Carnies.

Teaching in Korea is a carnival game. The object of the game is to teach children, seven or eight classes a day, five or six days a week, armed with Not The Best Resources In The World, with no time to sculpt those resources into a distracting never mind educational form, you must improvise; your students have already been in school for ten hours and they have cell phones and their cell phones have games and the kids are fairly ADD as it is; when you're not in school you're outside where the air smells like pitsweat and the water causes hallucinations and the beer turns your brain to petrified wood, and the Korean suburbanites hound you like a C-list celebrity, and your toilet clogs, and the music sucks, and the restaurant next door has gone and dumped clams in your front lawn and clams are not a mollusk that smells better with age, and your toilet clogs, and the music sucks, and every morning the grape vendor comes megaphoning down the block at 8 o'clock sharp, and amidst all this Seinfeldian angst, the cruelest of all cruel Teaching In Korea ironies comes Hammer-dancing into your mind: everywhere you go you will attract attention (stares, leers, gawks; giggles, titters, guffaws) but not at school, i.e. the one place you want people to pay attention to you is precisely the one place where you vanish, fade, become invisible, cease to exist - and it. is. maddening.

So, good luck. A whole year, 365 days. If you survive, you win. If not, _______. The carny eggs you on. You'll never make it, he says, pansy. But he underestimates the shit you can put up with. He doesn't know that you've survived core-level theology classes at a Jesuit University, that you've worked at a non-figurative zoo, that you've spent a week living out of a Dunkin' Donuts in Berlin, that for four months you proofread catalogues in the Oriental Trading Company's Really Dark Basement Where the Dreams of Liberal Arts Majors Go To Die, i.e. you've been through some shit, or just enough petty shit to know that life is just that: going through shit. So the clouds begin to part around month ten when it starts looking like you're going to make it. The carny is rattled and starts throwing out jabs that go beyond mere gamesmanship, talking shit about your haircut, throwing bottlecaps at your head, flirting with your lady friend and that. You keep going, the days keep falling. You're on pace not only to win but to win big, one of those top-shelf stuffed frogs that weighs more than a human corpse. But in the face of triumph you begin to wonder whether this slithery carny is really a man of his word, whether someone who conducts such a corrupt racket with such compunctionless ease can be trusted to deliver the goods even if you win the carnival game fair and square, whether you oughtn't to have avoided the game in the first place and just held onto your money and stayed home and just I don't know and -

and that's where I stand. Whether the metaphor has a happy ending depends on the next 55 days, whether I am handed certain envelopes, whether I am still sane enough to understand what those envelopes are for.

Last thoughts before North Korea

Last Saturday was Children's Day in the Children's Republic of South Korea. The word that springs to mind is the present continuous verb screaming. We Brazen Expats call it Youth In Asia Day, ha ha, I hope you get the double entendre. My apartment is surrounded on all sides by Korean larvae spawning sites: three elementary schools, a day care, a kindergarten, two junior high schools, a BB gun shop. So I tried to avoid certain things that day, like the universe. But around noon I caved and ventured to the GS 25 for a bottle of Orange 500. I was ambushed en route by a flashmob of girls with pigtails. They were filing into a pink bus. They just kept coming. Hello!!! How are you!!! I'm pine tenk you and you!!! I gave them the peace sign, The V. This excited them. Screaming. Someone hit a seventh-octave high F# and oops, there went another crucial Jenga block from the crumbling wooden tower of sanity.

Right now I'm seated in an oversized leather chair in a PC room in Seoul, waiting to meet my tour group at the Hongik University train station. We're taking a bus to North Korea, under cover of darkness. A hundred people playing Starcraft in a small room sounds like a World Farting Federation battle royale. I've spent most of the day in train stations. Nine months into the game, mass transit facilities are sources of almost sexual temptation. A train to Incheon, a card swipe, a quick frisk and I could be in Indonesia by nightfall. The urge to vanish. I sit there entertaining the thought with a ticket in my hand. My cell phone says "KOREA - 81 DAYS." An inmate on outdoor work detail.

Train stations are the most diverse places in Korea. The train station wildlife features varying shades of Asian, Buddhist monks in Irish Spring Icy Blast-colored habits, already-homesick-looking U.S. Army personnel, the occasional African or Jewish dude on business, trembling 20-something waifs in the early stages of THC withdrawal who really have no idea what they've gotten themselves into.

A side effect of life as a stranger in an Asian metropolis with a population density greater than 7.2 broom-wielding hags per square inch is that you come to devalue the sense of individuality that seventeen years of feelgood American education tried so laissez-fairely to instill in you. You start to think of yourself as an off-colored piece of candy coasting slowly upward on a network of treadmills in a big hollow candy factory, not fundamentally different from the pieces of candy around you but definitely off-colored and therefore more likely to be thrown away without being eaten. Or if you prefer gamete metaphors to candy metaphors, you imagine yourself as one of a billion other sperm cells ramming head-first into some sort of invisibly gigantic mucousy egg with a circumference so great that the mucousy wall you keep ramming into isn't even slightly curved. You know intuitively that penetrating the egg won't satisfy you, but will more than likely kill you and in the process serve some sinister purpose that reaches beyond your spermatozoon imagination in its vastness and diabolism, but still you keep ramming head-first into the same mucousy eggwall day after day, at no small expense of energy/intelligence.

But both of those metaphors are too grim. In fact, there is no real metaphor that works to describe the bigness of the world. None that I can come up with anyway. All metaphors end up coming across too grim or too glib. When I think of the world, I just kind of sit there with my mouth open so wide that if you came up and rapped me on the top of the head I'd make a hollow coconut sound. It's just big. And intimidating when you're right up close to it, but neither positive nor negative. It's just fucking big. The world. Big and indifferent. Smiling creepily. Everyone ought to experience the bigness for a year or two before returning to one's hide-outs in law school libraries, office cubicles, bunkers 4,000 fathoms below the ocean floor, classrooms, micro-worlds where the world is smaller and heavily distilled and somehow more meaningful that way. When I get back home I'd like to lay low in grad school for a while.

There's an essay by David Foster Wallace called "Laughing with Kafka." He writes:

"... our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home ... imagine [Kafka's] art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens ... and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along."

It is as he says. We spermatozoon have been inside the egg all along. Best to spare ourselves the head trauma and flagellate off in the other direction. Take a few laps. Take it easy. Go make friends. As another one of those anhedonic Omahans who strapped himself to a crude catapult and catapulted himself to someplace weirder than the American Midwest in pursuit of the big zygote, I have my suspicions that what we're all searching for isn't anywhere other than where we're at right now, or at least it is not localized in the Dongdaegu Station lavatory. I refuse to wax Zen Buddhist on the immediacy of the present because I am presently racking up a ridiculous internet tab. I need this money to buy some serious merch, Dear Leader ringer tees, juche rosaries, balsa wood replica Taepodong-2 warheads. K.J. Il, I'm putting your kids through college.

Kae-mi

On a dead grass island at high noon, Lou and Brian are whipping ants with their jump ropes. I'm standing like Boss Godfrey from Cool Hand Luke with one hand on my hip, looking on as if to say That's some fine ant whippin', boys, though mostly just hoping neither of them zings me in the eye with a backlash. Together they pursue a fugitive - black, wingless - across fifty feet of barren terrain, whipping at half-second intervals, stomping, screaming, spitting, et cetera. Miraculously, the ant survives, or is not visibly killed. Brian asks, "Is it dead?" and Lou says, "No."

But in fleeing, the ant has unwittingly led the Koreans to his home base. I kneel in front of the anthill before the brats can go DEFCON 1 on it. The ants are darting about with Schröder-era Germanic diligence, hoisting blades of grass a bazillion times their mass, arranging pebbles and leafy bits into fortresses impervious to anything smaller and less malicious than a jump rope-wielding six year-old. Four grunts line up along the gashed left side of an expired roly-poly and start pushing. In a fatherly moment, I lure an ant onto my palm and blather, grossly exaggerating the freakish shit-hauling capacity of your average 9 to 5 worker drone, and the boys are fleetingly awed. The ant complex - with its sunblasted gravel, its hopeless brown grass, its frantic ant bureaucrats crawling all over one other - reminds me dimly of Phoenix, Arizona.

Lou challenges me to a jump roping duel. I accept, though my left Achilles tendon has been groaning all morning like a busted hydraulic shaft. I hobble a few steps towards the parking lot with a pink Hello Kitty jump rope that barely reaches down to my knees. A girl pedals by on a banana-seat bicycle and eyes me with blank curiosity, singing an amelodic arpeggiated la la la song as she passes. When I turn back around, I see that the boys are whipping the hell out of everything. The jump rope droops from my hand as I watch the ants scatter, some dashing back to defend the fort, others shooting out into desert space. Their home has been destroyed.

Chinese Yellow Dust Blues No. 48

Strap on your Hello Kitty respiratory mask: here comes the Chinese Yellow Dust. It's that muggy breath at your window, the fine tan powder that blankets your blankets, it's that sick yellow-brown glow all around like somebody's clapped a pair of sepiatone filters over your eyes. You step outside, into the cloud: where you should be accosted by the hyperactive Korean preschoolers at your doorstep, cat-called by the mulleted teenagers hocking loogies in the alley back behind the pig intestine shack, there's no such hassle today, you can drift for blocks and blocks and encounter no one, just a stray cat army-crawling under a Kia, a polyethylene bag somersaulting in the wind, even the windbags seem to be running from something ...

If you breathe in deep, you don't feel like you're inhaling anything per se, this Chinese Dust after all is not quite what you expected - see, you envisioned, oh, I don't know, like, swirling Saharan dust devils, beach sand being tossed around through the air, haboobs, etc. - while this is more of an omnipresent pee-colored fog, generally thick rather than particulately abrasive, not unlike the basement atmosphere of Your State University's High Society house, except sucking this smoke in for a while doesn't so much give you a contact high as it makes you queasy and itchy all over, then come rashes, hair loss, impotence, goiter, red-green colorblindness, sweet and sour syndrome, Andy Van Slyke's Disease, shingles, the odd schizophrenic fugue state ... the Chinese Dust kisses you on the mouth, leaves you with the dull taste of tungsten on your tongue ...


Fig. 1, 3: Ordinarily gloomy
Fig. 2, 4: Extraordinarily gloomy

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

I go to bakeries all day long

A three year-old tottering up the sidewalk starts to tip over backwards because she's lost herself in the sunglare of the passing ten year-old's bicycle spokes. He squeals his brakes to gape at the 24 year-old foreigner trudging the other way in yesterday's jeans and a synthetic fur-lined coat that looks thrift storey but really cost him close to 200 American dollars. In seven years, the 24 year-old thinks, the three year-old will be another ten year-old coasting along on a bike. In fourteen years, the ten year-old will be another 24 year-old floundering around a foreign land he knows almost nothing about because he can't find sane work in the country of his birth. Birth; walking by one, pooping in the can by two, reading by six, nocturnally emitting by 13, having second thoughts about everything by 24, what then? ... Our lives unfurl with increasing slowness while our surroundings speed up exponentially. How weird, he thinks, everything must seem to the elderly.

(/artsy-fartsy third-person)

(self-deprecating first-person)

By dinner time, a six year-old affectionately known as "Fart Boy" has kicked me twice, square in the crotch. After the first kick, I get that post-soccer-ball-impact upswell of nausea and hobble to the bathroom, hovering over the can waiting for the puke that doesn't come. After the second kick, I feel positively nothing, I just stand there looking nonplussed. On neither occasion do I use my powers of bigness to scare the shit out of the little shit. But then, a six year-old who is kicking his English teacher in the balls twice in the same day is probably on the right track.

Today has been one of those not infrequent days where the 3rd graders scream for the sake of screaming. A test of the emergency broadcast system. Children ought to be schooled on farms or, when plausible, in the depths of blackest space. Trapping kids in classrooms, arranging their desks so they can be hoppingly navigated like lilly pads, arming them with toys like ceiling fans and markers and whiteboards and flashlights and chairs and windows and electrical outlets and fire extinguishers to play with, giving their high-frequency sound waves four walls to ricochet off of before they come slashing down into my eardrums like drumsticks shaped into shanks, Why?


Teaching in tongues. Give me a black marker and I swear I become a different person. I dislike that person. He's loud and sulky, prone to ranting. Today's pearls:

(after I've kicked over a desk in the front row, I rear my head and bellow so loudly the plexiglas windows rattle in their wooden casings)
"You like being loud, huh? Well, guess what? I can be even louder than you!"

(intoned in a heartbroken warble as I doodle frowning stick figures on the whiteboard with my back to the class)
"Fine. If you won't listen to me, I'll just teach myself."

(truly excited)
"A superintendent is almost the same as a plumber. And who was the most famous plumber of all time? Mario. And what console did Mario Brothers come out on? That's right: Super Nintendo. And Super Nintendo is almost the same as superintendent! Um, but it's spelled and pronounced differently."

Who says these things? Where do these words come from? Not from any mental state that could be called consciousness.


The elementary schoolers blast out of school around 7 PM, leaving in their wake a murder scene of Dixie cups and red sauce. The middle schoolers ooze in with their humid troposphere of sweat and octopus chips. The ecstasy of early childhood, the heroin withdrawal of adolescence, the rickety Temple of Doom bridge that sags down between the two. I make my first class of 7th graders act out a skit.

Tony: Surp is up, doody.
Surf's up, dude.
Tony: ... surp's is up ... dude.
Denise: Hey. Tony. I heard you lik-ee to catch-ee some wabes? I'm Liza's priend-uh, Dennis.
Denise.
Denise: Denise.
Jamal: What's up. Dennis. How - [suddenly realizes he is black, points this out to Tony and Denise, the three of them keel over laughing]
What's so funny?
Jamal: Teacher. Oh my God. I am look like ugly monkey.


Ten o'clock. My last class, 8th graders. They're sucked into to their cell phones within the first five minutes, so I get sulky and start writing Polish on the board. It takes a few minutes for the ringtones to fade, but my cryptic scrawling of seemingly random c's and z's gradually woos their interest for some reason.

"Teacher, what that?"
"Przepraszam. It's Polish for 'Excuse me,'" I say. "You bump into some drunk on the tram, you say, 'Przepraszam.'"
"Teacher, how say?"
"Shuh-pra-shahm."
[in unison] "Shuh-pra-shahm."
[As if awakening from a prolonged vegetative state, several students glance from whiteboard to notebook, notebook to whiteboard ... I stare back, aghast ... they are taking notes!]
"Teacher, Poland speak, what hello?"
"Dzień dobry."
"How say?"
"Jen do-bruh."

By the time the bell rings, they are saying hello, excuse me, goodbye, thank you, goodnight, my cat is black, chattering away like little Copernici. They are saying things in Polish that they probably can't say in English. I leave class looking constipated. In the water cooler reflection I can see the new cowlick that's sprouted from the back of my head flapping around like a car antennae; I didn't have a cowlick before I got everything straightened out. On the heels of this marginal teaching success, I'm thinking that my foppish personality might not be the problem. Maybe I'm just teaching the wrong language. Tomorrow: Plattdeutsch, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, American Sign, morse code ...


My copy of Infinite Jest has a knife wound that doesn't heal until page 157, where there is only the faintest dot of a dent under the word "fellow" in the sentence, "She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son." The book was stabbed on a Sunday morning before dawn two years ago by Jared in one of his whiskey knife rampages. With the same miniature bowie knife that he had earlier used to gouge a chunk of plaster out of our living room wall, he pitched Infinite Jest into the air and stabbed it in the heart, sending it tumbling an impressive ten feet across the room, where it thumped onto the couch and sat there bouncing up and down on the seat cushion for maybe ten minutes.

Infinite Jest is 1079 pages long, not including inside covers (of which there are several), a section dedicated to critical acclaim, and copyright pages. The margins are creepily slim.

Reading Infinite Jest is going to make the next four months more inconvenient than they're already going to be. After a day and a half of lugging it around, my right lugging bicep is already bluish and lumpy from so much lugging. On top of all the lugging, there is the added burden of explaining to people why I'm lugging around this brightly colored pretentious-looking book, and as most of the people I encounter in my lugging are Korean, there is the added added burden of explaining to them that the tome I'm lugging around is not The Bible, though it may one day become something like it.


I just devoured a marine eel (acoustic) in its entirety. According to the local folklore that surrounds all slimy, red, phallic-shaped beasts of the murky depths, choking down all those tiny eelbones is really going to do wonders for my stamina.

Brigadier General Relativity

March. My eighth month. I will soon be expatriating from Korea, the aptly named "Land of the Morning Clam," and I have this fear, you see, of leaving this wretched place behind without having kept an adequately thorough record of events and non-events as they occurred or didn't occur. So, for the last quarter of my term, this is my pledge: to divert you with sweltering tales of homoerotic sauna rendezvous, to write bimonthly reviews of local dog eateries, to defect to the North for your slight amusement; to fencehorth, forcehenth, henceforth spew forth more words, more pictures, more non-sequiturs, more naughty words, more misspellings, more misspelled naughty words ...

The best mimes of my generation ...

I'm a father on Saturday afternoons from twelve until two, at the rate of 15,000 Korean won an hour. My kids are Lou, 8, and Brian, 6. Lou is the cheeky precocious one who asks too many questions about my Friday nights, and Brian is the whiny sissy boy who is still too young to have any real talents besides crying and wetting his pants at the same time. My wife is Lee Ho-Geun. She puts the coffee on for me. And once in a while, she makes a mean bean paste stew.

Under the loose guise of teaching the kids English, I come over to the apartment and hang out for a couple hours. Sometimes we play chess, other times we play Chinese chess. But in all the times I have been there, I have never once seen their father. I don't imagine they see much of him, either. So far as I know, he has not left his plexiglass bank telling chamber ... bank telling, telling banks ... since the Lee Family Ski Trip last December.

It's Saturday. My alarm - this time, "Eye in the Sky" by Alan Parsons Project - startles me into a confused sort of awakeness. After three hours of sweaty sleep with a tornado tearing up my stomach, I have difficulty re-locating the Lee apartment, though I've been there maybe fifteen times. I am lost in the Korean morass of rectangles and squares. I finally straighten out the numbers in my mind - building 206, room 503 - climb the five flights of stairs, tidy my hair in the peephole reflection, dial the security code, 3, 2, 7, um, 2? ... The wife pops out and tells me to take the kids to the park and teach them how to play basketball, in English.

The three of us bring a sad collection of deflated spheroids down to the sandlot between apartment buildings. I dazzle them with a few missed layups and a series of airballs from behind the three point line. Then, I rebound while they granny shoot at the hoop. The only things they're managing to hit are each other. Enthusiasm wanes and our shoot-around dissolves into a soccer-like sport where we're punting the basketball around, and then we're just drop-kicking assorted deflated spheroids at the backboard. We experiment briefly with dodgeball, but the ball is so light, the wind so strong, the kids so weak that it feels like we're playing on the moon.

We get fished into a pickup soccer game with the usual neighborhood riffraff, The Kid With The Prominent Earlobes, The Kid With What Seems Like Nine Fillings, The Kid With Five Dimples Minimum, The Bob Hope Kid ... I am drafted in the first round by The Prematurely Balding Kindergartener, who strikes me at first glance as a shrewd and loyal general manager to be playing for, someone with experience. Brian is on my team. Lou winds up on the other team. The family has been divided.

The other team takes a commanding three to nothing lead early on, partly because The Bob Hope Kid is a juggernaut, partly because the ball is bigger than our goalie, partly because our lone defenseman, Choe Seong-Ook, is sulking and throwing sandballs at the ground. Lou gets cranky and demands that I stop going easy, so I humor him and do some trotting around in circles. I refuse to take any shots on goal. Legitimately trying to score goals in pick-up soccer games against kindergarteners makes you a pervert.

I try to suspend my disbelief and get caught up in the game, but my imagination doesn't fire me up the way it used to when I was ten, when the kids on the other team – whether best friend, churchy kid down the street, unibrowed heir to a local vacuum repair empire – in their striped rugby shirts and dusty Starter jackets, in the flurry of elbows and name-calling, took on suddenly evil hues. Those transmogrifications don't happen today. They are just little kids and I'm their big lumbering servile oaf, an oaf who gets rebounds, shags balls, climbs fences to retrieve things that have been thrown or kicked too far, an oaf who can't move one way or the other without crushing the tiny humans scuttling between his legs, an oaf who is drawing a crowd of ogling fans, who is feeling like a real sicko in doing something wholesome for once. While the kids chase each other around, the oaf stands at midfield, arms akimbo, casting a small Forrest Gump shadow in the early afternoon sun, waiting for a cleared ball to come his way so he can pass it to someone smaller than him.

The score is seven to two, them. A duststorm has kicked up and the game seems to be winding down due to mutual exhaustion when a skirmish breaks out. I decide to be cute and, reaching into my pocket as I trot towards the squealing mass, I produce an off-yellow bus pass, roll my tongue in a high pitched mock whistle, and stand there officiously holding the bus pass up in the air, hoping my idiocy does not go unnoticed. Lou glances up and smiles nervously, nudges his friend, hey, hey, get a load of this big creepy foreigner my mom makes me hang out with, and then there's a scream as The Prematurely Balding Kindergartener knocks Brian to the ground and pounces on top, clawing with both hands at Brian's face.

Brian fights back, grabs both of Baldy's cheeks and yanks down as hard as he can. Baldy punches him in the neck. Brian screams and spits upward, but the spitwad comes splattering down on his forehead, so he screams louder. I grab Baldy by the shirt collar and pull, looking around, hoping some nearby Korean adult will be drunk enough to intervene ...

... but the bystanders have cleared out and it's just me and these little kids on a deserted playground, surrounded on all sides by 14-story apartment buildings but completely alone. Brian and Baldy are both bleeding from the eyes. Every time I manage to subdue them, one dashes past me and roundhouse kicks the other in the chest. Taekwondo. I scream, "Stop, stop, stop," but my voice comes out weak, the sound waves dissipate instantly, scattered by the wind.

Baldy's face is flushed purple and caked with orange, somebody's blood. He's kicking Brian in the gut, trying to rip Brian's face off like a mask. I grab them both by the arms and pull. I am amazed at how tiny and fragile they are, and yet they overpower me, I can't make them stop, though I stomp, bellow, belt out sermons ... Sons of South Korea, peace be upon thee! Peace be upon thy greenish-brown heavily militarized peninsula overflowing with soju and kimchi! Peace be upon thee, ye corporate supermen of the future! Ye aspiring Woori Bank bank tellers! Ye Samsung Life Insurance life insurance brokers! Thy destinies grin sadistically at thee! Fourteen-hour school days! Drunken sexcapades in dimly lit karaoke rooms! Two Starcraft channels! And lo, one day at the end of the rainbow, feathered fedoras and hiking! Nay, drunken hiking! ... but to no avail. They are determined to kill each other, these two six year-olds, calling each other fucking sons of bitches in the sort of Korean that even I understand.

In the swirling dust, the flailing arms, the loogies ... I experience a flashback: grade four, John Beckett brings his yellow hamster, Peaches, to school ... decides Peaches really ought to mingle with the reddish hotdog-shaped class hamster ... drops Peaches into the cage ... in a flash the two furballs are one ... it's a moment before we realize they are tearing each other to shreds ... John, a classic Steinbeck Lenny if you knew the guy, miraculously pries the hamsters apart without crushing either of them in his meaty paws ... but it's too late ... when he holds Peaches up to the light, the critter's right eyeball is dangling out of the socket ... a sad little black circle, like the pupil of a plastic googily eye ... Peaches is trembling with what appears to be hamster rage, but is completely silent, no squeaking or anything ... Johnny's crusty lips tremble, these big blue bags well up under his eyes, he starts to weep ... Peaches, look what he done to Peaches ...


I separate the kids at last. Lou has pinned down Baldy. Brian has collapsed and is weeping into a tree trunk. Their faces are smeared in blood.

"Go home," I tell Baldy. "We go home, you go home."

He's staring, fascinated with the blood on Brian's face, like he wants to make more of it.

"I am big," I say, "you are small. Go home."

Baldy is unfazed, but Brian gets up and tearfully tromps home. Baldy spits in Lou's face and kicks out of the pin, gets to his feet. He charges and tries to tackle Lou, but I fend him off with a basketball. Then, with a strange Van Damme-esque "get into the chopper" sideways head toss, I gesture for Lou to go home. Lou disappears around the corner and then - truly strange - it's just me standing there in this empty sandlot, aiming a basketball at a bloody child who is glaring at my torso like he wants to fight it.

"Hey. Go home."



When I get there, Lou is waiting for me in front of apartment building number 206.

"See you next time," he says, waving.

"Should I come up to check on Brian?" I ask. "He seemed, um, bleeding."

"No, that's okay," Lou says, "but thank you for help in fight. Now I sleep."

A nap sounds good. I give Lou the victory sign and walk home. The clouds have snuck in and it's suddenly cold. The tail end of my coat keeps kicking up in the wind. High school girls float by in their black uniforms - crows or nuns, pick or choose - giggling at me as I pass, spitting out phrases like "Where are you prom?", "I'm pine thank you and you", and "Puck you". Giggling, giggling, giggling. I give them the peace sign. As I walk, sucking on the right corner of my moustache, "Get Together" by The Youngbloods plays in my mind, and this fades neatly into "Everybody's Talkin'" by Harry Nilsson as I'm coming up the stairs to my apartment.

There's a note on my door from The Bostonian, who I have been unintentionally but not accidentally avoiding since he and The Torontonian cremated that cat a few weekends ago. He wants to know where I've been. I shrug to myself. Where have I been?

If I could have any superpower, or if there is any superpower I suspect I may already have, it's obscurity.

The Animal World

Standing on the corner in the gas station glow with the Torontonian, the Bostonian, two high school dudes in matching blue uniforms ... the first dying moth of spring swims in circles on the pavement ... the Torontonian is peering down at his iPod with a green flask in his hand ... the Bostonian is emptying a bottle of soju into this high school dude's wide open mouth, molar fillings catching the light ...

A white girl enters the convenience store ... the Torontonian and the Bostonian peek at her through the glass ... the Torontonian pronounces her ugly ... the Bostonian diagnoses her a dyke ... she comes back out with a carton of milk, the Bostonian gives her shit ...

"Sup, cracker?" he snaps.
"Fuck you," she says.
"Just being friendly," shouts the Torontonian, flipping her off.
"Some party you got there, fags," she snarls as she crosses the street.

The wet sound of passing cars fills the silence ... the high school dudes are red-faced and beaming ... it is 2 AM ...

"What are we gonna do now?" asks the Torontonian ... the question makes me shudder, or maybe it's the wind ...

"We are standing here on the corner," the Bostonian says, "and we are keeping quiet until something happens."

While the Torontonian is quacking about the burgundy fitted suit he bought in Phuket, a cab screams to a stop in the middle of the intersection ... there is a sick muffled pop ... the Torontonian shuts up ... with the engine humming, the driver gets out of the cab, walks around front, squats before the bumper ... something's pinned under his right front tire ... a bag? ... a loaf of bread? ... grey and white ... fuzzy ... a tail ... it is a cat ... the driver lines himself up, free kicks the cat corpse and it tumbles, rolls over twice, tail windmilling, limp paws outstretched and bobbing ... he instep kicks it six times until it's nestled with its nose up against the curb ... the driver gets back in the cab and peels out, careens through a red light ...

The Torontonian removes his headphones ... "Christ," I murmur ... the Bostonian staggers into the convenience store and returns, leading the gas station attendant by the arm ... the attendant, his whole face marred by some terrible blueberry-colored bruise, spots the cat, nods grimly, speaks a soft aside to the high school dudes, they nod grimly ...

Minutes pass ... a white Kia pulls up to the curb ... two women get out of the car ... one woman is carrying a black Adidas shoe bag ... she kneels while the other nudges the cat into the bag with her toe ... the bag is carefully placed atop an impromptu sidewalk garbage heap ... the women get back in the car, the car changes lanes, coasts through a red light ...

"That ain't no way to bury a cat," the Bostonian says and I nod grimly, unsure of what he means ...

A man in a tan trenchcoat swaggers by, points at us, baptizes me with his bottle of soju ... drunk, Korean, man ... a drunk Korean man ... he says to us: "The cat has died. Let's go home."

The high schoolers bow to us and chatter to each other en route to the PC room across the street ... I wander into the convenience store to buy a cup of ramen ... the Bostonian and the Torontonian linger on the corner planning a cremation ceremony, but I'm in bed before that happens ...

Sometimes I'm the slave, sometimes ...

It's dawn and the foreigners are pushing each other around in shopping carts, frightened giggles and metallic rattling noises coming from the illlit alleyway between chicken places. Meanwhile, Korea sleeps: mommy curled up in bed with her 20 year-old son; daddy splayed out naked, lying unconscious on a medicine-white futon down at the neighborhood rub 'n tug. Soon, Korea will wake up, jettison the kids off to school for twelve hours. Mommy will strap on her sun visor, go out and price haggle with vegetable vendors, come home and cook kimchi stew, stare pensively out the window, watch KBS dramas all afternoon. Daddy will wear a silver suit for fourteen hours and he won't come home after that. The foreigner gets up at one PM, groans, watches videos on the internet until three, walks to school munching on a cornbread thing, thinks this is all a pretty raw deal, public restrooms ain't got toilet paper ...

Request

If anyone happens to find themselves in The Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, North America, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Universe: please let me know whether they still have The Best of Roxy Music and Exile on Main St. in the jukebox. So I can sleep at night.