Nowhere to Be Found

by Bae Suah

Every person and every procedure marches on at a measured pace. That’s how things get done, just as the less delicate components of a machine submit to the will of the machine without any conscious thought or shred of volition while being steadily ground down.

If I want to confuse the students, I read the chapters in reverse. That keeps them on their toes, since none of them have read to the end yet. It’s a simple method but an effective one.

You’re so cold that I shake with despair. The whole time we’re together your lips never once flush, and your body is like slippery ice. You have the eyes of a wolf-girl whose heart has never once been moved. When I press my ear to your chest, I hear only wind and emptiness.”

But then I see her: another me passing by like a landscape of inanimate objects outside the window of the empty house quietly collapsing in the rain.

This sadness that crept up and cut through all of my routines and my boredom and my repetition and my drama, like a sliver of glass piercing my flesh and sticking in the soles of my feet?

The weather was frighteningly dark, and the world was filled with shadows that made it impossible to tell the time.

My brother stroked my hair and said, “Let’s take a picture.” We held hands in front of the camera. His hand was hot, as if he had a fever. Then both of our hands were sweating. If I never saw him again after that day, I would think of him a hundred years from now. That photo of him was the last I would see of his face. His final face in some distant future. My brother and I clasped hands tightly, sweat slicking our palms, as if we’d planned it that way from the start.

When I can, for once in my life, for a brief moment, become ardently pure. When that day comes.

Rain falls on the corpses of time.

Silence. The silence inside a prison. The prison of time called life. The prison of class and circumstance. The prison of a code untranslatable into the language of the other. The prison of the flesh. The prison of sweaty hands that can’t let go even at the moment of falling.

Time pushes away that which is intended, rejects that which is rejected, forgets that which is sung about, and is filled with that which it turns its eyes from, such as the white hairs of a loved one.

It was the erasure of time that goes by the name of money and letters.

The sort of time in which people could become the purest they’d ever been; cancel any unimportant plans they had; and long for a random, distant ideal.

Clouds drift through my head. Blue sky so deep you’d never know the end of it, clouds from Africa, a slow-moving breeze, thunder and lightning. Pacing in front of a gas station on a night as black as lacquer.

When you die, I’ll have you taxidermied. Then I will have you forever. I will spend the light of morning and the despair of midday and the lunatic peace of evening with you. Never will you lie at rest in a royal tomb.