I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (8 page)

The big windows of the café provided a pleasant view. The café across the street did the same. C felt like he was looking at a mirror. He sat by the window, looking at the café across the street, where a man in a gray suit glanced at
him, drinking coffee. Sometimes their eyes met, which made him feel uncomfortable. Each time he looked away, focusing instead on the people walking by. Some of them looked into the café, and their eyes met his on more than one occasion. The windows were like a screen. He was an actor drinking coffee and the people walking by were the audience. Or it could be the other way around: The pedestrians were the actors. Passerby 1, Passerby 2, Passerby 3 ... Most walked without looking at him, performing their parts professionally, but a few looked into the camera like first-time extras. Each time that happened, he felt annoyed. C continued to wait for his friend, sometimes as a member of the audience, other times as the actor.

When that game got boring, he started envisioning the work he was going to show in the exhibit. He only had a vague concept: a piece that combined video and performance art. He didn't yet have a specific theme or a technique he wanted to employ. His ideas alternated between the grandiose, morphing into environmental art like Christo's draping of a Pacific island, and his reality, where he only had two camcorders and a Mac. He had gone back and forth between the Pacific Ocean and his apartment studio three times when a woman walked into the opposite café. He still remembers how the wind fanned up her long, straight hair and let it float back down again, like water from a fountain. He squinted, tracking her with his eyes. She sat down at the bar near the window facing him, her coffee on a tray. She was wearing a thin leather jacket and shorts, and he could
make out her legs through the picture windows. He kept watching her.

She was different. It wasn't that she had a unique sense of style or that she had bad posture. He wondered what it was that made her so attractive. Only when his ignored cigarette dropped ash into his coffee cup did he figure out her secret. She was a perfect actress. She didn't look in his direction once. She just sipped her coffee in the sun, delicately. She didn't read or rifle through her purse or touch up her makeup. She looked like she was concentrating on projecting herself through the windows, the screen. Her only movement was to caress her hair that fell over her shoulder each time she lowered her head, then flip it back.

"Sorry, were you waiting long?" His friend appeared. C's eyes had started to sting because he was so engrossed in the voyeuristic game of watching the woman behind two windows. His friend was a curator at G gallery in Insa-dong, which was putting on this exhibit. The curator sat down and followed C's gaze across the street. C was unable to tear his eyes away.

"Why is she over there?" the curator clucked. He went across the street and escorted the woman to their table. It was surreal. He was shaken, the way he always feels when he sees a TV ad where a tiger leaps out of the screen. The woman was now sitting across from him, having walked through the screen and the lens of the camera. He was a little embarrassed.

The curator introduced them. "This is Yu Mimi. I assume you know who she is." The two nodded in greeting. C had heard of her. People had talked about her performance art at a few gatherings. But it never occurred to him that he would meet her like this, so he sat back quietly and let his friend talk.

"We invited her to perform on opening night because we want to open with a bang. We think it'll be a nice mix, because we're mostly exhibiting video and installation," the curator explained, glancing at C as if he were uncomfortable with the way C was staring at Mimi. She was pale up close. Smoky eye shadow contrasting with her pearly skin gave her a decadent beauty. She looked to be around thirty and somehow reminded him of Judith. Judith, who wasn't interested in anything, and Mimi, who seemed so confident and self-assured, didn't have anything in common on the surface. Was it her scent? Her posture? The way she looked at people? C couldn't figure it out.

The curator rambled on about the exhibit's purpose and significance, but Mimi looked bored. Her aloof demeanor effectively canceled out the grand aim of the exhibit, and the curator became flustered. At the end of his spiel, the curator asked whether she would do him the honor of performing on opening night. She looked like she would refuse, but she assented readily. The curator looked at C, surprised by her agreement. C felt like he had to say something to fill the silence.

"That's great. It's going to be a wonderful exhibit, thanks to you."

She only smiled a little. She asked, "What kind of work do you do?"

He hesitated, unsure of what he should say, and the curator answered for him.

"Oh, C? He studied Western art in college but now he does video and installation. Video art is really how he pays the bills." The curator looked at C as if for approval. C nodded imperceptibly.

"What will you be showing in the exhibit?" she asked.

He saw that her eyes, which had been languorous during the curator's monologue, were starting to sparkle.

"Well, it's still in the planning stages, so I'm not exactly sure what it'll be."

"Ah, I see," she said, assuming her original bored expression. She pursed her lips and sucked some kiwi juice she had ordered up through a straw. Closing his eyes, C imagined the green liquid going down her throat and spreading throughout her body. He could see her body turning green, the kiwi juice seeping into her capillaries. That image called to C's mind the seventeen-inch screen through which he watched the world. The screen in C's imagination fuzzily captured the image of Mimi drinking kiwi juice. The image of Mimi onscreen sharpened into focus and overlapped with the real Mimi. He opened his eyes. She was still sipping kiwi juice through a straw. He held his breath and suggested out of the blue, "Won't you work with me?"

She didn't seem surprised, but she stiffened a little. She shifted in her seat, flipping her hair behind her shoulder. "Pardon? I'm not sure I understand."

"I'd like to capture your performance onscreen. Like Nam June Paik's
TV Cello.
I would film you, edit and transform the work, and on opening night you could perform your piece, live. Behind you would be my work. A meeting of performance and video art. What do you think?"

His palms started to sweat. He jabbered on, trying hard to convince her to agree, even though he didn't really have a clearly formulated idea. An unstoppable urge to capture her on film propelled him. He recognized that he was dangerously attracted to her, but he couldn't resist. She quietly looked into his eyes.

"Know how to ride a bike?" she asked, breaking the long silence.

"Of course," he answered, surprised by the sudden turn in conversation.

"A lot of people said they'd teach me how to ride a bike. I don't know why they wanted to. I guess learning to ride a bike is hard to do on your own. They hold on to the bike from behind, but as soon as they let go, I wobble and fall over. Whenever someone offers to teach me how to ride a bike, I treat them skeptically."

C couldn't figure out why she was talking about a bike, but didn't interrupt.

"Just now, hearing you propose to film my performance, I thought of the people who wanted to teach me how to ride
a bike. I don't really know why, yet. I haven't ever filmed or photographed my performances. For some reason, I get the feeling that this would be more dangerous than learning to ride a bike, maybe because it's something new?"

She paused, playing with her hair.

"Give it a shot. C is very talented," the curator piped in.

She smiled feebly. "It's a very strange day. One of those days where you can't refuse anything asked of you."

She took out a piece of paper from her purse, scribbled her number on it, and handed it to C.

"Call me. But I might change my mind." Leaving behind traces of her wispy silhouette, she exited the café.

"Isn't she hot?" the curator said, grinning. "There are two types of beauty, seductive and self-protective."

"Which do you think she is?" C asked.

"I'm not sure. I guess the only way to know for sure is to get close to her. It's weird. She's famous for not letting herself be photographed or filmed. Did you know that?"

"No." C shook his head.

"She never allowed it. So you can only see her performance in person. People who've seen it say it's amazing. It's possible that it's made to be something greater than it really is because her reputation was built on word of mouth. Anyway, be careful. A lot of people got screwed when they started hanging out with her."

Even before the curator's warning, an instinctive sense of precaution was growing inside C. He hadn't forgotten that the things he was attracted to were usually the very
same ones that pushed him into an abyss. Mounted butterflies were the first things that gripped his fascination. He was still captivated by his old fantasy where the butterflies came alive, flying around with pins rammed through their bodies.

But why did he push sharp pins through his most treasured possession? How did he do it at such a young age, when he wouldn't have been able to do it now? Had he been seduced by butterflies or the act of capture?

In any case, one spring day, all the butterflies burned to ash. The fire that burst forth from the kitchen devastated the entire house in a matter of seconds, and C, coming home from school, sobbed, mourning his butterflies. His mother tried to soothe him by telling him,
C, we can always build a new house.
C cried harder.

When K arrived at Judith's apartment, he found that every trace of her had been erased. Someone had already moved in. K sat in his Stella TX, parked in the lot in front of the building, and listlessly listened to the radio. The conversation he had with his brother that morning had been unpleasant. C had reacted as nonchalantly as if he were hearing about an incident written in the newspaper. C had slept with Judith. Didn't that count for something? K couldn't understand his brother. A week ago Judith swallowed sleeping pills, turned on the gas, and committed suicide. It had been five months since he'd seen her, and she left like that, without contacting him.

What had happened between Judith and C? The only thing K knew was that C also had no idea that Se-yeon died.

K started the car. He smelled a faint acrid smell, like the engine oil burning, but didn't pay much attention. He didn't know where he was going even when he took a ticket from the Gungnae tollbooth on the Seoul-Busan Highway. As soon as K's taxi went through the tollbooth, it roared up to the speed limit and beyond. He weaved through the cars emerging from the tollbooths and went into the left lane, feeling his body being pulled back. Unlike other times, the sensation was foreign and made him feel lonely. He pressed his foot on the gas.

K inserted in the tape deck a cassette tape he'd bought a few days before from a street vendor and turned up the volume as high as it would go. The speakers screeched, the high notes warped. K opened all four windows. He couldn't think through the sound of the cars whizzing by and the distorted noise from his speakers. He sped to Busan and returned to Seoul, making the trip twice. His eyes became bloodshot. Though he tried to fall asleep on the shoulder a few times, sleep never came over him.

C's studio wasn't ready to film Mimi's performance. C hurriedly checked the lighting and set up his two camcorders. On the floor, he spread a large canvas that had been leaning against the wall, and then mixed paint. When the paint was ready, Mimi took off her robe, hung it up neatly, and walked over to the canvas, naked. The white canvas was
blank. She studied the canvas and the camcorders. Then she squatted and examined the surface of the canvas. She smiled slightly, pleased with the rough texture.

White canvas. Someone once theorized that primitive man started to create art because of a fear hidden deeply within the human soul. The mere existence of a white blank wall is terrifying. That's why children scribble on walls and scratch the surface of new, shiny cars with knives. Frightened of an empty room without any furniture and paintings, people fill it up and refill it again. A late-night phone call, where you only hear the caller breathing, brings insomnia with its emptiness, its absence of conversation.

The theory that art originated from fear interested C when he first started to paint. It was a small but important consolation for him, who had to live off his art, that one could control inscrutable fear and transform it into art. But he still sometimes asked himself:
What am I really afraid of?

C focused on Mimi and the canvas with his camera. Mimi circled the canvas as if she didn't trust it.

"Okay, let's start," he told her.

Mimi snapped her head toward him and asked, "Can I get a drink?"

She took three gulps straight from the whiskey bottle.

"Stop drinking," he ordered, grabbing the bottle out of her grasp, and held out the paint. Mimi kneeled and dunked her long hair into the paint. He started filming. She carefully soaked her hair in paint, slowly got up, and stepped onto the top left corner of the canvas. She started painting with
her hair. As she painted, the paint got on her hands, knees, and blue paint took over the canvas. The cameras followed her movements from the front and the side. When she reached the middle of the canvas, propelled by her energetic head swishing, she raised her body. Her hair, drenched in blue, was disheveled, and the paint was dripping down her body. It trickled down between her breasts, down her spine, in between her buttocks. She solemnly rubbed her body, so that the paint would coat her skin. She became blue.

"Don't look into the camera," C called, his eye to the camera, but she ignored him and looked straight into the lens. Finally she rubbed her blue hands on her face. When she looked into the camera, a chill went down C's spine. He stepped back, overcome by a strange, inexplicable guilt.

"Let's take a break," C said, wiping sweat from his forehead.

She sighed, as if she had returned to herself, and stepped off the canvas.