No, my mother is a widow with cancer, she needs someone to take care of her, was what I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Umma liked to keep things to herself, even things there was no real need to hide, because it was “common” to let others know your business. Her extroverted personality concealed how uncomfortable she was with shame, and she seemed to be very ashamed of her sickness. She fobbed off the clients she’d been managing for twenty years with a story about taking a sabbatical to tour the Holy Land; not even her friends or my aunts were let in on the secret. I had no idea what was so shameful about cancer, but I went along with her wishes all the same. And that’s why, to my boss’s question, I smiled and said I was planning on becoming a writer after I quit. I even added that it had been my lifelong dream.
—Dreams are all well and good. But remember this: opportunities are like trains. Once you miss one, it will never come again.
Is this guy a fucking idiot, doesn’t he know trains come again and again like clockwork? In any case, I quit my job, and two weeks later my mother lay down on the operating table of a Gangnam hospital said to specialize in uterine cancer, where she asked the doctors not to anesthetize her because she wanted to participate in the pain of Jesus Christ, a declaration that (finally!) prompted her doctors to add some psychiatric treatment to her prescription.
Umma’s cancer, which the X-rays had shown as minor, turned out to be serious once they opened her up. The surgeon suspected that it had metastasized to the lymph nodes, and the liver function also seemed impaired. He recommended a multistep treatment implemented over a longer period of time. Despite multiple bouts of radiation after her hysterectomy, the cancer cells were slow to disappear. The road to remission turned out to be long and difficult.
It was around then when I first met him, in a humanities class at a private institute. The reason I picked the class on “The Philosophy of Emotions” was because I was having a hard time keeping a lid on my feelings. Not only was I cramming for English aptitude tests and entrance exams for companies, I was also taking care of Umma at the hospital and going with her for a daily walk after she had first begged for and then demanded it. Taking care of someone who was thoroughly sick in both body and mind made me feel like I was coming down with something myself. Hoping to avoid the well of unhappiness that was my mother, and to understand the feelings that kept threatening to boil over, I went to the class once a week. The course used Spinoza’s Ethics as a textbook and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and A Lover’s Discourse as supplementary texts, dividing up classes by different emotions. The instructor, who introduced himself as a “freelance philosopher,” did what most inexperienced teachers do, which was to force everyone to go around introducing themselves to the class. The school being run by a human rights organization, half of the students were activists. They went on about their affiliations, political beliefs, and sexual orientations (not that anyone had asked them), and I felt the pressure to confess to being a “center-left male homosexual” when my turn came, but I just stated my real name and that I was a college student. Jo Wind, James, Mapsosa, Legend of the Fall . . . The others had activist nicknames of bizarre national origins and esoteric references.
Someone came in the door just as the last person had finished introducing themselves. He was so tall that his head almost touched the ceiling, which explained why he had a slight stoop. He put his bag down on the seat next to me and shrugged off his hoodie. Both the black hoodie and the Eastpak backpack, which had a South Korean flag sewn into it, looked a few decades old. He must’ve been running, because the heat from his body slammed into my face. I saw hints of what seemed like a long tattoo on his neck, wrists, and even fingers. Something like a lizard’s tail. I wondered what shape would emerge if I followed it, or where that journey would end. I found myself gulping down saliva as my eyes took in every inch of him. Before I knew what was happening, he was right by my side. I felt the little hairs on my body stand up, all the way from my ears to my toes. He put his mouth next to my ear and whispered:
—Uh, excuse me, but could I have a sip of your coffee?
Before I could even reply, he popped the plastic lid off the disposable cup in front of me and started chugging down the iced Americano. I perceived his movements in slow motion. He clearly didn’t give a damn about my (no doubt steaming) gaze as he drank the whole thing down to the ice, which he then crunched between his teeth. For his introduction, he said he was “a creative” and left it at that. In that teeth-chillingly cool, simple declaration, in which he neglected to mention the field of this “creativity,” I had an inauspicious foreboding that this man was seriously full of himself (a feeling that soon proved to be accurate).
After the class was over, the man came up to me and offered to buy me a coffee, to pay me back for the one he’d drunk earlier. The fact he had taken my coffee without permission gave me a bad feeling, not to mention his way of talking and the look in his eye—so I waved away his offer. He then said, very formally, that he wanted to repay me for the moral good I’d done. That we then proceeded to walk to a nearby Starbucks wasn’t because I couldn’t again refuse such a moral offer but because in fact he was actually totally my type. He had a low, clear voice, a prominent brow, unreadably thin lips, and freckled skin that had never known the touch of sunscreen. His personality seemed a little weird, but the anticipation of spending a few minutes gazing at the good-looking guy overwhelmed all foreboding (again, in hindsight, a mistake).
Standing there at the counter, I noticed that he was a head taller than I was. It was unusual for me to have to look up at someone, my own height being slightly above average. We took up our iced Americanos and found a seat. He’d been the one to suggest coffee, but now he was just sitting there silently and staring into space.
What is up with this guy? Why did he ask me out if he was going to just say nothing?
In the end, I was the one who had to grope for an opener.
—You must’ve been very thirsty.
—You saved my life.
And . . . silence. Back then, as a temp who dreamed of a permanent contract, I was all about “putting myself out there,” which meant babbling on (entirely unprompted) about how I was a college student, majoring in French, how my favorite hobby was reading, how I had joined this class because . . . I kept on talking about whatever pointless crap came into my head. Meanwhile, the man stared at me almost rudely, as if sizing me up, and finally opened his mouth just when I was starting to run out of steam.
—You have a pretty way of talking.
What the hell is he saying, this guy, that I’m faggy? That I sound gay? Or is he just saying stuff for the hell of it? Am I being paranoid? Too many thoughts, which made me shut up. More silence. After an awkward pause had built up long enough for me to see the bottom of my mug, he suddenly piped up again.
—My umma is an alcoholic.
—Uh . . . OK?
—So I put her into rehab, but she escaped so many times that we’ve had to try a psychiatric facility.
—Uh . . . OK.
—We keep changing treatments but there’s no progress. She always finds a way to hide the alcohol. There are bottles under her bed, in her bag. It drives me crazy.