my mouth, eight inches tall, its black and white wings wet and folded to its sides, its white chest heaving with new breath, and it flies out of my mouth, frantic and afraid, and down Kidu’s throat. Kidu turns his hands into blue fire, and I buy a sausage from a street vendor, and we roast it over his hands and hand it to a pretty girl at our feet. We recite the scripts we’ve written, translating each other, trying to sound gigantic and theatrical, actors playing actors playing soothsayers playing clowns. Night clowns. Non sequiturs.
We stop in front of a seafood restaurant with giant blue fish tanks stacked up outside. Up there to our left, up that alley where the lights are high and pink, is where the brothels are clustered like a honeycomb, each sticky–sweet door leading to essentially the same place. The crude colloquialism of Itaewon’s expats declares: Hooker Hill. The Zoo. We’ll catch the lonely ones, the shame–faced first– and second–timers and the stony old veterans, give them another show, a better one.
I pull a balloon out of my pocket, careful not to let my fingers slide through the salt. And I blow it up.
Kidu says something in Korean. I don’t understand, but I know what he says. He tells them about the blister beneath the skin of the world, the chaos boil ready to burst and flood the streets of man. Any decade now. I catch the word
taeryo
. Ingredient. Those under the world, or those inside our skin.
The crowd is growing. Moment by moment, the crazy abandon, the celebration, leaks out of them and is replaced by wonder and fear. We’re a car wreck, a fistfight, a house fire, a crime scene. They drink us down.
My balloon is red and crawling with a lattice of veins. An excised tumor, an organ shuttering in my hand. It pulses. It squirms. Blood sloshes beneath translucent rubber skin, backlit by the spinning barber poles and pink neon lights of Hooker Hill, cast into silhouette. Into the megaphone, I say, “A deception has been committed by we, your humble night clowns! This is a magic show, but not a free one! This is the Itaewon Eschatology Show! Pay your admission! Love me! See me! Give me your eyes and your attention! Know me! This is the End of Days Parade! So march!”
I present the balloon to Kidu and he pops it with a needle. Bang. A flurry of butterflies. They rise toward the casino–colored lights, enough of them to cast a shapeless shadow onto the faces of the open–mouthed drunks below us. There is silence. A woman in a tan halter–top says, “I hate clowns. I always have.” She is crying a little.
§
There’s a girl back home. A girlfriend, I guess. A fiancée. Okay, yes, a fiancée. Someone waiting for me to come home, someone whose face I see once a week on the computer screen, an illusion. Her voice sounds different than I remember it. She’s changed her hair since I saw her. She asks me if I’m having fun, and I tell her I am. She is brunette, and her face is too thin, and she seems shy and cautious when we talk, the way she was when we first met, before we became comfortable with one another. We’ve regressed. She tells me about her week, and I listen. And then she tells me she loves me, and I tell her I love her too. She does most of the talking.
Last week, she said, “Your mom asks about you.”
I said, “Oh?”
She said, “Yeah. I saw her at the pool. You’re a terrible pen–pal.” Then she laughed like it was a joke. And then we both got quiet for a while.
§
With the crowd chanting, “End of Days Parade! End of Days Parade!” and dancing around our feet, with the thump and zap of a dozen nightclubs frying the night air with their noise, with the drinks spilling and the cigarette smoke swirling, we pass out the
tal
. Traditional Korean theatrical masks, made from alderwood, painted and lacquered. We pluck them from the air, perfect and solid, hidden behind open space, and hand them around. Everyone ties them on. I say, “Become someone else
We stop in front of a seafood restaurant with giant blue fish tanks stacked up outside. Up there to our left, up that alley where the lights are high and pink, is where the brothels are clustered like a honeycomb, each sticky–sweet door leading to essentially the same place. The crude colloquialism of Itaewon’s expats declares: Hooker Hill. The Zoo. We’ll catch the lonely ones, the shame–faced first– and second–timers and the stony old veterans, give them another show, a better one.
I pull a balloon out of my pocket, careful not to let my fingers slide through the salt. And I blow it up.
Kidu says something in Korean. I don’t understand, but I know what he says. He tells them about the blister beneath the skin of the world, the chaos boil ready to burst and flood the streets of man. Any decade now. I catch the word
taeryo
. Ingredient. Those under the world, or those inside our skin.
The crowd is growing. Moment by moment, the crazy abandon, the celebration, leaks out of them and is replaced by wonder and fear. We’re a car wreck, a fistfight, a house fire, a crime scene. They drink us down.
My balloon is red and crawling with a lattice of veins. An excised tumor, an organ shuttering in my hand. It pulses. It squirms. Blood sloshes beneath translucent rubber skin, backlit by the spinning barber poles and pink neon lights of Hooker Hill, cast into silhouette. Into the megaphone, I say, “A deception has been committed by we, your humble night clowns! This is a magic show, but not a free one! This is the Itaewon Eschatology Show! Pay your admission! Love me! See me! Give me your eyes and your attention! Know me! This is the End of Days Parade! So march!”
I present the balloon to Kidu and he pops it with a needle. Bang. A flurry of butterflies. They rise toward the casino–colored lights, enough of them to cast a shapeless shadow onto the faces of the open–mouthed drunks below us. There is silence. A woman in a tan halter–top says, “I hate clowns. I always have.” She is crying a little.
§
There’s a girl back home. A girlfriend, I guess. A fiancée. Okay, yes, a fiancée. Someone waiting for me to come home, someone whose face I see once a week on the computer screen, an illusion. Her voice sounds different than I remember it. She’s changed her hair since I saw her. She asks me if I’m having fun, and I tell her I am. She is brunette, and her face is too thin, and she seems shy and cautious when we talk, the way she was when we first met, before we became comfortable with one another. We’ve regressed. She tells me about her week, and I listen. And then she tells me she loves me, and I tell her I love her too. She does most of the talking.
Last week, she said, “Your mom asks about you.”
I said, “Oh?”
She said, “Yeah. I saw her at the pool. You’re a terrible pen–pal.” Then she laughed like it was a joke. And then we both got quiet for a while.
§
With the crowd chanting, “End of Days Parade! End of Days Parade!” and dancing around our feet, with the thump and zap of a dozen nightclubs frying the night air with their noise, with the drinks spilling and the cigarette smoke swirling, we pass out the
tal
. Traditional Korean theatrical masks, made from alderwood, painted and lacquered. We pluck them from the air, perfect and solid, hidden behind open space, and hand them around. Everyone ties them on. I say, “Become someone else
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