I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

by Young-Ha Kim

  The noise of something falling wrenches C from his dream. He's still in the dark car. He's suddenly unbearably cold, probably because his sweat is drying in the cold. He hears the noise again, a branch breaking. He opens the window and looks outside, hearing another thud. Snow, piled on a branch, is falling on the car.

  "Aren't you cold?" C asks Judith.

  "..."

  "Let's go."

  "..."

  No answer. C feels around the backseat. He doesn't find anything. He forces the car door open, pushing against the piles of snow. He opens the trunk and takes out a flashlight. It looks like the back door has been opened. He sees a winding path through the snow, which comes up to his thighs.

  "Se-yeon!" he yells, and starts following the footprints. The path is surprisingly long; he can't see the end. He comes back to the car, shuts the trunk, and gathers his things. He locks the car because he doesn't know how far she's gone.

  The wind stings C's eyes. The snowstorm, although it has lightened a bit, continues to blind him. C wades through the snow, the flashlight in one hand, his bag and her purse in the other. It seems to take him a full minute to go forward just ten meters. How did she get through all this snow? He starts to get annoyed. The memory of the last time they had sex and the scenes in his dream float in front of his eyes, jumbled together. But only for a moment. His efforts at fighting through the snow have left him covered in sweat, which drips into his eyes. How far did she go? He starts to tire, and tells himself he doesn't care where she is. She's like mildew that has invaded his life. She's the kind of mold that wouldn't have appeared if he lived austerely, the kind that breeds only in the dark, neglected corners of a building. She has infected his life, not caring what he wants. He hates himself for trudging through the snow looking for a woman who was having sex with his brother on the day their mother was buried. Seriously, I don't want to know where she is and whether she's dead or alive. Still, even as he thinks this, he advances, putting one foot in front of the other.

  He sees an amber glow far away. The light comes toward him, following the road. It's a snowplow. He signals with his flashlight to stop it.

  "Did you see a woman walk by?" C asks the workers.

  "A woman with long hair?"

  "Yeah, that's her."

  The workers point behind them, where they came from. "She was riding a snowplow going to Wontong."

  "Where are you guys headed?"

  "We're going toward Inner Mount Seorak, so it's the opposite way."

  He isn't sure if the woman going the other way is Judith, but he clambers on top of the snowplow. Twenty minutes later, he gets off in front of a restaurant attached to a gas station and stays overnight. When he wakes up the next morning, most of the snow has been cleared from the roads. Gathering his things, he sees her purse lying in a corner of the room. He takes out her identification card from her wallet. She was born on January 21, 1975, in Jumunjin, in Myeongju County, Gangwon Province.

  Back in Seoul, C never sees Judith again. He sometimes thinks about her, the woman who, on her birthday, disappeared into the snow, going in the opposite direction of her hometown. He lives his life without ever again seeing the woman who sucked on Chupa Chups during sex. And he sees the North Pole more and more often in his dreams. He always shoots the polar bear against the backdrop of the sun hanging low, and the bear always turns into K's corpse. Only now Judith laughs. And so each day passes. And nothing has changed.

  Part III

  Evian

  I sleep very late. I commit suicide at 65%. My life is very cheap, it's only 30% of life for me. My life has 30% of life. It lacks arms, strings, and a few buttons. 5% is devoted to a state of semi-lucid stupor accompanied by anemic crackling. This 5% is called DADA. So life is cheap. Death is a bit more expensive. But life is charming and death is equally charming.

  —Tristan Tzara,

  "How I Became Charming, Likeable and Delightful"

  I'M ALMOST DONE EDITING THE NOVEL. I'll be able to finish it in a week at the latest. I turn off the computer and step out onto the balcony to breathe in the change in season. It's already spring. I have more clients this time of year—because people are afraid of spring, not because they're reacting to the tedium of winter. It's not unusual to be depressed in winter, but with the advent of spring, people are expected to perk up. This expectation makes my clients feel more isolated. Everyone is imprisoned during winter; only those who can't help but be trapped are imprisoned in spring.

  I remember once seeing a farmer's squat shanty, roofed with shingles, deep in the mountains. The house was particularly memorable because it contained everything under one roof: animal pens, kitchen, living area, heating system, and a storage room for grains. Because of its confined structure, the smoke coming from the furnace couldn't easily escape the house. The smoke leaked out only after going through the chimney and heating the interior of the house. The snow, the first of which fell in October, kept the family inside. But as soon as it started to melt, all the farmers would rush out of their shingled houses and set fire to the mountain greenery to clear the land, like they were taking part in a festival. The crackling flames would shimmer between the valleys. But nowadays no one can hold such a festival. You can't burn up the land just because the dull winter has passed. Now people resort to setting themselves on fire.

  I met Judith in the spring. It was April; the sun was warm, but there was a nip in the wind. That day, I was watching a movie in a theater on Daehak Street. Three characters were in the movie—two men and a woman. One man is the woman's relative as well as the other man's friend. The woman works at a burger joint, and the two men are unemployed. The three rent a car with money they won gambling and go on a trip. The movie was Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise. Not once do we see the main characters close up. The moviegoers get bored because they can't really see the actors' expressions, and the actors themselves appear to be just as bored. The only escape in their dull lives is gambling or going on trips. Even if they win money by gambling, they then gamble it away again. Even when they go on trips, nothing is ever different. "This is the lake," the woman says in Cleveland, but the lake is indistinguishable: frozen over in a blizzard. You can't see a thing. One of the men grumbles that nothing's changed even though they had come this far. In this movie, there aren't even any of the romance or sex scenes that proliferate in modern cinema. I'm sure the audience wouldn't notice if you swapped the last scene of the movie with the first.

  Not surprisingly, only three people were in the movie theater that day. A woman sat three rows in front of me. It was Judith. She dozed off throughout the movie but didn't leave the theater. She didn't even get up after the movie was over. So I watched the movie twice. When the woman said for the second time, "This is the lake," Judith got up from her seat, stumbling a little. A sudden clatter reverberated in the theater; she must have stepped on an empty can. I followed her out. It was just after ten. She walked slowly toward Marronniers Park, bumping into people twice. She went into a phone booth, picked up the receiver, but then put it down.

  She walked on for a long time, finally settling down at an outdoor concert in Marronniers Park. Two men with acoustic guitars were singing onstage.

  "You come to some place new, and everything looks just the same, right?" I asked, sitting down next to her.

  "Yeah," she replied, continuing to gaze at the singers. "Hey," she said, taking out a cigarette.

  "Yes?"

  "Have you ever wanted to go to the North Pole?" She blew out white smoke.

  "You want to go to the North Pole?"

  "I went there for a few days once," she said, giggling. "It was really nice. The whole world was covered in white snow. If you stare at the snow for a long time, everything turns dark. Did you know the sunrise is different there? It rises from the sky and falls back into the sky. During winter, it comes up from below your feet and sinks down into the ground. Isn't that amazing?" She looked at me for the first time.

  I nodded,
agreeing with her. "People say that nobody dies in the North Pole. I know someone who's been there. When she was young she went on a cruise in the Arctic Ocean with her husband, but the ship struck a rock and her husband fell into the ocean and disappeared. In her sixties, she went back on a cruise ship touring the Arctic Ocean, probably to remember her late husband. She was on the deck, looking out to sea, when she saw an ice floe coming from a distance. Her husband was lying on it. When she saw him close up, she jumped into the water."

  "Why?"

  "He was still in his twenties, frozen in time, and she had gotten old."

  She nodded. "That makes sense. I understand how she felt."

  Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic. I learned at a very young age that it was easier to make up stories to make a point. I enjoy creating stories. The world is filled with fiction anyway.

  We watched the guitarists sing their last song, pack up their guitars and mics, and leave. I stood up and handed her my business card.

  "Give me a call if you want to tell someone that you don't want to talk."

  She looked down at the card. "What if I don't even feel like saying that I don't want to talk?"

  "Is that how you feel now?"

  "I don't feel that apathetic. But I think I will soon." She laughed for the first time. It was crumbly like days-old snow.

  "Follow me," I ordered, grabbing her hand and pulling her up. She walked beside me without a word. She sank into the passenger seat of my car. When I turned on the engine, we heard Chet Baker's low, gravelly voice.

  "Do you know who this is?" I asked.

  With difficulty, she slowly shook her head. "I don't know who it is but he makes me feel like the core of the earth is sucking my body in, like I'm going to disappear."

  "It's Chet Baker, a jazz musician. He didn't lead a very illustrious life. He was famous for some time, but he won't go down in jazz history. He didn't sing that well and he wasn't the greatest trumpeter. He only played to pay for his drug habit in the sixties."

  "Then why do you have his CD?"

  "I came across this album cover in a record store. It was a picture of this old, scruffy, unshaven man, his hair slicked back, showing all of his wrinkles. A black-and-white photo reveals a person's shadows. You can understand someone's life from each wrinkle. But his eyes had caught the flash of the camera and were sparkling, and they were so clear. I knew as soon as I saw that picture that this guy was ready to die."

  "How could you tell?"

  "His eyes were shining with a final hope. Some things can't be hidden even by fatigue-soaked wrinkles. That kind of hope is for rest, not for life."

  The second track of the CD came on. It was Baker's famous "My Funny Valentine." The title indicates a light theme, but his voice is low and sorrowful. The song isn't sweet or cheap. It reveals the maturity of a man who has suffered, the generosity of a man who has transcended greed.

  "This is a live album of his final concert. Two weeks later he jumped out of his hotel window," I explained.

  "Why did he jump?"

  "The Amsterdam police concluded it was an accident. But I don't think it was. The more I listen to this album and look at his picture on the cover, the more I think he chose to go."

  "Did he leave a will?" she wondered.

  "No, but I think this album was like his will, his last words. Some people communicate through writing, but others through their music. I think it's significant that it was recorded at a concert, not in a studio. The texture is different. Don't you think there's more feeling involved if you perform your last song in front of an audience instead of playing it in a sterile studio for some unknown future listener?"

  "I guess you're right."

  I drove her home. She lived in a rental apartment in the suburbs. I drank coffee in her living room, surrounded by cheap metal furniture and a fourteen-inch TV. She sat by me with a Chupa Chups in her mouth. And when dawn neared, Judith decided to be my client. Three days later, I executed the contract. I boarded a plane to Vienna with her story nestled in my heart.

  Vienna is a charming city, with ideas and people trickling through to other places. Ideas like religious reform, Expressionism, and Nazism spread to the rest of the world through this city. Now they call it the gateway between Eastern and Western Europe. Most travelers get visas in Vienna to go to the Czech Republic and Hungary. In Vienna, Hitler aspired to be an artist. "If fate didn't choose me to be the Führer, I would have become Michelangelo," Hitler announced confidently. Mozart also studied in Vienna. Hitler showed a knack for fascism and mob mentality while Mozart earned fame as a composer and performer. Both held an innate talent for captivating the public. But it was easy to move people back in those days, like the way Anne Frank's diary touched a nerve because of the Holocaust. But now it isn't so easy. Death has become pornographic, shown live on TV. Massacres, which used to be unearthed through rumor, are quickly reported in detail via satellite.

  Many different things coexist in Vienna. The traces of the Roman Empire, Nazi relics, and the glory of the House of Hapsburg are all jumbled together. Many people treat this small neutral country's capital as a stopping place, a place to go through on their way to elsewhere. In Vienna, I feel like I could sleep with anyone. I imagine meeting someone, going to a musical like The Phantom of the Opera, drinking a glass of beer, having sex on a creaky bed in a pension nearby, and in the morning, each boarding trains headed opposite directions.

  I went to Vienna because of my client, Judith. As soon as I carried out my contract, I felt an urge to go to the homeland of Gustav Klimt, who painted the historical Judith. Klimt, who painted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an aesthete, a typical fin de siècle artist. He created exuberant paintings. His Judith depicted the peak of decadence, enhanced by its background of decorative, dazzling patterns.

  "He called me Judith," Judith told me.

  "Why?"

  "He said I looked like the Judith drawn by some artist."

  That final night with Judith, I understood who that "some artist" was. "It's probably Gustav Klimt."

  Inspired by the Bible, countless artists drew Judith, but she resembled Klimt's Judith, no one else's.

  "It doesn't matter who the artist is. But I'm glad I know his name, now. I'm sure I'll forget it, though." Judith laughed.

  To see Klimt's Judith, I went to the Museum of Applied Arts in Belvedere Palace. The palace appeared in the distance as the tram looped downtown and entered the southern part of the city. I entered the museum slowly. It was crowded with children on a field trip and tourists sweeping the scene with camcorders. The Japanese cameras that used to proliferate in these places have almost all been replaced by camcorders. Like a magic lamp, the camcorder swallows the palace and sucks in the pond in front. In these tourists' minds, the Belvedere is reduced into an unfocused square image, cast with a bluish tint. The present is re-created to immortalize memories. It's pathetic, but that's human tendency now.

  Fortunately, most people were clustered around Klimt's The Kiss. Judith drew far fewer viewers. Her dark hair is unrealistically big and puffy. Behind her, the gold patterns turn the ornate painting even more extravagant. And her eyes. Her cheeks are flushed, but her eyes are downcast, perhaps open, perhaps closed. She seems to be welcoming the sensation right before orgasm, reveling in that moment. Her lips are slightly parted, relaxed. Her revealed breast is tinted blue. That bluish color, subtly, oppressively radiating, is the energy of death. Judith looks dead, though she is too sensual to be a corpse (or maybe that makes her more attractive). Her left hand holds up the head of Holofernes, whom she has beheaded. The black-haired man is dead, his eyes closed.

  Judith killed Holofernes, an enemy leader, after seducing him. But it isn't clear if she still felt traces of desire after his death or if she had reached orgasm at the exact moment of his decapitation.

  I was completely captivated by this painting when a woman stepped in front of me. S
he was Asian, short, and her straight hair was cropped into a bob. She was blocking the bottom of the painting. I moved to the side. Her eyes and face suggested Southeast Asian ancestry. At that point, a guided tour group streamed in to stand in front of Judith, so I left the room. I was parched. My client Judith and Klimt's Judith danced in front of my eyes and made me dizzy. I went down to the café in the basement and ordered an Evian and a salade aux lardons. The Evian, collected in the Alps, tasted a little strong compared to Korean water. But it was lucky that I was able to get an Evian. I often have to settle for carbonated water in Europe.

  Once, I went to Prague with a Dutch woman I met traveling. Before disappearing into our respective hotel rooms, we agreed to have tea in the downstairs lounge the next morning. We got to the lounge around eleven. It was a fancy establishment, with a string quartet and a cover. I was shocked when the Dutch woman casually ordered mineral water at a high-class place like that.

  Around the time I finished my salad, the Southeast Asian woman entered the café. She bought a Coke and two croissants, and ate slowly. I looked her over carefully. I was sure there had to be something about her that resembled Judith, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

  When she finished eating, she flipped through the museum viewing guide she'd purchased. Her gaze didn't leave Klimt's works. I initiated conversation. Vienna, especially in a Viennese art museum, is a good place to chat up strangers.