Instead, I drank pesticide. Pouring it into an iced Americano, I mused that to him even this coffee was a by-product of the American Empire (after all, it was called “Americano”), and a by-product of exploited third-world labor. That struck me as so hilarious that I was still laughing when my eyes finally closed. I shed no tears.
When I woke up again, I was in the ICU. Coincidentally, it was Asan Hospital, the same place Umma was at. My stomach had been pumped and doctors were administering hemodialysis; I could see Umma standing at a distance, watching. This was not the face I had wanted to see on the other side. The old Umma, when faced with this situation, would’ve screamed at me or hit me or burst into tears or started on a rant beginning “Dear Lord . . . ” or acted in some other manner worthy of a melodramatic daytime soap opera, but that day Umma just stood there looking at me. And then she said:
—Don’t try too hard. We all die someday, anyway.
I wanted to shout, Why don’t you give yourself that advice, aren’t you supposed to ask me why I did it, isn’t there something you always wondered about me? I wanted to shout down the roof at her, but there was a respirator tube going down my throat, preventing me from speaking.
?
For a while after that, it enraged me to hear people talking about love. Especially when it had to do with love between gay people; no matter who it was or what they said, I felt a violent, senseless urge to beat them up. Our love is the same, our love is beautiful, our love is just another form of love between one human being and another . . .
But is love truly beautiful?
To me, love is a thing you can’t stop when you’re caught up in it, a brief moment you can escape from only after it turns into the most hideous thing imaginable when you distance yourself from it. This is the uncomfortable truth about love that I learned in the ICU and recovery wards.
3.
Five whole years had passed since he and I went our separate ways. I was thirty and looked my age. I was a published writer, and I did not remember his phone number anymore. To tell the truth, I was too busy getting trampled on by life to remember a lot of the little things of daily existence.
It was Sunday again, and I was peeling some pesticide-free apples. A middle-aged woman sitting next to me, weighing in at ninety-nine pounds, was transcribing the words of Corinthians 3:2. When I offered her a slice, she refused by turning her head.
—You know I don’t like apples. They turn my stomach sour.
—Stomachs are meant to be sour. Eat this so you can grow a new liver.
—When you’re old, you can’t grow back your liver so easily.
—OK, great. Why don’t you be the doctor and the pastor and everyone else in the whole wide world?
Umma, her doctor, me, and everyone else in the whole wide world knew that she didn’t have much time left. She said she didn’t want an apple, she wanted to see the reservoir again. When I got up to get the wheelchair, she grew irritable and insisted she would walk on her own.
Ten minutes was all it took to get her exhausted. Her fierceness from just moments before had evaporated, and now here she was, bleating at me to find us a place to rest. We sat down, as always, at a bench near the reservoir. Umma breathed deeply and placed a hand on my leg. The many needles required for her treatment had made the veins on the back of her hand red. Her skin was like cardboard, like old leaves that would crumble when touched. She took out a note from her pocket and handed it to me.
Just as I care for you, the Lord also cares for you.
Jesus, Umma, you’ve sure got your priorities straight, why accept my pity when there’s a chance to annoy me instead?
My eyes kept wandering around the reservoir. Whenever Umma stopped to catch her breath, I found myself taking a moment to glance around us, looking carefully at the faces of each passerby. It was so pathetic that I almost laughed at myself. I wondered what I would say if he did show up. Would I introduce him to Umma as if nothing had happened? Would I say I was glad to see him? Or would I ignore him and pass him by? Ridiculous to think that I could miss him. Any six-foot-four-inch giant standing around that lake was going to stick out like a sore thumb.
I had changed my phone number after I became a writer. There wasn’t some big deal behind the decision—I just wanted my life to be a little different from the way it had been before I got published. A few clicks, and I had a new number. It would be a lie if I said I never thought of his number. It began with the numbers 010-81, but the other digits have long faded from memory. Still, I couldn’t shake that feeling of having fought against something and lost. My hoping to forget his number in itself was just a forced, unnatural effort in the end. I didn’t know what I truly wanted all this time, what I’d really been waiting for.
Umma and I sat down on the benches near the grass where the weird sculptures stood. It was the place where he and I were supposed to have met five years ago, the sculpture park. The more I tried to push him out of my mind, the more I kept thinking about him. He’d be standing there once I turned my head; I was sure of it. Why was I being such an idiot? Then I remembered the thick envelope in the backpack slung over my shoulder. The stack of pages didn’t feel like paper but like something as heavy as a brick or a dumbbell.
I went through many men after I broke up with him. Love that disappeared like light rain over asphalt, hot love, urgent love that faded after a single night . . . I threw myself into all kinds of love, but I never fell for anyone as hard as I had fallen for him. There had been better men than him, much better according to every objective metric, but none of them really managed to gel for me. It was a long time after, a much longer time after, when I realized that he had taken the hottest parts of me, that in doing so he had changed me forever.
Umma suddenly got up from the bench and walked slowly up the hill. I followed her. At the top of it, she sat down on the grass. It was an early fall evening at Olympic Park. The fragrance of drying autumn leaves came right up to my nose. I threw off my bag and used my mother’s emaciated thigh as a pillow. I felt like a nine-year-old again.
—Umma, why are you sitting on the bare grass? You used to tell me that sitting on the grass can cause viral hemorrhagic fever.
—When did I ever say such a thing?
—When I was ten. When you were getting your second online university degree. I remember you were wearing your graduation cap saying it. That if my bare skin touched the grass, I’d catch a disease where holes would appear all over my skin and I’d bleed from them. That it was from the germs in rat droppings.
—You’re making this up. I would never say something so disgusting.
—You really said it. See, you can’t remember any of this stuff. I remember everything. You gave me a lifelong phobia of grass because of it. To this day, I stick to the pavement and always avoid the grass.
—Really? How silly of me. The things I used to say to a child.
The sun began to set. Neither of us said anything for a moment as we watched it go down. Then, without taking her eyes off the sun, my mother spoke:
—Things are beautiful when they fade out.