Nowhere to Be Found

by Bae Suah

Every now and then I picture a subway train at night packed with people I used to know and random people whom I will meet by chance in some distant future. Most of the people I knew long ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now. They walk by apathetically, their faces gloomy beneath the dim lights of the city hall subway station, jostling my shoulders as they pass.

Even now I think maybe my family is just a random collection of people I knew long ago and will never happen upon again, and people I don’t know yet but will meet by chance one day. Their dim, indistinct faces will ultimately, and meaninglessly, become the faces of the people in my life, though at the present moment they are unfamiliar strangers with no influence over me whatsoever.

Being poor or being lonely could be either fortunate or unfortunate, but the truth is that the distinction was meaningless. Whether we were fortunate or not, we were still different, and that’s all there was to it.

He just looked blank sometimes. While everyone else was tormented by a restless anxiety, like the dizziness you feel on a spring day, which made them question what they were doing with their lives, Cheolsu was yawning and working on a crossword puzzle. He knew how to accept the tedium without the ennui.

What makes a relationship special? You talk on the phone every night before bed, hang out together every weekend, see new movies, remember each other’s birthdays, and, assuming there are no particular problems, introduce one another to your parents at your graduation ceremonies. You think of each other when you’re having a drink or watching porn, and gradually you come to understand all of life’s standards through each other. When you define it that way, then Cheolsu and I were not special. He didn’t make me feel anything, and I didn’t make him feel anything. But oddly enough Cheolsu’s friends and my friends all thought of us as a couple. Even my brother and sister thought so. They’ll get married someday, they all thought. Neither Cheolsu nor I had ever talked about that, nor did we feel any particular need to. But perhaps after more time had passed and Cheolsu had matured and grown older and sprouted a few white hairs and wearied of time, and I too had wrinkled lips and ruined looks and had reached an age where there was no longer any trace of a flirtatious smile and no one would find me pretty, then maybe we truly would end up married.

If you gently stroke my lips and the palm of my hand right now, you will find them strangely cold and icy, a feeling of endless distance that even I can sense. Someone once said to me, “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.”

I’ll cry out in the end and weep for fear of leaving this world without ever once discovering the me inside me, the ugly something inside me. 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. Where have you been all this time?

The me that was born into an animal body and lived as a slave to poverty and insult was nothing but the emptiness that had been momentarily bewitched out of me by an evil spirit. That distant me is precious and beautiful. No matter how decadent and corrupt my body becomes, I will, like a desert orchid that blooms once every hundred years, come to you bearing this frigidness toward life.

Human beings are capable of becoming perfectly pure at some moment in their lives. It doesn’t matter if they’re royalty or literati, middle class, working class, or the lowest class. For many people that moment must be the moment when they are clasping hands with each other. Memory finds its way back through blood, through body heat. Right at that moment. But now is not that moment. Right now doesn’t mean anything at all.

What was real and what was fantasy? And what was it that I really wanted—reality or fantasy?

“All you do is put up walls and make excuses that I can’t understand. I’ve always hated people who go through life as if they don’t care, making everyone else pander to their moods. I tried to feel a sense of duty toward you.”

“I’m never getting married.” “Of course you will. You’ll marry Cheolsu,” he said, grinning. Don’t say that, brother. You know as well as I do that this is all just theater.

Each time I wrote a note to my father, I hesitated. I knew full well that what my father wanted was not these silly notes telling him how the family was doing. 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. The prison of Cheolsu.

I don’t think anyone is really qualified to say they got a fate they didn’t deserve. No one is ever completely innocent.”

That was everything that happened in 1988. That year was my beginning and my end. It was one year of my life that was neither particularly unhappy nor particularly happy. It wasn’t so different from 1978, and it wasn’t any more or less memorable in comparison to 1998. The things that happened in 1988 had also happened in 1978 and would happen again in 1998.

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.

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. And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing and survived time.