I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (7 page)

The train started moving slowly while she was still in the bathroom. Another announcement was made in Italian and in German.

I caught myself thinking of Judith again. After mulling over several methods, she finally chose gas. I expressed my reservations: "That's a little dangerous."

"Dangerous? Ha!" She laughed. It was a little funny. I was warning of danger to someone dreaming of suicide.

"Gas sinks to the floor because it's heavier than air. It could leak downstairs or even explode if someone breaks down your door."

"An explosion would be interesting. But I don't want to go with so much fanfare. Isn't it your job to make it work?"

There was a way to do it. After a certain time, I could
call the police. She liked that idea. I explained the procedure.

"Around eleven
P.M
. you seal the door and windows so the gas doesn't leak out. Next, you unplug everything, including the phone. If something sparks it could blow everything up. Then go next door and ask them to keep an eye on your apartment because you're going out of town. So if someone comes by, they can tell him you're not here. Then you write a will. You could also write it in advance. If there's a will, the cops will quickly determine it a suicide. It's good to write a will in detail. The police are suspicious of vague wills. If a murderer wrote the will, it's usually vague. You should specifically mention people close to you. Like, so-and-so, I'm sorry for doing such and such. That will make things easier for me to deal with."

"That sounds hard."

"If it's too hard, you can choose something from examples I have, but I think it's good to write your own will since it's the last thing you'll ever write."

She sat down to write her will right away. She tore up a few drafts but diligently wrote away. I watched TV and drank whiskey.

We arrived in Florence, the city of flowers, around eleven in the morning. We were three hours late. As soon as we got off the train, we got her a Coke. She chugged it greedily. We walked leisurely over to the Duomo, the symbolic structure of Florence. In front of the majestic church, decorated in
white and green marble, there was a baptistery made from the same marble. Carvings in relief by Renaissance sculptors like Ghiberti graced the doors on four sides of the masklike Duomo.

"I don't like towers," she said, glancing up at the bell tower of the Duomo.

"Why?"

"They make me sick."

We sat on the Duomo steps and smoked. She snuffed her half-smoked cigarette out and remarked, "When I love deeply, I vomit."

"You loved a tower?"

"Dumbass. Nobody loves towers. I want to see the Ponte Vecchio." She showed me a picture of the Ponte Vecchio in her guidebook. We passed the Galleria degli Uffizi and arrived at the bridge lined with disintegrating, generations-old shacks.

"I've wanted to see this bridge for a long time," she told me.

"How did you know about it?"

"I had a British Airways calendar, and January was the Ponte Vecchio. I liked those rickety houses. That picture had the sun setting over the bridge. Isn't the bridge beautiful?"

But the bridge wasn't that beautiful in real life. It looked like a shantytown about to be dismantled. It failed to hide the hardships it had gone through over the years.

"I like how everything is mixed together and mismatched. And it's warm here." Her voice was tinged with
suppressed tears. It was true; Florence was much warmer than Vienna. We went to the flea market and a couple of art museums, then back to our small and shabby hotel. She showered and changed as soon as we entered our room. I drank a lukewarm beer I'd bought at the store.

"How do you have sex in Hell?" she asked, sipping beer.

"I don't have sex in Hell."

"Liar. I think the only thing you do is have sex."

"Why do you think the only thing I do is have sex?"

"Because you make me sick."

"Then why did you sleep with me?"

"You know when you feel like throwing everything up? My stomach is always filled with weird things. That's when I feel the urge to have sex."

"What did you do after you quit your job at the department store?"

"I worked at a bar."

"Were you a bartender?"

"No, I was too young. They wouldn't let me mix drinks."

"Then what did you do there?"

"I was a mannequin."

"A mannequin?" I thought of the movie
Mannequin.
It was about a man who loved a plastic model who turned into a person. Are humans that much better than mannequins? Why do cartoon monsters and cyborgs want so badly to become human?

"I was a mannequin sitting on the bar. I wasn't sitting at the bar, I sat on top of it."

"What were you doing up there?"

"I was wearing paper clothes."

"Huh, that's funny."

"The clothes were made of pieces so that you could take them off, one by one. And each piece had a price written on it. People would drink, look at me, then pay to take off a piece of paper corresponding to that price. I wasn't supposed to say anything. People always wanted to talk to me. They wanted to see how my expression changed whenever they took off a piece of paper."

"I would have wanted the same thing."

"Yeah, but I was too young to understand. You know, humans are really strange. I became very different when I was wearing that patchwork paper dress. I didn't like it when guys took off a piece of paper, leering, but then I would wish someone would take off all the pieces. I was sad when there still was paper stuck to my body after we closed. I was the sum of ragged scraps of paper, and I was sitting there, a mannequin with pieces of paper that couldn't be converted into money. Do you get that feeling? I doubt it. It's hard to understand a mannequin."

"Uh-huh."

"One day this guy came in. From that day on, he sat in front of me every night and drank. He didn't talk to me once. He drank a beer and took off a piece of paper from
my left breast worth thirty Hong Kong dollars. He drank another beer, looking at my bare breast. He would do the same the next night, and the night after that. He was only an unimportant salaryman. He wore a wrinkled suit and a cheap tie. I wanted to give him my left breast. I wanted him to fondle it all night and suck it and fall asleep doing that. But I couldn't. If I got caught sleeping with a customer, my breast would be cut off. For a month, he came in, looked at my left breast, and went home. I thought I was going to go crazy."

She grabbed my beer and took a sip.

"Then one day another guy showed up. He was wearing an Armani suit and looked like a small-time gangster. As soon as he sat down in front of me, he took off the three-hundred-dollar piece, the most expensive one. He left all the other pieces. I actually felt less humiliated. He then took off all the other pieces, all the way down to the cheapest scrap. Then he beckoned, someone ran over, threw some clothes on me, and put me in a car. He was the first man who took all the pieces off. I thought I should love him."

She gulped Coke straight from the bottle.

"I started living with him. I wore a paper dress at home. Only for one person, for him. Each time, he paid and took off the scraps. Then I would work for him. But I never slept with him. Instead, during the three months I lived with him, I drank his sperm, probably more than a liter. He didn't ever try to screw me. After he took off all the paper clothes, he made me kneel and eat his cum, then fell asleep. Afterward, every time, I drank the water he had in his house—Evian. My mouth always smelled like his juice and later the Evian started tasting like it. I began to collect it. He thought it was funny. I told him I would save it and drink it later. Whenever he came, I would funnel it in an empty Evian bottle and keep it in the fridge. Finally, when the bottle was full, I put on the paper dress again. He paid for all the pieces. He sat in a chair and waited for me to kneel. I went behind him and put a gun to his head. I forced him to drink all the stuff in the Evian bottle. He threw up. I left him there and ran out. Then I came on this trip."

Her story smelled of fiction. But I couldn't tell where the lies ended. The last part might be a lie. Maybe that guy dumped her. She might have fantasized every night about threatening him with a gun and forcing him to drink his own ejaculate. But it didn't matter. Whether her story was true or somewhat false, it was clear that she vomited whenever she drank water—something must have happened to her to cause that kind of reaction.

"I guess we're both fugitives," I commiserated.

"What are you running from?"

"I'm not in such a desperate situation as you. I always run from myself. I have to do that in Hell."

"Try drinking your own sperm. Then you won't have to keep running away."

She smiled bitterly and climbed on my lap, facing me, and kissed me. A gap persisted between us, as vast and fundamental as the ability to drink water. Even though our lips
were joined, even though we had sex, there was a river we could never cross.

After, we stumbled out of the chair. She reached for her Coke, but grabbed the Evian. In the dark, she might have thought the water was Coke. I left her alone. Keep vomiting, I thought. You'll stop when you can't anymore.

The next day we parted ways. I went to Brindisi to go to Greece and she left for Venice. Luckily, the train to Brindisi came first. She waved from the platform. I wonder if she went back to Hong Kong.

I return to the computer and reopen the file. I have to edit the last part of the novel. I hope I can finish before dawn. When I work at night, I'm disrupted only when the sun rises. I banish thoughts about Judith and the woman from Hong Kong and settle back to work.

"Boredom is no longer my love."

—Arthur Rimbaud, "Bad Blood"

WHEN C GOT THE PHONE CALL FROM K, he instinctively knew it was about Judith. C always got bad news early in the morning. In a subdued voice, K related that Judith had passed away peacefully. K didn't criticize him, which made C feel all the more uncomfortable. So he just listened. K didn't forget to ask before hanging up, "You did know it was her birthday the day you went away with her, right?"

"Yeah. I didn't believe her, though. I found out it was true after I got back."

"I didn't know it was her birthday until after she died." K hung up without waiting for C's reply. C looked at his watch. It was ten in the morning. He opened the curtains and sunlight filled the room. His head was empty. He went out to the balcony to smoke. He leaned on the railing and looked down. From the twentieth floor, it looked like the world was going about its business as usual. Nobody would
be thinking about the woman resembling Judith this morning. He stubbed out his cigarette, went into the kitchen, and washed the dishes from the night before, piling them carefully on the dish rack.

The water was boiling on the stove. He made coffee and ate a piece of his day-old baguette. Hidden in the paper was an article about an exhibition opening that day. Only two lines were written about his work, so he skimmed the whole article before he finished eating. The article was merely a reprint of the publicity materials the gallery distributed to the papers, edited a little. He couldn't really trust the veracity of the other articles in the paper now that he knew this, so he glanced at the headlines and pushed the paper away.

C thought back to that snowy day. Judith, who had disappeared five months ago, riding away on the snowplow, seemed more and more real. He felt her absence infiltrating his life, though he hadn't thought about her in months. He burrowed into the sofa and tried to remember Judith. But he couldn't remember anything specific, not even her face. Instead, images of the North Pole, Chupa Chups, a snowball, and dull sex circled in his head.

The phone rang about five times before the answering machine picked up. He heard Mimi's voice as he was lathering his face with shaving cream.

"Are you there? I'm coming up now."

The razor nicked his chin. Blood turned the white foam pink. He kept shaving. He slapped on some Old Spice, whose bottle had a picture of a ship departing in search of
spices. The cut stung. He went into his bedroom and put on some clothes, and the bell rang.

Instead of saying hello, Mimi pushed her nose into his cheek and sniffed. She nodded, about what he didn't know, and pulled off her tall boots. She sank into the sofa and hugged her knees to her chest.

"Coffee," she slowly whispered, as if imparting an important secret.

"I don't have any ground coffee ... Would you like some lemon tea instead?"

She shook her head. "Grind some now, I'll wait."

C went into the kitchen to grind some coffee beans. She hummed while he transformed the beans into a fine powder. She often crooned tunes he couldn't place. He put the grounds in a strainer and made coffee while she kept humming, not budging from the sofa. C poured the coffee into a blue mug and handed it to her. Mimi didn't touch it. She just stared blankly at the balcony and beyond.

"Are we working today?" she asked, still gazing toward the balcony.

"Today?"

She nodded. "I want to work today." She stood up and started taking off her skirt.

He grabbed her wrist. "You don't have to take it off right now. Have some coffee first."

But she slipped off both her skirt and sweater. "Doesn't mean I have to have them on. Just get me a robe."

He brought her his robe, which was big on her. Only
after she shrugged into the robe did she pick up her mug and relax.

"Good coffee," she commented. Holding the mug in her right hand, she reached behind her head and unclipped the pin holding her hair in place. Her brown hair danced down her shoulders like it would fill the entire room, and he felt slightly dizzy. She shook her head a few times to smooth out her tousled hair. The scent of soap enveloped him, and he burned the roof of his mouth with coffee.

Three months before, C sat in a café on Daehak Street, early in the morning. Another café was across the alley, which was so narrow that two cars passed one another only by scraping their side-view mirrors. He was waiting for a friend to talk about an exhibit. The friend was an hour late. Even though C knew his friend was always late, he always went to meet him on time. He cherished the time he spent waiting for someone to show up. During that time, he wasn't obligated to do anything. He could read a book or people watch. This was the only time he didn't suffer from a sense of debt to himself. He was free from the compulsion to be productive. On the other hand, making someone wait is unpleasant. Being late makes you impatient and servile. That's why C was always the one waiting.