Chapter 7

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.