Читать книгу Blood Sisters - Kim Yideum - Страница 10

Instant Days

I drank too much with the café owner that night. When I got back to Jimin’s place there was no one there. The room was a mess. It looked like the secret police had raided the place. The chairs were toppled over among beer bottles, and books, notes, and pamphlets were strewn about everywhere. I zigzagged left and right to clean up the place. A little later, Jimin was back and explained that there had been an argument among her friends, but they eventually stopped fighting out of consideration for her. She’d just seen them off. I drank from one of the open bottles and curtly asked why they had to do the group study here. I shouldn’t have said it, I was just a freeloader who wasn’t paying rent or buying groceries—not even a single ramen packet—just hanging out for over two weeks now, a full moon cycle. I added further insult by telling her about my new job.

“You don’t need to work at a shady place like that,” she scolded. “I never asked you to pay rent. What was the point of running away from home if you were just going to walk right back into another shithole. It would be better to starve.”

“You don’t know anything about me!”

“You’re being irresponsible! Think about it. What year are you living in? You just stroll through campus, molotovs and tear gas in the air, and you don’t feel anything?”

“Yup! I’m a clueless airhead. So what? Am I supposed to be like you, memorizing manifestoes and communist curricula, breaking bricks to throw at cops during a strike?”

“Think about the summer we met!”

“Fucking hell, I’m so tired of that story. We just protested because everybody was doing it! Everybody was protesting General Park’s constitutional amendment, yelling catchy slogans, because how could we not? If you didn’t join the protest, everybody would’ve thought you were an unpatriotic government dog! It’s different now. I just protested because I wanted you to like me. I have no political ideology of my own. Don’t tell me to read this book, that book, join your ‘group study’ like it’s some sort of holy ritual.”

“You’ve changed since your stepbrother died.”

That’s when all of the evening’s drinks rushed back into my mouth. I ran to the shared bathroom down the hall with my hand over my mouth, but someone had locked the door. I puked all over the bathroom door. Someone emerged to curse me out. By the time I cleaned myself up, he was gone. I had no one to curse at, so I just lifted my middle finger to the sky. Fuck you, motherfucker. Godfucker.

I came back to the room to lie down, still huffing with anger. Jimin held my hand under the covers. Her fingers were raw from her blood-drawing nail-biting habit. We knew we had drawn blood from each other’s hearts with our drunken argument, so we waited to fall asleep holding hands. She usually wrote before going to bed under the nightlight, but not tonight. Around dawn, we kissed. I held back my morning breath as our lips touched. I fell back to sleep.

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.