—They did. They had everything we have now.
I thought about all the other things that had always been there as I supported her back to her hospital room.
?
Around the end of that fall, I once met up with him when he came north of the Han River to hand over a manuscript edit he’d been working on. We fought a bit while drinking at a cheap pub near Hongik University when he commented that my inability to show restraint when it came to alcohol reminded him of someone—probably his umma. Tired of every topic of conversation being twisted back to his student activist days or his mother, I shot back that his inability to allow anything else but himself to be the center of attention was a sign of his having a mother complex. He retaliated by saying I had the same issue. Like any other accusation that wasn’t completely wrong, the words left hurtful wounds, which in turn spiraled into a huge argument. The nice evening of drinking I had anticipated turned into a long fight in which we said things we shouldn’t have said. Getting up from the bar with hurt feelings on both sides, we went out to the street to catch a cab. People were walking about with horrifically blood-splattered faces. Some were in superhero costumes and others were dressed as military officers. Halloween. Damn it, I thought. It’s bad enough that the night is ruined, it’ll be murder trying to catch a taxi now. He said, looking like he’d just eaten something rotten, that he was against Halloween because it was a holiday of the American Empire. He lectured on against accepting foreign customs without properly knowing what their origins were. I was so sick of him that I kept my mouth shut.
We were winding our way through the revelers, who were having much more fun than we were, when someone grabbed my arm. A zombie asked me if I could take a photo of him and his friends. Responding with a smile, I took a picture on his Polaroid camera of him posing with a Count Dracula and a Wonder Woman. He offered to take a photo of us as well and asked us to stand together. I slipped my arm under his and he stood there, stiff as a board. There we are to this day, awkwardly arm in arm. As soon as the photo was taken, he extracted his arm and took a step away from me. I asked him if he wanted the Polaroid they gave us, but he shook his head, hard. I slipped the little photo deep into my wallet.
That was the first and last photo we took together.
?
The Tree of Life on his back seemed to wither that winter, and the Irezumi ghost underneath seemed to fade even more. I think it was because he was gaining weight. He had quit his usual thrice-weekly workout and taken on two more theory books to edit freelance. The wrinkles on his forehead deepened, and the smallest things set him off—the usual signs of someone going through a rough patch in life. Not that I was doing any better. I’d contracted chronic nasal inflammation, received text messages beginning with “We regret to inform you . . .” from the forty-eight companies I’d applied to, was sleeping only three to four hours at a time on the caretaker’s bed at the hospital, and sat with my laptop on my knees punching out a story about a life that was and wasn’t mine at the same time. There was no end in sight to any of this. No one would look at me in my state of constant exhaustion and take me for a twenty-something. Our daylight dates that had once been as exciting as spy missions were now gray and boring, and we had somehow reached a point in our relationship where everything about each other was just a part of the tedium of daily life.
We were watching a movie in his room while drinking soju and eating sweet-and-sour pork that we’d ordered in. On the flat-screen TV he’d bought there was an Eastern Bloc spy fighting for his life. I was bored with the slow-moving plot, but he watched in rapt concentration. At some point, I must’ve dozed off. The movie was over by the time I opened my eyes again. He was lying on the sofa, asleep. It had been a long time since I’d seen him splayed out like that, defenseless.
With nothing else to do, I sat down at his desk and turned on the computer. I killed some time looking things up on the Internet, searching his name and mine. I opened his bookmarks folder. There were all sorts of links to articles and blogs in there, seemingly stored at random. One article, from a pro–North Korean website, with the word “homosexuality” in the title caught my eye. Bored, I clicked on it.
Southern Korean society is facing increasingly complicated problems as time goes on. The foreign-worker problem, international marriage, prevalence of English language in employment and education, homosexuality and transgenderism, increase in studying abroad and immigrants, extreme individualism, too much religion, increased dependence on foreign capital, and the invasion of Western culture are problems we couldn’t have imagined only a few years ago. (“The Path of the Nation,” March 2007 issue)
What the hell? I thought, turning around to look at him. He lay on the bed facedown and naked, having kicked away the blanket. His back, as usual, looked like a child had drawn on it while he was asleep. His rhythmic snoring resounded through the room. I turned back to the computer and read through the bookmarked article. “Southern” Korean society, foreign capital . . . I paid special attention to these strange words. I couldn’t understand them no matter how many times I read them. He’d used similar words with me before. Something sticky and vile, like slime, was engulfing me. Was this what he really thought of me?
I read through a few more pages in his browser bookmarks before closing the tab. All articles on the “disease” or “social ill” of homosexuality. I erased the browser history and turned off the monitor. Better to just carry on as if I had seen nothing. Especially since I was used to choosing to see nothing. I lay down next to him. The ruined graffiti of his back filled my field of vision. I traced my fingers over each line. They felt cold. Even after I covered us with the blanket that he’d kicked off, the chill did not go away. I curled up into myself with my back to him and suddenly felt that I was owed an apology. From whom?
The idiots who blamed homosexuality for every stupid thing? Or the specific idiot next to me for smothering himself in that bullshit and being unable to accept himself for what he was? Or the other idiot who fell for the first idiot, even when he knew the first idiot was an idiot, who fell for him so hard that he dug through his computer to know everything there was to possibly know about him? Maybe I was owed an apology from all of the above. Or maybe from none of them.