And the Past Went on Breathing
Grant Koo
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Grant Koo
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At a certain point there is no possible return. That is the point we must reach.
—Franz Kafka, Diaries
Monday
I hardly even noticed the voice at first. I’d catch a word here and there, or at most a murmured phrase—the way your ears might single out half a whisper from a whirlpool of white noise so that you’d wonder, without stopping whatever it was you happened to be doing at the time, whether that whisper was meant specifically for you. Your ears would strain to make sense of it, to drown out the swirl of other possibilities carried on the crisp autumn wind through your open window: a child reciting his bedtime prayers, an actress rehearsing her lines, the uninteresting half of a late night call to Timbuktu even. But if you were me, and a sharp pain suddenly cut off the air to your lungs, you’d realize that the half whisper belonged to you, that in fact it had been you muttering all along.
My eyes had snapped into a tight focus on a bead of blood suspended cinematically in midair, and I blinked a few times, thinking of Katrina as the world alternated between darkness and light. Had she already landed? The droplet splashed against the cold kitchen tiles as time shivered anxiously into motion again. I slammed down the knife and pressed the warm wound to my lips. Blood and lemon juice mixing on my palette stirred a distant memory, but I resisted whatever it was, doubting that the taste of blood and lemon juice, or any similar blend of bitters for that matter, was likely to have very many pleasant associations. I spat some blood into the kitchen sink and held my hand up to the light. A little bloody, but hardly something that required prompt medical attention. I teetered towards the bathroom in search of the ointment and bandages, and happened to catch sight of my reflection in the mirror. These things happen everyday, it shrugged. Today it happened to you.
I finished dressing the wound and retraced my steps back to the kitchen along little islands of hardwood peeping through a sea of clutter. A CD that had fallen out of its case caught the light at a certain angle and winked me a rainbow. As I bent over to check it for scratches, I met with my reflection a second time and heard the tick-tocking of the clock grow louder. Something snapped under a trancelike step towards the stereo.
“With the monkeys and donkeys,” I heard myself recite tonelessly.
As I thought about the friend in Seoul who had sent the present, a gesture that points to both remembering and wanting to be remembered, a serene sunset over the Han River flashed through my mind. A certain summery mood pushed its way forward through all the riverside conversations addled then by the soju and now by a failing command of the language they originally took place in. There was something else, however, hovering just outside the edges of memory, that I tried to draw in and own again, but I couldn’t seem to bring it into focus.
I began rummaging around the studio wondering whether that rose red sun had come from the birthday postcard accompanying the CD or directly from the place itself. I looked around in a few more piles, but in the end gave up without resolving whether that picture perfect postcard had compromised my memory or not. Lighting a cigarette instead, I blew three empty smoke rings, one for each decade, and found myself trying to recall the memory I had resisted earlier.
Blood. Lemons.
Lemons. Blood.
When the cigarette had burned down to the filter, I put it out, and turned up the volume to the stereo. If you couldn’t remember something in the length of a cigarette, it was best to let it go.
“I’ve forsaken my love for you,” the dark voice crooned over an even darker melody, and I nodded as if in agreement. I peeled back the bandage to see if the bleeding had clot, covered up the cut again, and shook my head. It had probably been, “For you, I’ve forsaken my love.” I waited for the refrain again, but it never came. The longer I thought about it, the less certain I felt. My Korean had gotten pretty rusty. I skipped through the long instrumental to the next track and returned to the kitchen.
I squeezed a lemon wedge over the ungarnished herring, wrapped it in buttered aluminum foil and placed it in the oven preheated to 325 degrees. I scanned the floor for a spoon, a matching pair of chopsticks, a usable plate, and a soup bowl. After running everything under the tap, I wiped down an area of the counter with a passably clean washcloth, set a place to eat, and waited for the rice to cook.
I yawned to moisten my eyes as they roamed the room. Zooming in and out, I began connecting particular things that were out of place to the overall effect of breathtaking chaos that the studio gave at first glance. From a purplish wine stain on one of the overturned cushions to the broken celadon vase beside the windowsill, the sense of disruption was categorical. I’d found clothes on the kitchen floor, chopsticks in the bathtub, toiletries on the coffee table, and magazines at the foot of the bed. Scattered were the odd collections of business cards and single serving-sized packets of soy sauce, old credit card receipts and the inexplicable “extra” parts leftover from having assembled the IKEA furniture without referring to their instructions. Avenged were all the penciled matchbooks, useless keys, and undeveloped film that had ended up in the back of a drawer somewhere and later forgotten about. What contributed most to the maddening mess were my books, flung haphazardly throughout the studio. I reflected that it just wasn’t in my nature to throw away a book. With the occasional draft blowing through the room tonight, I imagined ghosts stirring about from novel to novel piecing together strange, hybrid tales.
I picked up a book at random and proceeded to read from it out loud, pacing cautiously through the studio. “The world is a mirror,” it said, “but so is the mind. It is the imperfections in both that keep you from sinking into the perfect darkness of an infinitely empty reflection.” I smiled, reminded of a time when sentences like that seemed to dangle neat solutions to all life’s mysteries. I closed the book solemnly and put it back on an otherwise empty shelf.
I returned to the kitchen and craned my neck underneath the tap, gulping down as much cold water as I could. My eyes felt like shriveled grapes. Raisins, I guess. I turned off the tap and shivered, and again felt a fleeting, full-body sensation that I was in the middle of nowhere, caught between moving in and moving out, between coming and going. Through some tangled chain of associations, I began thinking of all the women that had come and gone, tallying up the ones that had left on the one side of my brain, and the ones I had left behind on the other.
It had started out innocently enough, but turned out to be a list of all the women I’d ever slept with.
The number had come out to seventeen, not counting Katrina. “Seventeen,” I heard myself repeating to avoid thinking that someday, maybe, she too would come to be included on the list. I had no idea what to think of that number, statistically speaking, but I supposed drawing up a list of all the women you’ve ever slept with was pretty reprehensible however you looked at it. I tried comparing the list to something less reprehensible, like say counting stars in the Sahara or some other welcome distraction should you ever find yourself stranded in the middle of a metaphysical nowhere that differed from now here by only a space, but only concluded that it was better not to compare it to anything and best not think of it at all.
The sound of duct tape unreeled in my mind.
I made my way to the sofa in a series of halts and lurches, over and around objects lying in my path, straightened out the cushions so that the wine stain didn’t show, and sank in for a think that had started off with a few obstacles of its own.
I wondered what time it was in Korea, not sure whether the difference was now thirteen or fourteen hours depending on daylight savings, which they didn’t observe. Probably fourteen.
And in Sri Lanka, as I’d read earlier in the day, guerillas had set up a state with its own time zone, exactly thirty minutes behind the rest of the country.
The first time I had come across that word in a book, I thought it was simply how the Spanish spelled “gorillas.”
What a mess.
Pressing my palms against my eyes, I stitched what I now knew into the fabric of what had been, aside from dropping Katrina off at JFK, a nothing special day like any other. Was that when this happened? While I was waving adios to Katrina at the security checkpoint? Or maybe not until I got on the subway to work? And was the intruder gone by lunchtime or had I just missed her by a few minutes?
At least the lipstick on the filter seemed to indicate that it was a “her.”
I remembered climbing up the wooden stairs and listening to the same ones creak the way I had practically everyday for the past three years. There had been no mail in my box today, not even junk mail. The TV had been blasting in old Alice’s apartment as usual. Judging from the all the magazines and newspapers piling up just inside the front door, I figured the Rosenfelds’ had been out of town all week.
Every slow step was slowed that much more in memory as if submerged in water or in music. I might have been whistling a little something as I climbed, just to take my mind off the fact that Katrina was gone. As I swiveled around the landing between the second and third floors, I realized that I had forgotten to pick up a bulb to replace the one that had gone out over the welcome mat to my studio. I ascended a few more steps in dim light and then stopped as if the door had just slammed shut in my face, an effect achieved simply by having been left ajar. The keys I already had out dangled uselessly from my hand. If I had been whistling something, I was sure that I wasn’t anymore at that point. I had stilled the clinking keys and held my breathing and stood there listening for movements inside. Hearing nothing out of the ordinary, I’d decided to take the last few steps to the top and pushed open the door. I had braced myself for change. You don’t come home to an open door in a big city like this and expect to see the place just the way you had left it in the morning. On the other hand, you hadn’t been prepared to see the place in such a shambles either.
As a person who has seen a horror movie or two, I checked the usual hiding spots: the bathroom, the closet, behind the bookcases, underneath the bed, and in the closet again just to make sure. Having assured myself that I was, in fact, completely alone, I picked up the cordless phone, which had been knocked off the end table, and dialed 9-1-1. I explained to the operator that my home had been violated. Those may have been my exact words, I don’t remember. Then she asked if the intruder was still on the premises, and I answered confidently in the negative. She asked if I wanted her to call in a patrol car, and I said yes please. She said it could be a while seeing how I wasn’t in any immediate danger. Lucky me. I gave her my name and address, and hung up.
As I set the receiver down in its cradle, I had caught a slight movement out of the corner of my eye from behind the curtains. “Who’s there?” No answer. I clenched my fists and took a step forward with the irrelevant impression that the curtains needed cleaning. Just then a gust of wind sent my mind reeling back to earlier on that morning when I had called up to Katrina from the stairs to check the windows as I dragged her suitcases down to the cab that had begun honking again.
The studio looked as if the idea of order in it had spontaneously imploded.
I shifted my position on the sofa, and closed my eyes to be alone with the smell of herring beginning to cook. In the dark, I could hear Katrina’s voice telling me that the soul of a food was in its smell. I opened my eyes and imagined the herring’s soul swimming out through the open window and into that inverted sea that was fish heaven. I let out a sigh. “No need to mention the window when Katrina calls.”
It had only been the wind, silly.
I remembered climbing out onto the fire escape and picking distractedly at the scabs of peeling paint as people in windows across the street went on watching TV, reading, drinking, waiting to fall asleep, calmly unaware of how fragile their privacy was. I climbed back into the studio, slammed the window shut and locked it. Dusting off my hands, I wondered what the television was still doing in its armoire.
Hmm.
I was puzzled by the presence of the DVD player and stereo system, and more than a little confused by the laptop and espresso maker. All the rest only added to my anxiety: the electric grill, microwave, new leather briefcase, Katrina’s change of designer label clothes, her telescope, the unlocked safety box containing some extra cash, bankbooks, passport and other important documents. The problem was it didn’t square with your feeling that something must be missing. Having found the digital camera underneath some winter clothes, I began searching for the fake Fendi watch, worried that I just might find it. I pictured my father buying it in Battery Park from some guy with shifty eyes who had knocked twenty dollars off the initial asking price. As I sifted through years of accumulation—ticket stubs to performances, Christmas cards from people I had long lost contact with, old letters—the doorbell rang.
I opened the door. The shadowy figure standing on the other side had peered over my shoulder and asked if I had called about a break-in. I blinked. He showed me his badge. I looked at its embossed perimeter, the numbers and lugs hard soldered into it, the nickel-plating polished to a high gloss…
“It’s the real deal,” he said putting it back in his pocket.
I had invited him in and offered him a drink which he declined citing company policy. A sense of humor? I shrugged and poured myself a tall scotch as he took out his notepad and started in with the questions.
I pointed out that the perpetrator had probably entered through the window, but seemed to have left in a less dramatic fashion via the front door. He knitted his eyebrows the way actors do to let audiences know that they are deep in thought. He did it again when I stated for the record that nothing seemed to be stolen.
I was pouring myself a second scotch when he found the cigarette filter stained with cherry-red lipstick. He pulled out a clear plastic bag from his hip pocket and dropped it in. After sealing off the top, he slipped the evidence into the inside pocket of his jacket looking as bored as can be. Very convincing.
He closed his notepad and inserted his ballpoint pen into the wire binding. I noticed the color of his unflinching eyes for the first time, a kind of bluish gray tinted I imagined with having traded looks with too many criminals. I broke off the uncomfortable eye contact, and thanked him for his troubles. He waved it off with an only-doing-my-job kind of smile. It completely transformed his face.
“Is the offer still on the table?”
Offer?
“The drink.”
“Right, of course.” I zigzagged my way into the kitchen to rinse off another tumbler. “Scotch, okay?
“Life saver.”
“Neat or on the rocks?”
“Neat,” he said still looking around, but no longer working. “So where you from?”
“Jersey.” Silence.
“I mean your ancestors.”
“Oh, them. Korea,” I said, handing him his drink. He emptied it and winced.
“That’s premium stuff.” I refilled his glass.
“So what about that filter?”
“Not very helpful,” he said, stating the obvious. He took a sip and added in a more consoling tone, “I’ll run through some records down at the station and let you know if anything turns up.”
“Records?”
“A history of this sort of thing in the neighborhood.”
“I see.”
“The best thing, though, is to get some rest. Things invariably look a lot better in the morning. And here, call if you think of anything else that might help.”
Extending a business card between his index and middle fingers, he emptied his glass again and exhaled loudly, “How’s about one for the road?”
I took his card out of my shirt pocket and held it by the corners. Detective Peter Gallagher. I tried to remember if he had really used the word invariably or whether my memory had simply given his vocabulary a sudden promotion. I shook my head and got up from the sofa to retrieve a beer from the fridge.
There were five bottles left in the six-pack Katrina had bought. I studied the fridge to see if any food was missing, and then wasted a few more minutes searching for an opener before realizing the cap was a twist-off. I sipped from the cold bottle thinking about the cigarette filter with the lipstick stain. Not very helpful? Not if you take a simple DNA sample of the saliva off the filter and cross-reference it with the extensive files that the government keeps on everyone. I sat on the floor and tried laughing. It didn’t help. I reached for the wool scarf Katrina had knit me last Christmas and wrapped it around my neck. It retained a faint trace of her perfume from the last time I took it off to keep her warm. I drummed my fingers against the floor. Now what? I picked up an old journal that was within reach and began reading. The first entry was dated March 22, about thirteen years ago:
What’s the connection then between the over-concreteness of dreams and the intangible themes of our waking life? Night is sleep and the day is dark water. Sure thing. But am I awake or still dreaming? My room is a mess and my socks have holes. I have slept again in my clothes. Last night, I dreamed of it again. The book written in disappearing ink where I can never get past the first chapter.
What kind of dream is this? Reality is a warden to fugitive dreams fed on faith and other lies. True faith has to come from without, like a voice calling from the wilderness. True faith just might manage to flip the prison inside out.
I interrupted my reading to check on the herring. That’s how I knew less time had passed than I thought. Maneuvering my way to the bed, I started skimming through a few of the other entries. My high school English teacher had suggested keeping the journal as a way of getting the lines I wouldn’t be able to use out of the way. Nothing fancy, just stream of consciousness. And work mornings since the day’s demands had not yet gotten between you and your feelings. The whole thing struck me as a little superstitious at the time. Not the sort of advice I passed along to my authors.
The handwriting, the tone, the style, everything was strikingly unfamiliar, and made it that much easier to distance myself from that person trying to crawl out from between the pages. Rereading the journal felt like slipping into a past that had never occurred. Dreams are private histories that never happened. I continued with a few more entries at random when the phone rang. I let it ring until I realized it might be Katrina. I leapt out of bed for the phone, but the new answering machine picked up a second before I did which caused a jarring feedback. I noted that the answering machine too was still here. I pushed a hectic combination of buttons as the machine played my processed voice back at me.
“Technical difficulties?”
“Sort of.” I returned to the bed with the cordless propped between my shoulder and ear, beer in one hand, and the other unable to reach an itch on my back. “How was the flight?”
“Strange.”
“Strange?” I juggled the phone and the bottle and reached the itch with my other hand. Taking another sip from the bottle, I nudged the journal over to Katrina’s side of the bed and tried, unsuccessfully, to get comfortable.
“Have you ever run into someone you’d almost forgotten about?”
I drew a breath in response, and exhaled an empty speech bubble. The problem was I hadn’t grasped her actual question at first, only the sound of the words. Her voice echoed in my mind, which then drew a complete blank. Someone you’d almost forgotten about? The chances seemed pretty good considering I had thirty years of forgetting already behind me, but I couldn’t remember it ever happening. Not once. On any other night, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me as much. I thought about it some more.
“You there?”
“Sorry, still thinking.”
“Well, there was this guy on the plane I thought I knew.”
“Oh, so it wasn’t him.” I didn’t know why I sounded so relieved.
“I’m not sure,” she said similarly puzzled. “He was arguing with some woman for most of the flight. There wasn’t an opportunity to ask.”
“Arguing?”
“Right.”
“About what?”
“I think there might have been another woman.”
“Another woman?”
“I think.” I considered the possibility of another woman.
“Who’s this guy again?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“What’s that.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Alright. Tell me again what happened. But from the beginning,” I drank more beer and waited for her to decide where to start.
“Well, I guess I was just nodding off when the plane flew into some pretty bad turbulence. I mean plane rattling turbulence.”
“Plane rattling?”
“Like extended plane rattling turbulence. The guy next to me buried his face in a vomit bag.”
“Ugh.”
“I know. And this other girl behind me was like ‘ohmygodohmygodohmygod.’ I swear I wanted to turn around and bitch-slap her.”
“Ha.” She knew I got a kick out of her use of terms like “bitch-slap”. Or “pushy” as she pronounced it. It just sounded so out of character for her.
“Okay, I mean, not really, but she was not helping. I guess everyone was pretty scared. Except for this one couple. That’s the thing. They didn’t even seem to notice. It was like…I don’t know. They were so bent on being vicious to each other. Then it felt like the plane hit another air pocket. A deep one. And that’s when I realized: Koo Tae Jin.”
She paused dramatically. The inflections of her English had already begun to disperse the evening’s fog of random thoughts.
“Koo Tae Jin?”
“That’s who it was, and I didn’t even realize it. It was so bizarre. There he was, my first crush, sitting exactly where he used to in junior high, a row up and on my left.”
“So it was him.”
“Maybe. We never actually got to talk.”
“Right. Hard to say.”
“That’s the thing. After that last big jolt, the plane sort of calmed down. You could feel this incredible surge of relief from everyone in the cabin. Except those two. They just never let up.”
“That is strange.”
“Isn’t it? You know, I bet there’s a picture of him still somewhere in the house. My dad doesn’t throw anything out. Man, he was like some perfectly preserved caveman suddenly thawing to life.”
I laughed and said I could understand where she was coming from. I gulped down the last of the beer, which had begun to taste a bit lukewarm by then, and pushed myself up off the bed. I took advantage of the natural lull that the conversation had eased into to chart out a clear path to the window, which I reopened to smoke another cigarette. Looking out into the night sky, I tried to picture Katrina as a young girl in love, and felt my shoulders relaxing for the first time since I got home. I wondered again, the way I did sometimes late at night as I watched over her sleep, what fraction of her past she actually remembered, and what fraction of that fraction had actually been communicated to me.
Suddenly, there’s the beep-beep-beeping of the smoke detector. Very loud and aggravating.
“What’s that noise?”
“Hold on.” I flicked the cigarette into the street, and rushed into the kitchen, accidentally stepping on and breaking a few things. I turned off the stove, tossed the herring into the sink and ran the tap. The herring sizzled and steamed in its aluminum coffin. I waved a kitchen towel under the smoke detector until it shut up. “Katrina?”
“Yeah. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Dinner’s a little crisp.”
“You’re having dinner now? It’s after 11 there.”
“It is?” The tension slowly crept back into my shoulders as I craned my neck to have a look at the studio. One of the conversation’s veils had hit a snagging point. “Dinner’s late because a cop was here. The studio’s been burglarized.”
“What?!”
“Not burglarized exactly,” I said pulling another beer from the fridge. “Nothing seems to be stolen.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, the place is wrecked.”
“Uh-mo-nah. Why didn’t you say so? I thought something was wrong. Your voice sounded all tight. Are you okay?”
I twisted off the cap, took a good long swig, and followed the tracks of dirt on the floor left by the cop. I hadn’t bothered asking him to remove his shoes. It had struck me as irrelevant at the time. “Bright side is I didn’t waste the weekend cleaning.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know,” I continued, “I guess I’m okay. It just doesn’t make any sense.” She let out a long sigh and for a moment I thought the line had gone dead.
“You should crash at Roger’s tonight.”
“I’ll be fine here. Really. I’m seeing him for lunch tomorrow anyway.” There wasn’t any connection really, but my point was made. We volleyed the silence back and forth over the line.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me right away. It’s like pulling teeth sometimes, you know that? Did the police find anything?”
“This cop came by and asked a bunch of questions. He wrote some of it down, but it seemed pretty clear there was nothing he could do. He took a look at the locks on his way out and suggested installing new ones. He also said something about getting a neighbor to pick up the mail for me when I’m gone. I hadn’t thought of that. I guess the mail tips off burglars that no one’s home when it piles up like that.”
I took a sip of beer and looked out the window. I heard the rice cooker ding just as a light blinked on across the street. It was another nondescript, autumn night. Everywhere leaves seemed to be falling or not falling. The breeze, when there was one, was neither warm nor cool.
“And nothing’s missing?”
“Not that I can tell. The laptop is still here, and so is the stereo.” I ran my finger along the top of the telescope by the window. “And your telescope is really dusty.”
“At least you weren’t at home when they came. They could have been armed.”
“Right,” I said, gulping down the beer and not wanting to contradict her.
I heard her father’s voice in the background calling her down for lunch. It was the first time I’d heard it. His muscular baritone carried a thick, southern dialect that Katrina had shed moving north to Seoul. There was a time not too long ago when hearing his voice wouldn’t have meant anything to me. She muffled the phone, switching to Korean to reply to her father before coming back on the line in English.
“Sorry, I’ve got to go. You okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow. Try to get some sleep.”
“Okay.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
I hung up the receiver and sighed. I thought some more about her father, recollecting the secondhand facts of his life in no particular order. He lost his wife early and never remarried. He liked to gamble. He was always singing and managed to raise three kids on his own. And when there was nothing left to think about, I found myself imagining a short scenario of just the two of us meeting somewhere, of me glancing out the window of some cab stopped at a red light at the exact same moment he happened to step off the curb to cross the street. Even in the imagination, things began with a coincidence. I’d recognize him instantly from all the photos Katrina had shown me, but to him I’d be no different from anyone else he didn’t know. I’d shove some money through the glass partition, and tell the driver to keep the change. Did taxis in Korea have glass partitions? It didn’t matter. I’d follow him through the streets of Ulsan, even though I’d never been there, because it was inconceivable that he’d ever be wandering through the streets of lower Manhattan. I’d follow him for blocks and blocks past the steaming street vendors and soju tents where salary men were barking orders under neon lights buzzing to life, and watch how he interacted with this fictive environment in which he moved, not once stopping to consider where he might be headed. And just as the scenario threatened to loop back upon itself and late into an illogical night, he’d drop his wallet or keys or something, and I’d rush over to retrieve whatever it turned out to be. He’d look at me in exactly the way you’d want your girlfriend’s dad to look at you and say thanks as I handed it back.
I supposed there wasn’t anything too distressing about your girlfriend not mentioning you to her father, especially if she happened to be Korean, so when Katrina and I had started seeing each other again last year, I hadn’t given it much thought, and over time, I simply accepted that her reasons for not telling him about us had nothing to do with me. What else could I do? I wasn’t about to ask her to change just because I had my spells of insecurity.
I finished the beer and put the empty bottle next to the one before it. I stared at this glass eleven and thought about cavemen thawing to life on international flights, about jetlag and time zones, about her promise to call and everything else tomorrow would bring. I tried to formulate what it was about Katrina that always brought me back to myself.
“And nothing’s missing?” she repeated in my head.
I stepped back into the kitchen, opened a can of sardines in olive oil and inverted it over the plate. I edged them over to one side by tilting the plate and piled a healthy serving of rice onto the other half. I reheated the soup and pulled a few side dishes Katrina had stored in Tupperware out of the fridge. It was a disappointing dinner, but then again everything took on that same blandness of taste whenever you ate alone. I closed my eyes and tried pretending Katrina was there, but the food tasted exactly the same. Bland. I repacked the side dishes, retrieved another beer from the fridge and began pacing the room, surrendering any palpable sense of reality that the present had to the history of whatever object caught my eye: a zippo lighter, a shoebox of assorted memories, a pair of boxing gloves. I pinballed through the past until it finally occurred to me that what I was looking at happened to be everything I owned.
I looked up at the clock, gulped down what was left in the bottle, and put on Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites, which was still in the CD changer, which was still in the apartment. I thought some more about why someone would go through all the trouble of breaking in, and really turn the place upside-down, without even stealing anything. Not all my stuff was cheap and ugly. I mean a lot of it was, but not everything.
I thought of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Maybe Roger’s novel was on the back of my mind, but it was possible that whoever my Goldilocks was was not your everyday thief, but was searching for something specific, something just right. Or maybe she had simply targeted the wrong place. Maybe she had wanted the Rosenfelds. I should offer to pick up their mail next time they were out of town. I even considered the possibility that some writer whose manuscript I had rejected was seeking her revenge. The guy I’d met at the book fair in Chicago last year said he knew an editor who read some deranged man’s manuscript from beginning to end at gunpoint. With stuff like that happening, the possibilities for explaining a mystery seemed endless. And if you thought about it for too long, you began to question the need to explain it at all.
I picked up a framed Polaroid of Katrina and I that had fallen off the end table. We were on the Brooklyn Bridge and the sun had been directly behind us when the picture was shot, casting both our faces in deep shadow. She had on a light denim jacket over a collared shirt, and a skirt that had shown too much skin for Seoul, but might have passed for fashionably short in New York. Her long, dark hair flailed freely in search of fresh descriptions. Some of it had gotten tangled in her mouth.
The wind had been blowing from west to east, so that I was walking into it from the Brooklyn end of the bridge. A separate memory of my slow advance, of meeting with enough resistance to consider turning back a couple of times, corroborated this. The force of the wind had seemed to blow any orderly notions of time straight out of my head. At least that’s what it felt like when I spotted her approaching from the Manhattan end of the bridge. The previous few hours, and then the night, and then entire years swirled away. Here she was, holding her hand to her hat to secure it in place, and seeming similarly lost in thought, or perhaps only admiring the flock of birds circling in the distance. In either case, she hadn’t noticed me, and for a foolish moment I thought I should let her pass, an undisturbed ghost, even though I knew somehow that it was inevitable for me to stop her. I tried to predict what I would say next as we passed each other, feeling that that too was somehow predetermined. I was still searching for a suitable attitude to settle into when I gently took hold of her elbow, surprised that it had been real after all.
“This is a surprise,” I said matter-of-factly.
She brought both hands to her mouth just as a sudden gust of wind blew, sending her hat far out over the East River. It was an awkward moment with the both of us watching her hat climb the sky. I released her elbow and noticed a tourist over her left shoulder taking Polaroids of the skyline. I cleared my throat and asked if he’d take our picture for a buck. As I began explaining to him the uncommon circumstances of our meeting, I realized that every word was meant for her. He was perfect, getting us to pose and complimenting her beauty in an Italian accent and everything. He handed us the Polaroid and acted offended when I took out my wallet. That made her laugh. As we watched the image develop, it occurred to me that it was the first picture we’d ever taken together. I met her eyes and found my laugh too, saying how I hadn’t looked that happy in a long time. I stopped to verify this in the picture, and in a moment of unprecedented giddiness, I pointed out the speck that could’ve been her hat flying out among the birds.
Despite the badly faded colors, I was able to restore the original sharpness of that day in recollection. I distinctly remembered that the weather made me wish I were on a boat. I had suggested we take a ride on the ferry to Staten Island. She said some other time, but we never went. It also occurred to me that you couldn’t tell from the picture that about two years had divided us at the time. An old intimacy still held up the corners of our smiles. As I stared on, the picture invited me down another alleyway of memory.
In those awkward moments as the wind carried her hat high over the East River, every delinquent detail of the morning that had divvied up our memories so messily came rushing back, complete with the boundless hollow of a thousand unspoken farewells that we’d known all along would be coming for us, but which found us on that morning in question nevertheless unprepared.
The thin curtains drawn over the open window fluttered and diffused the dawn after a sleepless night had passed in thick, episodic silences, like commas with nothing between them multiplying in the dark, through which I supposed we were both trying to understand the best we could that everything that had passed between us was now coming to an end, and that something irreparable was taking place, and would continue taking place in our lives forever. Her head was resting on my chest, and I stroked her hair as she improvised a melody, each doing whatever it took to keep the other awake. Studying the vase of carnations, I mentioned that it was odd to have live flowers in a room, where the only indication of flora one ever saw seemed to be that of the patterned wallpaper, the bathroom tiles or the bedcovers. She nodded as if looking back on a receding dreamworld that revealed everything that was sterile and coldly impersonal about the atmosphere of our rented room. I tried to hold onto our dreamworld a little longer and mentioned that the stillness of the mini-bar stocked with tiny bottles, the bare hangers in the closet, and even the artificial scent of spring rain made me feel like ours were the only lives to have ever animated that room and that our love-making in particular would haunt it forever. She stopped humming, adjusted her position in my arms, and looked me directly in the eye as if for the first time.
“It’s time for us to go,” she had said matter-of-factly.
“Yes,” I replied knowingly, but neither of us had moved.
I began to feel a strain in my legs from standing still for such a long time. I felt the weight of last things in the rented room and the lightness of new beginnings on the bridge. I felt myself soaring over the East River with her hat and thought what a shame it would be for new beginnings to have the same sad endings.
I carried the framed Polaroid with me to the sofa though I was no longer looking at it. I settled in, only vaguely registering the room’s clutter. I’d already slipped down a third alleyway, thinking of our earliest memories together and the special weight of sadness they took on even as they spindled through the silence of our room at the hotel. I suddenly remembered a musty note underlying the artificial scent of spring rain that I hadn’t detected at the time. I was too absorbed in the petals surrounding the vase of carnations and the tap-tap-tap of her fingers on my chest as they wired the story of how we met across vast oceans of time.
We’d met in the summer, the day before the solstice. Earlier that morning, after a sweaty night’s sleep, I’d decided I was done with the whole expatriate thing, which I knew, all through those three years I’d been keeping it up, was a sort of sham romance. At the end of my morning rituals then, with nothing much better to do, I grabbed a book and headed down to the Internet café on the corner, which was always crowded but at least air-conditioned, and looked into flights back to New York once a computer freed up. I made reservations for the fall, figuring that if I continued to work through the summer and taught whatever extra classes were available, I’d add enough to my savings to afford another month in Thailand and still have enough to tide me over till I found something back in New York. The idea pleased me so much I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it sooner.
After shooting out a few breezy e-mails to people back in the States, I called up a friend to come meet me at the Internet café so that I could tell him about my decision in person. I hung up and scanned a few headlines to see what else was happening in the world at that moment before ceding the computer to someone else.
A table by the window had opened up just as I ordered a second cappuccino. I steered through the crowded café without spilling a drop and sank into a comfortable pleather armchair. As I watched the women waft by in their soft summer skirts, thinking carnally of my damp, sun-drenched apartment with its insomnia-inducing wallpaper, I was overwhelmed with a lucky feeling that at once highlighted the apartment’s stark bareness and how easy it would be to leave it behind. I had accumulated shockingly little. With nothing but a mattress on the floor, a kitchen table and two mismatched chairs, you would never have guessed someone had really been living there for three whole years. It had been cheap though and easy enough to keep clean, and suddenly, I felt sure I’d been happy in my own way in that makeshift room of barebones living.
I had found myself taking stock of those years, as I started doing again now, sifting through the memories of teaching English or taking Korean and kum-do lessons, of escaping on cheap flights whenever the time and money were there or exploring the local countryside and reading in coffee shops when they weren’t. On some of those days, I’d awoken to find myself lying next to a girl, but more often than not, I’d woken up alone, and that’d been fine too. But one day, it had just stopped being enough, though I couldn’t remember if I’d consciously been thinking that at the time. It was a familiar feeling, a kind of quiet wonder at how neatly things could fit together into an image of what was supposed to happen next, and one that I’d always acted on.
I hadn’t realized at first that I’d been following this woman’s movements as she crossed the street towards me until she was staring straight at me. I thought I recognized her, or maybe only felt that I should have. Then I realized my mistake when she stopped right in front of me on the other side of the glass and looked in over my left shoulder straight past me. We were just inches apart and divided by only a thin sheet of glass, but she didn’t even notice me studying her features. She glanced down at her watch, worked something out in her head, and turned to enter the café. She joined the line of people waiting to place their orders.
I reached for my book and began reading from it, but was interrupted before I even got to the end of the paragraph. Since it had been particularly crowded that day, Katrina, though I hadn’t known at the time that that was going to be the English name I’d end up suggesting to her, had asked to sit at my table until one of the computers became available. I’d wanted to tell her that I was waiting on a friend, but before the words could form in my mind, she was getting comfortable in the armchair opposite mine. But then again, maybe I hadn’t really wanted to tell her that at all.
She removed a book from her bag and began reading, glancing up at the computers at regular intervals and unconsciously chewing on the straw to her iced coffee. I soon lost what little interest I had in my own book, though I was glad I had it out to use as an alibi for my eyes. She was good-looking, but not overly so as to make you feel like you couldn’t talk to her. I began thinking of things to say, working it out in Korean, ironing over syntactical wrinkles and bringing tenses into agreement, when I noticed she was crying. I imagined it was the book that moved her, and I decided not to disturb her. She must have become self-conscious just then because she suddenly spoke up first, asking if reading in English didn’t give me a headache. From the sound of her voice, I had the feeling that she knew somehow that I hadn’t been reading. I looked up, laughed, and responded that it was Korean that gave me problems. She shook her cup of iced coffee back into an even solution and, sipping through the gnarled straw, quietly recalibrated her questioning look. There was something about the straw that filled me with the feeling of déjà vu.
She got up abruptly, told me to keep an eye on her bag, and just beat a young man to the computer. I gave her a thumbs up, glanced out the window, and seeing no sign of my friend, returned to the book. After a few pages, I heard a question voiced in broken English.
“So you are American?”
“Yeah, but my parents are from Ulsan, just outside Busan,” I responded in English, adding in Korean that most people assumed I was Japanese when they heard me speak. It was a line I ended up using a lot.
“That’s just ignorant,” she said in Korean. “You look far more Chinese. So what do you think of Ulsan?”
“I’ve never been. I hear there’s not much to see.”
“That’s not true. We’ve got a wonderful fertilizer factory out there, not to mention the country’s first oil refinery. But I suppose most people who make it down that way just as well visit Busan instead.”
“I take it your from Ulsan.”
“Yes.”
That’s how I found out that she happened to grow up in the same town my parents were from. The discovery of such a meaningless connection between us seemed to heighten the promise of all sorts of future intimacies. We’d had the kind of easy conversation you wanted all talking to be, and I learned enough about her life to feel I knew her even though the more private details wouldn’t emerge until later retellings.
She was raised the oldest of three siblings. Her father, a bureaucrat in the ministry of public health, supported a family of five on a modest salary. Her mother died of stomach cancer when she was thirteen, and two years later, the family had fallen on financially hard times. More ruinous than the hospital bills was the bank loan her father had co-signed for a childhood friend. After the friend had mysteriously disappeared, the father was forced to take up a second job to pay off the loan. Through it all, Katrina had remained outwardly cheerful, curious about the world she lived in, and even excelled in her studies. Not out of any special interest in schoolwork, but because she saw how happy it made her father to brag about to his friends. She was accepted by a top university, but decided to attend a second-rate school that offered her a full scholarship. She studied astronomy, and upon graduation, moved north to Seoul where one of her professors had found her a position at a planetarium.
Over the faltering course of the consciously bi-lingual conversation, I did my best to explain the things I hardly ever took the trouble to mention to anyone and tried to understand the truth of her life as she knew it. The language barrier didn’t bother either of us in the least. It was part and parcel of the pleasure, and may even have helped establish a better understanding between us by forcing us to pay that much more attention to other, non-verbal forms of communication. Looking back, our generous exchange that day hadn’t stemmed so much out of love-at-first-sight than from an easy unburdening of the past with someone who was just passing through, and in our own way, lessening the sum total of loneliness in the world. My friend, who had been stuck in heavy traffic, later called the conversation “unapproachable,” and I commended his good judgment in deciding not to interrupt when he finally had arrived.
I gave the Polaroid one last look before returning it carefully to its place on the end table. It seemed to tame the disorder surrounding it. I remembered the Korean phrase i-ya-gi-reul-na-nu-da, which literally meant to divvy up the story or conversation, as if it were ready-made, and we were just claiming our share. I wondered if Katrina was still having lunch with her father at that moment halfway around the world and whether their conversation would involve me.
A strong gust blew in through the open window as I let out my deepest sigh of the day. As I got up to close the window, I noticed a woman undressing in an apartment across the street. As she reached around to unhook her bra, she paused, and turned toward me, making eye contact. Or so it seemed. I knew I should have averted my eyes, but I didn’t react fast enough. I had thought too much about reacting and ended up just watching on as she pulled the curtains closed.
Down in the street, a stray cat darted out from underneath a parked car. I thought better of shouting out an explanation that I hadn’t been spying. In the uninterrupted silence of the street, I felt wrongly accused even though there was a good chance she hadn’t even noticed me. Her window had been closed, and the light from her own apartment would have cast a deep reflection. As the possibility grew on me, I saw her light go out and a few moments later, she emerged alone from her building in an overcoat that seemed too warm for the weather. I instinctively ducked back into the studio. When I looked out again, cautiously, she was gone.
I lowered the window and turned out all the lights. Two in the kitchen including the bulb above the stove, the halogen and track lighting in the living room area, the reading lamp in the alcove, and finally the bedside lamp Katrina picked out one day in Soho a few months ago. I usually had only one or two on at a time to save electricity, but the cop had turned most of them on himself. I thought it was a bit presumptuous to be turning on the lights in another person’s home, but given the circumstances, I hadn’t said anything. I sat at the kitchen counter and polished off a fourth beer thinking about the woman, certain she had seen me. If not the first time, then the second, but probably both. All my lights had been on after all. I went to the bathroom. All the scotch and beer drained out of me, leaving me empty, with only the alcoholic awareness of my emptiness. “And besides, who hasn’t had that desire at least once in their life?” I asked the room. Receiving no reply, I climbed into bed and drew the sheet up to my chin. I was exhausted. I heard the faint whirring of a thousand tiny engines winding down for the night. I recalibrated my ears to this more perfect silence. A face stirred from the depths of this new silence, but luckily I fell asleep before I could attach a name to it.
The day’s residue resurfaces in my dream with slight variations.
I kiss Katrina at the airport and come home to the studio. It’s exactly as I had left it in the morning. I go through the same motions of cooking and cut myself. Lemon juice runs into the cut. The phone rings. It’s Katrina. She is crying inconsolably. I ask her what’s wrong, why she’s crying, but I can’t make out a word she’s saying. Her sobs recede, and when I ask her again if I’ve done something to make her feel bad, she tells me to look out the window. It’s the woman across the street. She’s holding the receiver to her ear. She waves with her free hand, breathes onto the windowpane, and traces a smiley face with her pinkie. “Hold on, I have a call from Timbuktu on the other line.” It’s no longer Katrina, but another. I mouth her name. Nothing. I try screaming it into the receiver, but no sound comes out of my throat. There is a click. I can hear the wind on the line, and inside that wind either laughter or crying, though I can’t tell which. I stop trying to make myself heard. I listen. Slowly I begin to discern a voice, quiet but insistent, whispering its accusations over and over. “You broke in here, motherfucker, you broke in.” The phone falls from my hand. It is not entirely clear that those words were meant for me.
I get up. It is the middle of the night. I don’t know what time it is or where I am, and for a moment I wonder if I’m really awake or just surfacing into an adjacent dream. Then in a flash, I remember. Everything is bathed in moonlight, and seems all the more sinister for being out of place. It happened to me, I mutter to myself, and feel around for the journal and a pen. I scribble away in the dark quickly, still half-asleep, and without worrying whether any of it will be legible in the morning.
Tuesday
The birds were out there again in a dizzying discussion of my dreams. As usual, it was useless to try to make any sense of it. Consciousness throbbed. I shifted away from the sun for a passage back to the other side, and felt around, forgetting, for just a second or two, that Katrina wasn’t there. My eyes fluttered open as my hand brushed against the worn leather journal warmed by the sun. The birds went deathly quiet, exchanged looks, and quickly reverted to their coded clicks and whistles.
I flipped through the pages, absently at first, but then with growing determination as the tail end of consciousness flickered between memory and dream. I’d almost given up and convinced myself that the entry in mind had never actually been written when, with a random insertion of my thumb, the book opened to an oddly overcrowded page that had been penned over twice. I read and reread it, first trying to visually extract the fresh from faded ink, and then dividing what turned out to be a single, unpunctuated sentence into sensible parts. It wasn’t until the third reading, when my eyes slipped into the ink of a younger hand underneath, that I found the name of the girl in my dream: Miranda E. Starr.
Saying the name out loud had cast an unexpected spell over me. I exhaled, but no fresh air rushed in to refill my lungs. The room began to blur over. The walls recede and a dozen years roll back to reveal the press of passengers through which I’d caught my final glimpses of her. Staring out at the waning afternoon light, she doesn’t look sad so much as contemplative, like one of those statues you end up mimicking in museums and dreams with the suspicion that they’ll shiver to life the moment you look away. A voice announces the next stop, my stop, and I almost make up my mind to stay in my seat and miss it. But I rise, and as I step off the bus, I am conscious of entering her line of vision. I turn to meet her gaze, but I can see her thoughts are elsewhere. The bus pulls away with a cough of exhaust, accelerates at twenty-four frames a second into the distance, and vanishes soundlessly into an unadorned wall marred with nail holes where intense parallelograms of sunlight advance daily by imperceptible degrees.
I stretched, inhaling deeply, and looked out the window, wondering whether the first girl I ever fell in love with even knew my name.