Plow the Bones (7 page)

§

There’s a girl back home. A girlfriend, I guess. A fiancée. Okay, yes, a fiancée. Someone waiting for me to come home, someone whose face I see once a week on the computer screen, an illusion. Her voice sounds different than I remember it. She’s changed her hair since I saw her. She asks me if I’m having fun, and I tell her I am. She is brunette, and her face is too thin, and she seems shy and cautious when we talk, the way she was when we first met, before we became comfortable with one another. We’ve regressed. She tells me about her week, and I listen. And then she tells me she loves me, and I tell her I love her too. She does most of the talking.

Last week, she said, “Your mom asks about you.”

I said, “Oh?”

She said, “Yeah. I saw her at the pool. You’re a terrible pen–pal.” Then she laughed like it was a joke. And then we both got quiet for a while.

§

With the crowd chanting, “End of Days Parade! End of Days Parade!” and dancing around our feet, with the thump and zap of a dozen nightclubs frying the night air with their noise, with the drinks spilling and the cigarette smoke swirling, we pass out the
tal
. Traditional Korean theatrical masks, made from alderwood, painted and lacquered. We pluck them from the air, perfect and solid, hidden behind open space, and hand them around. Everyone ties them on. I say, “Become someone else for a while! Change your ingredients! Remake yourself! Fashion yourself in wood, and burn! This is a magic show! When else will you have the chance?”

Kidu says this too.

And now we are surrounded by the grinning idiot face of
Maldduki,
the servant, his eyes set too far apart, his teeth sparse and white in his wide–open mouth, his face imposed over the bodies of slump–shouldered English teachers and tattooed air–force guys, of slender Korean rockstar–boys in tailored, open–necked shirts and unbuttoned vests, of drunken party girls in shiny club–wear. People look around at each other, pointing like children, laughing, reveling in weirdness, in silliness. It’s always like this. They’re never totally aware. They never grasp the impossibility of what they see. They can’t. After all of this over, they’ll wake up on busses and subway cars, hung over, remembering only that they passed, for the briefest moment, a pair of night clowns dancing through Itaewon.

It’s worth it. Every night, it’s worth it.

We hold up our hands, Kidu and I, and the partiers get quiet.

We drop our megaphones at our false feet. We won’t need them. We will whisper.

“Now,” I say, and I focus on the salt in my pockets, and the streetlights flicker. “The hour grows late. Or early. The sun will rise, and the night will die. So we have a final trick for you. A farewell present. The grande finale.”

Kidu buzzes his lips. Some people laugh, quietly, appreciatively.

And then we show them how the world will end.

§

Once, lying in bed with Alice, naked and sweating, our backs to one another, I asked her a stupid question.

I said, “Alice?”

She said, “Yes?”

I swallowed hard, trying to force my homesick tears to back down and leave me alone. This was in those days when I could still feel homesick, when I was still someone else. I said, “Why do you like me? What about me keeps you around?”

She sighed and said, “What an incredibly insecure thing to ask.”

§

This is how the world will end:

The fish tanks behind us boil and burn bright white. They hold a spectacular luminescence, an impossible glow that sets every color–catching cone in every eyeball in this narrow corner of Itaewon to blaze with white fire. The fat blue fish in the tanks turn in unison, in synchronized choreography, and they open their mouths. Their lips peel back and their faces wrinkle up like elephant trunks and make them look as though they are scowling. Maybe they scream, or maybe they sing. I don’t know. Kidu doesn’t know. No one here knows. Because whatever they do with their open mouths in those impossible light–tanks, they do it silently.

Let’s paint a tableau. Our little rats, having danced away from Hamlin, a captive audience in sudden awed silence, collected at the mouth of a corridor of bright neon pink whorehouses, masked, standing in a semicircle around a pair of obscenely tall night clowns, night clowns who bow and gesture at the scene between them, the dead–station television–glow of half a dozen angry fish singing the End of the World anthem.

I glance up from my bow, lock eyes with Kidu. Or the clown that is sometimes Kidu. The Kidu of daylight, slender and vain, awkwardly passionate about the stupidest shit, painfully aware of his own oddness, socially crippled by the conflict between his natural openness and the secrets he keeps — that guy is gone. And as for me? I must be gone, too. I’m a memory momentarily recalled by the night clown. My cynicism. My self–doubt. My thinning hair and my gut and my yellow teeth and my shitty alcohol tolerance. Obscured, and finally shut away.

We buzz our lips at each other. We sound like kazoos. Then the tanks crack. And then they shatter.

Then the night drops away, and we are all drowning in nonsense.

This is how the world will end:

It ends in a forest of tentacles rooted deep in slick mucous, waving and twitching and reaching so high that none of us, not even Kidu and I on our stilts, can see the sky, and in the center of each sucker, set like a glittering gem, a glassy blue eye, rolling like a pinball. We run through the forest, brushing by tentacles that reach for us, stick to us, see us with their multitudinous eyes, caress our calves and the napes of our necks, and we pull our shoes out of the mucous, producing protracted sucking noises, a wet percussive heartbeat to mark our footfalls. The club music has followed us here, intense and electric: artificial endorphin music, heart attack music. A chubby black guy with rimless glasses hung on the collar of his T–shirt reaches up and tugs on my shirt. I lean down to him, cupping one gloved hand around my ear. He says, “This is real, isn’t it?”

I say, “Tell me you love me, and mean it, and I’ll answer your question.”

He says, “I love you,” and he means it.

I say, “That’s the wrong question. The wrong feeling. The wrong attitude.”

Beneath his mask, glimpsed between the comical teeth of
Maldduki
, I think he smiles, and then he starts to cry. He says, “Thank you,” like a small child, and he runs off into the forest.

This is how the world will end:

It ends in barbershop poles, and they erupt from the mucous ground like mechanical pistons, spinning with fever–heat and seizure–quickness. Another symbol of sex in Korea, like the neon pink lights on Hooker Hill, a signpost directing you onward to the next lonely moment. You see them everywhere in this country, hanging over storefronts with dark windows. It’s not like it is in the States. It’s not something that nobody does; it’s something that everybody does. Here, at the end of the world, they stretch higher than the tentacle trees, higher than the sky, turning the forest into a flashing funhouse. Red, white, blue, red, white, blue, red, white. The club music thumps and buzzes, vibrating the barbershop poles, making them shake and click. A Korean woman grabs onto my leg and rides me through the forest, sitting on my oversized rubber shoe. I ruffle her hair.

She says something in Korean, so I carry her to Kidu.

He leans down to her and tells her that if she tells him she loves him, and if she means it, he’ll answer her question.

She tells him she loves him. And she means it.

So he answers her question.

This is how the world will end:

In images. In empty symbolism. In movie magic and nightmares and wet dreams. It ends in chaos, bubbling up from beneath the world, unweaving the natural fabric of the universe, confounding the wonders of law with the travesties of disorder. It ends in scientific criminality. We use it. We use it to succeed where others have failed. We become something special, Kidu and I. We’re night clowns.

The big military guy who hugged my stilt at the beginning of the night, the one who will dream of having wings and losing his feathers, bumps into me and almost knocks me over. He tries to talk, but every time he opens his mouth, he vomits honey through his
Maldduki
mouth and onto the sticky ground. It’s caked onto his shirt and his khaki shorts and his flip–flops. His eyes are gigantic and pleading and afraid and ecstatic. He’s lost his hat. I lean close, put my ear on his head, and hear him think,
Can I go home now?

I say, “Tell me you love me, and mean it, and you can.”

He thinks,
I love you.
And he means it.

So we go home. We all go home.

§

It’s five o’clock, and the sun is staining Itaewon in morning colors. Kidu and I wander back to the convenience store. I fetch my backpack and we go to the bathroom and wash our faces and change. We buy two beers and Kidu buys cigarettes and we walk out of the store feeling tired and sweaty. My calves ache from standing on the stilts all night. I catch my reflection in a dark window. Me. Just me again.

“Where you heading?” I ask.

Kidu says, “I don’t know. I feel lonely.”

“Take a stroll through the Zoo,” I say, joking but knowing I’m not, and I steal one of his cigarettes. He lights it for me.

“I might,” he says.

“I’ll walk with you,” I say, and we head that direction. There’s a bookstore near there that sells English books. I’ll hang out until it opens and then I’ll buy something short and unchallenging. I’ll read it in an afternoon some day when I’m bored.

We part ways at Hooker Hill, and I sit on the curb outside the bookstore. It won’t open for another four hours, but I don’t care. I have nothing else to do. In the gutter, face down, I find one of our
Maldduki
masks, and I pick it up, slide my fingers into his mouth.

After thirty minutes, I get bored and I get up to leave. I pass Hooker Hill, and I glance up that direction. I see Kidu coming out of a juicebar. He turns and walks up the hill, away from me. Alice comes out behind him. She is wearing a short black dress and impossibly high heels. She is smoking one of Kidu’s cigarettes. She turns her head and looks at me. She doesn’t wave, and she doesn’t say anything. Her eyes are calluses, thick and tough, and I can’t read them. Mine are American, eyes written in English, and her English is so goddamned good. She looks at me for a long time, and I look at her for a long time.

Then I put on the mask and tie it behind my ears. And I walk toward the subway, grinning with someone else’s face.

MOST MEMORIES WERE GONE.

The name of the ship he had served on. The name of his commanding officer. His daughters’ names, which husband went with which daughter, which grandchildren came from which marriage, which fiancé held hands with which granddaughter. That had mostly melted away. His head felt like an icebox, and someone had opened the door for just a simple moment and let all the cold air out, filled it up with thick stagnant heat. Alzheimer’s was a muggy goddamned country, the airless stomach of a huge beast that took its time digesting old useless machinery.

He could hold Audrey’s hand, like he was doing now, and he could remember her name and he could see the wedding ring he had given her, could run his trembling fingers over it and feel its coldness, its sharpness, the places where it had scratched and speckled and lost its shine. But he couldn’t remember the wedding, not a goddamned thing about it. He reached into that broken old icebox, strained a little further and tried to find the little details: what did her dress look like? How did she wear her hair? Was she smiling? Was she crying? It was gone. Melted. And he panicked because he knew it was there, knew that if he could just reach a little further… And then he looked around and realized he wasn’t at home. He was in a strange, stinking bed in a pastel–colored room, surrounded by mechanical noises meted out in impersonal rhythm, a bubble universe that screamed Waiting–For–You–To–Die. And he looked up at her and tried to say, Audrey, I’m scared, dammit, I’m scared and I want to go home, and some small part of me knows that I never will, that there is nothing to be done to save me, but lie, goddamn you, lie and tell me you’ll make it better, you’ll reverse it, redact it, reduce it and destroy it, please! And all he could ever say was, “Audrey… I don’t know…”

And Audrey said, like she always said, “Hush Cotton.” And he could see himself in her eyes, a useless old man, or not even a man but a reminder of the husband she ought to have. And he could see how tired she was, could see the part of her that wished the whole mess would just end. The part that wanted a period on the end of this awkward run–on sentence. It would be a period of a death, too. Not an exclamation point death like he’d always pretended to want in his Navy days, a smile on his face and the devil at his heels, a man’s sort of death. It — no — he would end quietly with a mushy melted head and a single dark period.

§

The hospital room was dark when Cotton woke up again. In the dimness, the white panels on the checkered linoleum floor looked dull blue, and the dark ones like pits.

Eisley was there in his frumpy brown suit, the hound’s–tooth pattern catching the room’s shadows, covering him in tiny honeycomb pools of dark. He sat in a chair next to Cotton’s bed, the same chair Audrey sat in every day, holding Cotton’s hand and looking tired. He tilted his head up and his glasses caught some secret pocket of light from somewhere in the room and held it in their lenses.

In the end, people never changed much.

“Hi, Cotton” he said, and his lips pulled back in a weak grin. “How are we holding up?”

“Fair,” said Cotton and pushed himself up in bed. “You?”

Eisley made a noise like laughter.

Another night, another visit from the eternally middle–aged Greg Eisley. One more evening with the lampreys. Their teeth shining in the lightless corners of the room.

Cotton closed his eyes for a second, and the undertow in his head sucked him away again.

§

Most of what was left came to him second hand; imprints of stories he had told a thousand times about memories he used to have, memorized monologues about a life for which he had no context. Copies of copies. But he still had a few pure memories. These, the last original prints, played over and over again. The cold Professor Eisley and what he turned into. Maybe what he’d been from the beginning.