Table for one, p.16
Table for One, page 16
“Did you know that motels have trends, too? When balloons were popular, I would circle the hallways carrying a balloon. Sometimes couples would call me over and ask me to sing a song. One thousand won for ten minutes. Back then, I did it for more, too. I made good money. After that, butterfly masks were a trend. When I wore one and danced, everyone loved it—even the older men and women. Sometimes, if there wasn’t anyone in the hallway, I’d light a firecracker to let them know where I was. Since I was wearing a garter belt and holding a whip, business was a little better than it would have been otherwise—by the way, can you hear what I’m saying?”
The man nodded.
“Strange. For a while now, no one in this place has been able to understand me.”
The woman had been beaten once before her ten-minute song ended. A customer struck her as if she were a vending machine that had taken his money and delivered nothing in return. He said the woman’s song sounded like static.
“I had no money, so I couldn’t go back to a room, and as I circled round and round the hallways, I thought that maybe someone could take me to theirs. But no one would look at me.”
The woman was one machine of many going down the conveyor belt, and just as no one asks for cola from a coffee machine, no one asks a machine selling performances to sell her body. What the woman really had to worry about wasn’t leering customers but a lack of them.
“I was forced to suspend my business,” she said. “You can’t keep an unprofitable vending machine for long. So I had to quit. I realized then that this place wasn’t a stage, it was reality, and reality wasn’t dictated by a script. A play was just an hour or so, but I had been going on for who knows how long.”
“Those props you used, like the butterfly mask. Do you still have them?” the man asked. The woman pulled a bag from a corner. Out of it came a firecracker, a butterfly mask, an uninflated balloon, a whip, and a garter belt. The only thing she hadn’t purchased was a rope. When she went to buy one—any kind, thick or thin—they were already all sold out. The inside of the woman’s bag was a sort of second Fantastic Love. The man looked at the fossil-like butterfly mask, whip, and other items for a long time.
The woman stopped telling her story. The stage may not have needed a heater, but real life did. There, she’d been illuminated whenever the lights hit her, but now she had to turn the lights on and off by herself when she needed them. There were good acoustics in the theater, but not here. And when she had performed in the past, she acted in a room with an audience, but here the CCTV recording in the hallway was all there was. This wasn’t theater after all, but reality, a tragedy in which she’d thought her entire life was a play. When the man started to root around in his pocket again, the woman held out the two thousand won she had received just a little while ago.
“Today, let’s just say I bought time from you.”
To be more accurate, they both had bought time from each other. The man lay on the bed. The ceiling was low, so it felt stuffy. The room spanned seventy centimeters all told, and the mattress lay thirty centimeters above the ground. As he lay down, his nose almost touched the plaster above. The woman turned off the lights. Under the cover of darkness, it was difficult to judge how much space there was. The room expanded in the blackness. If you turned the light off and closed your eyes, the ceiling, one-third the regular height, grew to infinity. It was nice to not be alone in the dark.
* * *
A few days later, they moved to a room with an even lower ceiling. The height of the room was one-fourth what was normal, so it was a good room to lie down in. If you lay prone, your head wouldn’t bump into anything, and there was no need to stoop until your spine warped. But because the room was so good for lying down, some people who went in would come out unable to walk very well. Their bodies had been molded to fit the room. When they moved, they’d crawl on all fours, or they’d stretch their arms out like feelers and sweep the floor with their butts and thighs. The man and woman were now such veterans they could slide their bodies across a bed of gravel. At some point, the man began to stroke the woman’s rounded back. Her spine was gone. It didn’t look like a back, but rather like the stomach of an expectant mother approaching delivery.
The walls diminished into nonexistence as rooms grew cheaper and higher up. The man and woman were now surrounded on all four sides by partitions as flimsy as a stage set. Here, everyone had to roll their back up like a ball to move even a little. The man and woman overheard some of their neighbors say that it wasn’t that the ceiling was too low: their own bodies were too long. Others said the problem was that their backs were too stiff. Of course, this was all just chatter that crept through the walls. One day, though, it sounded as if someone was purposefully sending a signal. They pressed their ears against the wall the sound was coming from. It was a rhythmical ringing.
. .—. /. .—. /. /.
Something like Morse code was coming through the wall, as if someone were trying to send a message. The sound continued for a bit and then stopped. After the first message ended, they continued to hear occasional tapping. Even if it were Morse code, they couldn’t decipher it. Still, the act of listening was meaningful, so they enthusiastically leaned toward the wall. They would sometimes bang the wall with a cup, too. Without knowing the meaning of what message they were sending, or even what letters they might be hitting against the wall, they tried to communicate.
One morning, someone flung their body out the window like a shooting star, and after that, there was no Morse code to be heard. They didn’t know if that someone, shrieking in midair, was committing suicide or attempting to fly, but the first thing they did after hearing the offbeat thud that followed was firmly close the double-pane windows. After closing all the windows, they got under the covers. They weren’t sure if the fallen person was male or female, young or old. But they did know that the moment that person had thrust their body into the air, they were finally able to straighten out a back and knees made crooked by the motel’s tiny rooms. Even if only for a second.
The thing they feared more than falling was ascension. Falling left traces on the ground, but when you rose into the heavens, up and up, until you were just a speck in the sky, there was nothing left behind. They were already so far up that they couldn’t see the ground from their window. The man wanted to put the woman, and her bag, inside Fantastic Love and carry them out of the motel. And if the snow had melted, and the road was clear, and he could find his truck and drive down Road 436 back to the city? He’d go to a room where he could put his two feet on the ground and stand up straight. Since the man was taller than the woman, the woman would be able to stand up on two feet right beside him.
At that moment, someone knocked on the door.
Thunk, thunk, thunk.
“If you don’t remove your vending machine by tomorrow, the motel will dispose of it. Have a wonderful day.”
As soon as it was bright the next day, the man went to the back door of the motel. He remembered that he’d placed the old person’s corpse inside Fantastic Love. But when he opened the door to the machine, what was curled up in between the springs wasn’t the body of an old person but that of an animal, its spine crumbling from decay. The wild beast had slipped to the bottom, like one of the vending machine’s products.
The snow flurries lightened up, little by little. When the man and woman ran out of all the money they had with them, a loan machine showed up again. This one was a little different. Its official name was ID Revocation Machine. It processed requests quickly.
Place ID card in slot.
After credit evaluation, withdrawal amount will be displayed on screen. Allowable withdrawal amount varies with individual credit score.
Press button for lifetime personal information transfer, and cash will be released.
ID card will not be returned; ID number will be authorized for external use from moment of cash withdrawal.
The man pulled his ID card out of his wallet. “If money comes out,” he said, “let’s pick the room with the highest ceiling in the whole motel.” The woman also pulled her ID out of her wallet. “Let’s eat steak and drink wine in the room with the highest ceiling,” she added. Considering that she was mortgaging her entire life, she wanted to spend the money on something special. They pushed their ID cards into the machine, and the cards didn’t come out again. All they received was eighty thousand won.
A room with a high ceiling would be too expensive. They calculated that they could manage to stay at the motel only for another day, maybe two. And so they paid for a room even better for lying down than any of the rooms before. It was one-fifth sized. They also bought a razor and nail clippers. They’d decided to tame into neatness everything that had grown too long. With the remaining money, they bought pork belly and vitamins. Lying prostrate, they placed the strips of pork belly on a frying pan. They crunched the bumpy bones between thick layers of fat. The whole room was filled with the sound of munching and crunching. It was only two servings, but no matter how much they ate, there was as much meat on the pan as when they’d started. The man and the woman placed several pieces of blackened, fossilized pork in front of them and lay side by side under the low ceiling. The woman pulled out the bottle of vitamins. They put several pills in their mouths as the label directed and gulped them down. A few tablets of hope fell down their long, tubular throats like shooting stars. Or maybe the tablets were more like crashing stars. On that night when shooting stars crashed down their throats, the two looked out their flat window at the moonless, starless sky until they could look no more.
Mail arrived for them. An envelope contained a bill for a card in the woman’s name. Someone had now taken her identity. A few days later, another bill came. Someone else had set up a phone number in the man’s name. While the man and woman lay in this narrow coffin, their ID cards had sprouted wings and flown out of the motel in a gust of lies. For some reason, every time a bill arrived, the man’s and the woman’s pulses quickened, their faces etched with a vague expression somewhere between resignation and ecstasy.
They could hear the sound of their bones adapting to the price of each room as they rolled their bodies into balls to avoid the ever-lower ceilings. They didn’t know if this was evolution or atrophy. Anyhow, in their one-sixth–sized room, there was no window, so they couldn’t even see the sky. All they could do was lie down. Because there was no furniture and no bedding inside, it was the best room of them all for lying down. Unwelcome mail like bills, past-due invoices, car-seizure notices, obituaries, and other such things flew through their firmly closed door and perished like birds hitting an iceberg. Time accumulated in front of the door like layers of dirt, and their room continued to rise higher and higher off the ground. And when it became so high that there was no way to climb down, it stayed up there like a dot in the sky.
* * *
One day, when the snow flurries had grown thin, the ice on the road cracked mightily and revealed what was hiding underneath. Layers of months-old moss were tangled between the cracks. The wing from a frozen bird spat out a necrotic groan. Then someone knocked on the door.
They couldn’t tell if the words they’d heard were “Leave the room” or “Leave the building.” What was clear was that there was no longer a single square foot of the motel in which they could stay. The woman left her stage, the man left his vending machine, and they both exited the motel. Straightening their curved spines once again felt awkward. They crawled on all fours the whole way down the slope. It was more stable that way, and faster. Their hands were roughened like feet. They could see Road 436 laid out below like tape at a finish line. Road 436, which had been at some point fully cleared, was now lacking more than just cameras and traffic. There was no snow, no trucks, no fallen bodies. The road looked like it had been wiped clean with an eraser.
They motioned wildly to stop one of the cars passing by the motel, racing along with no apparent regard for the speed limit. They waved their arms up and down, made hand gestures, and even stomped their feet. But no car stopped. Their horns honking, the cars flashed by in windstorms of their own making. The louder the man spoke, the larger the woman’s hand gestures, the faster the cars.
They saw a passing truck and ran to the middle of the road. The two tried to block the vehicle with their bodies, but it didn’t slow down. Man and woman, they lurched up into the wind, then fell onto the road like late-autumn leaves. From their point of view, it looked like the motel had flipped upside down. Up became down, down became up, and the mixed-up scene before them winked.
Someone emerged from the truck and checked on them before getting back in. They hadn’t died, but they were no longer human. Unbeknownst to them, the truck driver looked back through his rearview mirror as he drove farther and farther away. He was watching two wild animals lying in the middle of the road, their backs round as balloons, legs thin as whips, eyes dangerous as fireworks. And the “Caution: Wildlife Crossing” sign sticking up from the ground behind them.
“Wildlife crossing zone ahead. Wildlife crossing zone ahead.”
The GPS in the truck chirped like a cricket as the vehicle drove away.
6. TIME CAPSULE 1994
In 1994, the people of Seoul wrapped up their city and sent it deep underground, below the neighborhood of Namsangol. What they buried was the evidence of an era, to be unveiled four centuries later for Seoul’s thousand-year anniversary. But after fourteen short years, the city’s residents have decided to unearth it prematurely. The cover to the Namsangol time capsule is now removed, creating the world’s largest and most dangerous manhole.
A crane pulls the time capsule up from a hole in the ground—fifteen meters deep. Rotted before its time, the enormous metal receptacle is carried out on a stretcher, like a hospital patient. The truck onto which it is loaded moves as slowly as a hearse, and several cameras focus on the empty spot where the time capsule once lay. As I cover the hole with a blue cloth, I feel like I’m dressing a wound. Two ginkgo trees stand nearby like mourners: the trees are the only things left on the circular plaza now that the time capsule has been carried away. Because of the recent snowstorm, everything is frozen over, even the walkway between the ginkgos. The wind plays a dirge in the air, and the commemorative slogan carved into the wall—something that begins with the words “Citizens of Seoul”—becomes an epitaph.
The city of Seoul has hurriedly called together everyone involved with the time capsule, but scarcely a third of the people contacted can remember the events of fourteen years ago. Some of them have retired, or moved abroad. Others have died. That’s what happened to my predecessor—now he can’t even attend the time capsule’s untimely funeral. And so a new group of “time capsule managers” has been formed: fifteen or so dedicated volunteers. The group ranges from senior citizens who are so old they hardly remember the creation of the capsule to people who are young enough that, until recently, they didn’t know it existed.
The rusty vessel heads not to an emergency room but to a morgue. Or maybe a butcher. The technicians don white gowns and slip thin gloves over their hands; over their faces, they wear masks. Working in the aftermath of the storm, they conserve their breath as much as possible to avoid contaminating the wares they’re handling.
The time capsule is shaped like the famous Bosingak Bell, filled with four compartments that slide out of the main structure like drawers in a dresser. As soon as we cut its lock, the innards spill from the capsule like peas from a pod. The tops of the four compartments are covered with rust, just like the outside. The capsule has degraded masterfully, not a single part of it left intact. With its four inner components removed, the structure looks like a womb that has lost its child before the due date.
The section chief presents the cause of death. It’s corrosion due to humidity. Recent snows covered the slab above the time capsule and permeated fifteen meters below the ground. The siloxylane meant to block out moisture and foreign substances became a sort of poison instead. With all the acidic substances the sealant was up against, it turned into something that accelerated corrosion. Liquid that seeped into the frame of the time capsule quickly penetrated the nozzle on the outside of the first compartment. Several additional layers of protective coating have been rendered useless by the blizzard.
“See this thing shaped like an icicle?” the section chief asks us. “It’s a type of tubular stalactite made from hardened limestone. It’s hard and gray, you see. Concrete is usually heavily alkaline, but can corrode in acid rain. This snowstorm has been really acidic, to the point that these welded nozzles are rusty enough for water to leak in.”
The section chief emphasizes the word “acidic” as he reads the report. Someone asks a question: “So it corroded even though you used special, high-strength steel?” Another time capsule manager asks: “Didn’t you guys do tests before burying the time capsule? I was under the impression that you spent two months performing environmental breakdown tests. Why did this happen if you verified the time capsule’s environmental limits?”
