Читать книгу Blood Sisters - Kim Yideum - Страница 11

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 man returns from the bathroom and asks if he could order an apple mojito. I don’t know what that is. When I squint and tell him we don’t serve food, he smiles, “But an apple mojito isn’t food,” and orders a gin and tonic instead.

I can make a gin and tonic with my eyes closed.

“Do you want a drink?” He doesn’t even touch the shrimp chips that come with the drink. He orders another drink, the same one. There are five or six toothbrushes sticking out of his rat-colored pocket. He must be a toothbrush salesperson. Is he one of those people who loudly profess how amazing the toothbrush is that they’re selling on the subway, trying to coax the passengers into buying one? He glances at the check and gives me twenty thousand won.

“The total is ten thousand.” As I return one of the two ten thousands bills, he pushes it back into my hand. “Why would I take this?” I get annoyed, but Eunyong pokes my side to take it. Oh, I guess this is what they call a tip.

* * *

The Aesthetic Studies professor stops by. He studied Aesthetics at a prestigious university in Seoul. Now that I work at a café, I see people like this up close. I have to hide my excitement when I see him walk in with his fellow professors. I used to sneak into his class because everybody talked about him: he was a true believer in democracy, a great agitator, and a blindingly handsome man. I used to go all the way down to the Fine Arts wing of the university for his lecture, and I learned a few things about Lukács’ philosophy among the slacker Dance majors.

When the party he’s having with his friends warms up, the professor sneaks his arm around Eunyong. Is that okay? He’s allowed to grope her, just like that? Wait, should I have been sitting next to him? I don’t know how I feel about the situation. My head spins.

The professor’s friend picks up a fork and moves his hand off my thigh. He sings into the fork as though it’s a microphone. He sings a new pop song. His voice sounds like he is scratching the plate with a fork. I like the psychedelic song by Sanulim he’s singing, but he’s not getting it right, not even close. A professor next to him butchers Songolmae’s “I Lived in Oblivion.”

“Hey, you over there! You should sing a song,” the Aesthetic Studies professor yells at me, and I decide to obey his command, but can’t think of any song I know the lyrics to. I remember melodies better than lyrics. Everybody in the café is getting impatient with me. Whatever. I’ll sing a song that will elicit applause for sure.

“Having endured the long night, like the morning dew on the grass leaves, more beautiful than a pearl, the sun rises above the cemetery, and the sweltering daylight torments me …” The song is reaching its climax, and I feel great.

“Hey! What the fuck. Stop that!” someone yells at me. The room quickly cools in silence. They all look angry, abruptly sobered up. “I don’t believe this. You’re just bargirls at a shitty bar, okay? I don’t know what you think you know, but how could you sing a protest song here? Some things are sacred!”

After that everybody leaves, even the couple who have been giggling over two cups of coffee for several hours. Eunyong, Sungyun, and I go outside to talk. The two of them, who have worked here for a while, tell me that the tips are pooled and then split. But since it’s my first time getting a tip, I get to keep it. I head to the record store by the university. There’s a record I’ve been eyeing. I hope it’sn’t sold already. I’m nervous. The album cover was beautiful, and the title was glorious. The cover art had a monster’s face with diseased skin and an expressionless man caged inside its mouth. The man is probably the lead singer of the band. They are an Italian art-rock band called Museo Rosenbach, and the album is called Zarathustra. After all those days pressing my face against the display case window, peering at the album, I finally get to own it.

The dark and stuffy café is now filled with the fantastic Zarathustra. Running time: twenty-something minutes. I could listen to this album at least ten times a day, every day from now on.

“Are you just gonna play this record over and over again? I feel like I’m going insane listening to this!”

As Eunyong complains, I narrate, “Behold, I teach you, Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome!”

“You’re acting like an intellectual buffoon.” Sungyun replaces Zarathustra with Lee Guanjo’s record on the turntable. “The customer is king. We need to play songs that they like.” Sungyun is supposed to be majoring in Athletics, but he doesn’t look it. He hangs out with the jocks in town who call each other “brother,” but he’s barely taller than me, maybe 175 centimeters. Sporting a buzzcut and wide shoulders, he boasts that he only wears brand-name sportswear and trainers.

“I’ll donate the record here, since I bought it with the tip that should’ve been shared,” I suggest.

* * *

Down the dark alley, I return to Jimin’s place, swinging the plastic bag containing a pork cutlet I saved for dinner. The room is dark and quiet. “Jimin, are you asleep?” Nobody is there. She never stays out this late. Without washing my hands or anything, I just lie down on my belly, and open a book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one of the books Jimin begged me to read. I was probably drawn to Museo Rosenbach, not a very well-known band around here, because of her recommending this book. Goddamn, this book is thick. She would grin if she saw me struggling with it. Where is she? On the back cover, there is this passage: “The Earth has skin, and the skin is riddled with several diseases. One of the diseases is Man.” After turning a few pages, I am overwhelmed by sleepiness and worry about Jimin’s whereabouts. I can’t help it. I can’t help being the squirming skin disease. Even if the whole Earth self-destructs tomorrow, I’ll just pull a blanket over myself. I’m the Sleepy Demagogue.