North Station

by Suah Bae

  If things went on like this it was clear that the play would be criticized as an incoherent mess, so the director felt it necessary to implement some kind of control. She hit upon the bright idea of regulating the days by the tolling of a bell. When the first bell is rung, the actors all begin their mornings. Then when the second bell rings, the day concludes. But though this method seemed such a perfect solution, the actors didn’t take to it at all. In the world of the play, time does not flow as it does in reality, and the actors could not base their days on the clock of reality; are you saying we’ll be able to anticipate when the second bell will ring? That, as soon as it rings, we’ll have to end the day, unfinished, even if we’ve just begun performing the afternoon? How can a performance be improvised if all the day’s hours are standardized? It’s physically impossible to immerse yourself in an improvisation while at the same time diligently measuring the hours. In some rooms we encounter a strange woman wearing lace underwear and fishnet stockings, and in some rooms we end up sleeping alone—how can such days all be performed in the same amount of time? Will days that start and end simultaneously at the sound of a bell really suit this type of performance? The actors complained that they were not tin-headed soldiers moving their limbs in accordance with commands, not mice trained to change rooms automatically each time the bell rang. But the director held out, stubbornly insisting that this was the only way to make the play performable.

  The director also proposed that, were an actor to enter a room where two other actors were already engaged in a relationship, the unwitting intruder should instantly step back out of the room, pretending not to have seen anything. This provoked an even greater backlash than the idea of the bell. The actors’ opposition went beyond scorn and ridicule. They had no intention of being characters in some pre-programmed computer game, they said; they had to perform all the possible variations reality allows for, not comply with some foolish decree to ignore them. This play’s fundamental nature is that it is an improvisation; neither its lines nor its fingerprints are fixed. So why does the third person have to retreat obediently, pretending to be blind? All they need is the impulse, and a thrillingly risky three-way relationship, the sweetness of a private tête-à-tête in a closet, hiding from a lover’s eyes, adultery tainted with bare-faced lies and betrayal, the unalloyed pleasure enjoyed by three in one bed, or some more base hedonism, will be spread out in full color, in whatever way and to whatever degree they choose. Taking this opportunity to resurrect old debates, the actors questioned why they couldn’t leave their respective rooms while the day that had begun there was still going on. We often visit other people, or have them visit us. Why should love and friendship be permitted only between those who happen to enter the same room in the same day? And why do we absolutely have to change rooms when a day is said to have ended, and why does the actor who was there with us have to choose a different room to move to? With such a way of doing things, the actors cannot but enact scenes from a prison, a mental hospital, a detention camp. Angered by the actors’ apparent desire to place themselves above him, and convinced that such a degree of chaos and improvisation would only serve to further obscure the play’s intention, the director snapped that if it were performed in such a way then their actions would become incomprehensible not only to the audience but to the actors themselves, causing the play to descend into a hopelessly tumultuous melee, and asked how their demands were different from claiming that neither the rehearsals nor even the director himself were necessary to the production? Did audiences flock to the theater to be presented with a mere state of anarchy?

  Their differences of opinion deepened to the point where the discord between the director and the actors reached the point of no return, and the worst-case scenario became reality: the actors who had been scheduled to take part in the first night’s performance all chose to boycott the theater. Only one person turned up—Mrs. Kim. Mrs. Kim had also been going to appear as an actor in the play. When curtain time drew near and still none of the actors had shown up, Mrs. Kim turned to the director and, with the generosity of a lifetime, said, “I should be able to perform on my own. I don’t need anyone else. Besides, no one in the audience will be able to see all of the rooms, so there’s no need to fill the stage. I’ll go from one room to another. This way, there’ll be none of the confusion you’ve always worried about, and at least one major problem will have been solved, no?” As an actor, she might fail, but this was a risk she was willing to take if it meant that her play, at least, might triumph.

  But the director treated this proposal a little more coolly. The newspapers and media had shown an interest in the play’s experimental form, and because they had already mentioned several times, albeit in a fairly critical tone, that what was going to be performed was an orchestra of improvisation, a self-portrait of everyday life with deliberately exacerbated tedium and latent madness showing through, they couldn’t change the very nature of the play at such a late stage. Besides which, the stage was absurdly large for a single actor, meaning the audience would have to spend a lot of time simply locating the one room among over one hundred in which the performance was going on. Granted, you could solve the problem by putting a spotlight on that one room, but that wouldn’t be appropriate for the one visible theme that the play advocated—countless days running in parallel. Plus, the individual rooms were far too small in comparison with the stage as a whole, so there would be those in the audience who would watch carefully what went on in this one room, thinking that it was the entire plot of the play, and there would be sections of the audience who could only see those empty rooms in which, accordingly, nothing was happening. More than anything else, though, the play was never intended to be a one-man production; it was the type of play that clearly couldn’t work with a single actor, which shouldn’t unfold based on any individual actor’s spoken lines or personality. The play had been constructed in order to present a countless number of meaninglessly random human beings in parallel to each other; it wouldn’t work for the audience to concentrate their attention on any single actor. The kind of play whose very nature rejected any form of spotlighting. For all of these reasons, the director swore, it would be impossible even—or perhaps especially—for the most gifted actor to perform this play solo. “After all, the most important thing is that this play cannot have a main character. No one can have a name or a face, isn’t that right? Here, individuality is made identical with large-scale anonymity—nothing less will do.” At this, the director pressed his lips firmly together and adopted an expression of courage in the face of insurmountable odds. Feeling that he was over-egging the tragic heroism somewhat, Mrs. Kim flinched. How strange it was. Wasn’t the author of the play none other than Mrs. Kim herself? So why did she find it so difficult to accept all this? “Even if two actors encounter one another in the same room, as soon as they are each in separate rooms they become, as a matter of course, entirely unable to remember each other; not only that, but when they encounter a totally different actor they have to carry on with their performance, pretending, no, truly believing, that this new actor is the one they knew before. Believing so much that it soon becomes a fact rather than a delusion. Even though they have created this performance themselves, it’s not ‘their’ story. That’s the way it has to be—at least, if we’re talking about the play that I’m directing. Since that’s my interpretation. The audience, and of course the actors too, have to be born again in a world in which awareness, perception, is remade.” The director’s delivery struck Mrs. Kim as unnecessarily emphatic, even obstinate. Though he was not, in principle, mistaken. As the author of the original play, Mrs. Kim was best placed to know this. And though the director had not alluded directly to this, in the decade-plus during which she had worked as an actor, Mrs. Kim had rarely moved beyond run-of-the-mill supporting roles in which, far from being lauded for her superior talent, there had never been the opportunity for her to win even a respectable level of acclaim.

  As the director conti
nued to enumerate the many reasons why the play could not possibly be put on as a one-man performance, Mrs. Kim suddenly felt that he was onto her—that he’d figured out her desire to be a playwright. Though this was not such a difficult thing to guess at, given that she had written her own play, the idea that someone else might have gotten wind of the intensity and urgency of her desire, betrayed by her offering to step into the breach and perform the play alone, so desperate for it to go ahead that she would even betray its unique and representative characteristics, provoked such an enormous sense of shame in her that it hurt her to the core. Desire that goes beyond circumstance and degree is another name for vanity, and vanity means hunger and want—these, at least, must have been the director’s thoughts. And this must have been why he put such a strong emphasis on the importance of anonymity in this play. Mrs. Kim could read the questions in the director’s contorted expression. Why did this woman need over a hundred rooms and almost the same number of actors, if they were ultimately to be no more than ghost-images of herself? What was the point of such large-scale anonymity? If she’d imagined that she could simply substitute her own solo performance, why write a play of this chaotic magnitude, that had led to the actors causing such a scene? This woman is willing to overturn the play’s very subject, themes—oblivion, anonymity, repetition, reproduction, dispersion, isolation—which she herself gave birth to and which I as director have defended against considerable opposition, all due to her desire to be a heroine; isn’t that the long and short of it? If so—if the whole purpose of the play is null and void, and if all this time my efforts to keep its essence alive have merely condemned it to failure, and if that essence had never been anything more than a means to carry out the exact opposite of its purpose—there’s no reason on earth that things had to turn out like this.

  Ultimately the play foundered; the criticism of the mass media poured in, strengthened by the actors’ protests, so the curtain fell even before it had been raised, and the production was notorious, known far and wide as a disgraceful scandal, an egregiously expensive undertaking. Worse, a certain critic commented scathingly that if the work had actually been staged as planned, the audience would have been helpless in their seats, forced to watch as pandemonium broke out, exaggeratedly chaotic yet tediously monotone, and of which they could understand nothing, so that in that sense one could even call the production’s foundering a “stroke of luck.” In actual fact, the critic in question had dropped by the theater during one of the rehearsals and had seen it all, in addition to the problems the director himself had already foreseen; the actors hurrying back and forth down the narrow corridors, searching for the room that had taken their fancy, bumping into each other and knocking each other over, two actors of the same sex fighting over the same room, which each insisted that he needed to perform in alone; actors of the same sex finding themselves in the same room and, without coming to an agreement as to whether they ought to dramatize their relationship with romantic feelings rather than limiting it to friendship or discord, share a meaningless conversation of ludicrous misunderstandings, then bring the day to a non-committal close; actors who spent the entire day lazily picking their nose in the same room; other actors who, at the start of the rehearsal, found a room with a bed and promptly spent the rest of the time sleeping off the previous night’s hangover, insisting that this was a performance of important realism; worst of all, several quick-witted actors who used the rehearsal time to work on various side-projects, pretending that this was all a part of their performance. Thus did Mrs. Kim’s dream of being a playwright crumble into dust. It was to be her first and last play. She would never write another.

  Mrs. Kim saw. She liked what she saw. Colors and shapes which always appeared with different tones and different shading, even sound and touch, forms that, without exception, impressed her with their elegance, people, people of all body types, significant movements, gestures pregnant with or concealing meaning, vague things and defined things, visible things and invisible things, all things. Mrs. Kim was living in three rooms at the same time. She enjoyed the varied countenances of three different rooms, three wordless scenes, three countries that weren’t each other’s substitutes. Each of her three rooms was in a different city, and each city was far away from the others. Of course, this was all in her imagination. Had she wanted to make it a reality, though, it would not have been altogether impossible. She could have gone to a distant city, rented a room, and arranged for the rent to be automatically withdrawn from her account. Then she would be given the key to that room, and would be able to drop by whenever she felt so inclined. Not only would that be much cheaper than renting an entire house, but she would avoid the hassle of managing an empty house from a distance. She wouldn’t have to install a separate phone line, and if she was lucky there might also be a communal television that she could use.

  Having her own room to go to was different from staying in tourist accommodations. Hotels were the same the world over, whether in Singapore or Seoul, Bogota or Damascus. People called it international standard. And naturally you couldn’t leave your luggage in a hotel room when your stay was over, you had to take everything with you, even down to the smallest pin. One year, Mrs. Kim had lost her favorite sunglasses while on a city break. She wore her sunglasses everywhere in that city, as the autumn sunlight had been unusually dazzling. To restaurants and service stations, theaters and florists, newspaper stands and ice cream parlors, and to the cafes where she went to give her aching legs a rest. She must have left her sunglasses in one of these places, but there were too many of them for her to determine the precise one. She almost certainly hadn’t left them in her hotel room, but she telephoned the front desk just on the off chance. On informing the receptionist that she had lost her sunglasses, Mrs. Kim received an extremely sluggish reply: “It’s a shame, but there are no butterfly-shaped sunglasses with white frames among the lost-and-found items registered at this hotel. What we do have is a blue-and-brown patterned umbrella, a white bathrobe with a print of bamboo and Japanese women, an almost-full bottle of anti-dandruff shampoo, baggy pajama pants, a single black leather glove, for the right hand, a toiletries kit containing men’s shaving equipment, a handkerchief and socks, a camera, a ring, an earring, clear spectacles, a towel not belonging to the hotel, it hasn’t been looked after properly so the color’s faded, and two books in Chinese, I don’t know about what but they don’t look like Bibles. Something to do with Buddhism, perhaps? Then a map of the city center, a museum discount coupon, a set of postcards bought at the marionette theater, and . . .” The hotel was a neat little establishment, quite historic, in the small city’s old town, facing a square with a little fountain. The guest rooms were also small, without televisions or anything similar; there was a single step at the entrance to each room, and despite the “mind the step” notice hanging from the ceiling cautioning them, if a guest was even mildly incautious they would, without exception, embarrass themselves by stumbling. No one was sure why the step was there; it must have been a relic from the days when the building had had another use, before it had been remodeled as a hotel. But right by the bed was a long, narrow window that looked down on the square, which was as beautiful as old squares tend to be, and if you left the window open in the evenings you could hear musicians playing the accordion, and watch Protestant nuns in curiously-shaped gray-and-white hooded robes passing by in pairs.

  Listening to the hotel employee reciting the lost-and-found list like some epic poem, Mrs. Kim couldn’t suppress the laughter that bubbled up inside her; she clapped her hand over her mouth and, unable to regain her composure, was forced to hang up. She had never imagined that so many items would get left behind in a hotel, and of such variety too. And she thought of her own rooms. Rooms in which she was living, in this city and that; the room situated in a narrow alley of the city that was her destination, no, her point of departure; no, both, which she would set out from in order to travel to the city where that room was located. There, Mrs. K
im would be able to lose, or leave behind without worrying about someone else stealing them, not only sunglasses but old pajamas and shampoo, shaving equipment and umbrellas, summer shoes with the heels worn down, corn ointment or leg razors. Like former lovers, these items would age as they waited there for her, waiting in case she ever chose to come back.

  One of her rooms was in Seoul, the second was in Shanghai, where she had gone on her honeymoon, and the third was in a distant city where she had wanted to live but had never yet been able to. As there was no definite name for this third, distant city, it would change name and shape as though the city itself had become a vagabond, forever in transit. Each morning in her imagination she flung the windows of the three rooms wide open to drink in the sunlight and noise of each of the three different cities. After beating the dust from the three quilts, she boiled rice or sliced bread and made tea in three kitchens. She shared breakfast with three sets of companions, landlords and fellow renters, and turned up the radio, sat at the desk and wrote a letter to someone far away, or read one that had come from a similar distance. Mrs. Kim had a different name and ID for each room. Separate names even while all three were the same, and the same day even while all three were different; it took a secret magic to make this possible. The news was broadcast in a different language on the radio in each of the three rooms, indeed every sound was composed of a different language: that of the short-stay travelers in the next room flicking through maps and travel guides, the low voices of strangers, a ringing telephone, an unknown voice reading a fortune found in a book, lovers’ whispered confidences, footsteps crossing wooden floorboards, the feeble mewling of cats. Even the dreams dreamt in the separate rooms were each governed by different languages. The gorgeous patterns of rugs woven from mutually unintelligible languages fluttered about in three rooms. Three imaginings whispered to Mrs. Kim.