Vaseline Buddha

by Jung Young Moon

  Glaring at the swing and the girl who now had her feet on the swing, soaring up into the sky with her long hair flying prettily in the air, I thought that it would be nice if the swing magically flew high up into the sky to a place of no return with the girl still on it, and thought that it was quite amusing to watch a girl who looked as if she would fly away, while hoping that she would fly away.

  But I went somewhere else, thinking that the woman who was still glancing at me could report me to the police, and suddenly decided to go all the way to the Versailles Palace, for some reason, but it was so boring there that I became sullen and wanted to take revenge on the palace, which had done nothing wrong. A pleasant, overwhelming feeling, which comes at times from a structure taking up enormous space, did not come from the Versailles Palace. Nothing but arrogance could be seen in the Versailles Palace, which looked stiff on the whole and seemed as if it would never look otherwise, which was boring.

  What I thought of while looking at the Versailles Palace, where everything was in perfect balance, were the people of the royal family and the aristocrats who had strolled there in the past in fancy but uncomfortable clothing, and although I had nothing against them, I felt a strong urge to do something outrageous, to pull off such a thing, to make some kind of an unreasonable demand, and it wasn’t so much because I felt that a king of France, who was holding a fan in the brochure on Versailles in my hand, was fanning the urge—I only imagined this, and there was no king of France holding a fan in the brochure, but still, I pictured Louis XVI suddenly opening up his beautiful fan with an exotic painting on it to startle his favorite cat (I wonder what the cat’s name was), and playing around with the cat, for every king, and everyone, must, at times, want to think playful thoughts or play around, and actually think playful thoughts or play around—but because in watching people moving around in groups and flocks of pigeons walking on the ground or flying in the air, which made it seem as if everything were in motion—a baby near me was trying to catch an ant on the ground, with a hand that was suitably small for catching ants, but, being clumsy, he was doing so without success—I felt an urge to direct myself at something static, to make the scene come to a stop, at which moment I happened to see swans in the palace pond, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could make that happen by throwing a stone at one of them and hitting it. Or perhaps I felt an urge to create a small stir in the surface of the pond, which was quietly reflecting a brilliantly sunny and peaceful day, regardless of the swans.

  But because of the people around me, I couldn’t do to the swans what you shouldn’t do to swans. Nevertheless, I ended up bearing somewhat playful, casual malice toward the swans, which wasn’t because I wanted to commit a casual act of evil or atrocity, going along with the popular belief that travel sets you free.

  I had nothing against swans, just as I had nothing against the royal family and the aristocrats of France. If I did have anything against them, I could have done something on that pretext. Still, as I walked the paths through the impeccably manicured garden during my few hours of stay at Versailles, I couldn’t help but be afflicted by the thought that I should do something to the swans. Perhaps the thought came from the ill feeling I’d been harboring toward the French for some time. It seemed to me that they were excessively proud of their culture, to the point of conceit. It was easy, of course, to have your pride of something turn into conceit, which was understandable, but it seemed that the pride of the French seemed to go to such a ridiculous degree as to support the idea that pride was suppose to be ridiculous.

  Some ideas are difficult to shake off because the temptation to surpass them and make them materialize is too great, for they can’t be confined in the mind because they’re ridiculous, and the more ridiculous they are, the larger they become, which was the case for my idea of doing something to the swans.

  And, as I considered the idea, it seemed that the swans that were peacefully swimming or sitting still, indifferent to all the problems and cares of the world, in the palace pond of an old French king, were a symbol of monarchy, and that doing something to the swans would be a useless act of defiance against monarchy. Monarchy has long disappeared, and so it seemed that I was too late in defying it, but it seemed that I was fighting something that didn’t exist, this thing called monarchy, and that doing something to the swans, a symbol of monarchy, was my own lone and belated struggle against monarchy, and I’d be able to taste the joys and sorrows of the struggle by myself.

  It seemed that it could be fun to be arrested by the French police, in the event that I hit a swan in the palace pond of an old French king and made it swoon or die, and have a French newspaper print a small article on a foreigner from the East who incurred the anger of the sensible people of France by hurting or killing, with no reason at all or with a clear objective, one of the elegant swans long beloved by the royal family, the aristocrats, and the people of France. And it seemed that it wouldn’t be so bad to be in the paper for something like that. Perhaps I could be arrested by the police and make false statements to my own disadvantage, or plead the Fifth and say nothing to the end, thinking to myself that what I did was express anger on behalf of all the immigrants and foreign residents who have been persecuted and are still being persecuted in the country of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and then go to a French jail or be deported. Once that occurred to me, I felt strongly tempted to carry it out into action. At that moment I was fully ready to pay the price for a misdeed I hadn’t even yet committed and saw it as a necessary step that criminals must take. But it was something that required great courage, and entailed the very tiresome process of repeated failures until actually hitting a swan and making something happen to it, and it was for that reason that it was difficult for me to carry out in reality. Still, although I was tired and exhausted from the midday heat of summer, I kept on thinking that I should, not submitting to it, in a way, commit an atrocious act of some kind. But it helped to have had my fill of such undesirable thoughts about swans. By having various thoughts about swans, I could keep myself from actually doing something to them. Thinking a lot about something was a great way to keep yourself from carrying your thoughts out into action, although, of course, it depended on the way you thought. By thinking a certain thought, you could think that you’ve carried the thought out into action, or done something more.

  For a long time I watched, from a spot where the garden of Versailles could be seen at one glance, an autistic looking child flailing his arms in anger, and listened to him screaming his head off, thinking that he was expressing my own state of mind, but at the same time, I felt almost intimidated by the sharp noise and went somewhere else, and picked up a stone from the innermost part of the Versailles Palace, where there was almost no one, and threw it at some birds sitting on a nearby tree, and, having done that, I could finally leave the spot; throwing a ball absentmindedly, or aiming at something, was one of the things that made me feel strangely excited when I was a child, and is still one of my secret hobbies. How many stones had I thrown at rivers and trees as a child?

  But the swans of Versailles reminded me of the fact that it wasn’t really true that I didn’t have anything against swans. I recalled the family of swans, consisting of a couple and two cygnets, that lived in a small pond in a little park in a small French town I once stayed in, where I took regular walks. But one day, the cob literally went crazy, and could no longer control its anger, and did not hide the fact. In the end, it bit both of the cygnets to death, after which it became even more vicious and attacked people, and even after people shut it up in a fence it escaped the fence and continued to attack people, and I was one of the victims.

  At the time I chose to flee instead of getting into a ridiculous fight with the swan that suddenly came rushing at me, wounded me slightly by pecking at my buttocks, and again aimed at my weak spot with its huge wings spread out, because it instantly occurred to me that our weapons were much too different—a fight between a swan, which could use nothing
but its beak, and me, who could use both my hands and my feet, would be as ludicrous as a fight between a sea lion and a camel—for our fight to be fair. And what I felt after the somewhat awkward incident with the swan, which disappeared from the park soon after—I don’t know if it was sent somewhere else or was executed—was a somewhat pleasant sensation, which was also the case when a puppy suddenly appeared from an open gate of someone’s house while I was walking in an alley in the town sometime before that, and disappeared back into the gate after lightly biting my leg. Curiously, the puppy had a string with a blue balloon attached to it tied around its neck, and it was possible that the puppy did what it did to me because it was excited or angry over the balloon that a child at that house had hung on it for fun.

  And what made it possible for me to leave France, which had made me break up with my girlfriend, were the dragonflies flying in the air over the Versailles Palace. No, perhaps that wasn’t true, but I made an effort to think that it was. The dragonflies that flew around in confusion as if they owned the sky drained all my energy, and made me feel strangely uncomfortable, and, above all, dizzy. It seemed that my dizziness wouldn’t subside even if I distributed my dizziness all around to the countless dragonflies flying dizzily in the air. I wanted to leave Versailles, and France, in order to get away from the dragonflies, but I couldn’t do so right away, for I could get on a flight home only the day after.

  And as a result, my ordeal in France continued for a little longer. I stayed in a cheap Arab hotel at the foot of the Montmartre Hill, the owner of which looked as if he had walked right out of The Arabian Nights into reality, being big, with a long beard, and wearing a turban on his head, and looked so indefinably Arab, even when you considered the fact that he was Arab, thus looking like a non-Arab who was disguised as an Arab, but anyway, the inside of the hotel was even shabbier than its shabby exterior.

  When night came, I barely managed to fall asleep, being extremely tired and trying to put up with the still-loud noise that came from a nightclub nearby, but soon woke to find, to my surprise, that my body was literally tilted to a side, that the lower part of my body was on the floor, and what was even more surprising was that the bed, too, was tilted along with myself. It was clear that the bed had tilted when one of its legs, temporarily fixed and barely supporting the bed, fell out.

  Lying askew on the bed, watching the glittering light of the neon sign of a bar reflected by the window, and listening to the music to which some might be dancing, I thought that I didn’t want to have any patience in a place that required great patience, and almost losing my patience, I had the vague thought that by making an issue of everything that could turn into an issue, you could stir up and raise an issue, and at the same time, either find or not find a solution to the issue. The various sounds that came in through the window didn’t please me at all, and I thought that I had a good reason for not being pleased. The sounds were actually noises that tormented me, for I had experienced the horrors of noise more than the horrors of anything else, and had never been able to shake off my fear of noise. Several times, I’d felt an intense urge to kill someone all because of noise. One day someone who lived right next door to me played, endlessly and desperately all afternoon, a hymn called “Faith, Hope, and Charity” on a brass wind instrument, either a trumpet or a saxophone, probably practicing for some kind of a church performance, which drove me nearly insane, and I had to, with great effort, keep myself from running over to strangle the person.

  But when the noise from the nightclub subsided after a few hours and I tried to sleep again after temporarily fixing the bed leg, there was something else that kept me from falling asleep. Something seemed to be moving very quietly in the silence, and there was, in fact, something moving very quietly. At first, looking at the thing, hovering over the boundary between the circle of the faint light and the shadow created by the bedside lamp, I thought I was dreaming. But the thing, which appeared in the form of a shadow in the beginning, but soon cast off the shadow and revealed itself, gradually came toward me like some kind of a fluid movement being made on the floor, and the thing, which looked like a mouse in every respect, was none other than a mouse, and it was as real as the mirror hanging on a wall and the reflection of a mouse in the mirror. So there was no mouse that appeared before me, and I had not imagined a mouse, listening to the distinct sound made by mice running around busily or cautiously above the ceiling. (I already feel that I’ve forgotten how and why I’ve come to tell this story, but that won’t really be a problem.)

  I considered going down to the counter and waking up the Arab owner, who could be sound asleep, but then I had the feeling that he would, looking dazed as if he had been sleeping for centuries under a spell and had woken up through another spell, tell me to just go back upstairs and quietly try to sleep, with a scolding look on his face, as if mice in the building were nothing to make a fuss about, as if it were only natural that mice lived with men, as if mice, too, had the right to use the room, as if people were surprised or terrified to see mice because they lacked understanding on the order of the world in which they had to coexist with other animals, so I remained where I was.

  Looking at the mouse that was looking at me, I tried to think of it as something that was nowhere near a mouse, something that was infinitely far from being a mouse, something that wasn’t a mouse, something that wasn’t anything at all, and at last came to think of it as such, but at that moment—the mouse continued to stare at me, patting its face with its forepaws, as if trying to make me acknowledge the fact that it was indeed a mouse—I began to think that it was something close to a mouse, and in the end, I came to think once again that it was a mouse, and nothing other than a mouse. So recalling an anecdote about someone who was delighted to see mice on his bed before he died, I thought that this, in a way, was a delightful thing.

  Before I knew it the mouse had been joined by two others of its kind. They came closer when I stayed still and stepped back when I stirred or made a sound. As if that were how mice dealt with people. The mice, which had a lot of time on their paws, looked as if they planned to stay up the night with me. It didn’t seem like such a bad thing to spend a strange night, staying up with mice. I felt that doing so would require a game we could play together. Depending on the circumstances, I could play around with the mice, or play with them. But although they looked as if they planned to stay up the night with me, they didn’t seem to have prepared a game we could play together while staying up the night, and I didn’t know what we could do together, either.

  Anyway, it occurred to me that with nothing else to eat in the room, there was nothing but my body that the mice could easily choose as their food and be pleased to eat. It was only at that moment I realized that there was a problem between the mice and me that had to be resolved.

  I had no particular grudge, hostility, or fear toward the species of animals called mice, and thought that mice, too, were just doing what they were supposed to do in this world into which they had simply had the misfortune of being born as mice, and thought briefly about the persecution and suffering inflicted upon them by men, and the revenge they took on men, and thought that I could give them a part of my body as an offering of sorts, but I couldn’t allow that while sitting still, watching a part of my toe being torn off. And at that moment I recalled a story I seemed to have heard from someone. In the story, a man wakes up from sleep to find a mouse sitting on his forehead, about to gnaw on his nose. I wasn’t sure if it was a story I had heard from someone, or one that I had imagined myself, but it seemed that something like that might happen if I fell asleep.

  I turned off the light again to think calmly and properly about the things I could do with the mice, but I couldn’t come up with anything suitable. Nevertheless, I acted as if I wouldn’t just sit still, but for some reason, I just sat still. And the mice stayed still, instead of closing the distance between us in the darkness, through which the light from the outside faintly shone, as if they, too, were try
ing to come up with something suitable. I stared intently at the mice that made me nervous, growing more nervous, while at the same time, making the mice nervous as well.

  As I thought about myself and the mice, keeping still in the darkness in somewhat different positions, it occurred to me that the history of the wretched and complete banishment of wild animals, which lost their homes and were driven into literal wilderness, has never been properly dealt with, neither in human history nor animal history, and I felt a kind of guilt about the animals that humans have doggedly driven out. (In this way, I was thinking indirectly about the mice in the darkness which, facing the crisis of banishment, overcame the crisis with wisdom.)

  When I turned the light back on in the room, the mice were still in the same spot. It was plain that they hadn’t learned to fear men. Or they might have learned to forget to fear. Perhaps they were in the process of evolving from a wild animal into a pet. One of them was primping, again with a gesture characteristic of rodents, sitting balanced on its hind legs and rubbing its face with its somewhat daintily small forepaws. I thought, That’s the way mice sit, and the posture they take when they make themselves up, and it’s no different from the way women make themselves up. But the mouse wasn’t making itself up in that posture to win my approval.

  I felt as if the mice were warning me not to fall asleep unguarded, or trying to teach me some sort of humor or sorrow I didn’t know, which only they knew, but I just couldn’t understand what they were trying to say. So I thought, They don’t look like they’re carrying daggers, but they could be carrying daggers, only because the expression, carrying daggers, came to my mind while I was looking at the mice. And that made me see just how ridiculous I was in dealing with the mice.