Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America | Page 7

friend, Sung Ki. That night they slept together; and the boy that had stroked Sang Huin's leg with his foot when they were eating kimbop wanted to hold hands while the two of them lay next to each other. Sung Ki, soon afterwards, began to plan out their time together. Sang Huin did what he requested: touring the Independence Museum; mountain climbing; free English lessons, and visits to his Buddhist temple and congregation. Soon Sang Huin was spending every night at Sung Ki's apartment and a month later their relationship was a sexual one.
Sang Huin thought about how Sung Ki cleaned the apartment by putting a wet towel under one of his bare feet and sliding across the floor with it; how he used to go into the bathroom with his newspaper and would not come out for over an hour; and that sentence he would always say, "you must all eat" meaning that every speck of rice left in the bowl should be mixed with hot water into a soup so that nothing was wasted. On the day that he learned that Sung Ki was going away he came to his apartment and asked if there was anything he could do or get him. There wasn't. He sat on the sofa, cold and pierced, as Sung Ki ignored him, cleaning one thing or another and then reading something or another. Sung Ki lit a cigarette and sat on a balcony that overlooked the mountains and rice patties of Umsong. After a few more moments of silence, Sang Huin went to him. His voice was shaky like a faltering foundation. He cried. It wasn't so much in reference to him as it was his sister. It was his first tears for her. It was in reference to non-ending perpetual loss. He knew that Sung Ki would construe it as solely for him. He felt embarrassed and the embarrassment increased as the two men hugged. Sung Ki began to cry. Sang Huin said, "I want to apologize. I'm sorry if I did something wrong. You wanted a girlfriend and my friendship and I made you have a boyfriend."
"It's okay. I liked the feeling then." That friendship had bit the dust.
Right before the bus came to a stop, he fell into a dream where there was a dust storm in Pyongyang. He ran through one dong (neighborhood) to another lost, looking for distinguishable signs, shapes in buildings, and widths of streets. Everything from the thin dust-sheathed roads to the hangul (Korean language) on the signs, looked as identical as the occasional mom and pop stores and it was all indistinguishable from what he saw minutes and hours earlier. He ran into no one since the streets were empty. Then he became careful of where he stepped. "The dust storm," he argued, "could have slid land mines up from the thirty eighth parallel." The more he thought about it the more nervous he became and the more hurried. When he became breathless, he sat on a rock and drank the last of his bottled water. The taste of sauerkraut and hot dogs was in his thoughts and the boiling, bubbling surge of his saliva but he would have eaten kimchee or someone's dog being as hungry as he was. It became fully dark and he would have known entire blackness were it not for the speckling of stars, the moon, and a fire at a distance. He walked over to the fire. He saw four whores seated around a bonfire. He recognized different buildings, and the curves of the street near a hard dirt tennis court. This was Ne Doc Dong. "Do you want me," said one, "or do you want another?" Sang Huin's face turned a bright red like it did with drinking a bottle of beer. He smiled and looked toward the sidewalk in his embarrassment. He said, "No, I wouldn't; but would you have a brother?"
When he arrived in Chongju from the desolation of what was in between Seoul and it, the population and activity of this small city recreated an insatiable yearning for Seoul, which to him was a storehouse of all extraordinary venues to the mind (encounters both sexual and cultural). Large buildings were like the small mountains of Umsong with a topping of cloud on a rainy day--monuments of beauty welcoming him to its domain that edified and exhilarated his appetites and his love. The mountains, until recently, transported his imagination to green blankets of waving rice, and from there to farmers' markets and rural parades celebrating the farmer, the daily appreciation of the faces he saw, and the monotonous sounds of "Hello" from children and high school students who knew of him. Those students always made him seem retarded when he couldn't communicate to their Korean