North Station

by Suah Bae

  We were in the middle of a dark road. It was a backstreet, narrow enough to be called an alleyway; a row of houses with their lights off stood like high and mighty giants, lining the long, shallow curve of the pavement, and their black windows all faced outward, slightly damp from the light rain that was falling ceaselessly; now and then the raindrops were caught in the beams from passing taxis and pounced at our faces like squalling insects, and I reflexively raised my arm to shield myself, only to remember even as I did so that we were sitting inside a taxi, though in an extremely precarious situation. It strikes me that the road that curved and twisted here and there through the alleys was one of the darkest and narrowest I have encountered in this city. On top of the night being cold and bleak, the paved street was slippery, and even from inside the taxi I was all too well aware of this state of affairs; each time we inched forward it was as though the damp, black, high walls were themselves the ones approaching, looming at us as they rounded the corner, which made me think that on such a night, even if a thirty-meter-high tower were to pierce through the layers of darkness and appear right in front of our eyes, there would be absolutely no way for us to recognize it. Small shadows of a deep and wavering blue appeared briefly beyond the curve of that corner before disappearing; they had to be the lights of cars passing along a different street that leads on to an intersection. We had already circled the same address several times, having been informed that the car’s GPS could provide no further information. According to an extremely peculiar memory I had of that place, one which has remained with me until today, a group of people passed by who, in spite of the night having been bitterly cold, were wearing thin, sleeveless coats, and one woman among them was wearing the white tunic of a goddess, like at the time of the spring festival, and carrying a bouquet of yellow flowers, and they all went laughing inside some apartment building; since the building’s front door was a huge pane of cold glass, I was able to see, through the gap of the open door that was there just for the brief moment of them stepping inside, the black muzzle of a viciously barking dog. I recall that those people had moved as though kicking the earth with their feet. As though they were birds. Though I opened the window and stuck my head out to try and get a proper look at the shape of their shoes, the individual puddles strewn across the pavement had pooled into the single body of the night, and the swamp-thick darkness sunk down close to the ground was reflected still more blackly on the surface of the puddles, meaning nothing was visible at the bottom of this world, like a stage wreathed in black smoke so that the actors’ feet cannot be seen poking out from beneath their cloaks. Like birds scratching for feed in the frozen ground, people who had walked with light leaping steps, though the shape of their shoes was not visible. As though they were birds.

  For god’s sake, will you call the Center or not? the model-plane collector was urging the driver again. The driver made a gesture of helplessness and, letting out an exaggerated sigh, attempted to connect with the Center; his disobedient attitude further upset the collector. In Performers, there are two hundred twenty-five fool-performers, from all eras; that, for whatever reason, very few of these are women—I mean, women couldn’t be recorded in history even as performers or fools?—attracted the attention of feminist critics, the model-plane collector told me while the driver was telephoning the Center. This book of over a thousand pages, which has the ironic subtitle “small-scale performerology for beginners,” is a record not only of the truly great performers, but also of the performativeness and foolish aspects of those commonly remembered as heroes or wise men, and would be an entertaining read for anyone interested in strange tales and far-fetched episodes, the more obscure corners of history; there, the writer’s witty way with words and extensive, encyclopedic knowledge, albeit knowledge displayed as more of a miscellany, can be enjoyed together, the model-plane collector said. The driver repeated the name “Mouson” to the Center and asked for the address, at which the Center’s representative seemed to relay once again the address of our current location. But it isn’t here! the model-plane collector exclaimed, all but shouting. Where on earth would Mouson have founded a cosmetics factory around here? In this pitch-black backstreet? Why can’t you be more specific, more concrete, when you ask for the address? We’re already late, thanks to you. I mean, haven’t we already driven around this block several times?! The model-plane collector put excessive emphasis on the phrase “thanks to you.” The driver hunched his shoulders, the look in his eyes said “so what d’you expect me to do?”, but there was no way in the world that his punctured, perforated vowel-language could produce such a sentence, and so he only mumbled inside his mouth, fretful and plaintive. You good-for-nothing, let us out here, the model-plane collector burst out, unable to restrain himself. Adding severely, there’s not a single thing you did right as a taxi driver! But just then the driver pressed some button with an abrupt, resolute gesture, ensuring that the fare would not rise any higher, as though this alone lay within his power, and after this show of strength in the domain that lay under his jurisdiction, with the bearing of a dwarf sovereign parading it to the max, said: in any case I’m going to try and find it again myself. His words were pushed out from his throat with great effort, like huge rocks. Please look, I’ve stopped the meter so the fare won’t go up any higher. You see? If we just take another turn around the area, your tower will show up, so let’s give it a go. The driver spoke with difficulty, his voice thick as though with tears; his speech was relatively slow and stumbling, befitting a foreigner who couldn’t manage any better, and exacerbated by the fact that the model-plane collector had been glaring at him with a look cold enough to freeze the sun. What the driver actually wanted to say was that his suggestion for a compromise was not limited to putting a cap on the fare, but was also a plea for us to consider whether in cases such as this, when the information was less than satisfactory, his ignorance of the problematic tower, which every taxi driver in the city should know, was purely his own fault, and though it was a fact, wasn’t it, that the collector had not given him an exact address for this Mouson Tower, all the same the driver had not expressed any anger—at which the model-plane collector said emphatically, with the faultless pronunciation of an intellectual, as though beating out another hammer blow, that it was a trade requirement for a taxi driver of this city to know that name, the name of Mouson Tower.

  We eventually ended up right in front of Mouson Tower; surprisingly, the tower was located barely a block from the winding alleyway we’d spent such a long time creeping up and down, and all that was needed to bring it into view was a turn around a gentle corner. It was in a similarly narrow and shadowed alleyway; Mouson Tower occupied almost all of the narrow plot of land that lay between two alleys, one of which was called Mouson Street, borrowing the name from the tower. And since the entrance to the tower was situated on the opposite side of the alley, people habitually thought of it as “Mouson Street’s Mouson Tower,” though by some mysterious means all other taxi drivers were conveying their passengers to the front of the tower without any difficulty whatsoever, at least according to the model-plane collector. The darkness spread out in all directions, with no lights on in any of the buildings, though a small restaurant sign was visible on the ground floor of the building next to the tower. It was an Italian restaurant, with glowing candles in tin candlesticks, checked tablecloths, and the din of customers tangible through the rectangular window.

  Though we would trickle into that place like insects drawn to light and end up ordering two plates of pasta, though we would pick our way through the food in silence, not exchanging a single word, until the model-plane collector, still gloomy, would eventually bring himself to ask whether some action of his had made me uncomfortable, and I would answer that no, that the only thing that would make me feel uncomfortable would be to imagine that you yourself felt that way, and though after that we would end up looking sorrowfully at each other for a very brief while, ignorant of the reason that this might be, and tha
t a look like this would be of a type that induces pain in the chest, the heart constricting, and we would have to stand up hastily in order to go to Mouson’s reading, though we hadn’t managed to clear even half of what was on our plates, this was still before any of this had occurred.

  Mouson Tower looked like an ordinary rectangular lump of brick walls, looming tall and bulky against the black sky. This ordinariness was faintly disappointing after the history that had been recounted to me in the taxi, and had I not been aware in advance of the fact that it was a “tower,” I would have thought of it as a large rectangular chimney, its shape suited to the late-autumn night. There were several cars in the parking lot, but the surroundings were quiet, with no signs of human life. As it was far too chilly a night to walk around outside, the guests all seemed to have hurried into the tower as soon as they arrived. The taxi driver pulled up by the side of the road and had to ask another driver where Mouson Tower was; the other driver gave a very concise explanation for how to get to the tower’s entrance, and in this way we eventually ended up where we’d wanted to be all along, yet still the model-plane collector allowed his simmering anger to boil. My god, I’ll never again be able to take a taxi with peace of mind, and I paid good money for the privilege! the model-plane collector said. On top of that, since I would have been immediately branded a hater of foreigners if I’d breathed a single word of complaint, we just had to cower in fear, never mind how distressing or uncomfortable it was! My point was simply that it’s unacceptable for a taxi driver in this city to say that he doesn’t know Mouson Tower; what on earth has that got to do with a hatred of foreigners? Enraged, the model-plane collector took several big strides, then, as though something had just occurred to him, turned and stared hard at me; it felt as though his staring was an attempt to identify me, my footsteps, who I was, and there was something faintly sorrowful about this, too, though it was not clear who was the cause of this sorrow. This only occurred to me later, but we would probably soon recall it in relation to something else, while eating pasta; he was not in fact sitting in a restaurant chair, but in a pilot’s cockpit, his nerves made sharp due to the tension of flying, and beneath his feet the long white gleam of the mountain range was laid out like the spine of a dinosaur; his plane was in the middle of crashing, he was a sorrowful pilot who had been flying a plane that had now crashed; one day I would probably dig his spine out of the earth and brandish it in the air like a cane, and for some reason we are both aware of that while lost in insensibility; at the time I was clattering along the wet pavement, I leapt up lightly, overcome by happiness and sadness, and the model-plane collector, seeing this, opened his mouth wide and tried to say something to me, but I had slipped off my right shoe and was in the middle of shaking out the wet sand that had gotten inside it, and while I was shaking out those many grains of sand, at a loss as to where they might have come from, only then did I become aware of the bright white glow emanating from the form of my shoes, with their high heels and closed toes, like the moon in the middle of the month.

  After some time has gone by, I am doing some online shopping when I come across photographs related to the model-plane exhibition held in Bern, in an article for an online magazine. Beneath the title “Largest Exhibition in Switzerland,” the article states that the maiden flight of a model Airbus A380 is scheduled to take place; the model has a wingspan of eleven meters from tip to tip when fully spread, and not only that, but is fitted with four engines just like the real thing; the flight time of that model Airbus, which was around a year in the making, will be approximately twelve minutes. I stared for quite some time at photographs of those mechanical objects, studying them closely for the first time in my entire life. Twin objects, which imitate the form and function of the real thing on a smaller scale. I don’t personally know any collectors of remote-controlled model planes or steam trains, square box radios, rare stamps or advertising postcards, living reptiles or butterflies. Purely by chance, I had become aware of the fact that there are many more people in the world who have a mania for collecting than I had guessed, and that there are many cases where this is not merely a youthful fad but continues throughout the course of a life, and they want to hold an exhibition of their own collection at least once, and the greatest dream of their lives is to open their own personal museum, and that there are also more such museums than I’d thought, tucked away here and there in hidden alleys. Once we have paid the small entrance fee we can step in through the front door, and if we immediately take a right we will find ourselves in the ground floor’s main living room; in the center of the room, a five-meter wingspan Concorde, both the largest object on display in this museum and the proudest achievement of the collector’s life, is gently touching down, wings spread, and passing along the narrow corridor that this room leads on to we encounter uncountably many miniature aircraft in a glass display case, several model planes which seem to have been brought there straight from the shop and, most striking of all, a plane made according to Leonardo da Vinci’s design; looked at now in the present day, it resembles a surveillance camera installed on the side of the museum, and on the opposite wall are rare and precious black-and-white photographs of planes made by early twentieth-century inventors, photographs of the desolate expanse of runways at long-ruined airports, temporary runways for fighter planes to use in deserts and rugged mountain ranges, backwoods runways for archaeologists and explorers, or else grave looters and spies, and a photograph of the air base from which planes had transported supplies to West Berlin during the blockade; and if we go up the stairs to the first floor, stairs so narrow that for even one person it is a tight squeeze, the model planes are now displayed by period, in rooms that would once have been the owners’ bedroom, study, and dining room; in the majority of cases these are miniature objects, even those that have been fitted with remote-controlled engines, and if we wander this room we will come across an even smaller room in which we can sit and watch a black-and-white film such as History of Aviation III—1927 to 1945, its voiceover a weary monotone, or a silent film that plays on a loop, filled with scenes of jubilation from when Charles Lindbergh arrived successfully in Paris the day after his unsteady takeoff from Roosevelt Field on May 20th, 1927, and as there are cases in which the collector’s interest is not limited to the object itself, we can also discover small bookshelves holding volumes such as Night Flight or Beyond the Sun—A Biography of Lindbergh.

  Wandering here and there through the rooms, we never once come face to face with another visitor, and are only able to track those who have gone ahead of us through footsteps impressed into the carpet, handwriting in the guest book, or breath condensed on the glass of the display cases; we sense shadows disappearing swiftly behind the door, low coughing in the next room or the rustling of pamphlet pages, and on stepping into a given room, we sense the body heat of the person who had just moments ago been staring, entranced, at the display-case model of a B-58 Hustler, who would clearly also have stopped in front of the pop art picture hanging on the wall, a picture done in the style of Lichtenstein, in which a woman with egg-yolk-yellow hair is clinging to a man’s neck and wailing, the woman’s enormously exaggerated eyes and lips, the back of the man’s head, which is all we can see of him, the rough, thick outlines and exaggerated expressions, though the most intense characteristics of all are the glittering primary colors that bore into our eyes, so simple and superficial as to leave us dumbfounded, recalling manhwa or a cinema marquee, or else cosmetics posters from the 1920s, but over there, behind the man and woman, a plane stands on the runway prepared for takeoff, like a swan with its wings full-spread against the background of the blue sky, and the couple are probably in the middle of saying their final farewell. Above the head of the woman, whose fat tears are rolling down her face, is a speech bubble enclosing the words “I’ll miss you . . . please write,” and “Boeing 747” is clearly written on the body of the plane; in one corner of the painting, probably so that the picture could be mistaken for an advertisem
ent rather than a work of art, is an ambiguous phrase set in black type: “We will meet again at the world’s crossroads.”

  On the second floor is an office and workroom, so visitors are not permitted to enter; the thought that flashes into my mind as I walk down the stairs, a mixture of doubt and wonder, is why do certain people love airplanes so much, even though they’ve never known what it’s like to be borne aloft by their own feathered wings; why do certain people love these flying machines so much that they want to make small-scale models of them to display in their homes, to stuff their homes with them until there is room for nothing else, until their homes have in a sense been bequeathed to these models, so that they can stay there together for as long as possible, even in perpetuity, and ensure all that the models could ever need is there for them inside their home, so that they need never leave, the model plane’s moment brought to a still-greater perfection not only through things like runways, airports, and control towers, unidentified passengers silhouetted inside the aircraft windows, porters, and mechanics, but even going so far as a runway attendant who, due to some abrupt calamity, when the house is shrouded in milk-white fog, appears from somewhere and stands there holding a flag, their face impossible to make out because of the raincoat that covers them from head to toe.