North Station

by Suah Bae

  In my opinion, it’s more appropriate to say that whatever psychological meaning a dream has is more to do with the one who interprets it than the one who dreamt it. And so, interpreting a dream rather than disclosing one would be the more effective way to disclose oneself. Only some time later did I come to understand that, by treating dreams as an amusing pastime, you were largely aiming to provoke. You might also have fostered that light, benign atmosphere as a way of setting me at ease, so that I wouldn’t be afraid to disclose my dream. Wanting, as you did, for me to put it down in the form of an essay, as a full and coherent literary composition rather than some series of fragments.

  The dream was nothing, but at the same time it was also me. Because the dream was my fabrication, my lie. I was aware of that fact and did not conceal it from you. Even while recounting the dream just as it had unfolded, I believed I had prepared an escape route by continually suggesting that it was all a lie, broken free from the control of self-consciousness.

  There is a dream, one that ceaselessly recurs for me, a dream related to water and snakes.

  But to hew to my theory, that dream’s hidden psychology would necessarily lack any concrete connection to either water or snakes. Water or snakes would just be chance symbols, improvised keys that fit no lock. And so, any attempt to attach ourselves to the figures of the dream, to the faces within it, would be like trying to open a door with the wrong key.

  A newspaper ran an interview with my second writer. You sent it to me in the mail. The envelope contained page 17 of the newspaper—plus page 18, inevitably, printed on the rear side—the entirety of which was devoted to the interview, and which you had torn out as a full page and folded into a square. You hadn’t enclosed a note, as far as I could see, or even jotted something down on the newspaper itself.

  Mr. H, what do you generally get your inspiration from when you write?

  Back in the day, my subjects were almost always beautiful women I admired, you know. But now, the meaning of a “subject” has itself paled. It can be a mailbox or trash can. The subjects from which I draw inspiration now are precisely those that ensnare me in confusion . . . that ambush me in an utterly unpredictable fashion. That I can neither prepare for nor calculate in advance. Like dreams . . .

  Like dreams, that part was underlined. Your method of underlining is so very familiar to me. You always applied more strength than necessary, ruthlessly and impetuously, like drawing an arrow. I never knew you to use a pencil. Sometimes you would draw a big circle around one word, sometimes your underlining would be so excessive that I couldn’t make out the sentence itself. And then it would come to an awkward end, breaking off in some crude, incomplete shape as though you had snatched your pen away, having abruptly thought of something else. Next to the underlined passage there would generally be an exclamation mark, triangular in shape, gouged deeply into the paper. The kind of underlining that clearly had decades of egoism behind it.

  At some point I was standing in a long immigration queue. Even though I turned to look in all directions, the only thing to see was the throng of people drifting around distractedly, so many they filled the large entrance hall. You couldn’t even tell where the immigration counter was. A uniformed man (presumably a policeman) had planted himself firmly halfway down the line, standing with arms crossed and legs apart, to prevent everyone rushing forward en masse. In their jodhpur-style trousers, the policemen reminded me more of colonial prison officers or detention camp guards than they did of ordinary policemen. The concrete construction of the wharf entrance hall amplified noise. The extraordinary din of the crowd made me feel as though my head had been shoved inside a clanging steel bell. The people in front of me suddenly began to run. They were running blindly forward, all carrying bags, some holding the hands of little children wearing little backpacks. Without knowing the reason for all this, I too flowed into the crowd. As soon as we turned the corner, the immigration counter became visible. The instant they had that reassurance, ah, now we’re here, those who had been running stopped in their tracks. Once again, policemen were blocking the way in front. We were unable to move any closer to the counter. It was the turn of the group who had slipped through the other gate to approach the counter. Only then did I figure out the control system. Each line had fed in through a different gate, and now they were all rayed out in a semicircle, the people in them staring piercingly at the immigration counter. The policemen were fixing the throng with some truly intimidating looks, while there were those who accepted the system as familiar, and presumably had their reasons. Inside my bag was the notebook containing the first writer’s address, and when I recalled that fact my courage revived. As long as he is still living in this city, if he remembers the past appointment, I would be able to meet him. Perhaps, if I mentioned your name, I might receive some small welcome. He would ask how you were doing, and I would tell him.

  I thought that the city, though it was a city, would have looked suburban for the sake of those foreign aliens who came from rural areas. Befitting an exotic Special District. This was down to the brief, fairy-tale impression I’d gotten from you. I was vaguely expecting that if I came out from the harbor and took the bus, after a few stops I would be in the heart of the city, the square and ruins would appear and, without even knowing the name of the street, I would be able to recognize it at a single glance, with the feeling of ah, here it is. And my first writer was living in some apartment nearby. In that room with a potted red orchid and where the balcony window, hung with a rattan blind, looked down onto the ruins where a bell could often be heard.

  But what you’d told me was very different from what I found. The fact that quite a few years had passed since your visit needed to be taken into consideration. After finally escaping from the harbor area I managed to make it to the bus stop, constantly jostled in the great tide of bodies, and caught a bus with the driver’s seat on the right-hand side. The bus was small and there were many passengers, so I had to stand and cling to the handrail. Each street we passed through was packed with such an enormous mass of people that my eyes widened in shock. I thought of the mass of immigrants I’d seen at the harbor. If the throng that had passed through immigration was at this very moment heading for the narrow sloping alleyways of the old quarter, or the downtown shopping district, or to take souvenir photos in the tiny square with the fountain, this—the entire city looking as though it had been occupied by a swarm of scurrying ants—would have been the natural result. The bus cut through the city center, which was dense with malls and department stores. I had no idea where I needed to get off. More people crowded on at each bus stop, and I was gradually pushed farther to the back. I craned my head with effort to look outside the window, but couldn’t see a single street that might be part of the old district. On top of that, I didn’t know for certain the name of the ruins where my first writer lived.

  A long time ago, and a longer time ago still, two people I knew each came on a separate trip to this city. They sat on the steps of the ruins. What they saw was the last remaining colonial wreckage, a breeze soft as young rice, and in the heart of it a beautiful, young, yellowish-green woman who turned calmly toward them in the light, and the open window of some nameless apartment. A potted red orchid had been placed at that window. At each gust of wind the laundry hanging from the balcony, a white handkerchief, fluttered. All the balconies were ships leaving port. They were fixed there but forever departing, and with no way to return. All were the things of 1999, an awfully long time ago.

  For a long time now I’d been thinking of him as someone incredibly old. According to the common expression, someone “with one foot already in the grave.” But this was an illusion. Not that the first writer was old, but old people like him already have one foot in another world, hear voices from that other world and put them into their writing. Only later, when I was as old as him, did I realize how mistaken I had been in this. The first writer was still among the living. I’d been greatly attached to him for several years,
but could not have described his face in any detail. All I had was a photograph, one that had been taken some twenty years ago and printed in a book. Beyond that, there were only the photographs that accompanied his newspaper interviews, and they all seemed impersonal, sterile. Those images of him with his white hair, wearing black sunglasses and carrying a cane. All that anyone could tell from such a picture was that he was very old, that he wore unattractive, shabbily cut suits, was slightly stooped, and relied on a cane. But it was neither the cane nor the sunglasses that allowed me to recognize him at first glance. What stood out for me was his tempo. Because it was the tempo I’d come to love through reading his work. True writers emanate their writing from their body. And so his tempo is the same as the respiration of what he writes. It is neither faster nor slower than that of other people. At the same time, neither is it not faster nor slower. That was an error shining with self-conceit, quite out of touch with reality. A mistaken assumption made by millions of people, tiny yet persistent. At some point, in a magazine interview, he had answered the question “if you weren’t a writer, what would you be?” with “I would have gone mad and killed myself fifty years ago.” A wavelength that breaks up and becomes broken up, a lunatic wavelength. A tempo that reveals sickness and transcendence at the same time. His sentences, pulse, and tempo, made up of words that have slightly different meanings than they do in the dictionary. And only then did I realize that the small space filled with people was the entrance to the ruins, where I needed to get off. I pushed my way between the other passengers, and rang the bell.

  In his youth, he liked to gamble.

  He wagered everything that could be wagered. After having an appendectomy, he gambled his own appendix, preserved in formaldehyde, and a few days later his family had him dragged off to the psychiatric hospital.

  Even after he became quite well known, there was a time when he was always pressed for money.

  Content found on Wikipedia. He came here on a trip with his girlfriend, then set down roots, never returning to his hometown. More than twenty thousand dollars remained of the debt he’d accrued there, a sizeable amount at that time. Although he’d had no lawsuit taken out against him, even after having built a solid reputation as a writer he was unable to shake the stigma of having fled gambling debts. When he received the Andreas Gryphius Prize at the end of the 1970s, his creditors announced that they would officially write off his debts, happy to be magnanimous if it meant sponsoring a famous writer. The prize money and his success as a writer made it possible for him to settle his debts, but he didn’t, and never went back to his hometown, even after his last remaining creditor, who had at one time been his friend, died some time ago at the age of ninety, without a legal heir.

  “The morning after I’d lost all the money I’d taken to the casino, I was strolling the dew-damp streets of the ruins; I thought I heard the blue-tinged sound of a bell coming from between the martyrs’ graves. Though there was no way of explaining whether I really had heard it, or whether it was only an auditory hallucination produced by the climate peculiar to that place. We both stopped walking at almost the same time. Sighing lightly, she described it as the cry of a greenfinch searching for its mate. Whatever it was, we’d both heard it at the same time, there in that place. Turning to me, she asked ‘what if we lived here . . . ?,’ speaking as though to herself. At that time I had failed at everything I’d attempted, my heart was constantly torn to pieces, and I had no money, so I felt as though each day brought me closer to the brink of disaster. Worse, I would think to myself that even she whom I loved so much might leave my side at any moment. Because she was beautiful, the daughter of a rich family, and young to boot, only just past twenty, while on the other hand I was a flat-broke writer in his forties who had experienced one setback after another. But the moment I heard her say those words, I felt an abrupt, unlooked-for assurance that I was not alone. If I lived here, why, I could have it all, that kind of thought. All meaning both her and writing. At that, a feeling of relief swept over me, filling me up. Fulfillment such as I’d never known . . . it’s been a long time since then, and now, as you can see, my circumstances are very different from what they were. I broke up with her, and married a Mandarin-speaking woman who came here after 1999. My wife writes poetry, you know. My life back then, and the way this place looked then, will sound strange to you as I describe it now. Over the past few years, there’s been a huge increase in the number of mainland tourists who descend upon this place. Though it’s true that I have no plans to leave, I don’t want to say that it became my hometown at some point. At least to me, ‘hometown’ has long been nothing more than a word in a dead language.”

  At some point or other, I stopped loving the first writer. And the second writer became “my writer.” We made plans to go and visit the second writer just as we had with the first. This time you had a good knowledge of the locality where the writer was living. You called it the supreme land on earth; meaning, of course, that the natural environment was beautiful. In the meantime, I was drunk on anticipation. It swelled my body and tongue, made the rain fall endlessly in my dreams. Even while asleep, I had to wipe away the grass-scented rainwater flowing down over my forehead and cheeks.

  One day you asked me what question I would ask the second writer if I did manage to meet him. I said there were two, and that one was about the relationship between writing and ecstasy. Of course not the drug ecstasy, I was referring to the word that derives from the state of religious rapture that can be achieved through meditation. And added that my question had absolutely nothing to do with everything that word generally connotes. You confronted me then, claiming that the state of religious longing that arises from piety—in other words, from the desire to be submissive that human beings have always known, and which can on the surface be something obscene—is also and thus a comic struggle to make a clear division between ekstasis and ecstasy, though in any case both have the same meaning, with the one being the Greek, Latin root of the other. “And one more vague thing that’s impossible to distinguish. I doubt whether your ‘first writer’ and ‘second writer’ are really two different people. I’m starting to think that the reason you so abruptly switched to thirsting for your second writer was that you were trying to overlay him onto the first writer, and thus conceal from yourself the fact of their separate existences. In other words, you selected both the first and second writers on the grounds of their being people you had never met, people with whom, from your individual point of view, your ‘association’ can only be indirect, given that they are both so famous, and who must always be plural, and fatefully far away, thus satisfying the desire for non-specificity; though you keep saying that it has always been your dream to meet them, deep down you fear that meeting them in person would bring to an end the sense of distance and one-sidedness that establish the relationship’s necessary tension. Of course, the reason you need these individually ordinary human beings to be vague and mysterious is that this will amplify and perfect their perceived greatness, a greatness that you deeply long for. Do you remember what your first writer said in one of his interviews? ‘The point in time at which writers like myself acquired a kind of greatness was that at which human beings stopped believing in a god, and came to want a substitute for divinity.’ Most ordinary people would call that nothing more than vague envy. Envy has always had the character of a daydream. And persistent envy is a flight from something inside oneself.” You continued. “To you, then, is it a flight from ecstasy, or an ecstatic flight?” I told you then that you were no better than a porn addict, that you were unable to talk about dreams without making them into something dirty and vulgar. I could see that you were pleased, though too shy to want to show it.

  I spat out what was inside my mouth. The taste was unbearably poisonous and bitter. I didn’t know what it was, but its absolute inedibility was clear. The thing that I’d spat out was quite a large lump of excrement. I was shocked. The lump fell onto the widespread expanse of an enormous p
etal. The balcony was crowded with brilliant-hued flowers, but I kept feeling as though I would vomit . . . I thought. A while ago I put a poster up on the wall right next to my bed. It was a photograph in which the light-and-dark contrast of shade and sunlight was clearly defined. The shade was a black that looked deeper than darkness, thick and viscous, and the part where the sunlight shone was brighter than streaming sugar, and whitened as the real sun’s yellow light fell softly upon it. If I briefly woke up in the middle of the night, my eyes would always drift to that poster. Of course, in that kind of hazy dreamstate in which you haven’t completely woken up, I am never aware of it as a poster. It seems to be something other than the image I know from the daytime. And each time something different. It would generally be connected to something I’d seen in a dream, or an extension of the dream unaltered. If I started awake from a state of dreaming the bright part of the photo glowed a brighter white, jumping out at me as a different being each time. That night it appeared in the form of a luminescent well. The well from which light was streaming stretched slowly up into the air, becoming a huge pair of pale lips that seemed to suck me in. Though afraid, I stretched my hand out toward it. I don’t know why. But when I did, my fingers bumped up against a cold, hard wall. No, it was your wristwatch. A wristwatch with a large, round face. As soon as I took hold of it your wrist elongated like a butterfly’s feeler and before I knew it was pursuing me to the balcony, which was crowded with pots and planter boxes. I hurriedly gathered some petals to cover the disgusting excrement I’d vomited. But it struck me that I’d never be able to cover it completely, that you’d see it and I’d plummet into an abyss of shame and despair . . . There was only one way to avert disaster, nothing else for it but for me to swallow it back inside me. Making my mouth into the shape of a bird’s beak, I bent down toward it . . . Just then, the first writer carried tea into the room adjoining the balcony.