Mr. Rat, you are the virus that plagues this town.

He recognized me, though I can’t imagine how. It was over a month ago that he pulled that scam. Now he’s limping downtown among the throng. It’s gay pride weekend and people have gathered to show their support in the streets of San Francisco. Butterfly wings, rainbow socks galore. On nights like these I realize, “Dude you’re in f****** San Francisco, man!” I’m listening to noise in my headphones and laughing at everything, walking past Old Navy, past the Gap at Powell and Market whose window is adorned with a rainbow pattern of colored Tees.  Tonight, I’m the tourist of the tourists. Hehe. Going nowhere in particular, watching all these people watching things. I’m chewing on a popsicle stick.

He passes me going the other direction. I know it is him. He’s got the same stupid fake limp, and the same stupid scab, and the same stupid crummy suit, and the same stupid mustache, and the same stupid helpless expression on his stupid motherf****** face. I loathe him. He is a cockroach. I want to crush him with the heel of my boots. I want to boil him in oil. I want to pour him down the sink and grind him to little bits in the disposal. Such is my hatred for this man. This vile vulture.

I turn around and follow him to see if he will try his scam tonight. I hope does. That will be my moment. I’ll interrupt him and demand my money. No, I’ll play along, I’ll ask him all sorts of questions. No, I’ll just glare at him, freak him out a bit. He turns his head and looks straight at me. He recognizes me. He recognizes me? Impossible. I tail him through the crowd, keeping a comfortable distance, he darts across Market St. on a red light, so do I. He weaves through the crowd, almost jogging, so do I. My eyes are fixed on him, I’m trying to turn my vision into laser beams to sever his spinal cord. He turns North into the tenderloin, where emaciated black men sit in lawn chairs at street corners, and loose woman in loose clothing haven’t bathed in weeks, offer themselves, where every brick, every crack smells like piss and spilt booze. I catch him at a red light, act casual, but make sure he knows I know, he turns and dashes across the street just before the light changes. I follow him parallel on the other side. He ducks into a corner store to buy a forty with his ill-gotten gains. I wait, lean against a pole, glare at him in line. Turn my popsicle stick in my mouth. I’m a badass, I can tear this motherf****** to pieces. You filth. You trash. You vermin. You are the sickness of this city. You are the virus, the cancer, the raw canker sore under my tongue. I won’t tear him to pieces. I will glare at him, because I am not the kind of person to tear another person to pieces. But right now I wish I was. I want him to think that I am. I hope he is scared. Or at least a little nervous. He exits and sees me waiting for him. He definitely notices. He definitely tries not to show that he notices. He walks even faster, carrying the little black plastic bag of liquid escapism. Maybe he’s a drug head. Could be this is where he scores his H. All those tourists who didn’t know any better, thought they were gaining karma points, supporting this asshole’s habit. I keep following him, shooting lasers into his skull. Deadly, death ray lasers. From my eyeballs.

He turns down the filthiest, most god-forsaken, street in the whole city. Flesh rotten zombies troll these sidewalks day and night. Half-naked, putrid individuals holing up in half way houses and mangy rat hotels and gutters. Ha. He lives on Sixth Street. We’re practically neighbors. He gets lost in the mob. I lose interest and go home.

The Elegant Clinic on Floor F

We stepped off the elevator at the floor marked “F.”

The glass door slid automatically to the right and we entered. The room was elegantly decorated; black leather seats, gray marble counters, high ceilings. A huge flatpanel TV broadcast international news from the far wall. Minchul wrote my name on a list. I was number two. He was there in case I needed an interpreter. Minchul picked a magazine from the rack and we sat to wait.

Soon the mildly attractive woman behind the counter called my name. Well actually she couldn’t pronounce my name so she just said “cho-gi” which means “there” or “you there.” The doctors office was also smartly decorated. The stool was black leather, the bed was black leather. From behind two large flat screen monitors, the young doctor motioned me to sit at the stool.

His English was dreadful. And unusual. I leaned forward and strained my ears to understand him at all. All his P’s came out as F’s and vice versa. “Tell me ip you peel fain.” Except all the vowels were jumbled too. So it was more like, “Teel may eep yoo pal fain.” To make matters worse he spoke with a slight slur so it came out as more or less one word. “Teelmayeepyoopalfain.” I figured he probably learned mostly from books, and hadn’t had much opportunity to practice speaking. Somehow we managed to communicate anyhow.

I lay down on the black leather bed and they pulled the curtain. He felt my abdomen, where I’d been feeling the pain. His fingers felt more like cold surgical probes than flesh and bone. I couldn’t help but wonder if his lovers felt the same way. The probes dug deep and precisely. I felt they had passed right through my skin.

After a time, he smiled and nodded. Apparently his search had confirmed his suspicions. He told me that a family of small field mice had probably crawled into my mouth as I slept. They built a nest at the base of my ribcage out of black wire and twine. This would have been fine, if it hadn’t been for the several bottles of Soju I had drunk the previous weekend. The toxin, dangerous for humans, is downright deadly for field mice. They were killed in a state of great panic while trying to dig an escape hole in my intestinal tract. The pain I was experiencing was largely caused by the gases released by their decomposing bodies.† He then advised that I adhere to a soft diet, avoiding all alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, carbonation, hamburgers and all other of the more unfriendly dietary vices.

I picked up a prescription at the front counter and paid my bill of $3.00. Downstairs at the pharmacy I picked up my meds for the next three days for which I paid $1.50. I looked at my watch. All told the visit had cost me $4.50 and took 37 minutes.

This being the first time I have ever seen a doctor, I forgot to ask several pertinent questions such as, “I’ll be in Taiwan for the next five days and won’t be able to pick up more meds.” Well that’s not a question, but it probably is pertinent. I should probably also have asked, “Are fried eggs, kimchi, and buttered toast in a soft diet?” ...cause that’s all I have to eat.

† I don’t actually know what he said. But it did involve the words “gastric” and “intestinal.”

On White Day the Boys Give Out Chocolate

It was an obscure moment. Brief as a breath, yet timeless.

When I finish my last class of the day, you might think that I would be in a rush to get home, escape the echoes of shrill screaming voices, the odd stilted atmosphere in the teachers' room, the Hellish temperature of the heating vents. But, oddly enough, the place is kind of peaceful after the kids leave. The teachers sit and chat a bit. Share the spoils of White Day, a piece of chocolate and a peppermint. A little warm down before we part.

It feels a little futile to go home, seeing as I'll just eat, crash, and be back in the morning. So I was in no hurry as I sauntered down the three flights of stairs and saw David coming back up. He had just stepped out for a smoke and now had to return to teach a late class.
"You just missed your bus," he said as he passed.

This sucks because now I'll have to wait a good twenty minutes for the next bus comes. Maybe more, maybe less. The buses in Daegu don't run on any kind of set schedule, so you never know. But the weather was nice, first time in a while, and I was in good spirits.

The first bus to pull up was the Blue 427. My eyes aren't so good, so I have to squint each time a bus approaches. At first, I can't even tell if it's blue or green, let alone if it's the 427 or the 414-1. The brakes whined as it came to a stop right in front of me. The bus was packed, standing room only. I was silently grateful it wasn't my bus.

My eyes wandered down the corridor, back to front, and came to rest directly in front of me. There was a girl standing there holding the bar for support. She was looking at me. That kind of distant casual voyerism practiced only through the protective windows of moving vehicles. Moving vehicles protect our anonymity and embolden us. Our eyes lock for an instant, then two. She's cute. We should look away, protect our privacy, our vanity, but we don't. The side door opens and some elderly people step out slowly, like poorly repaired broken machines.

I think at this moment we both begin to realize the oddity of the situation. It has become a situation. Her mouth cracks like glass into a smile. I must have smiled back for I saw its reflection in her face. A slow progression as our smiles reflected each other's, larger and larger. It's a profoundly intimate and timeless moment shared between two total strangers.

The side door shuts with a hiss of hydrolics, the bus groans forward. Our eyes remain locked as the bus pulls away. We're both smiling childishly. And then it ends. Like a rubber band snapped, our gazes break. And I return to the rush of traffic and cool evening breeze. A drunk old woman hugs a tree nearby, gaining composure before venturing forth into the night. And lacking explanation, the moment becomes magical, brief, unexpected, and divine.

Now I can't even remember her face.

This is how revolutions fail: Without a sound

Did I foresee this? Or did I hide it from my mind?

I don't know.

This is how most revolutions end, I suppose. In silence, behind closed doors. When there is no martyr to sacrifice, to adulterate. And this is how this one will end too, before it began. What did we want after all? Money? Would that satisfy? We knew, after all, that we could not escape the hourd of five year olds. But would money make them more bearable?

We imagined, and enjoyed imagining, that we had strength, that bound together we could get our way. Our will would be granted. We were delusional in our scheming. We said to each other "they must do something." But what never occured to us was that they didn't. They didn't have to do anything.

They called us in, one by one, to break us down. Brick by brick. Until we accepted their offer of nothing, and thanked them for not giving us worse. Katrina was first. I was second. David was thrid.

I did not get to speak to Katrina, before I entered. In the meeting room, a small circular room with three chairs and a glass table, I could not help but notice the way the artificial plant cast its shadow across the frosted glass window. An articifial tree casting a shadow from an artificial light onto artificial frosted glass. I could see the green of the leaf fading gently. It was a meaningless detail.

"This isn't what you really want," they said, "why did you sign this?"

It sounds trite. An elementary tactic. Test the very foundation of the structure.

But funny thing is, they were right. I didn't want that, though I wrote it. I suppose greed had led me to sign it. Greed and envy. I thought we would win. No struggle. They do need us more than we need them, after all. But, when it came down to it, I didn't really care. But didn't tell them that. For something else took over my body. Something that has to do with principles.

Something was set in motion. A letter, a signiture, a meeting, a demand. And it was these things that spoke for me now. Each argument built brick by brick upon the previous action. Two selves seperated. One bound by desire, one by principle. Each acting out of turn.

It was, after all, desire that got me into this mess. And now, just when desire turns and flees, principle steps in and says, "I signed this letter in the delusion of my desire, but I will stand by it in the sobriety of principle."

Foolishness.

Dictated by the principle of argument, the principle of battle, the principle of pride, the principle of brotherhood. I lost sight of what I wanted and acted as a figure head. In the guise of fulfilling my will, I abandoned my self to an ideal. I am my puppet self.

Even as I speak, I know I am already defeated. But I cannot surrender, for the ideal always struggles onward. We parry, my bosses and I, and arrive at a stalemate.

As I greet my fellow comrades in the teacher room, I realize that I alone hold this ideal. I alone am willing to waste my time arguing fruitlessly. Risk my job. Approach martyrdom.

In their eyes, defeat. Shame.

And I realized. That all that time. In the small circular room. I was not I. I was them. I was arguing for their sakes. I was unrelenting for their sakes. I would not back down because it was not I who was speaking. It was us.

For when I saw the defeat in their eyes, when I heard them confess defeat, I too was defeated.

Lazarus

My clock (I shall name it Lazarus) magically started working again this morning. It had been lying on the floor a few days after I dug it out of the trash. But finally on Sunday I purchased a hook to attach it to my wall, found a battery lying around, and set it in its place on the wall (carefully calculated to achieve the greatest possible pleasure). For at least a day it counted the seconds diligently. It's calming tihc tawk, my lullaby.

Then one night I awoke quite inexplicably. It was dark. My dreams had halted. I sat up in bed, the room was unnaturally silent. I thought little of it, rolled over, and fell back asleep. It wasn't until morning, while I was eating a bowl of Wheat Flakes smothered in milk and honey, that I realized that Lazarus had died in the night.

But now he has returned to me from beyond the grave. His familiar voice is now somewhat disturbing, stained with death as it is. Yet, despite all he has been through, there he is on the wall, striving towards that noble goal. Diligently. He remains my humble servant. Twice dead, once buried, and blissfully unaware of his current discord with reality.

And just as I type these words, I hear the ticking fade, grow dim. Like through a veil. Faintly recognizable.

My clock is an artist. He does not merely labor on blindly. He brings you into his struggle. He reminds you of the difficulty of life. He challenges you to delve into the deeper meaning of existence and purpose. He halts, jarring you from familiar reality, and just as you get you bearings...

he takes two breaths and marches onward...

...towards infinity.