by Young-Ha Kim
I stopped typing. Still I heard the sentences in my head whirring past me.
I shouted at her, “Can you be quiet? Why’re you so talkative? Leave me alone so I can write.”
Looking surprised, she left me alone. After rustling around, she left, slamming the front door behind her. Whatever. My fingers kept flying.
How much time had passed? When she returned with Chinese takeout, I was still at the desk. No, I was in another world, not in New York or Seoul, but standing with the words at the threshold of everywhere, in every space, the cracks of the world, and the mezzanine of the spirit and the body. She appeared impressed by my first experience of writing at near the speed of light.
She said, “You’re really still working away?”
I was sitting at the desk in my underwear, the way I’d been since morning. I hadn’t had a single bathroom or water break. She set down the Chinese food and embraced me from behind. Her hands, as soft as silk, drifted across my chest and down to my nuts.
“My God. Look, look at how hard you are,” she said. “Were you really like this all morning?”
I’d had no idea till then. She gently stroked me across my bulging underwear as if it were the bulb of a tulip. I realized then that my lower belly was tensed up. It was clear that my blood had been concentrated down there throughout my writing session.
“Forget it,” I said. “Can’t you please just get out of my way? Don’t you see I’m writing?”
But she didn’t back off. She maneuvered to conquer me, the way that long ago, the legendary Hwangjini did to Seohwadam. Once she buried her hand inside my underwear and began licking my nipples, I couldn’t control myself. I leapt up and turned to her. The chair tumbled backwards. She backed away, assuming I was going to be angry again. Instead, I lifted her high up and tossed her onto the bed. She screamed, and I threw myself on top of her. When our frenzied sex grew louder than the mammoth ventilator, the neighbors complained by rapping against the wall. Even then my hands caressed her all over and imprinted countless, indecipherable sentences across her body. Afterward, we lay in bed and ate the cold Chinese takeout with wine. As if she couldn’t believe what had happened, she shook her head and began acting coy.
I said, “How about one more time?”
She burst out laughing and fled to the bathroom. As soon as she disappeared, I returned to the desk. This time I noticed that I was hard again as soon as I sat down. I started writing from where I’d stopped. Since it was an unpublishable, erotic, experimental, disjointed novel, I didn’t need to reread what I’d written, and consistency of character wasn’t important. Whether it made sense or not, all I had to do was keep writing.
As she emerged from the bathroom, she halted. I stared at her. God had made such a beautiful creature. The cunning woman was damp from head to toe, tempting me. Still, I couldn’t get up, because my fingers were moving relentlessly over the keys.
“Again?” she said. “What is this? Honey, are you some kind of freak? How can you keep writing like that without a break?”
“It’s weird, but I keep wanting to write. I can’t stop.”
My eyes were caressing her damp body, but my fingers kept flying madly over the keyboard.
“Do you know how many men have told me that they’d have all their wishes fulfilled if they could sleep with me just once?”
“Yeah, I do feel grateful for that. But you might be the reason why I’m able to write like this—see, this has never happened to me before. So you should be proud.”
“If so, that’s kind of rewarding. Then what should I be doing?”
“Stay just as you are and lie down. That’s what I need.”
* * *
The same situation replayed itself the next day, and the day after that. She left the house to meet friends and go shopping, but it made no difference, since I was completely absorbed in finishing the novel. In the apartment with roaming rats, I did nothing but write until my stomach was sore from the tension. My body and spirit underwent a chemical change. It might have been the epiphany I’d dreamed of, the moment that all artists seek so desperately. The muse had descended. Only now I was certain that I’d become a true artist. Earlier, I’d merely gone through the motions of being a writer. I’d had a lucky start when my debut book became a wild success, and I was respected as a writer everywhere I went. I’d assumed that this was what being a writer was. I’d written reluctantly only to meet deadlines, and submitted manuscripts as I suppressed my uneasiness. But I’d made a 180-degree reversal. The novel-in-progress and its main character were leading me. It elevated me to a level that I had never attained. When a reporter once asked Stephen King how he could be so prolific, he replied, “I would like to ask a different question. What the hell do other writers do with their time if they don’t write every day?” He had already achieved that level. He’d already experienced this rapture. Like him, I had also finally overcome a long slump and entered a new level. I saw now that there were only two types of writers: those who write furiously from a place of ecstasy, such as Stephen King or Balzac, and now me; and those who unfortunately are unable to—meaning writers who regularly beat themselves up and only meet their deadlines because of pressure from their editor. Before New York, I’d been one of the latter.
Reading my printed-out manuscript further surprised me. I hadn’t revised it yet, but there were future radiant gems inside it. It had an unforgettable main character and an original, tension-filled plot that branched out in brilliant confusion like the roots of a sweet potato plant. My Lord, I asked myself, is this truly my creation?
I would subsist on the takeout she brought back. We would relax together in bed, and when she nodded off, I’d sit down at the desk and begin typing. It sounds impossible, but I didn’t sleep for ten days. I only drowsed a few times on the toilet. Intense sex and crazed writing sessions, that was it. The following scene and others like it repeated themselves: A stark-naked beauty emerges from the bathroom on all fours, edging toward me as I pound away at the desk. I beg, “Please don’t get any closer. Can’t you see I’m writing?” as I compulsively try to get down a few more sentences. But finally she arrives at my desk and takes my erect penis in her mouth and enjoys herself. When I can’t resist any longer, I lift her up and throw her onto the bed. Soon after, I return to the desk.
Who’s going to sympathize with the fact that having heated sex with a peerless beauty was actually a heartrending effort to return to the desk?
After ten days passed, I crept into bed with her. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Honey, you smell.”
I realized I hadn’t showered once during that time.
She added, “You’re like an animal.”
I said, “Should I shower first?”
“No, I like you this way.”
We had passionate sex again. And for the first time in ten days, I fell asleep.
7
“Hey! Hey!” a voice shouted.
Someone was poking at my temple. I’d been deeply asleep and wasn’t sure at first whether I was in New York or Seoul. I didn’t realize that what I’d dimly heard was a man speaking my native language. I opened my eyes. The intruder turned on the light and the room went bright.
The man said, “Get up, boy.”
It was Raccoon. There was no mistaking him, especially under the light. Yeong-seon pressed close to me. She must have been awake.
“What are you doing?” I asked, heart pounding.
He yelled, “That’s what I want to ask you. What the hell are you doing? With another man’s wife, huh?” He leveled his right hand.
Yeong-seon gasped and held back a scream with her hand. The gun he held resembled the cross in a fanatic’s grip. I thought frantically about the many men who had slept with married women and ended up shot to death by jealous husbands. If there’s one experience to avoid in a lifetime, it’s this: waking up naked to an unpleasant conversation with an uninvited guest.
“Don’t do this. It’s not his fault,” Yeong
-seon pleaded. “Mr. Bak finally fell asleep just now. He didn’t sleep at all for ten days and just wrote.”
“Hmm, and you expect me to believe that?” The publisher’s Glock shook before my eyes.
I said, “It’s true. It was as if I’d been blessed with words suddenly raining down on me. I really wrote like a madman.”
“Don’t lie to me! How can you write with a woman like her beside you? You think I don’t know what she’s like? You must’ve stayed in bed the whole ten days. It’s obvious.” He looked at her. “You dirty bitch nympho sex maniac.”
“This is a misunderstanding!” I said. “Look, when I’m writing I develop an innately chaste constitution and am incapable of getting a hard-on. All the blood rushes to my head, and I can’t get hard—it’s common for people who use their head a lot, like writers. That’s what it is. The only reason I was lying here is because there’s one bed. In fact, it’s the first time in ten days I’ve put my head to the pillow. It’s the truth.”
He picked up the wastebasket beside the bed. It was brimming with used condoms. He slammed it down and, waving the gun in the air, began shouting at Yeong-seon. Seeing the sperm-filled condoms seemed to fuel his fury. He went through a litany of curses too crass to repeat. Yeong-seon repeatedly cried and begged, but he continued raging. Apparently she had regularly lured men home with her when they lived in New York.
I crept out of bed and returned with the printed copy of the draft.
“Here, this is my manuscript. Please have a look. I’ll admit something unseemly did occur between us, but I worked hard on the book. Of course, you’ll need to keep in mind that it hasn’t been revised . . .”
He looked skeptical. He raised the gun and said, “You two sit there facing the wall. It’s a rough neighborhood, so if I kill you both and take off, it’ll be seen as the work of a robber. You share the same last name, so the NYPD will think you’re married. They won’t come up with complicated scenarios like adultery. CSI and the like—don’t trust the way it looks on TV. A third of the murder cases in the States are unsolved. You know why? Because the killers use guns. Get moving—why aren’t you by the wall?”
We sat against the wall as he had commanded, clumsily wrapped in bedsheets. Yeong-seon extended her hand out of the sheet; I held it. I’d once done research for a novel I was working on about murder cases and learned that over 87 percent of murders in America are committed by men. What’s more, most of their victims are men—75 percent to be exact. Men normally kill other men, but why? The reason’s obvious. There’s always a woman involved. I remember an even more chilling statistic. In Canada, out of the number of wives murdered, as many as 63 percent were those who’d demanded a separation from their husband. The scenario before me was a classic example from a manual of violent crime.
The publisher appeared to be reading my manuscript. I’d never been so nervous having someone read my work. An editor with a gun in his hand: this situation might be what all editors dream of. The editor would break into the house of a lazy writer who was screwing around and not meeting deadlines, and after seizing his draft, immediately hold a trial. If the book was a masterpiece, the editor would let the writer live, and if it was rubbish, he’d be killed. And what about an audacious writer who hadn’t bothered to complete a draft? He’d be shot on the spot. Bang! There’s a saying in the Mafia that goes, “You get a lot more from a kind word and a gun than from a kind word alone.”
Outside of the whirring of the ventilator, the only sound was the turning of pages. It was a good sign that he hadn’t tossed the manuscript out after reading the opening page. When I first debuted, I’d watched Suji reading my drafts much like this, and agonized while analyzing her every reaction. If she was silent, I’d worry that it wasn’t entertaining; if she shifted in her seat, I’d wonder if she was bored and had become anxious. Then at some point, Suji stopped reading my drafts altogether.
Time crawled. I sat in silence and waited for him to finish reading. Each time I wondered if he was drowsing, I heard the page turn. Each time I felt more at ease, as if a tyrant had granted me another day to live.
“Mr. Bak.” The Raccoon finally called for me. His voice was more subdued than before. Could this be the power of literature, to purge a man’s violent emotional state?
“Yes?”
“What on earth is this story about?”
“Why? Is it boring?”
“No, it’s not boring. But I’m asking what it’s about.”
“It’s enough that you enjoyed reading it. Does it matter what it’s about?”
“When does the Japanese colonial period circus troupe part come out? So far it’s entirely an erotic story.”
“Um, it changed, in the direction of Ulysses.”
He snorted. “Does this happen often in the publishing industry?”
“Of course. Books written as planned are popular fiction and genre. Books that arrive from somewhere unexpected, beyond the writer’s intentions—that’s literature. That’s how it’s always been.”
“No, I’m talking about a publisher’s wife and a writer getting it on.” His tone was threatening again.
I said carefully, “That’s probably not so common.”
“Right?”
“How about a publisher who sleeps with his editor?” I cautiously went on the offensive. “Is that common?”
“How would I know? I’m new to the publishing world.”
“You don’t know?”
“I said I don’t know.”
I wasn’t the one with the gun, so I backed off.
“Oh,” he said, “so you thought that Ms. Lee and I had that kind of relationship. How asinine. Why would someone like me want that kind of relationship with your ex-wife? Oh, but I heard that Ms. Lee is seeing someone else. Do you know him? A philosophy professor who writes poetry.”
Shocked, I shouted, “A philosophy professor who writes poetry? Are you sure?”
“So you know him?
“Ms. Lee brought me a poetry manuscript, saying we’d publish it. Something felt off, so I looked into it and found out about them.”
“What—the son of a bitch.”
“It sounds like you know each other, but right now doesn’t seem the time to be angry . . .”
I recalled how my philosophy friend kept asking me about my ex and her boss. What was this? He’d said, “Is Suji really that amazing a woman?” The asshole had been playing with me. If I say something, he’ll calmly tell me about how Suji and he were merely dealing with the weighty “concept of sex.” I needed a gun too. I wanted to ask Philosophy: Can your weighty concept actually defeat the agility and speed of a bullet?
The publisher tossed my draft onto the desk.
“Now let’s forget about it. It’s not as if you’ll make it back alive. Here are my thoughts on your novel. It’s garbage. This novel you’ve written to make a fool of me—what the hell’s your real motive for writing it?”
“Garbage? I don’t understand. Of course, I agree that my initial motive for writing it was dishonest—I mean, my motive was unclear. But once I started, something mysterious happened. To some extent all writers experience how a novel ends up betraying its writer. This time, my novel transcended me, went beyond my miserable problems and my limited imagination and took me to an extraordinary place. This manuscript wasn’t written by me, Bak Mansu, but it borrowed my hands—the way Jesus borrowed Mary’s body and came into the world—and is being born into the world right now. You might object to my Christian language; maybe a Son Buddhist monk would say you’ve become enlightened, or something like that.”
“You’re trying to scam me now, since I’m just a Wall Street guy who fooled around with money.”
“That isn’t it.”
“Do you know what my job was at Goldman Sachs?”
“Not really.” All that had stuck was the acronym OPM.
“It was calculating the exact market value of bonds. Know what bonds are? Put simply, it’s debt. When it came
to bonds, I made no mistakes. When I bought out this damn publishing firm, it turned out the thing was entirely built on debt. Bad debt created by these writers who gobble up their advances and don’t turn in their manuscripts. And you’re the worst of the worst.”
“That’s a little extreme . . .”
“You even screwed my wife. You think this debt’s easy to pay off now? Outside of death . . .” He was overexcited and began stuttering. “Yeah, the debt’s only payable with de-death.”
“Since you’re reading with that kind of bias . . .”
“You think I got a large salary at Goldman Sachs by being biased while calculating bond values? I’m a cool-headed person.”
“I’m telling you, this novel is different!”
“Remember, I’ve read all your novels. Honestly, I did rather like them. But this one lacks even the few merits of the others. It’s complete shit.”
Yeong-seon said, “That’s not true.”
He said, “What’s this? You read it, too? But you don’t know anything about fiction.”
I was as surprised as he was. I had no idea that she’d been reading it.
She said, “You’re the one who doesn’t understand fiction. From a man who knows nothing but money . . . I used to read quite a lot of novels, though that changed once I married your kind.”
I said, “Anyway, what did you think?”
A writer always wants to hear his readers’ opinions, whether the readers are naked or fully dressed.
These words emerged from her lovely lips: “You’re right. I don’t know literature, but this novel knocked me out. Frankly, I didn’t really grasp the main character’s ideas, and I had no idea what direction the plot was going, but once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. It’s like taking a long drag of good pot.”
I asked, “What’s pot?”
The publisher answered instead, saying, “You don’t know pot and you call yourself a writer? It’s cannabis. Marijuana.”