Now I am putting away the futon and folding the pajamas she left behind. The room feels empty. I feel abandoned. I press the play button of the dusty cassette tape player. “A Bird on a Metal Tower” by Kim Dusu rings out of it. It’s the tape I gave Jimin for her birthday. So she had listened. I thought she only paid attention to Kim Min-ki and Nochatsa.
I open the photocopy of Kim Nam-jo’s poetry collection Jimin had given me. The very first page has an inscription: “Let’s go forward together,” in red, signed, “From, Warrior Jimin.” Warrior, huh? She isn’t as strong as she pretends to be. I usually don’t like the poems Jimin likes. Same with the prose.
Mayakovsky isn’t too bad. I like “A Few Words About Myself,” “Cloud in Trousers.” I heard he was a revolutionary, but his poems are avant-garde. I don’t know poetry too well, but I don’t want to know poetry too well. I’m gonna read one more poem, take a shower, and head out. I open the book carefully, like an illiterate shaman carefully picking a card. The title is great: “I Love.”
I can’t do it alone—
carry the grand piano
(much less
a metal safe)
Then how am I supposed to bring back this—
heavier than the grand piano
or metal safe—heart of mine?
Bankers are wise:
“We’re unimaginably rich.
We didn’t have enough pockets
so we stuffed our safes.”
I have hidden
my love
inside you
like the riches
in the safe
and like a Greek king
I strut.
The entire poem is long, 13 pages total. They are aligned weirdly, texts too close to one another. I wonder if the photocopier messed it up? The indentation of the lines moves in and out, and the text size is inconsistent. After reciting on my own, I feel deflated and a little embarrassed. My heart gets heavier than a metal safe.
It’s time for me to go to school, so I hurry out, leaving a note on the desk.
Jimin, If you have time this evening, stop by at the café where I work. It’s on the way to the subway station, and it’s called Instant Paradise. Sometime between 6:30 and midnight. Don’t wait for me, they said they will feed me tonight. Enjoy your evening.
—Jeong Yeoul
* * *
This isn’t commuting, this is mountain climbing! The stupid college gobbles up our tuition, but can’t spit out a single shuttle bus for the students. Getting to the Humanities building isn’t too bad, though. I have a German Grammar class at 4:00 PM. I’ve skipped too many classes and am not sure I’ll keep going. I still haven’t turned in the paper for my Interpreting Literature class. Ah, my heart is not a safe full of love, but a shriveled organ rotting with anxiety and anger.
I walk by the café where I now work. Instant Paradise. I salivate at the thought of a free dinner. The sign is already lit. I hadn’t noticed, but the huge, hot-pink sign looks tacky and a little suggestive. Instant coffee, instant ramen, instant camera—what else is “instant?” My life? My disposable instant life! There is no past, no future; there is no previous life or reincarnation; there is no eternity. Just one disposable day after another, and then—GAME OVER! I wish life was made of a single day: today.
Jeong Yeoul! Let’s not get distracted by the past nightmares, or make any foolish long-term plans. Here and now. Today alone is overwhelming enough. A black plastic bag soars above my head. It’s majestic, like a raven midflight.
Zarathustra
It’s been a week since I started working at Instant Paradise, but Jimin hasn’t stopped by, not once. I know she’s busy studying and writing poems, but it stings. When I get to her place after midnight, exhausted after a long day of work, she looks over her shoulder, avoiding me like I’m a pathetic prostitute. The past few days, she’s stopped nagging me. Stop working at that shady café. Read books.
But the café is near the university, so there are almost no shady customers. Most of the customers are college students. Occasionally school teachers, bank clerks, or middleaged men from the apartment complex across the street stop by. The owner shows up once every few days to ask halfheartedly, “Everything good? Water the plants, please.” Then she scatters her perfume smell and storms out. According to her nephew and cashier, Sungyun, she also has a huge coffee shop in Gwangan, so she doesn’t really care about this location. Her father owns the building, and she has good alimony from her divorce, so she isn’t really worried about money.
I am just about to brush my teeth after eating dinner in the kitchen when a tall man shambles into the shop. The sign’s light is off and it’s ten minutes before the store opens for the evening.
“Excuse me, we’re not open yet.” I look up, and my heart drops. Oh fuck, it’s Dad. He probably poked around the university student directory office, somehow heard about Jimin, and combed through the map to find her place. I can visualize him huffing and puffing through the university’s gate, the flower shop, the convenience store, the real estate agent’s office, and into the dark alley where Jimin and I live. He might have throttled Jimin to tell him where I was.
“I’m sorry, but can I use the bathroom?”
“What?” My father instantly transformed into a stranger. It wasn’t him. I feel deflated, so deflated that I fall to the floor. Eunyong, another server, tells him that the bathroom is up the stairs halfway to the next floor.
How long has it been since the last time I saw my father face-to-face? It feels like it’s been a million years since we ate at the same table. There is no way he has been thinking of me or looking for me.
The only time my father and I touched skin to skin was when I was in second grade. It was in the small, noisy workshop attached to our home where my father made squishy slippers out of plastic. I kept playing the rubber band game, where you dance along to a song with a specific sequence of moves, jumping over a long rubber band set up high off the ground. When I wore a cumbersome skirt, I would pull up the skirt and tuck it in my panties so I could freely kick my legs as high as the sky.
One sweltering summer night, I saw my mom in a dream. She spread her arms toward me by the lake. I ran to her, my feet so light, to jump into her arms. But her breasts were as cold as ice. She was made of plastic. When I woke up, soaked in sweat, no one was there. Half-asleep, I played the rubber band game in the dark. There was no rubber band, so I piled up the pillows. I sang a familiar song to myself: “Hopping over the dead bodies of my fellow soldiers, I go forward and forward,” and hopped back and forth over the pillows. But then I slipped on one of the pillows and bumped my head on the corner of the nearby desk. Blood spilled from my forehead. Covered in blood, I crawled into the workshop’s control room. Dad, working late that night, turned pale at the sight of me, picked me up, and rushed to the hospital. His white undershirt quickly turned red. It was a sweltering summer night, but my teeth were chattering. I felt like I was freezing to death. I was so sleepy. And I felt so good. When we were passing the overpass by the public bathhouse, I prayed: I hope the hospital light I see is farther away than it looks. Dear God, please let this overpass collapse.
So now I have a scar on my forehead. I usually cover it with my bangs, but when I feel like shit, I trace the scar, slender like an orchid’s leaf, and retreat into my heart’s garden. In the garden there are trees, songbirds, rose bushes, pots of orchids, and pretty pebbles. A white bird emerges out of a pretty pebble. On the green grass, I drink hot cocoa, and a nude woman sitting next to me touches my cheek. Who is my real mother?
The