Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  So the mask was gone; but that still didn’t mean it was the same one he had seen on the figure. Certainly, there was more than one of that mask in Seoul...

  He resumed his achy tramping toward “home”, and considering how lost he had become during the day he found it surprisingly much easier to reach familiar streets than he had expected. When that spire on the high hill near the inn came into view, the needle of a giant compass, he knew he was okay. He moved from the great city canyons into the older, smaller side streets, colorful with lights and bustling with people.

  While he was walking, he half saw or heard something light fall to the pavement in front of him, almost striking his shoe. He stopped short and looked down. A toothpick? A toothpick...thrown at him from above. He turned around and looked up at a balcony behind him. Like many balconies he had seen here, it was filled with large potted plants. Had the toothpick been tossed from a window, or from up there, and had it merely been flicked into the street or purposefully thrown at him – in the first overtly hostile or contemptuous act he had experienced?

  He thought, then, that he could dimly make out a face, peeking down at him between some of the fronds of those plants. The face appeared to be contorted into a huge, toothless grin, and to be unnaturally dark in color. Ford’s breath froze into a chunk of ice, blocking his throat. But then the face was gone. Either it had withdrawn into the shadows, or he had been mistaken about seeing it at all.

  He briskly started away, but glanced back nervously at the toothpick. Maybe not a toothpick? Maybe a splinter of wood...from a wooden mask.

  10: Souvenirs

  When Ford had mounted the guest house’s stairs and arrived at room 201, he found that he didn’t have his key with him. He had thought he’d put it in his right front pocket; could it be locked inside his room? He returned downstairs and talked to the man on duty, the one with the swollen eye. The man immediately produced the missing key, attached to its green plastic tag, and passed it to him. “You left it on the desk, sir, when you went out this morning.”

  “I did?” Ford scrunched his face in confusion. He certainly didn’t remember doing that. An unconscious act, no doubt...unless he had dropped it and someone else had left it there.

  “So, tomorrow we call the embassy, and I will drive you there if your visa is ready.”

  “Yes...yes...great.” Ford was about to turn back to the stairs, but he could see that the man had been reading something on his computer – the news? – and this made him recall their earlier conversation. “Have there been any developments on, ah...about the girl...murdered over here?” He jerked his head in the direction of the factory.

  “No, sir.”

  Ford grunted, had begun moving away from the desk when the young man went on, “Well...there was another murder, not too far from here.” Ford halted, and seeing that the American wanted to hear, the desk man continued, “Nothing to be concerned about, sir. It was a cleaning woman, in a department store called Migliore.”

  Ford nodded slowly. Instead of saying he’d been there, he droned numbly, “I’ve seen it. That’s where that...HORRORWOOD thing is, right?”

  “Yes, sir. The woman was killed on that floor, where HORRORWOOD is, before it opened for the day.”

  Ford realized he was still nodding like an automaton, taking in this information. “How?” he asked.

  “Sir?”

  “How was she killed?”

  The desk man winced. “Terrible, sir...too terrible...”

  “Tell me.”

  The man gestured around the outline of his own face. “She had her...entire face removed, sir. Cut off from her skull. Very horrible.”

  Ford discovered that both his hands had gripped the edge of the desk, the key’s plastic tag digging into his palm. With an internalized flinch, he became conscious of the two full-sized wooden masks framed to his left, and gave them a look. He knew them better now, from reading about the play – Yanban and Bune, Bune being the woman raped by the depraved monk Jung. In a weak voice, staring at Bune, Ford asked, “Did they find it? The face?”

  “No, sir. But please...this is a very safe city. There is very little crime in Seoul. You must not be afraid.”

  “I’ll be leaving soon, anyway,” he muttered, more to himself than the other man, laying out his plans. “Tomorrow – if they say my visa can be picked up – I’ll check out. Then I’ll take a cab to Gimpo Airport. Then a shuttle to Incheon Airport. At the airport, I’ll buy new tickets for a flight to...” He broke off. He didn’t want to reveal the name of the city where he’d be landing. “Anyway, then I’ll just wait there at Incheon until it’s time for my flight.”

  “I see, sir. Very good.”

  Ford drifted away from the desk, tried not to look at the two framed displays of miniature masks as he went to the staircase leading up to his room. Once inside it, he locked the door, slung his backpack off his shoulders, and pounced on his suitcase – flipping it onto the bed and unzipping it...

  Earlier, he had found himself unaccountably $100 short. $100 would work out to be roughly 120,000 won, wouldn’t it? He had been quoted that price at the gift shop on his first visit. And so – how many times had he actually visited that shop, after all?

  He clawed through the clothing and whatever else remained unpacked inside his suitcase. Not satisfied, he removed each item and placed them on the mattress until he was certain there was nothing out of the ordinary inside.

  No rubber mask.

  Why should there be? He couldn’t have done those things the desk man had described. The middle-aged cleaning woman he had nearly bumped into as she got off the service elevator on the abandoned 8th floor – the HORRORWOOD floor – of the Migliore department store...only another coincidence. The murdered cleaning woman and the one he had encountered might be two different people. After all, he had seen that black-garbed figure attack the young woman in the factory, he had watched him...another man, a separate entity, not him...not a mirrored reflection of himself, not a doppelganger, not some golem grown from a ginseng-like homunculus, not some evil spirit who had stolen his flesh while his own displaced soul gazed helplessly through the bathroom window...

  Straightening, another thought dawning on him, Ford turned about gingerly and looked toward his backpack, where it rested on the stool accompanying the desk his silent TV sat upon. It was black like his clothing, and lumpen. His body remembered its presence, its weight on his back. Not heavy, like Bune carried on the back of the monk Jung, but a weight that he felt oddly naked without, so accustomed was he to it after today’s seemingly endless, labyrinthine wanderings.

  Ford went to the backpack and took hold of the twin zippers at its top. He opened it about halfway down, enough for him to reach inside. But he hesitated, and it was several moments before he was able – again gingerly – to slip his right hand into its captured darkness.

  Almost instantly he withdrew his arm with a strangled cry, as if a snake coiled in the backpack had bitten his hand. But although the thing he had touched had been slithery, it had been nothing as solid as that, nothing with fangs. Breathing hard, steeling himself, he then reached in again, took hold of what he had touched – something so light against his fingers that it seemed ethereal – and jerked it out abruptly. He let it drop to the floor at his blistered, shoeless feet, which shuffled back from the object timidly.

  It was actually two objects that he had drawn out, he realized, partially tangled together. One was a shining blue-black color, the other dyed a lighter brownish shade, though otherwise they were similar. They were both the ponytails of women, both still clasped at one end with an elastic ring.

  Ford could only gaze down at them a long time without moving, without breathing, without even thinking. All he could really think was that the hair of both severed ponytails looked very silky to the touch, shining glossily in the room’s light. There was no blood on them that he could see, although they were admittedly dark in hue. They were not ugly in any way. In fact, they were bea
utiful...though he preferred the natural black color of the factory girl’s hair to the dyed brown hair of that attractive woman from the DVD store. Despite their beauty, however, they were the most ghastly things he had ever seen in his life, and he couldn’t imagine touching them again with his bare skin.

  But he had not found the mask...that mask...and he stepped carefully around the ponytails to dip his hand into the backpack a third time. And this time, he touched something rubbery, loose, slick to the touch. He pinched its edge, began to pull it up through the unzipped top of the bag. But when he had the object half out, he let go of it and jumped backwards. His left heel came down on one of the slippery ponytails and his foot skidded before he sprang back again.

  From a safe distance away, he stared at the visage that was hanging out of the top of the backpack, flopped down its nylon side. It was like a mask, but it was not a mask. It was the face of a middle-aged woman, in appearance somewhat like the mask of the character Halmi, an old woman living a life of hardship, from the Mask Play of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism.

  11: Confessions of a Mask

  Several times during the night he had gone to the little window in the bathroom and looked out at the window of the factory, but its entire inner surface had been covered with taped-up newspapers now...and anyway, the room beyond the newspapers was dark.

  What had he expected to see there, had the window not been covered? Himself again, gazing ferally back at him? Where had he really been on the night when he had thought he was here, in this room? When he had thought he was awake, had he actually been dreaming – or the other way around? When they had briefly locked eyes and contemplated each other, which of the two selves had been the flesh, and which the figment?

  Please let it be a demon in me, he thought, pacing his little room, the TV mindlessly prattling in a succession of incomprehensible voices, speaking in tongues. A demon using me as a puppet, he pleaded, a demon that can be exorcized. Please don’t let this thing be me...

  How could it be him? How could such a thing have developed in him, lived inside him, bloomed into full-blown independent life? How could he have contained such a force? Such a hatred?

  But if it was him, and not some possessing spirit, this couldn’t have been seeded in him – grown in him – here. It would have needed to ferment too long for that. But maybe, maybe, he considered, this country, this city, these women, had been catalysts for its emergence.

  Ford had not found the mask amongst his belongings, or in the drawers of the desk, under the mattress, anywhere. It remained sadistically, triumphantly elusive. Maybe the pallid, hollow-eyed countenance he saw in the mirror was the mask...and that darker, leering face hid beneath it.

  He looked out at the factory a last time before he closed the frosted sliding panes of the bathroom window, one after another. “I’m sorry,” he whispered across to the girl, his eyes dampening. “I’m so sorry...”

  It was not just guilt for what he had done to her. It was guilt for not having called the police then, and not planning on calling the police now.

  He did not sleep at all that night...to his knowledge, at least. As sunrise drew nearer he showered, and before donning new clothes – making a conscious decision not to wear all black again – he focused on some scratches on his left hand that he hadn’t taken much note of before. They looked a bit scabby, not too fresh. He remembered how he had had the impression that the girl had managed to claw her assailant when he was holding her down out of view, this attempt at self defense inflaming his anger. She had drawn his blood before he had drawn hers. If only she had killed him before he could kill her, he thought. It would have been a better outcome for the both of them.

  Using the end of his toothbrush, he finally found the courage to prod that mask-like rag of skin down into the backpack again. Peeking inside, holding his breath, he saw a dully shining black object underneath the excised flesh. He recognized it as a box-cutter knife, with its blade retracted. Surely he hadn’t brought it with him; it never would have got past the multiple X-rays he had undergone to arrive here. Where might he have purchased it – in that nexus of streets called Namdaemun Market? Now that he thought of its many stalls and shops, he recalled seeing a number of backpacks for sale there...

  Ford stole downstairs before it was even fully light outside, hoping to avoid being seen. No one was at the front desk. He walked along hilly gray streets between gray buildings, some new and some ancient, the latter with those pagoda-like roofs. For all its bright color, gray was Seoul’s predominate hue, he felt. Even the predawn sky was a kind of bluish gray.

  He saw a cardboard box full of trash set out on the curb in front of an apartment building. Into this he dropped one of the ponytails, too quickly to see which one. He hated touching it with his naked skin again, but he couldn’t take the time to wrap his hand in swaths of tissue first like he had done when he’d loaded the backpack. On one steep street – its stony pavement graded into ribs, perhaps to afford traffic better traction or simply to further torture his feet – he saw another, bigger box left out on the sidewalk. He was too impatient, too nervous to keep dispersing the contents of the backpack. This time, he glanced about him furtively, stuffed the entire nylon bag deep into the box between other bits of refuse, then hastened down the sloping street and around the corner, hating the brash clomping sound of his big American shoes.

  He found a café that was open, where he could sit for a while with a fairly good cappuccino in front of him and the sullen counter girl sweeping behind him (don’t look at her, he told himself, don’t turn around), until he thought the market might begin conducting business. When he located it again, with a minor degree of difficulty, Namdaemun Market was wide awake and already thronged. In searching for a stall that sold backpacks, he kept an eye open for one that offered box-cutter knives. There were a number of shops selling tools, and although he didn’t see any box-cutters displayed outside, it was not inconceivable that he had acquired his at one of these places.

  He did, at least, find a variety of backpacks for sale at one stall, and he was able to buy a black model with orange lining and trim. His original had been entirely black, but he liked the Halloween partnership of orange and black.

  At one point, winding his way back toward the guest house, he looked up to see the titanic pair of eyes on the flank of the high-rise department store Migliore, blue eyes like his own blue eyes glaring down at him accusingly. It made him feel defensive, as if he himself were a kind of victim.

  But maybe he was! As if it were a scrap of flotsam to keep him from drowning, he still clung to the desperate hope that he was under some outside influence. Think of the countless hours of actors projecting into the ether the mask play’s characters – the maddened, guilt-ridden butcher, and the degenerate rapist monk. Being a stranger here, an empty bottle, wasn’t it possible that he had become a receptacle for those hungry energies, thought forms given their own existence like a Tibetan monk’s tulpa?

  And then, too, hadn’t he read that the masks themselves held great spiritual power? That they would laugh after the actor laughed, become angry after the actor portrayed anger? Couldn’t it be that one of these mask’s spirits had reached out to him, and turned the tables on him...making him angry after it became angry? Angry at the impetuous foreigner who had come clomping ignorantly and irreverently into this mystical, alien land?

  Because he didn’t hate Asian women! He respected them, admired them, coveted them! He had read in books, and heard from women at work like the married Vietnamese woman he had developed an aching crush on, how they looked after their men, pampered them...fed them when they were hungry, massaged them when they were sore. They were so graceful, so feminine; he had come to consider American women crass, vulgar, tomboyish in comparison. For so, so many years now he had longed for a woman from the mysterious Orient.

  The closest he had come to acquiring one of them had come a year before he passed a love note to that Asian teenager in the town library. He had be
en fixed up with a blind date, a friend of his best friend’s girl. His buddy’s girl was Caucasian but her friend was half Asian. Half Korean, in fact, now that he thought of it! He had been both thrilled and dismayed to meet her and see how pretty she was. Her hair was almost auburn in color. He exchanged tense hellos with her father before the four of them left for the movies; the father had met the mother while he was a soldier stationed in Korea, and his military background showed in his gruff demeanor. As for the girl, whose name he could no longer recall, he could tell from the start that she did not find him attractive. She spoke more to her friend than to him, barely even looked at him. Before the film started they did chat briefly; she told him the last thing she’d seen was an animated movie about a unicorn. He had taken her to see Videodrome. He and his friend laughed about their choice of movie, later on – at least they had liked it. And of course, he had never seen or heard from the girl after that night. Well, what had he expected, with his untucked flannel shirt, his big dirty work boots? She had struck him as snobby, so he didn’t feel sad as much as he simply felt embarrassed. He was embarrassed even now, recalling that night. No wonder he hadn’t remembered the half-Korean girl until this moment. Sometimes memories can become mercifully shielded.

  But he had not given up, over two decades later; he still loved Asian women. He meant them no harm. He would not really go back to the travel agency, when he returned home, and kill that lovely girl with the uncanny gray contact lenses, as he had told An he would do in an email...even if it was her fault that his visa had been prepared with the incorrect date on it. No – he would be sure not to go near that travel agency again, not even to demand a refund. But he would keep an eye on the Worcester, Massachusetts newspapers, when he was home, to make sure that he spotted nothing...awful...in them.

  He saw the sign for the guest house ahead, as he plodded up the street with his new backpack riding empty on his shoulders. Now that his final errands were taken care of he was ready to ask the guy with the injured eye to give the Vietnam Embassy a call about that new visa.