Vaseline Buddha

by Jung Young Moon

  As I lay in bed looking at the Eiffel Tower, which could be seen only in part through the hotel window, I once again had a vague thought that there are certain scenes, objects, that you can see freely at last when they’re seen only in part, and that there are moments in which a part of something becomes equal to the thing itself, although it doesn’t surpass the thing. And I thought that the reason why I didn’t climb the Eiffel Tower wasn’t because I had lost my nerve at seeing the massive tower, which could be seen only in part through the window at that moment, but which stood in stately glory when seen from just below. What did make me lose my nerve, for no reason, was the statue of a peeing boy I saw in Brussels.

  In the hotel room I felt uncomfortable looking at the Eiffel Tower, which could be seen only in part through the window, and which reminded me that I was in Paris, and at one point, I leapt up from the bed and ran to the window as if in a race, and closed and opened the curtains several times, repeating the act until the scene out the window looked resigned, and, in the end, I closed the window and the curtains completely so that it could no longer be seen. And then I had the sudden thought that a part of the top of the tower that could be seen from my house, one of the symbols of the city in which I lived, could be seen from my bedroom window, and I felt at ease, thinking that I was in a hotel somewhere in the world. I lay still in bed, listening to the sound of quiet footsteps of people passing through the corridor from time to time, which the carpet absorbed, and when the sound faded away and silence fell again, I mumbled some words that sounded like footsteps.

  And at one point I took out the map of downtown Paris I got from the tourist information office, and put a candle flame to the spot I assumed to be the hotel I was staying at and made the small flame spread out in a circle, swallow some areas here and there in downtown Paris, and, in the end, turn the map into ashes, rendering downtown Paris void. And looking at the faint circle of light, created by the candle flame that had set all of Paris ablaze, I came up with the expression “corrupt light.” And I thought of Kafka, who died a terribly painful death due to laryngeal tuberculosis at a sanitarium in Austria—for at the time I was on the last page of a thick compilation of his letters—and pictured myself pacing around the sanitarium courtyard for a moment, looking at the window of the room where Kafka must be dying, and at one point the sanitarium overlapped with the Parisian hotel in which I was staying, for I was coughing severely, like a tuberculosis patient, from a cold I’d caught earlier.

  Looking at the ordinary wallpaper in the hotel room in which I was staying, I briefly considered death in a hotel room in a foreign land, which I’d always considered, and how a hotel room was a good place in which to have such a thought. But taking my own life still seemed premature, and I thought about suicide only in a vague and faint way.

  And I recalled the time several years earlier when I went to France and stayed in a small town with no clear purpose or reason, in order to leave the country where I was born and lived in because I couldn’t stand almost anything about it.

  When I thought of the small town, someone always came to my mind before anything else. In a little square in that French town I stayed in there was a statue of someone who was a scientist as well as a cyclist, and a beggar who was the spitting image of Karl Marx always sat next to it at a certain hour. But the beggar, at whose side was a bag which looked as if it would contain The Communist Manifesto, didn’t do anything at all, as if he had forgotten his duty as a beggar, or as if he were doing his duty as a beggar. I’d never seen a beggar who didn’t do anything, not to that extent. It seemed that the man, who looked questionable as a beggar, carried out his routine activities such as eating or receiving alms in other places, and his spot next to the statue seemed to be a place he visited in order to not do anything. No, it’s not true that he didn’t do anything at all. He did one thing, which was to take out some kind of a candy from his pocket at a certain time of the day, take off the plastic wrapping and put the candy in his mouth, and suck on it quietly like someone lost in meditation, and when he did, it seemed as if the present world, whose ideals haven’t been realized, were quietly, sweetly crumbling away. No, this isn’t true. He didn’t do anything at all, not even suck on a candy. It was my imagination that put a candy in his mouth. That didn’t suit him. He was better off doing nothing, which, fortunately, was what he was doing. In that town, where I saw a dolphin tube float down the river one winter, or which I left, thinking I saw a dolphin tube floating down the river, I dated a French woman for several months, and we would drive to nearby castles in her little car, and take walks in the woods, or hold each other in the woods, smelling the grass and talking, or taking a nap. One day, awake from one of those naps in the woods, I saw her, still in her sleep, and suddenly felt as if my life were happening out of my hands, which felt pleasant beyond description, which made me smile, and she, awake now, asked me the why I was smiling. When I didn’t tell her the reason, she didn’t pry, and I said it would be nice if we could come like this more often and take naps, and we did so several more times. And I would go see her on the bicycle she lent me, and the handlebars of the old bicycle were slightly turned to the left, so in order to go in a straight line, I had to mentally turn them slightly to the right, and do so in reality. Anyway, one day, I found that the bicycle, which I’d placed in a park, was gone. Someone had brutally severed the chain and taken the bicycle. We didn’t go around looking for the lost bicycle, but for several days after that whenever we sat in cafes we would stare fixedly at passing bicycles, and she said that her bicycle was easily recognizable. I felt as if she were saying that she could recognize her own baby, so I felt it imperative that we find the bicycle. But finding a lost bicycle was harder than finding a lost baby, and we never did find the bicycle. And we seriously discussed stealing someone’s bicycle, but we didn’t actually commit theft. Still, we kept our eyes on bicycles when we took walks, and all the bicycles were brutally chained up. I don’t remember much else about her, but I do remember that thanks to her I learned French very quickly, and that she made me feel awkward by crying when I left the city. I awkwardly took her hand and tried to respond in a way you should in front of someone crying, but it wasn’t easy. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice that I felt awkward, because she was busy crying. With that, I could sum up what happened between us. (It may be wrong to talk about your relationship with someone, short or long, and furthermore, about someone’s life, in such a way, but everything can be summed up in a few sentences.)

  In the end, I came out of the hotel, and before leaving Paris, went again, for some reason, to the Eiffel Tower area that I’d vowed never to go near again and sat with my back to the tower on a bench from which the tower could be seen in its entirety, and, seeing the person sitting on the bench next to mine staring off into space, I, too, stared off into the space into which he was staring, but then he suddenly turned away his gaze, as if angry at discovering that someone was looking at something he alone was looking at, something that he alone should look at—I couldn’t understand the reason at all, for the space into which he was staring was an exceedingly blue sky with no clouds at all, and there being no signs of weather change, it seemed that the space, in which there was nothing but the blue sky, wouldn’t change at all no matter how he stared at it, no matter how much he stared at it—and glared at me, which made me realize that space, which I thought was for everyone, and something at which anyone could look at any time, wasn’t something at which you could look thoughtlessly at anytime, that there was something in space that people shouldn’t look at together. No, I think it was more because I had a hangover and was quite red in the face. But looking with such disapproval at someone who was red in the face because of a hangover was something that no human should do. I turned my gaze to something else, and saw a black dog. It would be very big when full grown, but it was still small. The dog didn’t yet possess the dignity that dogs of that breed have when full grown. In a little while a white dog—it was a kind
that doesn’t grow to be very big, and was small, although it was already an adult dog—appeared, and the two felt each other out for a moment, then sniffed at each other and barked. The dogs seemed to be communicating perfectly with each other. Then in a moment, the white dog went off somewhere else, and the black dog, left alone, went to a flowerbed nearby and ran around among the flowers playfully, wantonly. The dog, like all dogs, demonstrated that dogs want to run around every chance they get, and never miss an opportunity to do so. At that moment it suddenly occurred to me that one night, while spending the night with the woman I’d broken up with, I might have strangled her at one point when it seemed as if I would pass out. I was drunk, and extremely tired, and it seemed that I unwittingly strangled her with my hands, then came to myself when it looked as if she had stopped breathing and let go, and woke her up by slapping her cheeks several times. But it wasn’t clear if such a thing had actually happened.

  In the flowerbed, there were roses and other pretty flowers of various colors, and I casually hoped in secret that the dog would trample on the flowers even while being pricked by their thorns, as if it couldn’t help itself, and thoroughly ruin the flowerbed. But the dog was careful in its own way not to ruin the flowers, although it didn’t look as if it would be, and wasn’t injured by the thorns hidden by the trees, either.

  Thinking about how many different breeds dogs and cats have developed into, and how nice it would be if someday humans would do so as well, I thought again about the woman I’d broken up with, and thought that it was for the good of both of us that we broke up, and pictured the day when humans would have evolved into as many different breeds as there are of dogs and cats, and thought, as to the breakup, that we had merely found one of the countless reasons for which we should break up. Perhaps the reason why we broke up was because I couldn’t find a reason to keep seeing her, and I thought such a reason was sufficient for a breakup. And I thought that everything that can happen in the world only happens because it can, that what happens is just that something among the things that can’t happen loses its possibility of not happening—everything that has happened up to this point could have not happened—that if there is a purpose to the world, it’s to make everything that can happen, happen. And I thought, as if coming to a conclusion, that my mind was made up while I was looking at a part of the massive steel structure called the Eiffel Tower out the window, and that I, having always pictured the end of my relationship with someone, had always pictured where and how my relationship with her would come to an end. And it seemed that the fact that I thought about her for a moment told me nothing as to if I still had feelings for her, or if the opposite were true, and that’s what I believed.

  Looking at the Eiffel Tower, I tried to savor the pleasure a breakup brings—in the same way I sought some pleasure in returning home from a trip, looking at the empty house with no one there, and feeling that I was back to my original self, or in other words, my lone self—but without success.

  I had already had a chance to break up with her before that. Late one night when we were in the city where we lived, we were sitting in a cafe, and she was telling me that she was breaking up with me. I’d already felt earlier that something between us had come to an end, and I wondered why the feeling that something had come to an end always came to me before something actually came to an end, and I quietly listened to her, thinking that perhaps it was because I always had in me a sense of anticipation for the end of something. Anyway, while it was raining, and while she was talking, a man who had been passing by outside the window came to a stop and looked at the window, and it turned out that he was someone I knew. I waved lightly at him when she stopped talking for a moment and looked elsewhere, but he didn’t seem to see us inside. He went off somewhere else after a little while, staggering as if drunk, but when I looked out the window a moment later, he was once again passing in front of it. For several minutes even after that, he kept going back and forth as if lost, or for some other reason, like an illusion, and I had a hard time focusing on what she was saying because of him, and accepting what was happening to me as something that was actually happening to me, and although it wasn’t necessarily because of that, we couldn’t break up that night.

  I recalled some memories I had of her, for instance, how we picked acacia flowers together every spring and made liquor with them, and how she was always more daring than I was in every way, and how we talked about the fact that we didn’t have a single picture of one of us sitting and the other lying with his or her head on the other’s leg, against the backdrop of a landscape, and how I thought that we may never end up having a picture like that, although one of us said that he or she wanted a picture like that, and I felt a little sad thinking about the process and the results involved in meeting and breaking up with someone, in which the person seems indispensable at times when you’re seeing each other, but becomes irrelevant after you break up, and in the end, becomes almost completely removed from your mind, as if the person had never existed, but the sadness, too, like the joy that seems insufficient to be called joy even when I do feel joy, seemed insufficient to be called sadness, and I didn’t feel anything more special than that. One of my biggest problems was that I couldn’t feel any emotion fully. I must have come across something beautiful once, and felt that it was beautiful, if only in that moment, there must have been such a moment, but I didn’t have a clear memory of such a moment.

  Looking at the Eiffel Tower I’d tried so hard not to see, I felt a sort of confidence rise in me, confidence that I’d fail in all my future relationships as well, although I didn’t know where the confidence came from, and thought that I could put a closure to our relationship by writing something about how I met and broke up with her, perhaps a novel about a relationship that turned into a failure, or never turned into a romantic relationship—thinking that sometimes, all you can do about something that’s come to an end is talk about it—and felt somewhat tempted to write a love story, but writing such a thing seemed a very unseemly thing to do. Anyway, a little while after we broke up, I saw her, no, someone who looked very much like her, walking side by side on the street with a man, holding hands, looking affectionate, and realized that I’d never walked with her like that, holding hands—I always felt awkward walking with a woman, holding hands, and offered my hand grudgingly as if I were about to shake off her hand—and thought that the fact could explain one aspect of my romantic relationships, and that perhaps I could write a story about that, but again I gave up.

  I was deeply disappointed by the game the dog was playing, and in the end got up from the bench, went to a nearby park, and sat on an empty swing, picturing the playground near my house that I visited from time to time, and thought that I might be able to go home with a happy heart if I saw girls jumping ropes, or a dog being dragged away by someone against its will, past children running around columns of water spurting from the ground—once I went somewhere and saw someone climb an artificial rock wall in a park in the city and sincerely hoped that he would fall in the middle of climbing, and could end my journey and come home when, in the end, he fell to the ground—but there were no such sights to be seen. There were, however, children running around between columns of water spurting straight up in a nearby fountain, but the sight, which ordinarily may have drawn a different response from me, made me feel indifferent at that moment. But I was pleased to see instead a girl sitting on a bench eating ice cream. The ice cream in her hand was melting and trickling down her hand, and it was always pleasant to see a child licking melting ice cream. Was it because the ice cream was trickling down a child’s hand? Or did ice cream trickling down any hand bring me pleasure? Or did the pleasure come from my idea of ice cream melting in hand? I can’t be sure.

  And by then I was feeling somewhat ridiculously good after passing a period of extreme bitterness resulting from the breakup, so I tried to make my somewhat ridiculously good mood ridiculously better, or keep it up, at least, but it wasn’t easy, and there was
nothing around me that responded to my effort.

  A Caucasian man who looked somewhat slow was sitting on a bench next to me, and I saw that he was plucking his nose hair very subtly, in his own way, as if he weren’t doing such a thing as plucking nose hair, as if he were concerned with what people around him thought, although he didn’t seem concerned, and what he was doing looked so subtle yet naïve that it made those who were watching him feel extremely frustrated. He somehow managed to pluck a few strands of his nose hair, and although it was quite understandable that he was concerned about not having plucked the rest, it was very unseemly that he was plucking his nose hair like that, while pretending not to, in a public place. He could have gone someplace without people and plucked the rest of his nose hair as much as he wished, to his heart’s content, but he didn’t. Plucking your nose hair in a public place like that should be legally banned, just as it’s legally banned to name or call a pig Napoleon in France. Seeing someone plucking his nose hair could make you aware of your own nose hair, even if it didn’t make you pluck your nose hair, which could stop your train of thought.

  Anyway, at that moment, a woman with long blond hair, who had brought with her a girl with long blond hair, looked with disapproval at this man from the East, who looked dazed and yet was glaring threateningly at everything in his sight for no apparent reason, taking up the swing that was for her blond girl—there was another swing next to me, but it was broken—and glared at me, waiting for me to get off the swing. Her gaze wasn’t insufferable, but in the end, I got off the swing and went off to a side. I was used to quietly making way or sidestepping for people who wanted a certain spot in a place.