I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like (29 page)

—
Why don’t you ask someone to dance? Tomo asked.

—
Why doesn’t someone ask me to dance?

That was how they’d entered: everyone in the bar was old. No one cared if they were fifteen, if they ordered shots and sat in the back, since there was obviously nothing for them to enjoy, nothing to leave an impression, only a barely stylized tawdriness. That he’d let Tomo take him here implied a certain slackening on his part. He could have imagined, if prompted, the desired state, an illicit intelligence in the form of drunks, dealers, and anyone with cigarettes, conversations to be joined with an air of authority, university girls with dull eyes and full flesh. But he hadn’t expected these things, Park told himself: he did not permit himself to expect
.
It was only that Tomo had misled him, subtly, through enthusiasm, that doglike thing in him, feckless and sincere. They were best friends, he would have reasoned, and so it was necessary for them to conspire together, necessary now, on the last day of break, the final clutch at desperation—

The workers wouldn’t meet their eyes.

—
Let’s go outside, he said.

Tomo straightened and gripped his beer.

—
Hey, we could go to Amplifier, he said. I know we can get in, they’re not going to be checking for another hour and there’s usually no one on anyway.

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I don’t feel like it, Park said. He met the old man’s eyes and tried to hold them, but the plate arrived and he took up his chopsticks with the same empty expression.

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Then what do you want to do?

Park got off his stool and walked to the door.

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Probably just head back.

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Okay. Yeah, okay, but I mean — why? It’s seven-thirty.

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I’m tired.

He crossed behind the building, down another intersection, and sighted the entrance to his JR stop.

—
We haven’t even done anything, how can you be tired?

—
Nn...

Park stopped. To the right of the station entrance, a section of sign over a pharmacy had broken down, its characters blinking like startled fireflies. The heat had risen to a crest, blurring the pockets of darkness past the station’s fluorescent glare. Park caught a mosquito on his neck and crumbled it between his fingers.

—
So Hanazono tomorrow... Tomo said.

—
Yeah.

—
I guess we’ll meet at the park before.

—
Alright.

Park looked at him. Tomo kept brushing back a strand of hair that fell over his left eye, and the corner of his mouth was open a crack, just wide enough for the bent edge of a straw. He puffed up his cheeks and breathed out a stunted sigh, not meeting his eyes. Tomo had been affecting this expression for the past month, a look of contrived expectation, but now it had reached its parodic peak. Park imagined a child standing in the snow, tongue extended to catch a drop of cold. He tried to think of something to say.

—
You take care of yourself, Tomoki.

Tomo looked at him, trying to catch a joke he hadn’t intended.

—
Yeah. Thanks.

He nodded at Park and walked back to the intersection, the sound of his footsteps soon obscured by traffic.

•

At fifty-three years of age, Park Sujung forgave herself the vanity of her waist-length hair. She’d taken to tying it in a long plaited braid, clasped at the top with a silver clip. When Park looked at his mother from behind, the clip’s smooth, polished surface reminded him of its age. Once, while she slept, Park had slipped into her room and taken the clip from her bedside, examining it in the dim light of the hall. The arabesques inlaid in its silver spun across the surface of the teeth, criss-crossing their curves like the tracks of an ice-skate. A tiny spot of rust had formed at its base, nearly hidden by the arch of the grip. To Park it seemed as if this small orange speck, invisible unless it was held to the light, had taken on the life of its object. He supposed that a number of identical clips had been made, but only this one had condensed its existence in time to this single point of rust. Like most of the possessions Sujung hadn’t sold, it was a gift from Park’s father.

As he walked in, she said:

—
I’m glad you’re back early. You can get your things ready for tomorrow.

Park walked past her and sat at the edge of the table. His mother was looking at him; he could feel her eyes tracing his outline as he reached for a newspaper and shifted his glance down, so that only the lined backs of her hands were visible as they rested on the edge of the table. She stood up very straight.

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You’ll want to get up early, she said. To make sure you get the train. You did wash your uniform, didn’t you?

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Nn. Not yet.

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Well when is it going to get done?

Park unfolded the newspaper and leaned forward.

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I’ll do it in a little while. I haven’t taken it out yet.

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You haven’t taken it out yet. It needs to be washed before you wear it, it’ll be stiff.

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I’ll do it before I go to sleep.

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You do that, Seok-Hwan. You have to look smart. If you stop caring about your appearance, everything else goes.

She made the barest gesture, raising one hand and opening it from the end in a tiny explosion of her fingertips.

—
Now, I’ll leave your lunch out for you in the morning. You can come to the shop when you get out.

Park put the paper down and headed to the kitchen to heat up a late dinner, and Sujung waited until he had finished washing the rice before leaving. When it was ready Park carried the bowl to his room and locked the door. He placed the bowl on a small table next to the bed, then unbuttoned his shirt and took off his belt, curling its length in his hands. The Hanazono uniform lay on the bed in its plastic sheath, next to a pile of papers. Park took a pocket knife from the drawer and slid it down the length of the plastic, separating its edges into two flaps. He took out the uniform and held it against his chest in the mirror. Immediately the reflection confronted him with a certain finality: a high school student in a freshly pressed uniform that covered him like a chrysalis.

The mirror extended halfway to the ceiling, and pictures of Park’s father had been hung near the corners of its frame. To the right was a black and white portrait of him in his late twenties, taken in Gwangju. He stood facing not the camera but a point slightly above it, so that the arched uplift of his eyes gave a serene distance to his bearing — not a true aloofness, Park thought; only the distinct cast of preoccupation befitting a young doctor. Already the fine lines of his face were firming, his short hair freshly cut and combed. Park hated him. He knew he’d never have children — the line would die with him. He could think of nothing more appropriate, his father’s work for nothing, remembered by no one... an assertion of absolute reality.

He tossed down the uniform and doubled the length in his hands. With a twist of the belt, he could hang himself from the doorknob. He smiled.

Looking at the rest of the photographs, he was conscious of having accomplished nothing, of retaining only the most banal memories. He felt as if he were surrounded by invisible magicians constantly managing the stage, ensuring that only brief moments of temptation broke the schedule. At these moments a noose would descend from heaven, waiting for him to slip his neck inside, as if the universe were a kind of angler, casting out the line which he — year after year — refused to bite. These windows arranged themselves in a row, a line through time connected to the present, to the tight length of the belt in his hand—

He lay down on the bed, a calm joy spreading through his mind.

•

Park and Tomo had met in the first year of junior high school, the year they turned thirteen. Assigned to the same homeroom, Park noticed the pale boy in his class as soon as they took their seats. Tomo’s build retained traces of its childhood fat, but his limbs had begun to stretch and thin, an awkward elongation carried through to his face, its cheeks too sallow for his age, contrasting with his short neck and tiny ears. It was not a face to be given a second look. Already bored with the class, Park thought nothing more of Tomo or anyone else until he found himself walking to the station at the end of the day, as the dusk began its early-autumn descent to the feet of the zelkova trees. Flipping a hundred-yen coin in his hand, he glanced across the sidewalk and saw a boy in the same uniform turning towards him, a notebook carried at his side. Park ignored him for a few more feet until their shared destination became too obvious for them not to speak.

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Hey you’re in my class right.

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Uh huh.

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Where do you live?

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Miyamaedaira.

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I’m down that way too.

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Yeah where?

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Kajigaya.

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Yeah, it’s the same line.

He looked at the boy’s face, its lean edges.

—
So what’s your name?

—
Tomoki.

Park introduced himself and they walked to the train together, Park flipping the coin and catching it in his palm as it spun through the air, Tomo holding his notebook increasingly higher against his side, twisting the end of its wire spiral. When the train came they sat on opposite sides to take the only free seats. Tomo’s stop was first, and he nodded to Park as he left, carried forward by the tide of suits. Every day after that they’d walk back together, sometimes talking, often not. Unlike his, Park learned, Tomo’s father was not dead, just ‘gone’. As they’d ridden back on Friday in the third week of the term, sitting in the reserved seats at the far end of the train, they stared through the window as the doors for the next station opened. For Park, the group of young men who entered next — holding up drinks and swinging on the rails, their laughter a serrated exaggeration — produced an immediate dislocation: from the seams at their collars made to show to the jeans ripped and faded and aged on the assembly line, all of their expensive clothing had been designed to look like thrift store rags, as if they were trying to wear an experience they’d never had. One of them swung towards him, pivoting off the overhead bar.

—
Give me your seat, I’m pregnant!

Park looked at him. There was no reason for him to move; there was no reason not to. A simple inertia kept him resting against the seat, his hands hanging over the side of his legs. Another of them spun away, edging towards the opposite door as it closed, the train already starting towards the next station.

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That cunt didn’t hear you.

The first stepped towards Tomo and kicked the side of his leg.

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What’s that? You an artist?

He grabbed the notebook lying on Tomo’s lap, its pages open to a sketch of the facing landscape. The other sat next to Park and threw his arm around his shoulder.

—
Hey, there’s a pregnant man waiting for a seat!

The other passengers corrected their posture and stared straight ahead, narrowing their eyes to emphasize their detachment, to protest that this was happening to Park and Tomo and not them; that even if the third boy now standing before Park were to produce a knife from his pocket and shove the blade into the corner of his eye, each of them would maintain the same remote posture, hands firmly gripping the overhead bars and the handles of their handbags.

—
Let’s hang out for a while okay?

Park felt himself being pulled to his feet and directed towards the doors as the train stopped. From behind him he heard the sound of Tomo’s notebook dropping and the ascending scale of a mobile phone. They were two stops away from where Park usually got off. After leaving the station they passed a small shrine, its roof shining in the sunlight. No one spoke. Park felt a kind of unreal solemnity, as if they were being led to an execution, or to engage in some childish game. If they’d wanted, he and Tomo could easily have broken away and ran off, but even when the first boy rounded a corner and disappeared from view they continued to follow at a slight distance. Park looked over and saw that Tomo’s face had assumed a cast of complete passivity — whether from fear or the assurance that he, Park, would do something, he couldn’t tell.

The first boy returned the phone to his pocket.

—
Toru’s gonna be here soon.

They’d stopped at a lot in one of the industrial blocks, its surface shaded by the glass skyline. As dusk approached Park saw slivers of light peering through the building facades, brilliant red and focused, brightening as they narrowed, as if the sun had been caught in a maze of beaten metal mirrors. The fading heat warmed the back of his neck, and as his skin cooled he sensed the end of the day. The first boy had taken to pacing, crossing the concrete between Park and Tomo. Even this brief wait seemed to have deflated him. The other two — resting against the wall — took a final drink and lofted their bottles to the middle of the lot in a distant nova of broken glass. One of them moved on Park and he stared back. He could tell from their clothes and speech that they were middle-class, not used to any real violence. A fight with them would be mostly circling and threats. There was no point in prolonging it. He stepped forward and unbuttoned the bottom of his shirt.

—
Punch me in the stomach.

Tomo stood motionless behind him like a shadow enfleshed. The boy glanced back at the others, then stared level at Park.