Art on fire, p.6
Art on Fire, page 6
I emphasised ‘still’. The woman asked me to wait a moment, and then I heard what sounded like something collapsing. What the heck? At least she hadn’t hung up.
‘You said your name is An Yiji, right?’ the woman asked when she returned. After I confirmed, she told me that my project was briefly on hold due to the absence of a driver to pick me up.
‘On hold? What do you mean?’
‘That’s its current status.’
But what did that mean for me? When I asked if someone was still coming to pick me up today or tomorrow, she said, ‘That’s to be determined. For now, everything is on hold.’
‘You picked up the phone, you’ve heard about my situation,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’
She told me her name was Sam.
‘Sam, can you help me, please? Just take charge!’
Sam said in a low, uncomfortable voice, ‘I’m an intern,’ then, ‘I’m still in my probation period, so I don’t have any authority. I can’t be in charge of this.’
‘Can you tell me the name of the person who is in charge, then?’
‘They’re on their way, so I’ll leave a note for them.’
‘No, I want to know their name.’
‘Oh, I can’t give you that. To be honest, this is my job.’
‘Huh? It’s your job to annoy me?’
‘No. This person is busy. It’s my job to tell people when they’re too busy to answer. I want to do my job right.’
‘But you haven’t told me that, and you haven’t told the person in charge, either.’
‘Telling you that they’re temporarily unavailable — that’s my job. I told you that.’
‘It’s not temporary … There’s no one in charge of my case, is there?’
Did no one want to take charge? I was about to ask. Fortunately, I swallowed my words and spit out something else instead.
‘I’ll take a taxi.’
‘You’ll arrive by taxi? Alright.’
Her tone was a little bit gentler than before, and I lost steam. I was starting to think they had been waiting for me to do this all along. It didn’t seem possible that she’d care about when I arrived, but I assured her that I would get there as quickly as possible. She had already hung up, though.
Now all I had to do was take a taxi … but no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t get one. Uber, Lyft, another rideshare app I’d never heard of before — none of them had cars available. When I went to the hotel front desk and asked if the concierge could call me a taxi to Palm Springs, he said that would be difficult due to road closures. And even though not all the roads were closed, the chances of having to return without another passenger were so high that taxi drivers wouldn’t want to take me, he said. When I asked if there was another way to get there, the employee just reiterated that lightning had struck the area ten thousand times in the past few days.
‘I guess I should just go to the airport,’ I said.
The employee gave me a pitying look. ‘The domestic terminal is closed.’
‘Then I’ll go to the international terminal and fly home.’
I was serious, but she took it as a joke. She told me to wait, that my friend had said they were coming to pick me up. I asked if the person she’d spoken to on the phone had sounded trustworthy, and she took that as a joke, too.
I went to the breakfast buffet and put a piece of bread in the toaster. The mother and daughter I had spoken to earlier, who said everything was on fire, saw me and asked me to remember them. ‘Everything is on fire, but remember us, please.’
I asked them to remember me, too. It was a breakfast before the end of the world, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to forget them. The daughter was beautiful, with long hair. Every time she leaned over to talk to me, her hair would brush against my arm. She didn’t seem to notice that I kept leaning away from her (in spite of my efforts to make it clear), but I got some useful information from them. Behind the hotel, there were several small travel agencies and rental-car companies.
After breakfast, I spent three hours, in the midst of the heatwave, searching for anything — bus, train, plane, taxi — to travel by, to no avail. Almost everyone told me that the roads were closed due to the fires, and the most optimistic among them said it would be at least two days until I could go anywhere.
As long as I found some form of transportation, I didn’t care if I had to stuff myself in the luggage compartment, but every time I came close to finding one, something went wrong. One taxi-company employee, holding the car keys in his hand, asked, ‘Just you?’ I couldn’t bring myself to answer. He might have been a driver, but he was also the type of person I intuitively wanted to avoid. When I said I was just shopping around, he offered to lower the price, but after I left, I ran into him again at another place, offering me a higher price. I was told I’d be shown a ‘sincere, professional driver’, and it turned out to be him. By then, my will to keep searching had halved.
For the next two days, I continued my search and — for absurd contrast — I did two more deliveries for Bballi. No one was getting in touch with the artist An Yiji, but there was regular contact with the delivery person An Yiji.
On the fifth day of my stay at the hotel, I heard that the man in the room next to me had acquired a car and was going to drive to Las Vegas. This was my chance! But when I asked if I could come along, he said no.
‘Song Jun, help me, please,’ I said.
Surprised, he asked, ‘How do you know my name?’
‘I like the movie you were in, Zero G Syndrome.’
The movie had come out five years earlier, but I’d watched it the day before, so I was able to talk more concretely about why I liked it. Jun had played the role of ‘real-estate employee two’, something I’d discovered after several layers of searching. When I’d looked up the name of the series having a launch party, several articles had come up, and there I’d seen comments congratulating the actor ‘Song Jun’. That was the guy in the room next to mine. If you looked at his filmography, you’d see that he mostly played bit parts, but he’d held an important supporting role in Zero G Syndrome. He’d played a man who didn’t believe in gravity, who couldn’t believe that the earth was round. His lines were memorable — his character insisted that you had to drink, because that was the only time you could step on the curved parts of the earth. Of course, there was no need to tell him about the entire process. It would take too long to explain why solving this puzzle that had nothing to do with me gave me a sense of comfort.
Jun seemed flattered and told me that we could take a picture together if I wanted. It seemed like he was going to give me a ride, but in the end he refused.
‘I’m not actually sure if I’m going to leave tomorrow or not, and riding in a car with another person is a bit …’ he trailed off, then said, as if looking for my agreement, ‘It’s self-care, you know?’
‘No …’ I replied. ‘Aren’t you a celebrity?’
‘Gosh, thank you.’
‘I’ll pay for the petrol,’ I said. ‘I’ll even pay you extra for going through the fire zones!’
‘I’m sorry. I’m just being cautious to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings. This is why I haven’t had a single scandal since the beginning of my career.’
He listened as I explained my situation and asked if I’d face some sort of penalty for not arriving quickly. When I told him no, he said this was a first-world problem. He didn’t understand why I was anxious about waiting a few more days. If it were him, he said, he’d just sit in comfort at the hotel. I wanted to be like that, too, but the next day brought further woes.
Throughout the early morning, I could hear sirens shrieking like wild beasts. By the time I went down to the lobby at 6.00 am, a violent storm had already come and gone. The classical music that had droned on had been turned off. The lobby looked as haggard as a deflated ball, and without the music playing, it felt too big. Someone — I wasn’t sure if they were a guest or a passerby — told me there had been a murder. The eighty-three-year-old mother from Ohio and her daughter had been attacked by a stranger in front of the hotel. The mother had been taken away on a stretcher, unconscious, but her daughter had died. It didn’t feel real — I remembered the feeling of the daughter’s long hair brushing against me as we sat by the breakfast buffet, and how they’d asked me to remember them. I touched my arm. The perpetrator had been caught at the scene. He wasn’t targeting the mother and daughter, it was just a random act of violence. They’d never met him before.
The hotel employee who’d discovered the two victims kept apologising to guests, who were hurrying to pack their bags and check out. She said that she understood, that she didn’t want to stay in this city anymore, either. I will never forget what she said when I made eye contact with her: ‘As you can see, it’s now extremely possible for me to move you to a 1:1 room. If you want, I’ll move you.’
When I told her that I intended to check out today, too, she reminded me that my stay was fully paid for. I knew that, but I was still going to leave. I didn’t have a plan, but I couldn’t stay. It wasn’t just about switching hotels; I needed to get to where I had to be. My head throbbed.
‘Are you still looking for a car?’
It was Jun. Yesterday, he hadn’t displayed the slightest desire to take me with him, but now he seemed different.
‘I’m about to take off,’ he said. ‘If you want to come, I’ll give you a ride.’
I packed my bags in ten minutes and went down to the lobby.
On our way out of the city, I saw the Hollywood sign restored to its original lettering. HQLLYWQQD had returned to HOLLYWOOD. It hadn’t taken long. Maybe I’d even noticed it belatedly. I felt like I’d seen a misprint on the pages that made up this city.
An Young, who’d met my driver several days earlier at the LA airport, must have got onto Interstate 10 after leaving the airport and sped passed Riverside, Morongo, and the Yucca Valley before reaching my destination, the Robert Foundation. While the wrong person arrived at my destination, I had been waiting vacantly at the airport. Finally, I’d found someone to take me.
An Young’s route was very different from the path we ended up taking, as we had to detour to avoid the blazing mountains. We were forced to choose between a road that would take us to the north of the Robert Foundation or one that went to the south. To the north lay the Pearblossom Highway. When I said it was the inspiration for one of David Hockney’s photo collages, Jun seemed interested. He said he’d heard the highway was in some music video, too. The STOP sign in Hockney’s collage had long since been changed to traffic lights, but for the music video, Jun said, they’d changed it back to STOP. We decided to take the Pearblossom Highway ourselves.
‘Yiji, you’re not answering your phone. Call me as soon as you get this. I see that you’ve taken a taxi.’
The text from Director Choi arrived two hours after we’d left. He wanted me to call him so he could find another way for me to get to the Robert Foundation, but I was already in transit, using the only means possible. When we’d left, our expected arrival time was two in the afternoon. It was a generous calculation that included breaks, but variables kept changing. Three hours into the drive, the cars on the road were at a complete standstill.
‘A tour bus and a cargo truck collided. The bus overturned and it’s blocked the road like a barricade. There are injured people, and police are patrolling the area.’
That’s what Jun said when he came back to the car after checking out the situation. It didn’t seem like the flow of traffic would resume anytime soon, so people were getting out of their cars and then returning to them, opening the doors with ruddy faces. When I searched the name of this area online, live news stories popped up. There was even a picture of the scene ahead, which I couldn’t see in real life. Helicopters had been mobilised, and people were being carried away on stretchers. As vast a country as the US was, the roads here were narrow. I saw a car attempting to go back the way it came, but it couldn’t. We could only go east. The only good thing about being trapped here was that there was a shopping mall a five-minute walk away.
Some people, like us, left their cars on the road and went to the mall. It was a fully constructed three-storey building, but the shop windows all had ‘For Rent’ signs, as if no one had moved in yet. At the entrance, several people were handing out long black umbrellas. I wondered if they were emergency supplies, but it turned out that they were ‘grand opening’ gifts. Since we were already here, we figured we might as well eat lunch at the mall. From the window of a pizza restaurant, we could see the road chock-full of cars. At the other tables, we heard people in the same situation as us talking about the accident. I didn’t know if what they were saying was true, but according to them, the hand of a child on the overturned bus had been severed. The child was the first person to be carried away by stretcher to a helicopter, and there were other injured people, too. There were also several tons of eels from a cargo truck scattered on the road.
Road conditions didn’t improve until after we’d eaten pizza, gone to the bathroom, and slowly walked around the building. I noticed that all the needles in the shopping mall seemed to be broken — the hands on the clocks didn’t move, the needles on scales in the hallways didn’t weigh anything. Much of the mall was at a standstill, so when I found an elevator that clearly went up to an observation deck, I wasn’t sure whether I should take it.
‘If we go, we’ll be able to see farther along the road, won’t we?’ Jun asked. ‘I’m curious about the future. Our short-term future.’
‘But is the elevator working?’ I asked.
When Jun pressed a button, the elevator door opened without a sound. The floor inside became level with our feet. Because there was a sign that read ‘check elevator floor’ affixed to the front of the door, I poked at it with my umbrella.
‘This is like a slapstick comedy.’
‘What is?’
‘You poke at the floor with your umbrella, then the next moment we fall through the elevator.’
‘Why would you say that?’
‘Can you really ensure our safety with an umbrella?’
‘It’s not a weight check, it’s a knock. Can I come in? That’s what I’m asking.’
The site of the accident was farther ahead of us than we’d thought. This was the best place to see the future, but since there was no roof, I felt like my scalp was burning. Still, at the end of the road, I noticed that cars had begun to move. Traffic had started flowing again.
Jun imitated me when we got back to the car. Tapping the hood with his umbrella, he asked, ‘Can we ride?’
Cars set off, one after another. We passed the section of road slippery with eels, and in the midst of it all we realised at some point that we’d bypassed Pearblossom Highway. Jun had wanted to take a picture there, so he was disappointed, but then another view unfolded in front of us like a new world. The cars that had covered the road had scattered, and now it was just us.
Jun was on his way to Las Vegas for an audition. Someone else had been chosen for the role originally, but they had dropped out at the last minute, so now Jun had his chance. Despite the fires, this was such an opportunity that Jun said he had to go. When he asked what my reason for coming was, I had to think about how to answer. Fear of exclusion? Doubt? If so, doubt about what? Anxiety about myself? I said, ‘Because I’m curious.’ If Jun had asked about what, it would have again taken me a while to choose my words, but he didn’t ask any further questions. I told him what the Robert Foundation did, how they discovered artists. I had started talking because it seemed like Jun was fighting against drowsiness, but it put my mind in order, too.
‘What you’re saying reminds me of this song,’ he said.
Jun played ‘A Day in the Life’ on his phone. He said that the silent part of the song wasn’t actually silent, that it was audible to dogs, that the music was at an entirely different frequency. I wanted to keep listening to the song while Jun had the radio on, so he handed me his earphones. We continued along, listening to different songs and occasionally talking. He couldn’t believe that Robert was a dog. I said that I hadn’t either at first. But the more I’d learned about the Robert Foundation’s history and traditions, the more comfortable with the idea I had become. This unfamiliar world, like an image in a frame, was now only thirty minutes away. The road stretched out narrowly below the low, cloudy sky, surrounded by light-olive-coloured fields, as if just briefly permitting two new tenants. It wasn’t that narrow, but amid the vast nature it looked like a thin line. Sometimes we would pass a parked car, but they were only ever there for one of two reasons: the car had broken down, or it had run into wildlife. Neither applied to us, but at one point we, too, had no choice but to slow down. What looked like dead animals littered the road.
At first I thought they were roadkill, but as we got closer I recognised them as tyre marks. I saw tyres in the distance. The car slowed down further. As the field covered in tyres stretched out on our right side, we turned off the road to see.
When I opened the car door and climbed out, a feverish heat hit me. The air was breathtakingly heavy. As soon as I put my feet on the ground, I could hear the parched earth collecting moisture from my body. Everywhere I stood was an extension of a crack. The ground was made up of countless puzzle pieces the size of my hand. Upon closer inspection, I realised that some of the black shapes I’d thought were tyres were in fact bumpers. And they weren’t the only things that melted when they touched the ground here. After standing for a while, it became clear that my brain was melting, too. When I looked around, I saw the black shapes rolling around here and there. If I fixed my gaze in one specific spot, I could see even more.
