Blood Sisters Read online

  “You don’t need to work at a shady place like that,” she scolded. “I never asked you to pay rent. What was the point of running away from home if you were just going to walk right back into another shithole. It would be better to starve.”

  “You don’t know anything about me!”

  “You’re being irresponsible! Think about it. What year are you living in? You just stroll through campus, molotovs and tear gas in the air, and you don’t feel anything?”

  “Yup! I’m a clueless airhead. So what? Am I supposed to be like you, memorizing manifestoes and communist curricula, breaking bricks to throw at cops during a strike?”

  “Think about the summer we met!”

  “Fucking hell, I’m so tired of that story. We just protested because everybody was doing it! Everybody was protesting General Park’s constitutional amendment, yelling catchy slogans, because how could we not? If you didn’t join the protest, everybody would’ve thought you were an unpatriotic government dog! It’s different now. I just protested because I wanted you to like me. I have no political ideology of my own. Don’t tell me to read this book, that book, join your ‘group study’ like it’s some sort of holy ritual.”

  “You’ve changed since your stepbrother died.”

  That’s when all of the evening’s drinks rushed back into my mouth. I ran to the shared bathroom down the hall with my hand over my mouth, but someone had locked the door. I puked all over the bathroom door. Someone emerged to curse me out. By the time I cleaned myself up, he was gone. I had no one to curse at, so I just lifted my middle finger to the sky. Fuck you, motherfucker. Godfucker.

  I came back to the room to lie down, still huffing with anger. Jimin held my hand under the covers. Her fingers were raw from her blood-drawing nail-biting habit. We knew we had drawn blood from each other’s hearts with our drunken argument, so we waited to fall asleep holding hands. She usually wrote before going to bed under the nightlight, but not tonight. Around dawn, we kissed. I held back my morning breath as our lips touched. I fell back to sleep.

  Now I am putting away the futon and folding the pajamas she left behind. The room feels empty. I feel abandoned. I press the play button of the dusty cassette tape player. “A Bird on a Metal Tower” by Kim Dusu rings out of it. It’s the tape I gave Jimin for her birthday. So she had listened. I thought she only paid attention to Kim Min-ki and Nochatsa.

  I open the photocopy of Kim Nam-jo’s poetry collection Jimin had given me. The very first page has an inscription: “Let’s go forward together,” in red, signed, “From, Warrior Jimin.” Warrior, huh? She isn’t as strong as she pretends to be. I usually don’t like the poems Jimin likes. Same with the prose.

  Mayakovsky isn’t too bad. I like “A Few Words About Myself,” “Cloud in Trousers.” I heard he was a revolutionary, but his poems are avant-garde. I don’t know poetry too well, but I don’t want to know poetry too well. I’m gonna read one more poem, take a shower, and head out. I open the book carefully, like an illiterate shaman carefully picking a card. The title is great: “I Love.”

  I can’t do it alone—

  carry the grand piano

  (much less

  a metal safe)

  Then how am I supposed to bring back this—

  heavier than the grand piano

  or metal safe—heart of mine?

  Bankers are wise:

  “We’re unimaginably rich.

  We didn’t have enough pockets

  so we stuffed our safes.”

  I have hidden

  my love

  inside you

  like the riches

  in the safe

  and like a Greek king

  I strut.

  The entire poem is long, 13 pages total. They are aligned weirdly, texts too close to one another. I wonder if the photocopier messed it up? The indentation of the lines moves in and out, and the text size is inconsistent. After reciting on my own, I feel deflated and a little embarrassed. My heart gets heavier than a metal safe.

  It’s time for me to go to school, so I hurry out, leaving a note on the desk.

  Jimin, If you have time this evening, stop by at the café where I work. It’s on the way to the subway station, and it’s called Instant Paradise. Sometime between 6:30 and midnight. Don’t wait for me, they said they will feed me tonight. Enjoy your evening.

  —Jeong Yeoul

  * * *

  This isn’t commuting, this is mountain climbing! The stupid college gobbles up our tuition, but can’t spit out a single shuttle bus for the students. Getting to the Humanities building isn’t too bad, though. I have a German Grammar class at 4:00 PM. I’ve skipped too many classes and am not sure I’ll keep going. I still haven’t turned in the paper for my Interpreting Literature class. Ah, my heart is not a safe full of love, but a shriveled organ rotting with anxiety and anger.

  I walk by the café where I now work. Instant Paradise. I salivate at the thought of a free dinner. The sign is already lit. I hadn’t noticed, but the huge, hot-pink sign looks tacky and a little suggestive. Instant coffee, instant ramen, instant camera—what else is “instant?” My life? My disposable instant life! There is no past, no future; there is no previous life or reincarnation; there is no eternity. Just one disposable day after another, and then—GAME OVER! I wish life was made of a single day: today.

  Jeong Yeoul! Let’s not get distracted by the past nightmares, or make any foolish long-term plans. Here and now. Today alone is overwhelming enough. A black plastic bag soars above my head. It’s majestic, like a raven midflight.

  Zarathustra

  It’s been a week since I started working at Instant Paradise, but Jimin hasn’t stopped by, not once. I know she’s busy studying and writing poems, but it stings. When I get to her place after midnight, exhausted after a long day of work, she looks over her shoulder, avoiding me like I’m a pathetic prostitute. The past few days, she’s stopped nagging me. Stop working at that shady café. Read books.

  But the café is near the university, so there are almost no shady customers. Most of the customers are college students. Occasionally school teachers, bank clerks, or middleaged men from the apartment complex across the street stop by. The owner shows up once every few days to ask halfheartedly, “Everything good? Water the plants, please.” Then she scatters her perfume smell and storms out. According to her nephew and cashier, Sungyun, she also has a huge coffee shop in Gwangan, so she doesn’t really care about this location. Her father owns the building, and she has good alimony from her divorce, so she isn’t really worried about money.

  I am just about to brush my teeth after eating dinner in the kitchen when a tall man shambles into the shop. The sign’s light is off and it’s ten minutes before the store opens for the evening.

  “Excuse me, we’re not open yet.” I look up, and my heart drops. Oh fuck, it’s Dad. He probably poked around the university student directory office, somehow heard about Jimin, and combed through the map to find her place. I can visualize him huffing and puffing through the university’s gate, the flower shop, the convenience store, the real estate agent’s office, and into the dark alley where Jimin and I live. He might have throttled Jimin to tell him where I was.

  “I’m sorry, but can I use the bathroom?”

  “What?” My father instantly transformed into a stranger. It wasn’t him. I feel deflated, so deflated that I fall to the floor. Eunyong, another server, tells him that the bathroom is up the stairs halfway to the next floor.

  How long has it been since the last time I saw my father face-to-face? It feels like it’s been a million years since we ate at the same table. There is no way he has been thinking of me or looking for me.

  The only time my father and I touched skin to skin was when I was in second grade. It was in the small, noisy workshop attached to our home where my father made squishy slippers out of plastic. I kept playing the rubber band game, where you dance along to a song with a specific sequence of moves, jumping over a long
rubber band set up high off the ground. When I wore a cumbersome skirt, I would pull up the skirt and tuck it in my panties so I could freely kick my legs as high as the sky.

  One sweltering summer night, I saw my mom in a dream. She spread her arms toward me by the lake. I ran to her, my feet so light, to jump into her arms. But her breasts were as cold as ice. She was made of plastic. When I woke up, soaked in sweat, no one was there. Half-asleep, I played the rubber band game in the dark. There was no rubber band, so I piled up the pillows. I sang a familiar song to myself: “Hopping over the dead bodies of my fellow soldiers, I go forward and forward,” and hopped back and forth over the pillows. But then I slipped on one of the pillows and bumped my head on the corner of the nearby desk. Blood spilled from my forehead. Covered in blood, I crawled into the workshop’s control room. Dad, working late that night, turned pale at the sight of me, picked me up, and rushed to the hospital. His white undershirt quickly turned red. It was a sweltering summer night, but my teeth were chattering. I felt like I was freezing to death. I was so sleepy. And I felt so good. When we were passing the overpass by the public bathhouse, I prayed: I hope the hospital light I see is farther away than it looks. Dear God, please let this overpass collapse.

  So now I have a scar on my forehead. I usually cover it with my bangs, but when I feel like shit, I trace the scar, slender like an orchid’s leaf, and retreat into my heart’s garden. In the garden there are trees, songbirds, rose bushes, pots of orchids, and pretty pebbles. A white bird emerges out of a pretty pebble. On the green grass, I drink hot cocoa, and a nude woman sitting next to me touches my cheek. Who is my real mother?

  The man returns from the bathroom and asks if he could order an apple mojito. I don’t know what that is. When I squint and tell him we don’t serve food, he smiles, “But an apple mojito isn’t food,” and orders a gin and tonic instead.

  I can make a gin and tonic with my eyes closed.

  “Do you want a drink?” He doesn’t even touch the shrimp chips that come with the drink. He orders another drink, the same one. There are five or six toothbrushes sticking out of his rat-colored pocket. He must be a toothbrush salesperson. Is he one of those people who loudly profess how amazing the toothbrush is that they’re selling on the subway, trying to coax the passengers into buying one? He glances at the check and gives me twenty thousand won.

  “The total is ten thousand.” As I return one of the two ten thousands bills, he pushes it back into my hand. “Why would I take this?” I get annoyed, but Eunyong pokes my side to take it. Oh, I guess this is what they call a tip.

  * * *

  The Aesthetic Studies professor stops by. He studied Aesthetics at a prestigious university in Seoul. Now that I work at a café, I see people like this up close. I have to hide my excitement when I see him walk in with his fellow professors. I used to sneak into his class because everybody talked about him: he was a true believer in democracy, a great agitator, and a blindingly handsome man. I used to go all the way down to the Fine Arts wing of the university for his lecture, and I learned a few things about Lukács’ philosophy among the slacker Dance majors.

  When the party he’s having with his friends warms up, the professor sneaks his arm around Eunyong. Is that okay? He’s allowed to grope her, just like that? Wait, should I have been sitting next to him? I don’t know how I feel about the situation. My head spins.

  The professor’s friend picks up a fork and moves his hand off my thigh. He sings into the fork as though it’s a microphone. He sings a new pop song. His voice sounds like he is scratching the plate with a fork. I like the psychedelic song by Sanulim he’s singing, but he’s not getting it right, not even close. A professor next to him butchers Songolmae’s “I Lived in Oblivion.”

  “Hey, you over there! You should sing a song,” the Aesthetic Studies professor yells at me, and I decide to obey his command, but can’t think of any song I know the lyrics to. I remember melodies better than lyrics. Everybody in the café is getting impatient with me. Whatever. I’ll sing a song that will elicit applause for sure.

  “Having endured the long night, like the morning dew on the grass leaves, more beautiful than a pearl, the sun rises above the cemetery, and the sweltering daylight torments me …” The song is reaching its climax, and I feel great.

  “Hey! What the fuck. Stop that!” someone yells at me. The room quickly cools in silence. They all look angry, abruptly sobered up. “I don’t believe this. You’re just bargirls at a shitty bar, okay? I don’t know what you think you know, but how could you sing a protest song here? Some things are sacred!”

  After that everybody leaves, even the couple who have been giggling over two cups of coffee for several hours. Eunyong, Sungyun, and I go outside to talk. The two of them, who have worked here for a while, tell me that the tips are pooled and then split. But since it’s my first time getting a tip, I get to keep it. I head to the record store by the university. There’s a record I’ve been eyeing. I hope it’sn’t sold already. I’m nervous. The album cover was beautiful, and the title was glorious. The cover art had a monster’s face with diseased skin and an expressionless man caged inside its mouth. The man is probably the lead singer of the band. They are an Italian art-rock band called Museo Rosenbach, and the album is called Zarathustra. After all those days pressing my face against the display case window, peering at the album, I finally get to own it.

  The dark and stuffy café is now filled with the fantastic Zarathustra. Running time: twenty-something minutes. I could listen to this album at least ten times a day, every day from now on.

  “Are you just gonna play this record over and over again? I feel like I’m going insane listening to this!”

  As Eunyong complains, I narrate, “Behold, I teach you, Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome!”

  “You’re acting like an intellectual buffoon.” Sungyun replaces Zarathustra with Lee Guanjo’s record on the turntable. “The customer is king. We need to play songs that they like.” Sungyun is supposed to be majoring in Athletics, but he doesn’t look it. He hangs out with the jocks in town who call each other “brother,” but he’s barely taller than me, maybe 175 centimeters. Sporting a buzzcut and wide shoulders, he boasts that he only wears brand-name sportswear and trainers.

  “I’ll donate the record here, since I bought it with the tip that should’ve been shared,” I suggest.

  * * *

  Down the dark alley, I return to Jimin’s place, swinging the plastic bag containing a pork cutlet I saved for dinner. The room is dark and quiet. “Jimin, are you asleep?” Nobody is there. She never stays out this late. Without washing my hands or anything, I just lie down on my belly, and open a book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one of the books Jimin begged me to read. I was probably drawn to Museo Rosenbach, not a very well-known band around here, because of her recommending this book. Goddamn, this book is thick. She would grin if she saw me struggling with it. Where is she? On the back cover, there is this passage: “The Earth has skin, and the skin is riddled with several diseases. One of the diseases is Man.” After turning a few pages, I am overwhelmed by sleepiness and worry about Jimin’s whereabouts. I can’t help it. I can’t help being the squirming skin disease. Even if the whole Earth self-destructs tomorrow, I’ll just pull a blanket over myself. I’m the Sleepy Demagogue.

  Aldebaran

  Lately, Jimin Sunbe seems to be plotting something with other Sunbes. Jimin spent the past four days protesting at the day-and-night nonstop rally after the activist Lee Hanyeol passed away. She’s that kind of bleeding heart. She resigned as the PR manager of the Feminist Students’ Association group to go join the laborers at the Guro workshop. She gave up on that mission after her mom threw a fit, but she’s still a troublemaker, big time. For some reason, she tries to embrace all the illnesses of the world with her bleeding heart.

  During finals week, I never see Jimin come back to the apartment. She says she’s been studying late at the library and in the activity room,
but I don’t know if she’s even taking the exams or eating enough. She won’t answer me when I ask what she’s been up to, or if she does, the answer is curt. I want to hassle her into telling me what’s going on, but I can’t. I’m close to academic suspension myself. I turn in my German Grammar exam with almost nothing filled out, and the professor rejects my late paper. The electives aren’t too bad, but even in those, I’m not sure what kind of grades I’ll receive.

  * * *

  At Instant Paradise, the owner seems to have taken to me, so she doesn’t care if I don’t come to work during finals. She even copied the key to the café for me to keep, telling me to feel free to come study there. Tonight she’s standing on the street with Nana in her arms.

  “The stars are beautiful tonight,” she says. I look up into the sky. When I walk, I only look down at the ground. Frankly, I find the people who ramble about the stars pathetic.

  “I don’t see any.”

  “You have to envision them through your imagination. One star, two stars, three stars.”

  There are too many of these romantic literary types in the world. I walk into the café, and she follows me.

  “Yeoul, what’s your zodiac sign?”

  I’m getting real sick of this shit. “I was born in May, so probably Taurus.”

  “Hmm. You were born under the influence of Aldebaran. It’s a large star, and in astrology, it’s the star that brings fortune.”

  “Hmm. I guess that’s nice.” I find it strange how chummy she’s being with me tonight. I wonder if she wants something from me. “Aren’t you busy today? You usually are.”

  “Not today. By the way, did you know that you’re popular here? Someone was looking for you.”

  “Me? Who was it?” I ask, intrigued.

  “I dunno. We talked a little over drinks. I think he runs a hospital over in Gupo.”

  “I don’t know anyone like that. He must’ve been looking for someone else.”