Table for one, p.22
Table for One, page 22
For a while after Male’s death, I couldn’t eat anything at all. I kept dreaming that he was exploding into little pieces right in front of me. In my dream, I sewed together the fragments of Male’s blown-up body, and my drooping shoulders trembled as I huddled over the completed patchwork. My wife often appeared as well, wearing her white gown. With her vigorous appetite for food and sex, she demanded even in dreams that my genitalia grow larger. And when they grew, she snipped them off. To avoid being castrated, I spent the entire night wandering around outside, and in the morning, I awoke with my body in a slouched position.
* * *
My feet stop at DEAD. They’re the first part of me to recognize the piercing parlor’s gloomy sign, affixed like a doormat to the ground in front of the entrance. Inside, the walls are packed with pieces of metal, and charts show where on your body you can be pierced. Underneath dim lights, holes are pierced over and over, in all heavenly and earthly directions. Dumbbells, locks, stars, hearts, sunglasses, crosses, x’s and letters of the alphabet, unknowable hieroglyphs … among all the sparkling metals, my fingers turn to the whale out of habit. Was it J or my wife who told me that whales can get erections that are three meters long? I’m not sure. Anyhow, I liked whales from the beginning, and I put seven of them in my body, like an addict. The whales are a beam holding up my life, a prop against which I can lean. The ones in my body were 1.6 centimeters long. But the dreams they hold inside can expand—to three whole meters, like the erections.
The piercer looks carefully at my ears and tilts her head.
“Did you apply the ointment?” she asks. “It looks infected, doesn’t it?”
“Please, don’t use any sort of anesthetic,” I tell her. “Just pierce it again—I can deal with the pain.”
The piercer shakes her head, saying that the inflamed ear can’t be repierced. But what good does it do to avoid inflammation when you are piercing a hole in an ear? The thing to fear more than inflammation is loneliness. When I hear that she can’t pierce me, my entire body itches, and I feel a crawling sensation on my skin. I’d rather be undergoing withdrawal from some kind of drug than feel like this. I buy a few whales, walk over DEAD again, and leave.
This place never exactly agreed with me; it always made me a bit uncomfortable for some reason. But I paid money for that discomfort. Other than my daily half pack of cigarettes and ingredients for meals, DEAD was my only expense. It was because of J.
“It’ll get better with time,” J said at the beginning. “If you pierce yourself once, you’ll just keep doing it again and again.”
What initially caught my eye inside DEAD was a diagram of a body showing where you could get pierced. To me, it looked like a target at a shooting range. A target where invisible points marked each part of the body, and to get a perfect score, you had to hit every dot.
“Personally, I think the tongue is the best place to get a piercing,” J said. “Cause then you can play with it in your mouth.”
I got a tongue piercing, a thick whale, just like J suggested. I’d sat in a chair and stuck my tongue out far. I hadn’t eaten for a while, and the bad breath dormant on my tongue began to awake.
“Chew on your tongue with your teeth,” the piercer told me. “If you massage it enough, it will hurt less.” I chewed the inside of my mouth as instructed.
“Stick your tongue out,” she said.
“Ahhh.”
A prick. High-pressure current flowed across my tongue. My mouth hurt, but I couldn’t tell exactly how much pain I was in. I closed and opened my eyes, and then there was a cold and sharp rod inside me. It was a durable and dangerous rod, worth using to support my entire body.
The piercer said that two weeks was enough to heal from the piercing, but it took a very long time for me to recognize the whale as part of my body. My tongue was connected to a cold metallic protrusion, from which it couldn’t free itself. At first, every morning, I had to wrestle with the burning pain that spread across my body. If I drank hot or warm soup, my tongue jumped suddenly like a surprised eel, and whenever I spoke, my voice sounded a bit harsh. When I brushed my teeth, too, I had to brush carefully, and if I happened to put a cigarette in my mouth, I worried about the tip heating up the metal of the piercing. Finally, I grew neurotic and developed sores all over the inside of my mouth from the stress.
The sharply budding sores caused me to push away all food and drink, and an awful film began to coat my tongue. In order to forget the burning, I tried immersing myself fully in my daily activities, but the more I did that, the more painfully the injury throbbed. It throbbed and throbbed and finally it billowed like a strange desire and solidified into a firm marble—a lump. The metal and the entire area around it hardened and turned red and bloated, and each night I could hear the lump growing.
After several weeks like that, the whale had built a nest for itself. It was stuck in my tongue like a mass of cells that had always been there. There was no more pus coming out of the lump, and my voice didn’t sound strange anymore. Sometimes gum stuck to the piercing, or ramen noodles got caught on the whale’s tail, but that wasn’t a big deal. When the pain grew dull, J contacted me. After not seeing each other for almost a month, we relished our reunion as we walked around the city. And before we parted, we decided to give each other a taste of our respective tongues. Two pieces of deeply rooted metal bumped into each other inside our mouths. I could hear the whale breathing. It seemed, too, like the whale’s entire body was erect.
After that, we pierced our skin each time we met. I got seven piercings while we were meeting regularly. Like J had said, only the beginning was difficult. The pleasure that came after, the joy of drilling into flesh, ended in just a moment. Nothing was permanent. I was like an addict: each time I drilled a hole, I was already searching for the next spot. The piercings were a conversation recorded on my skin, and because of them, it seemed like my loneliness was being alleviated a little bit. Just like that, piercings began to mark their domain on my body one by one.
On days that I got a piercing, and the metal pin drove its roots into the hole, we went up somewhere higher, even just a floor higher. A place where, if possible, the world felt a little bit more like a toy: a towering lookout where daily life couldn’t follow us. We went up there and looked down at the streets and buildings that were so small, you could hide them with the palm of your hand.
* * *
J doesn’t contact me today, either. I’ve walked around places where the kid used to show up a lot, but I don’t see her. She hasn’t gone this long without contacting me before. I fiddle with the silver whale I bought at DEAD. J planned to put this one in her body when she leveled up to “diamond.” J is the new runner in my life, holding me: the old baton that she picked up off the ground.
J understood me: she understood how I could fall into a deep sleep only after daybreak, after tainting myself with cigarettes and alcohol, how I only woke up in a fog of bad breath after the sun was high in the sky. I also understood J, who had to sell smiles to earn a living. Our mutual understanding was definitely something different from the indifference that flowed between my wife and me. When J ran, holding me as her baton, I was as happy as she was. Because we were running toward someplace together, even if that place was the fiery pits of hell, or just somewhere far away from heaven.
The relationship between my wife and me was like an imperfect book, one that contained a printing error. I didn’t fit into my wife’s life at all. Her life contained exactly one incorrectly inserted page: me. My certainty about our incompatibility reached its peak not long after Male’s death.
“I’m pregnant.”
My wife spit the words out at me, a bag of meat from the butcher dangling beneath her grip. She confirmed as she took her shoes off. “I said I’m pregnant.”
In that moment, someone pushed my wife toward the toilet, but it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me who struck her back with my rough palms. It wasn’t me who shouted, “Throw up! Throw up!” Until I heard the sound of slapping, and her cheeks started to burn like they were on fire, I wasn’t myself. When I gathered my wits, the plastic bag she’d dropped came into view. Pork neck dripping with red, bloody water. That nasty pork neck, that nasty pork neck. When she brushed off her body and stood up, I hugged the toilet and flopped to the ground.
“Isn’t it a good thing?” she asked, unsurprised by my violent outburst. “Since we were talking about adopting.”
No. I didn’t want a baby. The words came up to my throat, but my mouth was too sore to blurt them out. I knew I wasn’t the father. Which lover’s child is it? The guy you were seeing recently? Best-case scenario, it would be the child of the lover who most resembled me.
“Will the baby recognize me?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “You’re the father.”
So she acknowledged that I would raise the child. The household she and I had maintained for five years was based on this trust that she wouldn’t leave. She always said it was “fair,” the way we did things. She earned money, I ran the house, she’d have a kid, I’d take care of the kid: we were that kind of family, logical and egalitarian. But pregnancy: for some reason, a self-mocking smile escaped from my mouth. I was eager for a cigarette, but the inside of the house was a no-smoking zone. I trudged outside and stepped into the pharmacy to buy iron supplements for pregnant women, then I went to the butcher to pick up oxtail, then I stopped by the fruit seller and bought a sack of creamy-skinned peaches. Lastly, I bought a lottery ticket. I picked the six numbers in today’s date. I wanted it to be a losing ticket. Please. All I wanted was for it to be a losing ticket.
For three, four months, her stomach didn’t grow. Her morning sickness worsened, and her nerves grew more sensitive by the day, but her stomach was unmoving. Six months passed, then nine, and when her false pregnancy came to its last few weeks, the only thing that came out of her bloated belly was a tumor that had festered for ten months.
My wife was infertile, just like me. Even before I knew it wasn’t real, I hadn’t wanted to be involved with her pregnancy, because the kid wouldn’t be mine. But I realized afterward that my ever-meticulous wife hadn’t gone to the hospital even once, because she was afraid of the truth. She feared what she didn’t want to believe, and knew what she did want to believe. She’d already learned that she was infertile, but she couldn’t accept it. Her imagination had resisted, but finally, it too fell into the fires of hell and cut her womb out of her life. Her insides empty, she called my name through her parched lips.
“One of us has no womb, and the other has no sperm,” she said. “How fair.”
We went through the procedures and formally separated. The moment the documents were stamped with our names, I heard the sound of a baton falling onto the surface of a track. Just like that, the curtains fell on our five years together. It didn’t hurt, but the spot where she’d existed in my life swelled into a round lump. A lump that you could poke, and those restless, yellow desires inside would explode.
* * *
The alley I walk through on the way home is pitted with craters, like the surface of the moon. Down the road’s steep incline lies the precariously tilted multiunit complex where I live. Its windows are arranged on the wall like cubes of radish kimchi, and they always look dangerously close to falling off the side of the building.
The door creaks open as I firmly twist the doorknob. The ceiling, once incredibly high, feels about three feet lower than before. The ashes in the ashtray have grown as large as children’s fingers, and the blanket that was damp when I went out is now dry and weightless. The half-crumpled can of beer on the floor lurches to straighten its wrinkled frame, and tiny beams of light fall like graph paper squares onto the room. As the room brightens, it becomes less and less familiar, with one new centimeter of space visible every ten minutes. The light seems to be disinfecting the place.
I sweep up hairs woven together on the ground like fishnets until I have a fistful. Long, rough, wavy hair. No one has come in here other than J, so it’s definitely hers, but considering that I have almost no memory of sweeping the floor, they must have fallen long ago. I scrunch up the hairs and place them on the table. There’s a red wallet underneath it. J’s ID card isn’t inside. All I find alongside the many debit cards in the wallet is an expired lottery ticket. The crumpled lotto card is riddled with lifeless numbers.
Has something gone wrong with us? Thinking back, I can’t say that we had no problems. The last time I saw J, she found me. After we drank together, I took J to my house. J was drunk. On that particular day, she wore thicker makeup than usual and laughed a lot. Unnecessary laughs mixed with a nasal twang—they didn’t fit J. The heavy perfume was just as ill-suited. Like always, I paid her five thousand won to twist her nipple. J shouted that it hurt.
“Nasty!” she’d yelped.
Was it nasty?
J chuckled, then spoke.
“You’re just like a kid, really.”
Just like a kid. That was something my wife had often said to me. When we were in bed, she always told me I was like a kid. Of course, that was my wife: J didn’t say things like that. J wasn’t that kind of person. I calmed J down and grabbed her nipple one more time. I wanted to twist and twist, like a mechanic in a movie screwing something tight. J got upset again and pulled herself away, and in that moment I realized the ring was gone. I rubbed my eyes and then rubbed them some more. There was no ring.
“When did you take it out?” I asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“The handcuffs that were hanging from the piercing.”
I lunged at J, who was smoking her cigarette silently, and ruthlessly bit her nipple, then bit it again. I bit until I could smell the reddish scent of J’s blood under the stench of her disgusting perfume. J’s arm pushed my body roughly.
“If you’re going to do this, five thousand won isn’t enough,” she said.
Money wasn’t the problem. I had to check J’s body. J’s chest, arms, and ears didn’t have any metal in them. She opened her lips and stuck out her tongue. It was entirely soft. There was no sharp dagger inside her mouth. The arrow that I loved so much had disappeared. Had it fallen into her throat since I’d last looked?
“When the hell did you take them out?” I asked. “Without telling me.”
“Don’t avoid the subject—tell me if you’re going to pay,” she said. “Five thousand won’s not enough.”
J made a stiff cracking noise as she chewed her gum. A regular and definite, sharp crack. Like the sound of my wife’s tall heels hitting against the cold hallway floor. “Are you going to pay or not?” As J asked, I hugged her body so tightly I could have broken it. Barely able to push my arms away, J took the loud gum out of her mouth and stuck it against a corner of the wall before hacking up some spit.
“Fine, I’ll do it for five thousand won, but be quick,” she said. “I’m busy.”
Splayed on the floor with her skirt pulled down, J didn’t look even a little bit beautiful.
“I told you I’d do it for five thousand, so you have to be fast!”
J unzipped my pants with her nimble fingers. Her cold, smooth hands went toward my crotch, but I wasn’t excited. J’s coquettish moan seemed hollow. I grabbed J’s shoulder and shook it. “Get yourself together, just get yourself together!” I shouted.
Squirming against the rhythm I was creating as I jerked her around, J let out one horrible shriek and then stood up suddenly. She didn’t look in my direction as she gathered her clothing and put it back on, her brows furrowed. I couldn’t send her off like that. I grabbed J’s leg. She fell down as she tried to push me away. I leaned toward J’s face and spoke desperately. “Eat seafood stew with me in the morning, and then you can go. And what happened to the arrow in your throat—did you swallow it or something?”
“Perv,” she said.
J’s furrowed brow smoothed out like it had been ironed or something, and for a very brief moment, a blue vein protruded from her forehead. Something hot brushed against my cheek, but I couldn’t tell if it was J or my wife who’d hit me. I stared at J while I held my hand to my burning cheek. J resembled my wife more and more. I reached my arms out to hug her. Instantaneously, my ashtray broke into pieces above my head. I stood vacant for a second as I wondered whose head it was, and all the holes in my body grew warm. It was probably my head that was damaged, not the ashtray. Blood clung to the hand that had been touching my head. It was warm. I was the one bleeding, but J was the one who was afraid. I shook J’s body and then shook it more. The problem wasn’t that she’d injured my head. All I wanted to know was where the arrow in J’s throat had gone. J slowly stepped back. The pile of books behind her looked like a dark expanse.
J pushed her back against the book-covered wall. She clasped her hands together and seemed to be begging for something, but I couldn’t hear her. “I’ll give the whales an erection, an erection that emanates throughout their entire bodies,” I told her, “then it’ll all be okay. Just don’t say that I seem like a child.” And then I could feel the corner of one of the thick hardback books striking my temple. I stood vacant for a second as I thought about whose temple had been hit, and all the holes in my body grew warm. It was probably my temple that was damaged, not the book. Blood clung to the hand that had been touching my temple. It was warm. I was the one bleeding, but J was the one who was afraid. The pile of books behind J looked like a dark expanse.
