Drifting House (9 page)

Gilho had accepted a month’s rent in advance. There was his balcony of horticultural treasures, but he was not a person to violate his commitments. He sank into the leather sofa.

“I advertise for a tenant; I get a dirty little bird.”

Wuseong stroked the goose with long pianist’s fingers. Like a
tamed animal, the goose rested its head against the boy’s thin chest. Then the boy scuttled over to the balcony, slid open the glass door, and deposited the goose in the middle of Gilho’s plants. It stretched its short tuber neck and disappeared behind a waxy green frond. After waving to it, the boy hefted his suitcases up and deposited them in the spare room. He returned hunched, one tentative foot at a time, so different from the way Gilho had become: a man used to having his way, a man used to making demands.

“Please, Ajeoshi,” Wuseong said. He blushed like a newlywed. “It’s eight o’clock at night and we don’t have anywhere to go.”

They were an incongruous pair: a man whose gaze did not seem to take in anything more than it needed to; whose very walk was efficient and with purpose; the kind of man who seemed to have ambled out of his mother’s womb fully formed. Wuseong teetered like a beanstalk when he walked; his speech hovered precariously between leisure and panic. He watched in awe as Gilho completed fifty ­push-ups while reading a newspaper spread flat on the ground.

Gilho stood up, his breathing even as if his body had been at rest.

Gilho said, “If that bird eats my plants, it’s leaving first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Goodnight, my
ajeoshi.
”

Gilho shook his head, and turned away.

Precisely at six the next morning, Gilho headed to the balcony with a steaming mug of green tea. He cultivated, among other
plants, cacti, specializing in Mexican Tehuacán desert specimens that he kept warm through the forbidding winters with a special heating unit. For a decade he had found refuge each morning in this forest of cacti, where, before facing the grayness of his responsibilities, he read out loud half a dozen
sijo,
­three-line classical poems that made him shiver with their beauty. But when he slid open the glass door, the goose fixed its gelatinous eyes on him and honked. It was resting on a shelf next to a potted
Aloe bellatula.
Alarmed, he pumped his arms at the goose. One wing dragged crookedly as if broken, and the other, billowing like a dirty white parachute, struck him in the face.

Gilho fled from the bean goose, the mutt of all birds. He was a ­forty-six-year-old accountant, an age and a profession that in their society commanded respect. He had relinquished so many possible selves to rescue his children from Korea’s university exam hell and his wife from the crippling anxiety of the education disease, and the boy dared taunt this so–called goose father with a goose; he deserved better than this mockery!

He hunted down Wuseong.

Wuseong was in the kitchen flipping a scallion pancake in the air. His motions were languid and confident; like all of them, a different person when he was alone. Seeing Wuseong with the washcloth perched on his head like a chef’s hat, his singular pleasure in the browning edges of the pancake, made Gilho forget his anger.

“Surprise!” Wuseong said. “You haven’t had a homemade meal for some time, I’m sure.”

Since Soonah had left, Gilho had resorted to buying egg and toast or a roll of
kimbap
at vendors’ stands; seeing the steaming
food made him feel sentimental. It was also uncomfortable, seeing a man performing a woman’s role.

“­But—I don’t have anything for you,” he said.

“You can write me a poem!” Wuseong looked hopeful.

Gilho felt a phantom pain at the word.
Poem.
It had been years since anyone had talked about poems with him. He had belonged to the literature club on campus; some of those friends had become Korea’s most exciting writers, but while they had risked and struggled, he had built himself a fortress of security and accepted the changes it had exacted from him.

“How did you know I ­write—wrote poetry? No one knows that about me.”

The boy flipped the pancake once, twice, before saying, “I read your first book of poems.”

“My only book of poems.”

“Your only book of poems.” He clasped his hands in a kind of prayer. “I looked and looked…why wasn’t there a second?”

“I didn’t have a second in me…there was only a first,” he admitted. “So that’s why you went and found me? To see what this old dinosaur who once wrote a few poems is doing these days?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now you know. He’s an accountant with a faraway family who reads more than he should.”

“Ajeoshi, don’t be angry.” His hands fluttered, graceful and nervous. “Those poems carved me out.”

Gilho wasn’t angry, just ashamed.

Wuseong inhaled the strong perfume of fish and bean paste stew. “You should eat.”

Gilho obliged and tried the typical family breakfast: the
stir-fried garlic stems and seasoned vegetables and roots were rich with flavor; the haddock was grilled to gold; the steaming communal pot of
dwenjang
stew had a complex base of anchovies, garlic, seaweed, and mushrooms that changed on the tongue with time. The food, doing what only good food was capable of, helped him relax.

Gilho set his chopsticks down. “You could open a restaurant.”

Wuseong giggled and touched two fingers to his lips.

“That will never happen. I despise people, but I like cooking for you.”

Gilho turned away shyly. “I’ve never heard anything so strange.”

“Well, I don’t really hate
hate
people. I’m too melodramatic,” Wuseong said, and smiled. “It’s a character flaw. I have a lot of those.”

He sat back delicately, as if afraid that his weight would break the chair. But only long enough to suck a grain of rice off his chopsticks before he leaped up again. He set aside a bowl of lettuce and seeds, stuck a plastic daisy into a leaf, then admired the effect. Gilho stared as the boy tiptoed to the balcony to feed the goose fresh lettuce and potato wedges; its ­orange-banded bill the size of a kid’s trowel swooped down as if to kiss the boy’s palm.

Watching the boy, Gilho felt a little dizzy. Wuseong belonged to no category of people that he recognized, and it disturbed Gilho’s ­hard-won world order.

When Wuseong returned with the goose in one arm, Gilho pushed his chair back and snatched his briefcase, still chewing the last spoonful of rice. He said, “
Gomab–ne
. Breakfast was filling, but don’t do this again.”

The boy struggled to maintain his smile; Gilho halted. He had
not meant to be unkind. At the interview, he had learned that the boy’s mother had passed away with kidney failure; his father he had lost contact with years ago. There was only the goose.

He said, “I mean, I don’t want to waste your time.”

Wuseong brightened with shy pleasure; like a boy unused to kindness, he was so easy to please. He shouted thank you and leaned forward so dangerously that Gilho leaped back to escape the hug. The boy frantically waved his free hand in the air as if Gilho were embarking on a long journey.

Over the next month Gilho learned that Wuseong was not only a skilled cook and a tamer of wildlife, but also an accomplished photographer, a collector of useless, arcane facts, a ­three-time employee of the month at Lotteria Burgers, and an amateur director who had shot two ­above-average short films on a borrowed camcorder, each made for less than the price of a cup of coffee. But Wuseong’s immoderate passions made him quick to panic. At night Gilho heard him making disturbed talk in his sleep, sometimes crying out, his voice lashing through the silence. He spent weeks painting miniature boxes, then threw them away. All his closest friends, he said, were in jail; Gilho did not ask him any more about this. Perhaps because of the chaos of his past life, Wuseong seemed to delight in Gilho’s solidity. All that was ordinary about ­Gilho—chewing an apple ­twenty-five times with each bite, reading while ­blow-drying his ­hair—was for the boy admirable, mysterious. As for Gilho, he often found himself at work wondering at this boy who didn’t disguise his uncertainty, his eagerness to please, his poverty, everything that Gilho had worked
so hard to hide. It was as if the only thing he knew how to be was genuine.

One morning he walked in on Wuseong talking to the goose.

“He’s shy, my
ajeoshi,
” said the boy.

My
ajeoshi
. This time, the use of the possessive made Gilho flush. He said, “And now you know how to interpret goose talk?”

The boy became radiant. “She’s not a goose, she’s my mother.”

“Your mother?”

He shook his head to laugh, but he stopped when the boy disappeared behind a jumping cholla cactus.

“And what exactly is your mother saying to you?”

“I’m still learning how to understand it myself.”

“I start humoring you, bringing back home bags of chopped salad and sunflower seeds for the goose, and you start seeing your mother?”

The boy popped out from behind a swollen cluster of cactus spines. “She promised me she’d come back, and she did. That’s what matters.”

Gilho shook his head. He said, “No, it’s not possible.”

The boy’s nervous hands ruffled the goose’s muscle of a neck; it angled toward the boy, submitted to its caretaker.

Gilho embarked on an awkward conversation concerning the cycle of life and death. He tried to be as gentle as he knew how. God? Allah? Buddha?
Mudang?
Wuseong retreated to the corner of ferns. He told the boy that all religions were ancient tricks aimed at parting you from your money, as if the boy were twelve and not ­twenty-two. “I wish you were right, but this isn’t the answer,” Gilho concluded. “A goose is finally a goose, no matter what you want it to be.”

The boy’s large eyes emerged over the ferns, his expression quizzical and unconvinced. He merely said, “I’m going to make you believe.”

“I believe in helping people,” Gilho said. “In responsibility. In family. And our country. But this is only a goose!”

“You don’t need to justify yourself.” The boy smiled the kind of smile that made Gilho’s face heat up. “You’re saying this because you care about me. It makes me happy.”

All he knew was that Wuseong did not leave him alone. After work or rehearsals on a comic adaptation of
Hamlet
(Gilho had not known that it was possible), the boy came directly home and flustered Gilho by skating around the kitchen with soapy sponges tied to his feet while chanting ancient Buddhist sutras on reincarnation, which forced Gilho to childishly cover his ears with his hands, though more often Gilho would spend an evening listening to Wuseong read out loud his favorite poems; the boy, to add to his prodigious talents, had a voice with the clear tenor of a church bell. Another time, Gilho came home and found Wuseong asleep, curled up on the hardwood floor without a pillow or blanket, and no
yo
underneath him, and when Gilho woke him up, the boy looked straight at him and said, “Everywhere I go, a road,” before falling immediately back to sleep. The line reminded Gilho that he had, finally, lacked the courage to trust the person he had wanted to be; he walked away to recover from vertigo. When he spoke of the boy’s strangeness to Soonah on the phone, she said reasonably (she was always reasonable), “Why don’t you find another tenant?”

Gilho could only wonder. In a country where a university degree made you respectable, the boy had dropped out because he
wasn’t being taught anything. He had thespian ambitions; he raised crippled animals for fun. His idealism couldn’t last. But what might have happened if Gilho had not married and scrambled to provide Soonah the life that she and her parents, that everyone, expected, if he had not been so susceptible to her fear of risk, of failure, of others’ eyes, all fears that were his own?

Two months into the boy’s stay, Gilho was persuaded to visit a local song room with Wuseong. He had come home to the boy weeping about a documentary on the fate of krill whales, and in distress, Gilho had offered to cheer him up.

The song room hall was lit with last year’s Christmas lights.

“So you want a
baang
for the hour?” A woman leaned over the counter, outraging Gilho’s aesthetics with her silicone monstrosities.

Wuseong nodded, knocking gently against Gilho as his body swayed to a silent music. He kept saying, “We’re having so much fun,” after the
soju
they’d shared at the drinking tent just before. Somehow this friendship with a boy half his age had become possible though people with two years’ difference between them called each other “junior” or “senior” but rarely friends. But Wuseong had no barriers; he was too guileless, Gilho thought, too trusting, and he found himself worrying about how the world would hurt him.

They were assigned a room that smelled vaguely of gym socks. As soon as the door closed Wuseong zipped open his oversize backpack and withdrew the goose. He told Gilho not to worry because in this song room people did whatever they pleased, but Gilho worried because that was his nature. Still, they sang from the book of songs sticky with soft drinks they drank. Wuseong plucked a pink wig off the video seat and put it on; he shook the
tambourine while cavorting on the red velour couch. Gilho sang a famous folk ballad and cheered when he received a score of 100 from the machine. Even the goose, Gilho hated to admit, seemed to lumber to the music. He was feeling free and almost bohemian when he went searching for a bathroom and a girl with a large satin bow in her hair slipped past him into a room of three men. Maybe if they had enough to drink they would go somewhere else and have sex that night, the four of them.

He returned, quieter. Wuseong had lain down across the couch with his legs propped up, his face pink from the rushing blood. When he saw Gilho, he blew him a kiss.

Gilho said, “You really don’t care what people think about you, do you?”

Wuseong considered this. “Not really, no.”

“I’ve always cared about the good opinion of others,” Gilho said. He had once been proud of this.

“What’s wrong with that?” Wuseong sat upright. “You have people who care about your opinions.”