for a while! Change your ingredients! Remake yourself! Fashion yourself in wood, and burn! This is a magic show! When else will you have the chance?”
Kidu says this too.
And now we are surrounded by the grinning idiot face of
Maldduki,
the servant, his eyes set too far apart, his teeth sparse and white in his wide–open mouth, his face imposed over the bodies of slump–shouldered English teachers and tattooed air–force guys, of slender Korean rockstar–boys in tailored, open–necked shirts and unbuttoned vests, of drunken party girls in shiny club–wear. People look around at each other, pointing like children, laughing, reveling in weirdness, in silliness. It’s always like this. They’re never totally aware. They never grasp the impossibility of what they see. They can’t. After all of this over, they’ll wake up on busses and subway cars, hung over, remembering only that they passed, for the briefest moment, a pair of night clowns dancing through Itaewon.
It’s worth it. Every night, it’s worth it.
We hold up our hands, Kidu and I, and the partiers get quiet.
We drop our megaphones at our false feet. We won’t need them. We will whisper.
“Now,” I say, and I focus on the salt in my pockets, and the streetlights flicker. “The hour grows late. Or early. The sun will rise, and the night will die. So we have a final trick for you. A farewell present. The grande finale.”
Kidu buzzes his lips. Some people laugh, quietly, appreciatively.
And then we show them how the world will end.
§
Once, lying in bed with Alice, naked and sweating, our backs to one another, I asked her a stupid question.
I said, “Alice?”
She said, “Yes?”
I swallowed hard, trying to force my homesick tears to back down and leave me alone. This was in those days when I could still feel homesick, when I was still someone else. I said, “Why do you like me? What about me keeps you around?”
She sighed and said, “What an incredibly insecure thing to ask.”
§
This is how the world will end:
The fish tanks behind us boil and burn bright white. They hold a spectacular luminescence, an impossible glow that sets every color–catching cone in every eyeball in this narrow corner of Itaewon to blaze with white fire. The fat blue fish in the tanks turn in unison, in synchronized choreography, and they open their mouths. Their lips peel back and their faces wrinkle up like elephant trunks and make them look as though they are scowling. Maybe they scream, or maybe they sing. I don’t know. Kidu doesn’t know. No one here knows. Because whatever they do with their open mouths in those impossible light–tanks, they do it silently.
Let’s paint a tableau. Our little rats, having danced away from Hamlin, a captive audience in sudden awed silence, collected at the mouth of a corridor of bright neon pink whorehouses, masked, standing in a semicircle around a pair of obscenely tall night clowns, night clowns who bow and gesture at the scene between them, the dead–station television–glow of half a dozen angry fish singing the End of the World anthem.
I glance up from my bow, lock eyes with Kidu. Or the clown that is sometimes Kidu. The Kidu of daylight, slender and vain, awkwardly passionate about the stupidest shit, painfully aware of his own oddness, socially crippled by the conflict between his natural openness and the secrets he keeps — that guy is gone. And as for me? I must be gone, too. I’m a memory momentarily recalled by the night clown. My cynicism. My self–doubt. My thinning hair and my gut and my yellow teeth and my shitty alcohol tolerance. Obscured, and finally shut away.
We buzz our lips at each other. We sound like kazoos. Then the tanks crack. And then they shatter.
Then the night drops away, and we are all drowning in nonsense.
This is how the world will end:
It ends in a forest of tentacles rooted deep in slick mucous, waving and twitching and reaching so high that none of us, not even
Kidu says this too.
And now we are surrounded by the grinning idiot face of
Maldduki,
the servant, his eyes set too far apart, his teeth sparse and white in his wide–open mouth, his face imposed over the bodies of slump–shouldered English teachers and tattooed air–force guys, of slender Korean rockstar–boys in tailored, open–necked shirts and unbuttoned vests, of drunken party girls in shiny club–wear. People look around at each other, pointing like children, laughing, reveling in weirdness, in silliness. It’s always like this. They’re never totally aware. They never grasp the impossibility of what they see. They can’t. After all of this over, they’ll wake up on busses and subway cars, hung over, remembering only that they passed, for the briefest moment, a pair of night clowns dancing through Itaewon.
It’s worth it. Every night, it’s worth it.
We hold up our hands, Kidu and I, and the partiers get quiet.
We drop our megaphones at our false feet. We won’t need them. We will whisper.
“Now,” I say, and I focus on the salt in my pockets, and the streetlights flicker. “The hour grows late. Or early. The sun will rise, and the night will die. So we have a final trick for you. A farewell present. The grande finale.”
Kidu buzzes his lips. Some people laugh, quietly, appreciatively.
And then we show them how the world will end.
§
Once, lying in bed with Alice, naked and sweating, our backs to one another, I asked her a stupid question.
I said, “Alice?”
She said, “Yes?”
I swallowed hard, trying to force my homesick tears to back down and leave me alone. This was in those days when I could still feel homesick, when I was still someone else. I said, “Why do you like me? What about me keeps you around?”
She sighed and said, “What an incredibly insecure thing to ask.”
§
This is how the world will end:
The fish tanks behind us boil and burn bright white. They hold a spectacular luminescence, an impossible glow that sets every color–catching cone in every eyeball in this narrow corner of Itaewon to blaze with white fire. The fat blue fish in the tanks turn in unison, in synchronized choreography, and they open their mouths. Their lips peel back and their faces wrinkle up like elephant trunks and make them look as though they are scowling. Maybe they scream, or maybe they sing. I don’t know. Kidu doesn’t know. No one here knows. Because whatever they do with their open mouths in those impossible light–tanks, they do it silently.
Let’s paint a tableau. Our little rats, having danced away from Hamlin, a captive audience in sudden awed silence, collected at the mouth of a corridor of bright neon pink whorehouses, masked, standing in a semicircle around a pair of obscenely tall night clowns, night clowns who bow and gesture at the scene between them, the dead–station television–glow of half a dozen angry fish singing the End of the World anthem.
I glance up from my bow, lock eyes with Kidu. Or the clown that is sometimes Kidu. The Kidu of daylight, slender and vain, awkwardly passionate about the stupidest shit, painfully aware of his own oddness, socially crippled by the conflict between his natural openness and the secrets he keeps — that guy is gone. And as for me? I must be gone, too. I’m a memory momentarily recalled by the night clown. My cynicism. My self–doubt. My thinning hair and my gut and my yellow teeth and my shitty alcohol tolerance. Obscured, and finally shut away.
We buzz our lips at each other. We sound like kazoos. Then the tanks crack. And then they shatter.
Then the night drops away, and we are all drowning in nonsense.
This is how the world will end:
It ends in a forest of tentacles rooted deep in slick mucous, waving and twitching and reaching so high that none of us, not even
Similar Books
