Table for one, p.28
Table for One, page 28
The packages were all different. Organic sugar, nonorganic sugar, organic sugar, nonorganic sugar. The kidnapper scooped up a heap of sugar with a ladle and poured it into the different sacks. The packages varied in price and shape, but they all held the same sugar inside. And each was labeled differently. The kidnapper scooped up water with the same ladle and poured it into the sacks. The packages varied in price and shape, but they all held the same water inside. And each was labeled differently. The kidnapper scooped up dye with the same ladle and poured it into the sacks. The packages varied in price and shape, but they all held the same dye inside …
“What’s that? Hey, you!”
The kidnapper looked at me. He was wearing a hat, so I couldn’t see his eyes. I gulped down the spit in my mouth.
“You, what are you doing? Come in! I said come in.”
The kidnapper gestured for me to enter the hole. The hole in the sketchbook grew larger and larger until it was big enough for me to fall inside it. The kidnapper began to take steps toward me. I mumbled the words from my conversation with Jinu, words I’d memorized like they were the Lord’s Prayer.
“You know, my mom, she’s never really done anything with her life.”
“But she looks like she has a lot of money!”
“No, that’s not true. Not really. She can’t—can’t—get a job.”
The kidnapper was distracted. He’d come one step closer to me and then draw two steps back. He lifted the trench coat he was wearing, he twirled cotton candy, and he crouched like he was going to punch a shape out of the sugar candy. The smell of fish emanated from his body.
“You, do you know who I am?” he asked.
Who are you? But the words didn’t come out of my mouth. The kidnapper’s nose flashed briefly under his hat. It was a nose with no speed bump. It was a nose you could run down at full speed.
“Number 40511, Hongdo Park!”
The kidnapper’s voice echoed down the long alley. Someone grabbed me by the back of my neck, and I could feel myself being pulled.
“Hongdo, what are you doing there?”
It was my homeroom teacher. His face twirled in front of my eyes. Even though the kidnapper was wearing a hat, I felt like I could already see the scars hiding underneath. The kidnapper wasn’t the flasher from earlier, but it seemed like I could draw what was inside the kidnapper’s coat. All the things that had disappeared from my school hung from the man’s body in clusters, and they fell out of the sketchbook.
“Hongdo, are you alright? Why are you sweating like that?”
My homeroom teacher wiped my forehead with a tissue. His face shook in front of my eyes. A speed bump took its place firmly in the middle of his sharp nose. Maybe to my mom that hook nose was a blacklisted ingredient, but it wasn’t to me.
“Hongdo, is something upsetting you?” he asked.
“Sir, I wish my mind were like flour. I wish I could make it into dough and shape it like I want.”
As I said that, my face burned like a fish fillet being cooked over a fire. My eyes twirled like a ladle of sugar candy. A burning smell emanated from my tongue. My homeroom teacher rubbed my shoulder comfortingly. I dried my eyes, blew my nose, and wiped off my sweat, and at some moment, when I looked around at my surroundings, I saw a whole lot of tissues at my feet, like flowers.
* * *
A week later, the art teacher called me in again.
“Did you draw a new picture?” she asked.
“I just painted over the old one.”
“On top of the old picture?”
“Yes. But the Gangnam trees and flowers the principal said to include—there was no space, so I couldn’t draw them.”
I opened my sketchbook. The entire image was just black. Here and there, the depth of color and the texture varied. There were paler grayish sections and other parts with holes punched out of them, big enough for fingers to go in and out of. I’d painted so many layers on the paper that it had been punctured by my brush. In my painting, there were the pink school gate and several holes—that was it.
A look of confusion showed itself on the art teacher’s face. She closed my sketchbook and said: “Hongdo, if your mind is made out of flour, why is this painting so black?”
“Flour?”
The art teacher gathered up her hair, starting at her forehead, until she reached her part. I closed the door to the faculty room and went out into the hallway. Suddenly my homeroom teacher’s face looked like an enormous ball of dough. I wanted to hurl his mouth down the hallway. He’d told the flour story to the art teacher! That was the first confession I’d made to him.
I walked, skipped, ran down the hallway. The hall’s length seemed to be commanding me to run. No matter how fast I ran, my feet didn’t make any clicking noises. The hallway continued without end. I was drifting between Hanam and Gangnam. There were countless valleys between the two places: valleys where the subway didn’t go, and holes where busses didn’t stop.
* * *
The cotton candy man returned. Jinu, who was still suffering from withdrawal, tingled with excitement. The cotton candy man wore red clothing like Santa Claus and twirled white, sugary beards in the middle of a round machine that resembled a washbasin. Lumps of sugar spun like millstones, like tops, and soon they bloomed into mottled blossoms of cotton candy.
“Sir, this is junk food, isn’t it?” I asked.
The cotton candy man still didn’t know how to market his products, but business was brisk. As soon as the kids escaped from prison, they hurriedly searched for the cotton candy man for their post-prison meal. The cotton candy man wasn’t wearing a hat. Instead, he hid his forehead scars with a bandana made from a Korean flag. He sold over one hundred cotton candies per day, and as soon as he was done with work, he took out his sunglasses and put them on. He started up his motorcycle with a vroom, and the dangling cotton candies wobbled like balloons. The cotton candy man left for home as if he were flying into the heavens, his merchandise swollen like balloons.
And at some point, the man in the trench coat started to appear again. Men on the street wearing coats over exercise pants seemed as ubiquitous as telephone poles. It wasn’t just in front of the school: they also lurked in nearby alley corners, standing pole-like before suddenly unfurling their jackets. Their huge penises dangled heavily inside. Come to think of it, cotton candy dangled, too, open and exposed. It seemed like my homeroom teacher’s face would appear in the midst of everything. But the trench coat men didn’t give us much of their time. They closed their coats again an instant after revealing themselves.
I wasn’t able to represent my school in the art competition. The principal chose the landscape painting that portrayed the front of the school like it was in Gangnam, but it didn’t win a prize in the competition. There was a clear difference between real Gangnam and real Hanam, and no one paid attention to what lay in between.
My picture served another purpose, though. When the thickly applied black paint dried, the drawing started to give off a strange mood. The organic club moms who’d made our house their hideout saw the picture and were mysteriously entranced by it.
Change the World with Dirt.
With this title, the black drawing passed back through the school gates. Several hundred copies of it were affixed to the surrounding walls. The school zone in front of campus was being wallpapered with the drawing. Volcano eruption, fire, earthquake, tsunami … if you saw my drawing, a tangle of words like those came to mind. It seemed like, sometime, the inside of the manhole I’d peeked into would come back to life. The note that I’d written was included alongside the drawing, although in an edited version. One of the moms in the organic club claimed to be a poet.
The fish fillet man disappeared. The next day,
The ice cream man disappeared. The day after that,
The hamburger man disappeared,
then we found him by the school’s side entrance. Next,
the sugar candy man disappeared,
but thankfully he survived. The criminal to blame
was E. coli.
After finishing my painting, I set down my brush.
Around the time when I gave up my creative pursuits, the organic club moms began to call me an artistic genius.
9. HONGDO, DON’T CRY
News spread that at the end of the month, the homeroom teacher would be leaving our school. The students believed that he was switching schools because he had talent, but Mom said it was because his job was only temporary.
“Do you not like my homeroom teacher?”
When I asked that, Mom looked at me blankly and answered: “What does it matter, if I like him or not?”
“He’s not your style?”
“He has a hook nose.”
“But why did you like Dad? He had a hook nose.”
Mom didn’t answer. She probably didn’t know the answer.
I paced up and down the hallway several times, hoping to see my teacher. After the school day ended, I went back to his classroom. I couldn’t explain why I was acting like this. Only when I saw his face through the window, from the hallway, did I feel relieved.
“Unfortunately—”
That’s what our teacher said to us the day he left. “Unfortunately, I will be leaving.” My heart pounded furiously. For a while, I hadn’t been able to see the teacher’s face correctly. In my mind, for a long time, our teacher had slowly been losing his hair, locks vanishing like they were being eaten up by a grain thresher. So when I looked at him properly for the first time in a while, he actually looked a little handsome. I seemed to have been aging him too fast in my dreams. As the teacher gave a long speech about the beauty of endings, he looked cool, and I felt confused. I thought of his face in my dreams. Sir, stop it—bald head, come back!
The teacher said he was going to America. That was all we knew.
“Everyone, do you remember the poem I talked about once? Kim Chunsu’s ‘Flowers.’ When someone says your name, you become the most meaningful being in the world.”
The kids went up to the podium one by one, starting with those by the window. The teacher hugged us while saying our names. He gently patted our backs and shoulders. I stared at the spectacle, but felt strange. As each child went forward, my heart beat a little faster. Finally, when all the kids in row one had gone, and it was time for row two, my stomach made a rumbling noise and began to hurt—it was like my heart was exhausted. As my stomach pained me, the kids in row three received hugs from our teacher. And finally row four! The kids in front of me went up one by one to get hugs from the teacher. My stomach rumbled turbulently. It felt like I needed to run to the bathroom. I stood up carefully so I wouldn’t let out an embarrassing noise. Everything went by sluggishly, as if in slow motion. My teacher saw me, he extended his arms toward me, he wrapped his two arms around me, and with one hand he patted my back twice. I was surprised, because it seemed like some part of his fingers was going to touch my bra hook. That day, I’d worn my size 65AA bra that had a hook rather than a band, for the first time, and before the idiot boys could run their fingers over it, my homeroom teacher had patted it. My teacher hit my back with a tapping, or maybe a flicking, or maybe a rapping noise, or did it sound more like dripping? Anyway, as he knocked on my back, I was so overwhelmed that I almost farted. I just barely held it in. And after he said my name, I couldn’t hear a single one of his words of advice. When I finally gathered myself together, everyone in row four had all finished their hugs. My stomach must have been crazy, because it didn’t hurt anymore and just felt normal.
“What did our teacher just say to me?” I asked Jinu.
Jinu shrugged. This was how it was. He was too preoccupied to remember what he’d said to him, much less other people.
“To me he said, ‘Jinu, get a pretty girlfriend.’ Something like that?”
If I’d known the homeroom teacher was going to give such a concrete message, I would have paid more attention. It was no use feeling regretful. The teacher had already left for the faculty room. For a moment, I considered going down there and asking the teacher what his advice for me was, but it was a silly idea. If he couldn’t remember either, I’d feel even more hurt. What had he said, what had he said? The kids left the classroom in swarms. Jinu pestered me to hurry up. I purposefully packed up my things slowly and left the classroom last. Minyeong Han passed by me.
“You, why did the teacher say that to you?” she asked.
“What?”
“ ‘Hongdo, don’t cry.’ That. Did you really cry? You do everything to try to catch his eye—ugh.”
Once again, the hallway was long enough for me to run down it. I dashed down the hall like the floor was going to fall beneath my feet. Everything around me flew out the windows.
The cotton candy outside was two times bigger than usual. What was usually the size of a child’s head was now the size of an adult’s head. It looked like an eyelid puffy from crying. I wiped the puffy pink eyelid as if I was wiping away tears. Jinu was taken aback.
“What are you doing with my cotton candy?” he questioned.
I was flattening the puffy eyelids with my hands so no more tears could come out of them. I pulled off a fistful and held it out to Jinu.
“What’s this for?” Jinu asked, looking upset.
“Cotton candy is full of lies. Let’s each eat a bite—it’s our duty.”
Jinu pushed the cotton candy forward like he was punching me. I hid my face in the snack he was thrusting toward. Nothing came out of the fluffy bundle until we’d gone over the crosswalk in front of school. Then it somehow seemed like a huge fish bone was sticking out of the cotton candy.
Yun Ko-eun, Table for One
