For the sake of a future with Umma and him and me, for the life that remained for all of us ahead, I had to be brave. Let’s open the door and go outside. Yes, let’s close our eyes and jump into the darkness.
After accompanying my mother in the ambulance that transported her to Asan Hospital for her surgery, I went back to her hospice room to clean it up a bit. There was a photograph lying on her nightstand. The Polaroid of him and me.
I picked up the photo. My sloppy habits (and my old, stretched-out leather wallet) must’ve made me drop this photograph somewhere. Had my mother picked it up and put it on the nightstand, or had it been the caretaker? It surely was my mother. Who knows when I had dropped it, but to put a photo where I’m standing arm in arm with a man right where I would immediately see it, just on the day she was going into surgery, and then disappearing into the OR without a word—this was very much the kind of stunt my mother would pull.
She had always been that kind of person. Someone who knew everything, who saw through everything.
Even during the Asian financial crisis, when my father disappeared after bringing our household to ruin, Umma had seen through everything. “Son, we’re going to go catch Father together.” She and I got into her little red car and arrived at a rent-subsidized neighborhood in Incheon. There were so many spiderwebs in the stairways and corridors that we were flailing against them with our whole bodies by the time we pounded on the door of room 302. We knocked for a long time—I thought the apartment would shatter from the thumping—but there was no answer. After peering inside the window in the corridor for ages, trying to catch Father (and the Other Woman) in the act, we decided to return to the car. And just as we had turned the car around and were about to head home, we found Father in the empty lot behind the apartment building.
—Umma, look.
Father was playing badminton with a petite, middle-aged woman. They looked totally different from how I imagined them. There was something similar about the way they looked. Like two puzzle pieces, a perfect fit for each other. Father’s face had an expression of calm that I had never seen during his whole life with Umma. An outsider who didn’t understand the situation would’ve taken my mother and me for debt collectors come to make life hell for an innocent, ordinary couple. I will never forget Umma’s face as she gazed upon the pair. That look she had, as if the whole world had stopped turning, surely could not be explained by any of Spinoza’s forty-eight emotions. Its subtleties of feeling, brought on by that strange calm that Father and the Other Woman seemed to share, could not be simplified into concepts like despair or suffering. That feeling of pressing down on something that threatens to boil over or explode—it was the first time I learned of such emotions.
After her operation, Umma, despite the tubes of blood running out of her stomach, would get up from her bed at a certain hour and sit on the edge of it. She would light a candle on the nightstand, bring her hands together, and pray for over half an hour. Folding her stomach and legs like this could not be good for the recovery of her surgical wounds, but she insisted on repeatedly mortifying herself. After her prayer, she propped up the meal table of her hospital bed and copied verses from the Bible. Her obsessive transcription was like an ascetic practice. I suppose that instead of crying and screaming about her misfortune and ripping out her hair, she had chosen the method of copying out Bible verses, carefully pressing down the letters into the notebook with her ballpoint pen. That was the only penance that my mother, who had tried to refuse anesthesia, could achieve, and her transcription felt like a kind of breathing, almost.
A letter inhaling, a letter exhaling.
This act of breathing and writing struck me as being similar to the passion that ailed me at the time. Had it really been a passion for someone? Or a passion for the person I became when I was caught up in someone?
That was, in a way, a bottomless passion for me.
A passion for loving Jesus, for throwing oneself wholly into the act of living. That was, perhaps, the feeling I had toward my guy at one time, a feeling of giving myself up to something, an energy I was never a minute away from; perhaps it was something close to religion. To let oneself fall into complete darkness, a kind of faith.
I once discovered her sitting in this pose, unaware of her urinary catheter being dislodged. It made me so mad that I shouted at her. “What were you doing, do you think praying is going to change anything at all, how can you think this bullshit can help you in the slightest?”
Umma often used the word “miracle.” That a fellow worshipper at church had transcribed the entire Bible in a thousand days and had been granted the miracle of healing. That she herself would also experience this miracle soon. The miracle hadn’t happened to someone she knew personally but to the deacon’s nephew’s wife. For Christ’s sake, the deacon’s nephew’s wife? Such a miracle seemed as unlikely as peace between Palestine and Israel. Umma added that she was not necessarily wishing for a miracle, she just wanted to have lived a life that the Lord considered beautiful. The only thing I could do was to call the nurse, against her stubborn refusals, to reinsert the catheter and change the sheets on her bed.
In those days of pain and disease, the only things she found meaningful were prayer and copying Bible verses. I’m sure this was how she truly felt. She did not look in the mirror or ever call anyone, she just wrote down letter after letter in diligent silence. I read this as her protest against my inability to stop my vice (namely, homosexuality), her resistance against this absurd cancer that had been inflicted upon her despite her lifelong diligence, her testimony of passion for life itself—all of these things mixed together in a kind of letter of complaint to the divine absolute. In the end, I could not talk to her about him, or about the photograph. I couldn’t talk to her about anything at all.
?
I couldn’t get a hold of him on Sunday.
His phone was off and there was no answer to my text messages.
Umma and I took a walk by the reservoir, just the two of us.
I looked behind me several times. Of course he wasn’t there.
Our walk that day was short.
?
I got a text from him four days later. Something bad had happened to a hyung he was close to, and he couldn’t pick up the phone. He said the word “sorry” like an afterthought, as if placing a sprig of parsley on a plate as a garnish.
Some hyung he had never mentioned before. Something bad happening.
Sure. That definitely happened. Something bad. And you were busy.
I didn’t get angry at him. We carried on our conversation as if nothing had happened. Just like all the times before.
?