
middle of winter in contrast to the crowds of Iraqi and American
soldiers ready to ignite the deserts the way crowded rats, too
overpopulated, too irascible, and too conscious of the movements of
other rats, kill each other off.  The whole thing should have made her
feel leery: a single woman near the outskirts of the city limits all
alone with a baby, hearing banging against her home and listening
intermittingly to the news on her radio about the Persian Gulf War.  She
did have knowledge of Judo and fully believed that any violent intruders
would regret trespassing on her space but she knew that it did not
protect her from the fact that she was a tenuous mortal, a woman with a
baby in a flimsy trailer, and that this trailer was in an inauspicious
location in one of the more violent countries on the planet.  To
compound matters, she didn't have any friends or much society except for
her bovine-thinking neighbor, Rita.  That woman, who called herself
Lily, was like a lackadaisical grass-snacking cow right before slaughter
time.  She had been a former group-home girl at a home for
schizophrenics and manic-depressives although she recently graduated to
semi-independent living.  For Gabriele, her intrusive presence often cut
through the black gauze of isolation that could cover every aperture of
one's senses prompting her to feel an extreme numbness.  But, apart from
this mental sustenance, isolation was something that she thrived on like
a light hating moss deep in damp and obscure crevices. The walls seemed
to shudder in the winds but she did not mind the cold. She felt that it
was comforting and when it crept in it seemed to be tangible and come
through the cracks around the windows and the door like waves. The baby,
however, was another matter.  It sneezed out into the cold.

The previous day he was crying in part from the cold and the need to
be suckled. And she did suckle him occasionally although, less
euphemistically, she saw it as him being allowed to devour her.  She did
this to pass on her nutrients and antibodies, although giving milk and
having a child use her for her tit repulsed and stiffened her posture at
times like a soldier at a machine gun in a trench and at other times
like a soldier in a queue waiting for inspection. This act more than any
other was a reminder of the fact that she was a bit like all other
women: a female animal there to be bred and to nurture the continuum of
her breed. She fed him and dressed him even more warmly, then, but it
was to no avail. Lacking options, she repelled her repulsion toward the
rock-a-by song by telling herself that it was the collective culture in
the earliest of all primitive American, if not western minds, and so
inescapable in a sense. On that day she brought herself to hum a few
bars while rocking him according to the melody of the song; but he
frowned and looked at her skeptically if babies were capable of
skepticism, and so she had to speed up the movement. The faster and
harder she rocked him the more he seemed to enjoy it, baby-laughing that
one monotone squeal and slobbering all over her. At that time of such
Pavlovian drooling she wondered to herself belatedly if having him there
to seize her day was worthwhile but the squealing gave her a sense that
it was. This roller-rocking of her arms was at first enjoyable because
his squeals of euphoria were delightful to listen to but soon she found
them to be a tiring repetition and so she gently tossed him back into
the crib which inadvertently caused him to cry once again.

This was a new approach following a few minutes of having him "swig
[his] bottle." "Unlike present day Ithaca, in the land of Ancient
Atlantis," she read after raising the baby up to the tray like a cold
piece of meat and then squashing the insect into her composition, "there
was harmony;" and even when he "puked"-she would never say 'spit-up'
because it was not so--she recited a few paragraphs of what she had
written while the vomit seeped into her bathrobe. Her bold attempt to be
indifferent to such an inauspicious start to the morning was becoming a
poorly constructed fa?ade for her determination was crumbling like a
desiccating sand castle. The smell of the vomit and all of the baby
smells bothered her.  As her body fidgeted, which in turn caused the cat
to bury itself behind the lowest area of the bookshelf (although this
time avoiding the tripping on a ceramic dish) she contemplated this
euphemism, "spit-up."  The term didn't matter in public, she argued; but
to oneself, she thought, one had to be honest.  Puke was puke, and she
had a tale to tell, and her child needed to listen and she needed to
resist shoving her child back into the crib to change out of her
bathrobe.

As one of her long arms stretched and she grabbed one of his baby
bibs that was folded on an end table, dabbing herself with it, she
thought about how the two of them were family because of a sexual
indiscretion.  Fate had backed into her earlier thinking that family was
nothing but war games.  At one time she believed that husband and wife
soldiers of the same side often acted