Vaseline Buddha

by Jung Young Moon

  When I went to the royal palace in Budapest there was snow piled up on the bench there, and there may or may not have been an apple with someone’s teeth marks on it on the bench, but through a story about false teeth I’m placing a teeth-marked apple on the bench there.

  And in a shoebox in my house there’s a set of false teeth, a plaster replica I bought in a souvenir shop on my way back from Budapest. Even now, I take out the replica from time to time and put it on a table by a windowsill and look at it. On this table, there’s a flowerpot with a flower whose name I do not know, and a little statue of an ivory monkey, which is covering its eyes with its hands as if to say that there’s nothing it could bear to see with its eyes open, which is what I like about the monkey statue.

  Now, having written a story about false teeth, I take the replica in my hand and become lost in futuristic thought. All devices installed in human bodies, such as artificial eyes and prosthetic legs, elicit great admiration, probably because in them can be seen a model of the most primitive stage of the mechanical man, which could emerge sometime in the future—they’ll be manufactured in factories instead of being born from the womb, but that, too, could be called a birth. This is the kind of thing I see in people who wear things like false teeth and artificial eyes and prosthetic legs, and I very easily think that they’re people from the future.

  In the meantime (from when to when does meantime here refer to? It’s probably the period between when I began to write this, or when I became lost in thought after that, and this moment. And I could also say that it was when most of the trumpet creepers outside my window had fallen, and the grapes in the fridge had gotten all rotten and moldy, and I found that a lot of juice had come out of the plums I put in a glass jar with sugar, and I had finished translating part one of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which ends with the Ramsays and the visitors to their summer home going to bed at the end of the day, and which I had been working on much longer than usual because I wasn’t feeling well. Anyway, I feel as if during that time, I passed through a space like a river you have to swim across, and was carried in a rough current to a wrong place, completely different from where I’d intended to go at the beginning), I would often slip into a state in which I never went outside and let my thoughts float around, thinking about traveling, or perhaps about certain places. As the range of my movement decreased, and I could barely manage to go on with everyday life, let alone travel, I didn’t become more and more desperate to travel.

  I liked stories of adventurers, such as the story of Marco Polo, who wanted to reach the end of the world of his imagination, and Ibn Battutah, who traveled, endlessly deviating from his original itinerary, led by revelations and strange dreams—if his superhuman will was the light that led him, revelations and dreams seem like clouds that both blocked the light and let it shine through their cracks—but I didn’t enjoy going on adventures. And I liked to have people tell me about the somewhat strange experiences they had while traveling, but didn’t think about writing a travel sketch, for the experiences I had while traveling, which remained in my memory, were things that most people wouldn’t find interesting.

  For almost the first time since I’ve been writing, I think that I might talk about certain trips I took. But even if I do, what I write won’t be an ordinary travel sketch. What I write will probably be as far from an ordinary travel sketch as possible, and not very helpful for many people, or not helpful at all for some people. That would be because essentially, there’s nothing I seek to gain through traveling, and even if there were something, it would be nothing more than little passing impressions or some perceptual experience that would be difficult to explain.

  And although traveling, in a way, is one of the only tolerable things that remain for me, there are many things that make it difficult for me to travel. First, I’m not very good at planning or pushing forward with something, but I can’t very well stand traveling with someone, either.

  In addition, my whims—alternating in my heart are the desire to do something, and the contrary desire to do nothing, which moves faster—and boredom, which follow me doggedly wherever I go, also make it difficult for me to travel, but the biggest reason is that when I consider traveling, the thought, What would I do if I did go somewhere? Nothing’s going to change anyway, would present itself before anything else. In the end, the moment when it becomes possible for me to travel is when, very rarely, the thought, What would I do if I didn’t go anywhere? barely manages to prevail over the thought, What would I do if I did go somewhere? But even when I end up traveling in this way, I often get caught up in a serious quandary as to why I’m traveling. Countless are the times when not long after I’d set out on a trip I witnessed and confirmed my reason for being there, which may not have existed in the first place, quickly vanishing, and I always regretted taking the trip, and at times gave up the trip midway through. And in part, my disposition itself, which makes it possible for me to feel utterly bored by anything and everything, which in a way is an inherent gift, makes it difficult for me to see and experience something new. What I found in traveling in the end was boredom, which wasn’t different from the dreadful boredom found in everyday things, and boredom, indeed, was something that accompanied me wherever I was, and there was nowhere I could rid myself of it.

  Thinking about travel and stories about travel while I was in a state that made it difficult for me to travel anymore, I thought about getting lost in my own story about traveling. Or in other words, making the story continue to deviate—the easiest thing would be to have other stories continue to make their way into the story to get a taste of the difficulty, trouble, and pleasure of getting lost in a story.

  And yet there were moments in which I vaguely picture travel spots, which often included Tuvalu, the island nation that’s slowly sinking and will soon be disappearing into the Pacific Ocean, and Madagascar, the island nation in the Indian Ocean. I know why I think of Tuvalu—it wouldn’t be so bad to move to an island nation that will soon be disappearing into the ocean—but why does Madagascar come to my mind? The only thing I knew about Madagascar was that it broke away from a continent a long time ago and has been separated from the continent for a long time, hence its variety of unusual plants and animals, including all kinds of colorful and marvelous chameleons—which isn’t surprising, considering that half of the chameleon species on earth live in Madagascar. Nevertheless, when someone calls me on the phone and asks how I’m doing, I say that I might be going to Madagascar—even though I know for sure that I won’t—and tell them about the baobab trees there. But I could go to Madagascar, just to see the baobab trees which, according to legend, were placed upside down by a god who got caught in one of them and became infuriated.

  A memory that has to do with Madagascar suddenly comes to my mind. It starts out with a French girl majoring in French literature, whom I came to know while staying in a small town in France, inviting me to her home in the country at the beginning of summer vacation (perhaps here, where I’m about to talk about something that has to do with Madagascar, I could attempt to get lost in a story by making a detour). Several days later I went to the small town where she lived and called her on the phone and she picked up, but she sounded quite cold, although I had no idea what had happened in the meantime, and told me to go back because she didn’t want to see me, without telling me the reason, and I ended up being abandoned in a feeling of abandonment in the town I had arrived at after several hours of train ride. We sort of liked each other from the beginning, which could have been my imagination, but not quite, for if it wasn’t true, she would’ve had no reason to invite me to her home.

  There may have been a good reason for her to do so, or there may have been no such thing as a good reason—there may have been many reasons, or no reason at all—but I was a little angry at first, and after a little while, more puzzled than angry, and then more bewildered than puzzled, but I could accept what happened as something that could happen.

  Whil
e on the train on my way to meet her, I pictured, with some excitement, a romance that could soon be taking place—it was summer, and thinking that there might be a little lake near her town and we might go swimming together (I pictured the beginning of our romance with us swimming in a lake), I thought that it wouldn’t matter that I didn’t bring my swimsuit, that maybe we could go skinny dipping—and the dismay I experienced upon arriving reminded me of the beginning of another somewhat strange—it becomes somewhat strange as I think about it—romance I experienced.

  What you could call my first romantic relationship in college began while I was on my way home one night, taking a somewhat long way around to my house from the bus stop and going toward an alley. A girl was walking ahead of me, and we walked for a while, keeping a fixed distance between us, but sensing that someone was following her, she—I wasn’t following her but felt as if I were, and the moment that I felt that she, too, could feel that way, I felt more certain of it—she quickened her pace and began to run in the end, sensing danger, and ran through the last alley into her house, and as I stood hesitantly in front of her gate, the gate suddenly flew open and a dog came running out. It wasn’t a very large dog, but it came running out so fiercely that I stepped back and had to run in the end, but the dog, faster than I was, easily caught up to me and nipped at my trouser leg, making it impossible for me to go any further. Thus began our relationship, and we ended up seeing each other for some time because of that encounter, and she later told me that she’d felt, as I had, that someone was following her, and came out through the gate with her dog to give that someone a little scare, but the dog, which saw me at that moment, became agitated, and she let go of the leash—she said that she may have let go of the leash without really thinking about it, that she may have just wanted to do so—and that was why the dog came after me. For a long time after that, I would talk about the humiliation the dog inflicted upon me, and for a long time, she would talk about how ridiculous I looked in my humiliation. But I never told her about how once, when we went to a café together, and a dog there came running and went under the table we were sitting at and stayed there with its head stuck between my legs, I stayed still and let it smell the smell it wanted to smell.

  Recalling that episode from long ago, I felt, despite the rejection, the kind of delight you feel when something ridiculous happens to you, so I didn’t go back right away. Curiously, I wanted to further explore the town of the French girl who had made something absurd happen to me. The small town was a typical small French town, and it took less than ten minutes to walk from one end of the town to the other on its main road. I went around every nook and cranny of the town as if everything piqued my curiosity, even though there was nothing to see there.

  That night, after roaming around the small town, I stayed at a little hotel there, and while reading Molloy, one of Beckett’s Trilogy, which I bought and was reading at her recommendation, I thought about the Irish author who died not long after he said, while spending his last hours in a hotel in Paris, that he would die if somebody didn’t change the horrible wallpaper.

  I also thought about something I read in another author’s autobiography, something his aunt said before she passed away, her last words being, “That’s interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water.” She, who was a doctor herself, went to a dinner party where she met Chekhov, a young doctor who later became an author, and she offended him somehow while having a conversation with him on medicine, and made him express his anger toward her in a letter he later wrote.

  That night, in a hotel in a small town in France, I thought for a long time about how you could spend your dying moments. Since dying moments could be important to anyone, or could be considered important, I could think about them for a very long time, and then maybe get a small live octopus and spend my dying moments with it, thinking that the only thing left for me to spend my dying moments with was an octopus, and feeling a certain gratitude toward it for that, and time it well and die at the same time with the octopus, which can’t live long out of water, or die thinking that I’m following the octopus which died before I did. Or I could go buy an octopus a little earlier, and spend my remaining hours, the rest of my life, with it, and die with the realization that there’s no difference whatsoever between the death of the octopus and my own. And I could realize anew, or not anew at all, the fact that death is what eliminates the difference between every living thing, which isn’t anything new, and that everything becomes one before death and extinction, as I share my fate with the octopus. And looking at the octopus, I could mutter, That really strange looking green cat looks like a pineapple somehow, and think, But even as a pineapple, it looks somewhat strange.

  And looking at the octopus, and continuing to think about the octopus, and recalling the black pebbles I think I saw once, glistening with water on a pebbled beach, under a blazing summer sun, and the octopus wriggling among the pebbles, I could think about how the octopus wriggled, how many black pebbles there were on the beach, and how black they glistened, and how, looking at them, I felt a certain joy at the fact that they would glisten with water for a long time to come, perhaps even after mankind disappeared, and how absorbed in the joy I was, and wonder which beach it was where I thought I saw the countless pebbles glistening with water, or if the wet pebbles glistened incredibly under the bright moonlight because it was night, not midday, or if it was pitch dark night and I saw the pebbles glisten momentarily because of the light from a lighthouse, or if I heard, between the sound of foam constantly breaking, the comforting sound that pebbles make as they roll around, crashing somewhat uncomfortably into each other, the sound that makes you feel that your heart is being carelessly caressed, but not uncomfortably, and above all, if I had ever been to such a beach, and think that what I was trying to recall was not an octopus wriggling among pebbles, but black pebbles, glistening with water and reflecting some sort of a light, or the countless beams of light reflected by them, and wonder why I had recalled, of the many things I’d experienced or thought of in my life, black pebbles glistening with water, while at the same time breathing my last breath, feeling pleased that I had recalled them.

  And in the hotel room where I was staying, there was a flowerpot with daffodils in it, and it didn’t seem like a bad idea to leave my will to the daffodils. So I said in the direction of the daffodils, as if leaving some kind of a will, The treadmill left behind by a squirrel that left on a search for a new path must meet more than three unfortunate ends, regardless of who takes it; in any case, the daffodils that were either in full blossom or were budding, had a shape that seemed fit to talk to.

  And it occurred to me that in the act of talking to daffodils there was an element of an aside in a play, which is uttered with the assumption that someone is listening, different from a monologue, which is uttered when no one is listening, even though the daffodils couldn’t talk back, and I may have felt this way because I felt that the flowers, at least, listened to every word of what someone said.

  In any case, daffodils were certainly better than shoes to talk to, feeling as if you were talking to each other, and if there was something else that was decent to talk to, it would be something like a fedora. I thought that I could blurt something out to daffodils before I died, and that the act would bring some kind of a pleasure.

  I also thought about writers who, like Oscar Wilde, couldn’t stand their own countries, and tried to abandon them, such as Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, and I thought about the country in which I was born and raised and still living, and thought that the biggest thing I tried to accomplish in the country was to leave it permanently, even though there wasn’t really another place I wanted to settle in.

  I fell asleep thinking such thoughts, and when I woke up the next morning I was able to think almost nothing at all about the girl I never ended up meeting. But while having breakfast at the restaurant on the third floor of the hotel, resenting the girl, who could have rejected me for a reason she couldn’t tell
me, or explain herself—this because the waitress who brought me my food, who was around the same age as the girl, made me think of her—I saw, through a window whose curtains were drawn, two workmen who were replacing the round red roof tiles on the roof of a house across a little alley that was about the same in height as where I was sitting, and I was pleased beyond words. They worked very slowly, and I ate very slowly as if to keep some kind of a pace with them. And I was able to eat slowly because I was lost in thought, about an anecdote which I wasn’t sure was true or not, about Salvador Dali, who supposedly painted the droopy clock in the painting “The Persistence of Memory” not long after watching, as if in a trance, the camembert cheese that was melting on a dinner table. On the table before me was, in fact, a plate holding two pieces of cheese, which I placed deliberately where the sun was shining to make them melt slowly, and as I watched them melting and changing in shape, not as if I were in a trance but as if I couldn’t take my eyes off them, and tried to think of something other than what Dali must have been thinking of as he watched the camembert cheese melt, or in other words, what he must have been thinking of as he tried to see the camembert cheese before his eyes as something else, or, in other words, tried to see it as something that couldn’t be thought of as something else, and again, in other words, of something other than a droopy clock, but nothing else came to my mind other than a droopy clock.

  But at that moment, I saw a crow that flew over to the roof where the workmen were, and through a process of association, I thought of van Gogh, who killed himself with a gun he claimed to have borrowed to shoot the crows that annoyed him, and suddenly wondered if he didn’t shoot himself, mistaking himself for a crow, and where exactly he killed himself with a gun. He could have done it while painting in his studio, while crows cawed loudly outside, or while standing absently before an easel with a brush in his hand, not being able to even think about painting because of the crows, but I fancied that he did it in a wheat or corn field while a flock of crows watched him. As he died, he could have thought, You win, but this isn’t your or anyone else’s victory, and if you must determine whose victory it is, it’s the victory of the corn field, where countless corn kernels are ripening. And as he slowly bled to death, the crows could have fled for a moment, startled by the gunfire, and then returned and spent the day eating grains, after which other painters could have come to the spot where van Gogh died, and painted the wheat or corn field where crows were flying around, cawing loudly, or sitting.