Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  The butcher staggers offstage, maddened by the crash of thunder, growing increasingly insane with guilt.

  Paekjong’s mask was described as conveying a sinister, murderous expression when the actor tilted his head forward. But when he tipped it back, the mask took on a deranged grin meant to express the butcher’s remorse for the animals he slaughters.

  Ford studied the leering dark face of Paekjong closely. It was one of the two he thought best matched the rubber mask he had seen in the gift shop. A butcher. But then he looked into the character of the other suspicious mask. Jung – ha. No relation to Carl, he thought. He had a book edited by Carl Jung at home, titled Man and His Symbols. He recalled it mentioned the ritual use of masks here and there, along with addressing Jung’s classic subject matter such as the collective unconscious, synchronicity, the female anima and male animus...

  He found the character named Jung in Act 5.

  The female character Bune enters the stage, her face heavily powdered and made up like a bride’s. She squats to urinate, and is spied by Jung, a wandering monk. The monk is so aroused by this that he gathers the soil she urinated on and sniffs it. To Bune he says, “Hello, pretty maid. I may be a monk, but I'm also a man. Come dance with me.” He then rapes her...and ultimately takes her onto his back and runs off with her.

  Ford was reminded of that appalling movie playing on his TV while the factory girl was being attacked, its horrible rapist of a hero. Yes, he thought, studying the grinning, crescent-eyed mask of the depraved monk, that lump bulging from his forehead like a brain tumor pressing outward, a diseased fruit, ready to burst. Maybe it had been this one.

  Ford knew what he had to do today. He set two tasks for himself. Find an ATM to get more money...and find that little store with the Halloween masks again. He had to see if that rubber mask he had admired was missing. He had to know if – in some kind of serendipity, or synchronicity – the mask he had seen in that shop was the same one worn by the man who seemed to be playing the roles of Paekjong and Jung at once. Because Ford was still undecided about which of those two characters the rubber mask had represented. It might have been a synthesis of both...two characters in one skin.

  8: The Citizens

  While wandering about Seoul in an effort to fulfill his second task, Ford experienced mounting frustration in fulfilling the first.

  ATMs in a convenience store and outside a bank gave him nothing but indecipherable slips of paper. (He was relieved, at least, that they spit his card out again.) He remembered that the tourist book he’d been given suggested subway ATMs, and he descended below the street in search of some, found a few, received only more cryptic receipts for his growing collection. While in the subway he tried to calm himself with a little diversion, browsed briefly in a comic book store. The graphic novels he looked through were violent, disturbing, and he supposed they were Korean though they looked Japanese to him. Again, without knowing much about this country’s history he sensed the Japanese had influenced the Koreans heavily, but their presence in Korea couldn’t have been entirely agreeable: one thing he recalled hearing about was the Korean “comfort women” the Japanese had pressed into sexual slavery.

  In entering and then leaving the subway, he became a little exasperated to note that – while the cars here drove on the right side of the road as in the US – people climbed up the left side of a flight of steps and descended on the right. This seemed backwards to him and he nearly collided with others a few times, though he might have been a rock in a stream for all the attention he received as they flowed around him. Another thing began to nibble at his patience. People walked slowly here. Couldn’t they sense him behind them, wanting them to speed up or let him around? Once he actually let out a loud sigh and the man in front of him glanced over his shoulder. He wanted to bark at a few of these people, “Come on, I’ve got things to do, I’m an American!”

  He went into a branch of Citibank, hoping the familiar American name would bode well for him, but a pretty young woman could only smile and apologize with that familiar, sweet but professional politeness that he found increasingly cloying. When he asked her if there were a Bank of America about, as they owned the chain of banks he belonged to back home, she sketched him directions. Initially hopeful, in following the directions he became hopelessly lost.

  Either they were fawningly polite or they rudely ignored him in the street, although he knew his presence was conspicuous, to say the least. “Look at me!” he wanted to snap in this or that icily closed face, to draw the gaze of those downcast or averted eyes. He had never felt so much like a ghost in his life; unseen, unrecognized. Occasionally flocks of schoolgirls, appearing Japanese in their short tartan skirts and jackets, drifted by and he eyed them with a weak, irritable lust. The otherness that had intrigued him so recently now chafed him. The city was just familiar enough to taunt him, just alien enough to disorient him. Dis-Orient, he thought. Ha.

  Hours were passing. His feet weren’t breaking in his new shoes – his new shoes were breaking his feet. They clumped along, big and black and noisy like Frankenstein’s boots. Like a soldier’s. He didn’t care any more how he came across to them – warmongering American, Ugly American, uncouth vulgar self-important American. Whatever you say.

  What was the fucking problem? The book said the ATMs here were global...they said he should be able to get his money out of them, damn it. He was punching up the English directions on them. But the scraps of paper they thrust out like mocking tongues were not in his language.

  In his search for both a responsive ATM and – presently, just an afterthought – the elusive gift shop, he came across two pitiable beggars. The first was in a motorized wheelchair, paraplegic, and a tape player somewhere (in the back of his chair?) was oozing maudlin music as a kind of soundtrack for him. Ford gathered all the change he had in his pocket and dropped it into a slot in the wooden box affixed to the front of the wheelchair. If the ATMs wouldn’t give him money, then he might as well feed money into what looked like the shoddiest ATM in Korea. As he lifted his eyes, a man on the street nodded to him, obviously with appreciation, but whether this man was accompanying the cripple or simply a pedestrian impressed with Ford’s brusque gesture of compassion, he didn’t know. In either case, the nod did soothe his irritation a little bit.

  The second beggar, later on, was much more grotesque. He, too, played tear-wringing music on a tape player resting on the pavement, but rather than sitting twisted in a wheelchair, this man lay on his belly on a board fitted with wheels, dragging himself along. Weirdly, his pants looked to Ford like they were made of black rubber, and they looked like they didn’t have legs inside them. Ford didn’t see a pot or bucket to drop money in as he strode by, but he saw plenty of other pedestrians ignoring the man as they passed him, so he felt a little less guilty.

  When not seething, feeling thwarted at every turn, Ford waxed philosophical. Here he was focusing so intently on a prosaic matter like getting some cash out of a machine, and almost forgetting entirely that he had seen a human being murdered. At first, he had believed he was facing all these trials and challenges bravely, thinking fast on his feet, since having been evicted from Vietnam. But now he wondered if he was not so much resilient as merely somnambulant, trudging numbly and fatalistically along through his situation like a sleepwalker.

  What was the correct reaction, the appropriate behavior – sit down and pray for the girl’s soul, so as to pay proper respect to the enormity of this loss?

  He knew what he could do. What he should do. Call the police.

  An anonymous call from a pay phone, at least? But what if they could find out how many English-speaking tourists were in Seoul (he argued with himself weakly) and track down their whereabouts? As he marched on robotically, he decided that once in Vietnam he would do a web search to find the proper email address, and then send a detailed message about what he’d seen to the Seoul police department. Surely they wouldn’t extradite him as a witness! Or, because he woul
d need to pass through Korea again on his return trip home, maybe he’d just wait until he was back in the States. That would be soon enough, right?

  At another tourist center, he asked a woman with a plaque labeled ENGLISH in front of her about Bank of America again, and was given a real map with the area circled in ballpoint. Still, he soon found himself befuddled when back on the pavement. With each misplaced step, the pain in his blistered feet increased.

  He entered a street gouged open its length like a chasm, apparently a subway line being repaired or laid in. The shops facing this street were dusty, shabby. He paused to gaze into the window of one of them. It took him a while to understand what he was seeing, preserved in liquid inside several very large glass containers and a row of relatively smaller bottles, like the deformed babies – or “pickled punks” – in carnivals he remembered from his boyhood. Some of these masses flowered into uncountable threads, looking like a human nervous system branching out from a central spine – extracted in one piece, every nerve ending intact, and stuffed into a bottle of formaldehyde. Other masses looked vaguely anthropomorphic, like unformed homunculi, waiting to be removed and grown into full-sized, human-like golems. Mandrake roots? No...ginseng roots, he realized.

  To his relief, the building housing Bank of America was just around the next corner, but the tourist center had told him it was located on the 9th floor and this made him leery as he walked toward the looming structure. In the elevator up, he stared at his own reflection in the mirrored walls, crosshatched into many diced pieces. A security guard at a desk let him past, and just inside the office he met with another lovely young woman with more smiles of apology. He sensed a slight degree of amused bewilderment from her and a male colleague as she explained that this bank only served businesses, not individuals. Hearing his plight, she suggested a bank down the street, but her tone sounded dubious about his chances of success.

  Ford rode down to the street again, feeling bitter and defeated. That was it, then, wasn’t it? He would not have enough money to buy new tickets to and from Vietnam, or to properly vacation there, paying for the hotel room An was booking for him, gifts for her, meals for her, taking her whole family out for dinner as he’d planned. Should he use what money he had left to remain in Seoul, in the guest house, until it was time for his flight from Korea to Chicago to Boston...or should he try to exchange that flight for an earlier flight, and just go home now? Either way, he would have to abandon his goal, his dreams.

  He sketched the beginnings of an email to An in his mind; words like, “I’m so sorry, em...” and, “I tried...”Anyway, was it for the best? Would An have turned out to be so different in every way, in matters large and small, that her initial exotic appeal would warp into frustration, exasperation? Was his experience with this country a portent of that? She and he as lost with each other as he and all these pretty bank workers? His one-time future ba xa an embodiment of all Asian people, another race from his, with whom he could only exchange politely mystified smiles?

  9: Horror...wood

  When Ford realized where the bank was that the woman had suggested to him, he wanted to laugh. It was on the other side of that dug-up abyss of a street. Of course it was! Where else would it be, except maybe on the moon? Should he even bother trying? The day had declined toward late afternoon. It might be closing time, soon. But, zombie-like, he walked down the street far enough that he could go around the immense trench, cross and double back toward the bank.

  He took a number, waited to be seen, at a service desk changed the last of his money into won. Whatever he had left prior to leaving the country he’d trade for dollars again at the airport. Before he made this exchange, however, he had counted what he had remaining and was dismayed to find himself $100 shorter than he had thought. How had that happened? He supposed he hadn’t been calculating the exchange rate accurately, or hadn’t been keeping a close enough eye on his expenses (he knew it hadn’t been stolen anywhere; he’d been careful to wear a money belt, advised to do so in travel guides to Vietnam). He felt more dismal than ever. As he was given his won, he asked the person at the desk if he could use his debit card to withdraw money from his US account. This seemed to cause some nervous concern or confusion, and a handsome young security guard was beckoned over to talk with the man at the desk. The guard indicated for Ford to come with him to a row of ATM machines. Ford wanted to explain that he had tried half the ATMs in Seoul, with no luck. The man disappeared into a room behind the machines, then shortly came back. Ford had the odd notion that the guard with his little holstered toy-like pistol, as cute as he was, had done something to unlock or bypass one of the ATMs in some way. He inserted Ford’s card, touched the keys the screen prompted him to...and Ford heard a familiar, whirring sound that made his chest lock up in anticipation. A moment later, the machine began spitting out money. Ford wanted to grab the cute guard and kiss him.

  As soon as he left the building, it looked like the guard locked the door behind him. Was it closing time, or did they just want him out? He was too happy to be paranoid. He would celebrate, find himself a nice restaurant to have dinner in. His step was lighter (however agonized his feet had become). In keeping his eyes open for a place to eat, he saw signs advertising a DVD store. Why not? He could finally enjoy himself a little before he made it back to the inn. He went inside, found he had to climb a flight of stairs to reach the store, but knew he was in the right place from the wall of the landing above, covered in a montage of Korean movie posters (or Korean versions of posters for American movies). The shop itself was tiny, a single tall shelf stuffed with DVDs facing a counter at which stood a very attractive woman with her brownish-dyed hair tied back in a long ponytail, who gave him the obligatory courteous smiles but who seemed a little uneasy to find such an unexpected customer in her shop. Ford wondered if he could presently be the only Caucasian man in all of Seoul (with its ten million citizens, according to his guide). He jokingly thought that maybe he himself should have bought one of those wooden, full-sized masks that he’d seen for sale in the street the other day, and worn it to give himself narrower eyes, darker skin, in an effort to better blend in with the masses.

  He found a DVD of a horror movie he had heard about, starring a Taiwanese actress he’d seen in an English-language action film – so gorgeous that he had yearned for her almost painfully while watching that film. Later, on the web, he had found and printed out numerous sensuous and even nude pictures of her. At the moment, however, he couldn’t recall her name. To make conversation, feeling as uncomfortable as the proprietress, he pointed to the box and asked her the actress’s name. “Oh...Hsu Chi?” the woman said.

  “Yes...yes...that’s her,” Ford said. “I like her.” He then asked her if this DVD would be compatible with an American player. The woman didn’t speak English, as it turned out, made some kind of apology in Korean. Ford replaced the movie, told her maybe he’d come back, and descended to the street. In just these few minutes, evening had begun to encroach.

  He ate in a branch of the American chain TGIF – Thank God It’s Friday – and smiled when he saw that the uniforms (multiple cute and funny buttons pinned on them) and decor (lots of American flea market-style junk all over the walls) were identical to what he was familiar with. It was someone’s birthday, and a number of the wait staff even assembled at the table to sing some kind of birthday song as they did in the States, though this one was in Korean and they played a guitar and tambourine. It felt good to be sitting down – his lumpy backpack off his shoulders and resting on the floor – and indulging himself with first one and then a second frozen mudslide. But Ford soon found himself a bit perturbed once more. He had been seated in a far corner, away from everyone else, and it almost seemed intentional, almost made him think it was because he wasn’t Korean. And though his waitress was naturally super-pleasant, the service was terrible. When he had finished, he seemed to wait an eternity for his check. Finally, his good mood lost, almost fuming, he got up and went to the f
ront desk. His bill was produced and he paid, indignantly not returning to the table to leave a tip, not knowing or caring at that moment if tipping was expected.

  And so he began threading his way back in the direction he hoped the guest house lay. While he had been dining, night had truly fallen.

  He had almost forgotten to look, had given up on finding it...but in heading back, outside a shop he saw rows of plastic jack-o’-lanterns ranked along a shelf. Flaccid rubber masks, pitchforks and swords flowering from a bucket. Ford fairly broke into a trot to reach the gift shop, and plunged inside. The man who had followed him upstairs the first time opened his mouth as if to begin a greeting, but Ford passed right by him and danced up the steps to the second floor.

  There, he stood staring blankly at the empty spot where he knew the mask play visage had been hanging. The young man caught up with him, hovered at his shoulder. Ford turned to him, pointing at the gap in the rows of masks. “Someone bought it?”

  The man grinned awkwardly, looking at a loss.

  “It’s gone. Who bought it? The Hahoe mask.”

  “Hero?” The man looked like he would reach for a Spider-Man mask.

  “No, no, forget it. Thanks anyway.”

  “Trick-or-treat?” The man swept his hand through the air between them. “Trick-or-treat?”

  “Huh?” The motion caused Ford to look down at himself. He was wearing a black t-shirt, black denim jeans, those new black shoes. Was that what the man meant...that he was wearing all black? Was he asking if he were dressed to go trick-or-treating? It hadn’t been an intentional act to dress all in black today – it was simply his favorite color for clothing. “No...no trick-or-treat,” he replied. He smiled at the man, nodding, moving back to the steps quickly to avoid another round of sales pitches. “Thank you,” he said as he departed, leaving the poor helpful worker more perplexed than ever, he was sure.