Thirteen Specimens (9 page)

     The elderly man in the orange jacket had the end of that flayed hide in his mouth, as if he were sucking it in slowly. But it wasn’t a skinned animal hide, I realized as I saw it close up. It was a shaggy werewolf costume with no child inside it. Any longer.

     I handed the man his bill and rolled up my window as quickly as I could. I didn’t like the glaring, challenging look in his eyes as he sucked in another inch of the costume.

     I didn’t turn around at the gas station, after all. I pulled my car back onto the street to continue on toward home.

     It was only eleven-thirty, after all, and I might still catch
the end of a horror movie on cable if I hurried.

     I refused to let go of the night’s magic. I was determined to have my share.

The Mask Play of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism

Hello, pretty maid. I may be a monk, but I'm also a man.

– From the Mask Play of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism

1: The Inn

     The first examples of Korean masks that Brian Ford saw were miniature brown faces, contorted into exaggerated expressions, presented in a frame on a wall of the reception area of the little inn in the Jung-gu section of Seoul.

     Initially, he glimpsed the display more or less peripherally as he booked himself in at the front desk. He had been picked up in a van by the owner of the inn – which was referred to in the pamphlet he had been given as a “guest house”. A worker in a downtown tourist information station, responding gently to the Westerner’s obvious breathless befuddlement, had given him the pamphlet – suggesting the guest house to him for its low cost – and had even gone so far as to call the place for him. By Korean
won
, which he had traded his American dollars for at a currency exchange booth in Incheon International Airport, he figured the cost to be less than $40 a night. Now he was grateful that the big hotel he had tried first, before going next door to the information center to look into other options, had been booked solid.

     Heavily loaded with his backpack and suitcase, he had tripped on a little elevated step upon entering that big hotel, plunging into its revolving door on hands and knees. An attendant had rushed to his aid but he had already gathered himself up by then. He assured the attendant he was okay, yet in the days that followed an ugly dark bruise developed on his tender right knee. The attendant apologized about the hotel being full, and Ford embarrassedly felt him watching in concern as he exited more carefully through the same revolving door.

     He thought that his stumbling into the revolving door was an apt analogy for the situation that had befallen him – his arrival in Vietnam from Korea, and his swift deportation back to Korea until he might attempt to gain entry into Vietnam again once his faulty visa issue was resolved...

     Ford was given a moment’s tour of the inn’s downstairs, which consisted of showing him the little kitchen area around the corner from the reception desk – this room doubling as an internet center, with two computers on a counter and a little kitchen table upon which he was invited to make toast in the morning. There was a coffee maker and its contents were complimentary, for which Ford was very grateful; he had enough figurative headaches already without worrying about actual headaches from caffeine withdrawal. He had feared that the mystical Orient would be a land dominated by tea, which he disliked.

     On a partial partition separating the kitchen from a carpeted hallway, Ford saw another display of framed masks, this one long and vertical where the larger display opposite the reception area had been square, the masks in this one even smaller than those in the first.

     Branching from the carpeted hallway were several narrow corridors; he was led into one of these, which quickly ended in steps ascending to a second storey. The carpeted steps were steep and seemed designed for a much shorter foot than his own size 13. Directly at the top was his room, 201, and he was let in.

     Downstairs, he had noticed that one needed to step up onto a slightly elevated tiled area to enter the kitchen, and that some pairs of shoes and sandals had been left near its edge. He asked if he must remove his shoes before stepping onto the raised floor of the kitchen, but was told no...only in his room. As he now stood looking into room 201 with his host, he saw that there was a small space just beyond the door where he might leave his shoes before stepping up onto the pristine polished wood of the little room’s floor. He was reminded of the elevated area that had tripped him at the large hotel, and of a branch of the American
Dunkin’ Donuts
coffee chain that he had been delighted to discover back at Incheon Airport, which also had a raised platform-like floor one needed to step up onto. This subtly alien, subtly exotic arrangement regarding something so mundane as the floor one trod upon struck him as Japanese-like, since he knew more about Japan than he did Korea.

     He was soon left to his own devices, as he liked it, and locked himself into room 201. He wasn’t at all inconvenienced by leaving his shoes near the door; he welcomed removing his feet from them after these many, many hours spent aboard four planes, and in three countries, and walking the streets of a country he had never planned to spend more than a couple hours in.

     The room was small, spare, clean, bright. An oval mirror hung over a little desk, on top of which was a smallish TV and under which was a tiny fridge. Above the similarly smallish bed was a window with an air conditioner in it, and a fan mounted on the wall, though the temperature here was as mild as it was back home. In Korea, it was also autumn, also October...

     He found that there was no bath tub in the bathroom, nor even a shower stall, though there was a spray hose mounted on one tiled wall. The floor was tiled as well, with a drain in its center, and the best he could figure was that one must stand or squat in the plastic basin he saw stored under the sink, spray oneself, dump the water from the basin and let the rest of the sprayed water simply run down the drain in the floor.

     There was a little window above the sink, and like the one set rather high above his bed, it had been left open to let in air. But Ford was concerned about insects carrying viruses he might not have been vaccinated against also being let in, so he moved to close this window as he had done with the first. As he stepped onto the red-tiled floor, currently dry, he saw a pair of rubber sandals had been left for him but they were inches short of his foot size.

     The window proved to have a bewildering and indeterminate number of frosted panes that slid on aluminum tracks, the last of the many layers being a mesh screen. He ended up sliding about half of the panes to the right and leaving the other half on the left. Before he did so, however, he leaned forward to have a look at his view.

     Adjacent to the guest house was a brick building that formed a narrow, dark alley studded with the air conditioners of other of the inn’s occupants. Directly below was the tar paper roof of a projecting section of the brick building’s ground floor level. Beyond the brick building loomed another, taller brick building, mostly blocking anything else he might have seen. Simply from gazing out this window, he would not have guessed that he was looking upon another country, the first other than the United States that he had ever set foot in.

     Ford returned to the main room, and opened his suitcase on the stand provided as if to unpack, but he soon found himself turning on the TV and stretching out on the bed. The mattress proved to be quite hard, but he actually preferred them that way. He knew he had to recharge, after all he’d been through...the flight from Boston to Dallas, the interminable stretch from Dallas to Korea (the plane a time machine traveling forward from October 2 to October 3 as it skated across uncounted time zones), the flight from Korea to Vietnam, the brief hour or two spent in Vietnam before he was forced to fly back to Korea for having the wrong date accidentally printed on his visa, the shuttle bus from Incheon International Airport to the domestic Gimpo Airport across a rather bleak brown landscape with a horizon of large hills or small mountains under a white overcast sky, the taxi from Gimpo into the thick of Seoul and there to the Vietnam Embassy (which the driver had a hard time locating on a twisty, hidden back street), his applying for a new visa and fatalistically accepting the news that it would take three days to process it, walking numbly out onto the streets of Seoul lugging his heavy suitcase with his backpack weighing on him in search of lodgings, hailing a cab to take him to a hotel in the bustling and very Western heart of Seoul, finding the hotel full, learning about this guest house at a tourist information center near the hotel, and now...here he was, lying in a bed for the first time since he had risen, in Massachusetts, to shower in anticipation of his trip to Logan Airport.

     He had been stunned by the blow in Vietnam, and stumbling along from one obstacle to the next ever since, literally thinking on his feet. Now, he allowed that blow to bring him to blessed unconsciousness at last. At least his dreamland should prove to be familiar territory.

2: The Girl

     Ford slept from around 2 PM to, he saw when he put a light on, 11 PM. He hadn’t slept for so many hours straight, even in the US, for he couldn’t recall how long. He felt refreshed, and guardedly optimistic. He was as yet undaunted, determined not to be deterred from the mission he had set for himself.

     He was tempted to creep downstairs and use the computer to email An again, but decided he didn’t want to risk awakening any other guests or the guest house’s owner. It could wait until the morning; anyway, he had emailed An from an internet café inside Incheon Airport to explain more thoroughly what he had barely been able to get across to her initially about his plight – having borrowed a mobile phone from one of the Vietnamese immigration officers as he was X-rayed with a wand by a security officer, before being hustled onto the Korean Airlines flight that was being held for him as if he were a criminal of great importance.

     Instead of leaving room 201, he decided to watch TV for a while, either until daylight came or he fell asleep again...though first he showered (again, for the first time since home) in the manner he had determined to be the accepted approach.

     Prior to showering he had tuned to a Korean home shopping channel selling lingerie, the camera swimming in close over the flesh landscapes of scantily clad women both Caucasian and Asian, but before he returned to the TV he decided to slide open the panels of the little window over the sink and gaze out for the first time into this country’s night.

     As the cool night air wafted into his face, Ford noted that there was light in the second floor window of that tall brick building across the street from the inn. If there were other windows alight on that floor, they were blocked by the intervening building, leaving only the one closest to the corner of the structure exposed. The upper part of the window was blocked with newspaper, apparently taped on the inside and perhaps to shield the glare of sun in the day.

     He saw a woman in the window, busily occupied. She was using an iron in quick, sure strokes, its spiral cord hanging from above. He couldn’t determine if he were looking into a laundry service or a garment factory. The woman seemed to iron one plaid garment after another – unless it was the same one that she kept flipping over, placing aside, then retrieving for another round of ironing. He felt it more likely that it was a factory, however, and that she was working on a series of plaid skirts or perhaps men’s flannel shirts; it seemed to him that she was ironing a strip of the plaid fabric onto a larger portion – maybe heat-gluing it in place? He had no clear notions of how clothing was manufactured.

     Beyond her he saw only a portion of another woman, who would move in and out of view, and it was apparently she who placed a bundle of something near the ironing woman from time to time, unless that was a third worker. A second shift, then. He himself worked a third shift back home, and could relate to these nocturnal creatures, laboring industriously while others dreamed.

     As if watching a TV screen with the sound muted, he continued regarding the girl’s fast, almost nervous, movements...his actual TV droning on behind him incomprehensibly. The dark of the bathroom kept his own window in gloom and he never saw her look across at him. She never seemed distracted from her work. At times, the other woman or women disappeared utterly from view and the ironing woman seemed oddly alone to him.

     She was young, and wore a maroon top and blue jeans, her sleeves pushed up her slim arms and her black hair in an appealing ponytail. When she leaned forward too far, her shirt pulled up to reveal some of the skin of her back. She looked intense, and from here she looked pretty. He found he felt an odd fondness for her, in that she reminded him of pretty Asian workers at his own place of employment. He had watched those women many times in their work, and in the cafeteria, but had never been able to date any of them. He had once passed a note to a married Vietnamese woman in the cafeteria at the end of their lunch period, before fleeing back to his department so she could unfold and read it in his absence. In it, he told her how attracted he was to her. A few suspenseful days later, she had come to his department and told him she was flattered by the note but that she was married; she had even shown her husband the note rather proudly, and he had told her she should keep it as a memento. Apparently they both saw it more as an expression of praise than of romantic intent. Confused and embarrassed, Ford had not conveyed any more of his feelings for her since.