We headed to a nearby gynecologist. She said the doctor there was rude and the place a dump, but she began going there when they offered a 40 percent discount on HPV vaccines. Whether the specialist even did abortions was a separate issue. “Shouldn’t you have researched that on the Internet beforehand,” I asked, but there was no way Jaehee would spend even a microsecond thinking about that kind of thing. She said if they didn’t do abortions, we’d go somewhere else. No one was better than her at bumbling through life’s important decisions.
The clinic truly was a dump. We were the only people there, which got Jaehee a meeting with the doctor as soon as she registered. I sat to wait on a sofa so old that it had permanent butt depressions in its seats. On the walls were posters of all kinds of viruses, the diseases they caused, and the miraculous medicines that cured them, as well as a little blackboard advertising summer deals on laser hair removal, Botox, and fillers. I read all of them while waiting for Jaehee, musing over how much it would cost to make my stupid face more tolerable. It was taking longer than I thought for her to get an appointment. The young nurse sitting at the reception desk yawned. They weren’t going to do the procedure today, were they? What was taking so long . . . ?
Unwrapping a couple of the plum-favored candies on the table and popping them in my mouth, I thought about the urology clinic I’d gone to a few months back. It had a similar vibe.
At first, my urethra had tingled a bit when I peed, but after a while it felt as uncomfortable as if someone were squeezing it, prompting me to get it checked. And since I was going to the clinic near the university subway station, I figured I should take the engineering student I was seeing with me. I felt it was right because we’d done it a few times at that point. An innocent mistake on my part.
After peeing into a cup and getting that analyzed, I learned the results weren’t some dramatic STD, just my urethra infected by germs, and inflammation resulting from it. “I didn’t know you could get infected in there,” I mumbled to myself, and the doctor, with a concerned expression, delivered an unsolicited lecture about how a woman’s genitals featured many kinds of bacteria and in some cases the urethra would get infected. Feeling weirdly guilty, I closed the consultation room door behind me, face red. Slightly embarrassed, I went into the injection room and was lying there with my trousers halfway down when I heard across the silence two male nurses talking to each other behind a partition.
—Did you see those two? I’m right, aren’t I?
—Yeah. Faggots.
—Fuck, so disgusting.
Before I could stop myself, I burst out laughing. The engineering student I’d come with said there was no trace of an infection in his sample. I joked about what I’d heard in the injection room, but the engineering student immediately flew into a rage and demanded to see the two assholes who had said such bullshit. Watching his reaction, I finally realized this was something I should’ve been angry about from the beginning, and that I had a tendency to laugh loudly in situations where I should be angry. The shot I received that day was painful, and I went out with the engineering student a few more times until it became boring and I stopped returning his messages.
In the midst of reminiscing about my great past loves, I suddenly heard Jaehee screaming inside the consultation room. The nurse who had followed her in opened the door and said to me, with an apologetic expression, “I think you should come in here.” Inside, neither doctor nor patient looked like they had the wherewithal to pay me any attention. The middle-aged doctor, with an angry face, was waving a small ultrasound printout right under Jaehee’s nose.
—This is all because of the way you live your life. Understand?
—Fuck this, I can’t take it anymore.
Just when the doctor was about to say something else, Jaehee grabbed her bag and stood up. And that’s not all she grabbed; she also picked up the 3D model of the uterus on the desk. I had just enough time to think of the word What? before Jaehee ran out of the consultation room with it. The doctor got up and shouted:
—Hey! Put that back!
Jaehee was gone like the wind, and there was no point in following her. She had, after all, been a champion sprinter up until middle school.
I was left to pay the consultation fee: 48,900 won. Feeling sorry about the whole thing, I said to the nurse:
—I’ll get the model uterus back to you right away. She has no endurance, she won’t have gone far.
The nurse answered me with a long sigh.
Sure enough, Jaehee was only a few steps outside the building, hugging the model womb as she leaned on a utility pole. As soon as she saw me, she waved an arm in the air, asking for a light. I took out a lighter from my pocket and held it out to the Marlboro Red in her mouth. Jaehee stared at the model uterus and said:
—It’s so fucking old.
—He must’ve bought it on graduation day. It says he entered SNU medical school in 1988.
—How did you find that out?
—I was so bored I read his doctor’s license on the wall.
—I’ve made a decision. Never deal with shits from Seoul National University.
—Fuck SNU for a minute, why did you have to do that? If he wasn’t going to do the procedure, you should’ve just left.
—I wouldn’t have screamed at him like that for no reason. He’s a psychopath. Listen to this.
As soon as she mentioned she was pregnant, the doctor had immediately made her lie down on the examining bed and administered an ultrasound. The results showed that the fetus (which is what he called the clump of cells) was about eight weeks along.
—He demanded that the father come in and see it, and I told him that you weren’t the father and that in fact I had no idea who the father was.
—Would it have killed you to lie? Just make shit up!
—You know I cannot tell a lie.
Which was a lie in itself—the truth was quite the -opposite—she just couldn’t ever tell a lie when she really needed to. The doctor had gone on a rant about prophylactics and the need for chaste living for over twenty minutes. He flipped through her chart and said her recurring bouts of bladder inflammations could be from promiscuous sexual intercourse and began to berate her about her moral looseness and wild drinking habits. Jaehee, noticing the cross hanging on the wall, had suppressed her anger and replied:
—You know, it’s thanks to sluts like me that you can make a living.
—I’m only saying this because you feel like a daughter to me. What are you going to do later on if you’re so immoral? Do you know what the worst thing for a woman’s body is? Promiscuity and unsafe sex. Don’t you understand?
—Actually, pregnancy and birth are the worst things for a woman’s body.
—What are you saying?
—I read it on the Internet. A fetus is basically a foreign object lodged inside a woman. And there’s nothing worse than pregnancy and giving birth for the body. So just give me the abortion.
—Who says that?! Who?!
The doctor, in a loud and angry voice, lectured her for about another three minutes on the baseness of the Internet and the ignorance of the masses that refused to trust educated people before pulling out the ultrasound scan and waving it at her.
—There’s a life already growing inside of you. Why can’t you understand that your body is a sacred temple?