Authors: Douglas F. Warrick
When he gets close enough to me, he plucks the cigarette out of his mouth, cocks his head to one side and buzzes his lips. He sounds like a kazoo.
“Cute,” I say. “I thought we were getting dressed in Itaewon.”
“I got it out of the way,” he says. “You’ve got the stilts?”
Both pairs are sticking out of the top of my backpack, stark and obvious like the stolen bones of some enormous and forgotten animal, and I know he can see them, so I don’t answer.
We hail a cab. Kidu tells him where to go. When we are together, Kidu talks, and I am silent. When I am with Alice, it’s the same way. In Korea, I don’t ever have to talk to anyone.
§
Once at dinner, Alice told me, “It isn’t like the States. It’s not something that nobody does; it’s something that everyone does. Women expect it. Men don’t even think about it, they just do it.”
“That’s just so fucked up,” I said.
She wrapped a piece of barbequed pork in a piece of lettuce and slid it into her mouth, occupying that space so that she wouldn’t have to respond.
“You’ll get hurt,” I told her. “Don’t you have a pimp or something?”
“I have a boss,” she said. “A female boss, by the way. Not a pimp. Some girls have pimps. I have a boss. I’m not a slave.”
That was the first time I ever talked to Alice about what she does for a living. We haven’t talked about it since. Alice is just this girl I know. A girl with whom I’ve had sex a handful of times — silently in my bedroom, the window open, letting in the sound of a language I can’t understand and she can, because when it’s closed the streetlight catches on the frosted glass and turns the window into a sparkling eyeball — because it was something to do, and because we like each other enough to do it. She lives in Itaewon six days a week, and spends the other day in Hopyeong with me. I’ve never paid her. It’s not serious.
§
We get out of the cab in Itaewon and dump our empties on a ledge outside a restaurant. The streets are jammed with people. The nightlife here is maybe thirty percent native. Everyone else is a lost boy, a wandering girl. During the day, this place is a multicultural center, packed to the gills with Africans and Brazilians and Iranians and Japanese and Greeks. They open restaurants and barbershops and bars. They build communities. Sometime before I was born, they found their way to Korea and carved a groove into her face where they could hide, a clubhouse from which they never had to go home. At night, it’s overrun with English speakers, lost in a strange and magnificent country, frightened by the alien traditionalism of the towns where they work and live, desperate for a slice of home where the other expats on the street are common enough to be ignored. This is Foreign Town, a filthy Epcot Center, a small–world–after–all that smells like fried food and cigarette smoke. Nobody stares at me here. They all stare at Kidu, because he’s dressed like a clown.
We foreigners come here for the same reasons. You can talk about the innate drive to teach, or service to your country, or the rich pursuit of collecting stamps in your passport, but that’s just the paycheck, or (at its noblest) the PR. That’s just what you do when you’re not running away from who you were back home. Everyone who leaves home wants to be a different person when they get off the plane in Incheon, everyone wants to find some definitive and primal force to help them become a better and more interesting human being.
I found some tricks. See, Kidu has this book that he won’t let me read.
We duck into a convenience store, buy two more beers, and then lock ourselves in the bathroom. I get dressed, put my street clothes and Kidu’s jeans into my backpack, smear on my greasepaint, and then we strap on our stilts and hobble out of the bathroom, ducking to make our way through the convenience store. Now we are both clowns. Korean clowns, the kind with stilts and long pantlegs, our war paint angular and precise and only whimsical in theory. As we emerge, the guy behind the counter — the wrinkles in his face granted added depth by the harshness of the overhead lights — smiles and claps and says, “Ah! Ah! Very good.” I hand him my backpack, and he stows it behind the counter without being asked. I buzz my lips at him. I sound like a kazoo.
§
I introduced Alice and Kidu once. Alice hated Kidu.
This was three months after I got into the country. Three weeks after I’d met Alice, and only one week since Kidu had found me wandering at night, looking depressed with my hands in my pockets, squinting at the neon lights and trying to read them, as though the words would make any sense to me, even if I could read the alphabet. Which I couldn’t. Kidu the clown, with his giant black plastic clown shoes fastened to the end of his stilts, staring down at me and buzzing his lips. A night clown, as complete a non sequitur in Korea as me.
I said something stupid. I didn’t know he could understand me.
He said, “Go fuck yourself, elitist. Fucking Americans are all elitists. Too cool to smile. Well, who needs you?”
His English was good.
I apologized. I bought him a drink. And then he bought me twelve more. And I guess we were friends after that.
On the day I introduced him to Alice, we were hung over. Kidu and I, not Alice, who never gets drunk. I was having lunch with Alice on the terrace of some café that served sandwiches that almost tasted American, and I saw him walking by on the street, his hair longish and cut jagged beneath his low–slung BoSox cap. I called him over. We talked. We laughed. He said goodbye.
And then Alice said, “I fucked him once. Your friend.” And then she sneered and rolled her eyes and took a drink of her coffee. Then she said, “I’m going home now.” And she left.
I don’t know when I became a night clown. Not long after that day, I suppose.
§
We set up shop in the sloping alley behind the Hamilton Hotel, where the shops and bars loom and cast down their lights and damn the narrow corridor to perpetual daylight. We have our megaphones in hand, and our pockets are full of salt. Kidu has a book that he won’t let me read, and it says that you need to fill your pockets with salt, and that your fingers mustn’t ever brush through it. So we keep our hands where everyone can see them.
The foreigners are pointing to us and laughing, many of them too drunk to remember we were ever here. One guy — big and white with a bristly scalp that folds beneath the elastic of his ball cap, military if I had to guess — grabs me around one stilt and hugs it tight. He says, “Clowns, baby! Time for clowns! Time for clowns, baby!” in a broken, drunken falsetto.
There was a time when I would have stumbled, when I would have fallen on my face and broken my nose and left a smear of grease paint and blood on the cobblestones. But that time is not now, and so I lean down and buzz my lips at him. Then I snatch his cap off his head and kiss him on the forehead. Then I focus on the salt in my pockets, and I whisper, “You will dream of having wings, and in your dreams, your feathers will be plucked out.” For a second, he looks solemn, like his knees might go out and he might start crying. Then he laughs, mocks disgust for the benefit of his friends, and backs off.
Into my megaphone, I say, “Clap your hands! This is a magic show!”
Into his megaphone, Kidu says the same thing, only in Korean.
Everyone claps and cheers.
I say, “Of what is a man made? What are his ingredients? Is there some part of him that is permanent, some part that is important?”
Kidu says this too.
Someone says, “My cock!” and everyone cheers.
I smile and look at Kidu. He smiles too, and his face paint makes his dimples into deep, dry riverbeds.
We hold our hands together, his left, my right. His on top, mine below. Then we pull them apart. We focus on the salt in our pockets.
The book that Kidu won’t let me read taught us how to do this.
Now there is a little man between our hands, a puppet, a cartoon character made three–dimensional. He is naked, and brown, and sexless. His eyes are absurdly big, and green, and they shine like glass. He looks out at the crowd and waves. He says, “Annyeong Hassaeyo! Hello! I am made of wood! Are you made of skin? Wood burns! It keeps you warm! If you burned your skin, would it keep me warm?”
Then we close our hands around him, and the little man disappears. And the crowd cheers. I know how they feel. There is a filter in your brain, something designed to reject things like this. The trick is to slip through it, to infiltrate. Magic is an addictive animal, and it only takes a little taste. After that, you want more. You crave it. You will follow it into the crevasse and fall for years just to brush the tips of your fingers against the rough, unfriendly bristles over its shapeless spine. They’ll do whatever we want now, if we promise them another chance to stroke that great feral eyeless cat.
We walk, shouting into our megaphones, “End of Days! End of Days! End of Days Parade!”
§
When I had known him for three weeks, Kidu told me about the book. He said, “If you knew all about the end of the world, you would do what?”
I stole one of his cigarettes and lit it with his lighter. “Get drunk,” I said, because I was drunk.
He laughed, but it sounded fake when he did it. Then he said, “No. I’m serious. Pretend you know all about the end of the world. You do what?”
I groaned and let my head fall back against the back of the booth. Then I thought about it. “I don’t know. Try to stop it, maybe?”
“Bullshit,” Kidu said. “That’s the wrong feeling. That’s the wrong…” here he looked down and pounded lightly on the table, searching for the word. “The wrong attitude.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay, Kidu. Enlighten me.”
“What does this mean?”
“It means tell me what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, and filled my glass with another shot of soju. “The world is ending. Every day, it’s ending. All of the universe is eating itself until it is gone. There is chaos like a blister beneath the skin of the world, and the blister is… What is it… it is bleeding. And soon it will burst completely.”
“Fancy words, Kidu! Impressive.”
“They aren’t my words. I read them in a book I have. Where was I?”
“Bleeding blister, end of the world, etcetera.”
He snapped his fingers and then pointed at me. “Good. Yeah. So what you will do? Try to stop it? No. This is foolish to think. What you will do is, um… enjoy the ride.”
“Okay,” I said. Because I was drunk, and I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“In the book I have,” Kidu said, and drew with his finger in the condensation on the table, “it says that the only thing to do is drink the blood of the blister. To be drunk on the…
taeryo
… the ingredients… beneath the skin of the world.” He looked suddenly sheepish and childlike, staring up at me from beneath the uneven fringe of his bangs. “Do you want to do that with me?”
I said, “Kidu, I don’t understand what you’re — ”
“This is your only chance. You can be someone special. Someone better than anyone else. Or at least you can feel that way for a while.”
We locked eyes then. I couldn’t look away from him. He looked like he might cry, or maybe reach out and grab my face and kiss me. Behind us, someone shouted something at the soccer game on the bar TV.
“Fuck it,” I said. And we clicked glasses and took our shots. Then I said, “Sounds like a hell of a book. Can I read it?”
“No,” said Kidu.
§
They follow us up the hill, we the pied pipers, they the rats and the children of this place, hooting and singing and weaving around our stilts. We perform tricks for them as we walk. Little things to keep them entertained, to keep them interested. I summon up a magpie from my mouth, eight inches tall, its black and white wings wet and folded to its sides, its white chest heaving with new breath, and it flies out of my mouth, frantic and afraid, and down Kidu’s throat. Kidu turns his hands into blue fire, and I buy a sausage from a street vendor, and we roast it over his hands and hand it to a pretty girl at our feet. We recite the scripts we’ve written, translating each other, trying to sound gigantic and theatrical, actors playing actors playing soothsayers playing clowns. Night clowns. Non sequiturs.
We stop in front of a seafood restaurant with giant blue fish tanks stacked up outside. Up there to our left, up that alley where the lights are high and pink, is where the brothels are clustered like a honeycomb, each sticky–sweet door leading to essentially the same place. The crude colloquialism of Itaewon’s expats declares: Hooker Hill. The Zoo. We’ll catch the lonely ones, the shame–faced first– and second–timers and the stony old veterans, give them another show, a better one.
I pull a balloon out of my pocket, careful not to let my fingers slide through the salt. And I blow it up.
Kidu says something in Korean. I don’t understand, but I know what he says. He tells them about the blister beneath the skin of the world, the chaos boil ready to burst and flood the streets of man. Any decade now. I catch the word
taeryo
. Ingredient. Those under the world, or those inside our skin.
The crowd is growing. Moment by moment, the crazy abandon, the celebration, leaks out of them and is replaced by wonder and fear. We’re a car wreck, a fistfight, a house fire, a crime scene. They drink us down.
My balloon is red and crawling with a lattice of veins. An excised tumor, an organ shuttering in my hand. It pulses. It squirms. Blood sloshes beneath translucent rubber skin, backlit by the spinning barber poles and pink neon lights of Hooker Hill, cast into silhouette. Into the megaphone, I say, “A deception has been committed by we, your humble night clowns! This is a magic show, but not a free one! This is the Itaewon Eschatology Show! Pay your admission! Love me! See me! Give me your eyes and your attention! Know me! This is the End of Days Parade! So march!”
I present the balloon to Kidu and he pops it with a needle. Bang. A flurry of butterflies. They rise toward the casino–colored lights, enough of them to cast a shapeless shadow onto the faces of the open–mouthed drunks below us. There is silence. A woman in a tan halter–top says, “I hate clowns. I always have.” She is crying a little.