by Frank Wynne
But with Nimrod it wasn’t even that he was homy; he was simply in love with her. Her name was Netta, which is a name that I still love to this day, and she was a paramedic at the infirmary. Nimrod told me once that he could lie next to her in bed for hours without getting bored, and that the place he liked her to touch the most was the spot on his foot where everyone had an arch but his was flat.
At the base we would do guard duty twice a month, and once every two months we had to stay the weekend, which Nimrod always managed to arrange for days when Netta had infirmary duty so that even on guard duty they were together. A year and a half later, she left him. It was a strange kind of split, even she couldn’t really explain why it happened, and after that Nimrod didn’t care when his guard duty came out. One Saturday, Miron, Nimrod, and I were on duty together. Uzi had just managed to forge some kind of a medical pass for himself. We were all on the same patrol—Miron first, Nimrod second, and me third. And even before I had a chance to replace him, this officer rushed in and said that the guy on duty had put a bullet in his head.
ROUND TWO
The second time Miron lost it, it was much more unpleasant. We didn’t say a word about it to his parents, and I just moved in with him till it passed. Most of the time he kept quiet, sitting in the corner and writing a kind of book to himself, which was supposed to eventually replace the Bible. Sometimes, when we’d run out of beer or cigarettes, he would swear at me a little, with conviction, and say that I was really a demon disguised as a friend, and I’d been sent to torment him. Other than that, he was almost bearable. Uzi, on the other hand, took his extended period of sanity very hard. He didn’t admit it, but it seemed like he’d really had it with that skyrocketing international company of his. Somehow, whenever he flipped, he had a lot more energy to write all these grim prospectuses and things and go to boring meetings. Now that he was a little more sane, the whole businessman thing was that much harder to handle. Even though it seemed as if his company was about to go public and he’d be sitting back, raking in a couple of million. Me, I’d been fired from another job, and Miron, in a lucid moment when he was off beer and cheap cigarettes, said that he was the one who’d gotten me fired with his unearthly spiritual powers. I don’t know, maybe all those jobs just aren’t for me, and all I should really do is sit it out till Uzi strikes it rich and tosses me a little.
The second time Uzi started going batshit proved once and for all that there was definitely a rotation thing going on, and I started to worry because I knew I was next. Miron, who’d chilled out by then, kept insisting it had something to do with Nimrod. “I don’t know what he wants exactly. Maybe he wants us to even the score or something. But one thing’s for sure, so long as we don’t do it—whatever it is—I don’t think it’s going to stop.” “Even what score?” I countered. “Nimrod killed himself.” “How do you know?” Miron wouldn’t let it go that easily. “Maybe he was murdered. Besides, maybe it isn’t exactly vengeance. Maybe it’s just something he wants us to do so he can rest in peace. Like in those horror films, you know, where they open a bar on an ancient burial ground, and as long as it stays there, the ghosts can’t rest in peace.” In the end, we decided that Miron and I would go to the Kiryat Shaul cemetery to make sure nobody had set up a Coke-and-mineral-water stand on Nimrod’s grave by mistake. The only reason I agreed to go there with him was that I was freaking out about it being my turn soon. The truth was that of the three of us, my crack-up was the worst.
Nimrod’s grave had stayed exactly the same. We hadn’t been there in six years. At first, on Memorial Day for the fallen soldiers, his mother still used to call us. But with all those military rabbis and those aunts who’d faint away again every year, we weren’t exactly eager to go. We kept telling ourselves that we’d go some other day, on our own special memorial day, except we always put it off. Last time we talked about it, Uzi said that actually every time we went to shoot pool together or took in a movie or a pub or whatever, it was a commemoration of Nimrod too, because when the three of us are together, then even if we’re not exactly thinking about him, he’s there.
It took Miron and me maybe an hour to find the grave, which actually seemed to be well tended and clean, with a couple of stones on top as proof that someone had been there not too long before. I looked at the dates on the grave and thought about how I was just about to turn thirty, and Nimrod wasn’t even nineteen yet. It was kind of weird, because somehow, whenever I thought about him he was sort of my age, when in fact I hardly had any hair left and he was not much more than a kid. On our way out, we returned the cardboard yarmulkes to the box by the gate, and Miron said he didn’t have any more ideas, but we could always have a séance. Outside the cemetery, on the other side of the fence, there was a fat, shaggy cat chewing a piece of meat. I looked at him, and as if he felt it, he looked up from the chunk of meat and smiled at me. It was a mean and ruthless smile, and he went back to chewing the meat without lowering his gaze. I felt the fear running through my body, from the hard part of my brain to the soft part of my bones. Miron didn’t notice there was something wrong with me, and kept on talking. “Relax, Ron,” I told myself. The fact that I remembered my name made me so happy tears came to my eyes. “Take a deep breath, don’t fall apart. Whatever it is, it’ll pass.” At that very moment, in the smelly office of some attorney in Petah Tikva, Uzi was chickening out of signing a deal that would transfer thirty-three percent of his company’s shares to an anonymous group of Polish investors for a million and a half bucks. Think about it, if only he’d stayed flipped out for another fifteen minutes, he could have taken us and the Turnip on a Caribbean cruise, and instead he was on his way home in a number-54 bus from Petah Tikva with an asshole driver who wouldn’t even turn on the AC.
TRI-LI-LI-LI-LA
When Uzi announced he was going to marry the Turnip, we hardly even put up an argument. Somehow we’d known it would happen. Uzi lied and said it was his idea, and that it was mainly so he could take out a mortgage from the bank for an apartment that he’d planned to buy anyway someplace near Netanyah. ‘How can you marry her?” Miron tried to reason with him, without much conviction. “You don’t even love her.” “How can you say I don’t love her?” Uzi protested. “We’ve been together for three years. D’you know I’ve never cheated on her?” “That’s not because you love her,” Miron said. “It’s just because you’re uncoordinated.” We were just shooting pool, and Uzi had clobbered both of us with the bull’s-eye shots of someone who’d made up his mind to squeeze every drop out of the little bit of luck he still had left, quickly, before it had a chance to run out. There was only the eight ball left, and it was Uzi’s turn. “Let’s make a bet,” I said, in an act of desperation. “If you pocket the eight ball, Miron and I will never call her Turnip again, ever. And if you miss, then you drop the whole wedding thing for a year.” “When it comes to feelings, I never make bets,” Uzi said, and pocketed the eight effortlessly. “Besides,” he said, smiling, “it’s too late. We’ve already printed up the invitations.” “What were you thinking, betting him like that?” Miron told me off later. “That shot was a sure thing.”
By the time the date rolled around, Uzi had managed to lose it two more times, and on both occasions he said he would call it all off, but changed his mind right away. As for me, I just crashed in Miron’s apartment while it was going on. Now that we were wigged out most of the time, it was much nicer living together. And besides, I couldn’t really afford my own place. Miron had stolen a big pile of wedding invitations from Uzi, and we would use them to make filters for joints. “How can you go and marry someone whose mother’s name is Yentl?” he would ask Uzi whenever we’d smoke a joint together, and Uzi would just stare at the ceiling and give that spaced-out laugh of his. The truth was that even though I was on Miron’s side on this, I could see it wasn’t much of an argument.
Three days before the wedding we held a séance. We bought a piece of blue construction paper, I drew all the letters on it with a b
lack marker, and Miron got a glass from the kitchen, one of those cheap ones. He said he’d had it for ages, from his parents’ house, and that Nimrod must have used it. We turned out all the lights and placed the glass in the middle of the board. Each of us put a finger on it, and we waited. After five minutes, Uzi got tired of sitting there, and said he had to take a shit. He turned on the lights in the living room, found a week-old sports section, and locked himself in the bathroom. Miron and me rolled a joint meanwhile. I asked Miron—if it had worked, and if the glass had moved, what did he expect to happen. That pissed Miron off, and he said it was too early to say it hadn’t succeeded and that just because Uzi gets bored with everything so quickly, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t going to work. After Uzi finally came out of the bathroom, Miron switched the lights back off and asked us both to concentrate. We put our fingers on the glass again, and waited. Nothing happened. Miron insisted that we try again, and neither of us could work up the energy to argue with him. A few minutes later, the glass began to move. Slowly at first, but within seconds it was racing all over the board. Miron left his finger on it the whole time and kept writing down with his other hand each of the letters that it stopped on. T-r-i-l-i-l-i-l-i-l-a the glass hummed, and came to a smooth stop on the exclamation mark in the right-hand comer of the board. We waited a while longer, and nothing happened. Uzi turned on the light. “Tri-li-li-li-la?” he said, annoyed. “What are we, in kindergarten or something? You moved it, Miron, so don’t give me any Agent Mulder shit. Tri-li-li-li-la? Fuck it. I’m beat. I’ve been up since seven. I’m going to sleep at Liraz’s.” Liraz was the Turnip’s name, and she lived close by. Miron kept staring at the board with the letters he’d drawn even after Uzi left, and for a while I read the sports supplement that Uzi had taken to the bathroom, and when I’d read it all, I told Miron I was going to crash. Miron said OK, but that first he just wanted us to give one more chance to the thing with the glass, because no matter how much he thought about it, that Tri-li-li-li-la thing didn’t mean a thing to him. So we turned out the light again, and put the glass in place. This time it started moving right away, and Miron took down the letters.
D-O-N’-T-L-E-A-V-E-M-E-A-L-O-N-E the glass said, and then it stopped again.
MAZEL TOV
The wedding itself was awful, with a rabbi who thought he was a comedian and a DJ who played Enrique Iglesias and Ricky Martin. Still, Miron met this girl there with a squeaky voice but an amazing body. Plus, after the ceremony, he freaked Uzi out when he told him that the glass he’d stepped on was the one we’d used for Nimrod’s séance. While this was going on, I got another of my anxiety attacks and puked about four pounds of chopped liver in the toilet.
That same night, Uzi and the Turnip flew off on their honeymoon in the Seychelles. Me and Miron sat on the balcony drinking coffee. Miron had a new thing going now. Whenever he’d make us coffee, he’d always make one instant for Nimrod too in the séance glass, and he’d put it on the table, the way you leave out a glass for Elijah on Passover, and after we were through drinking, he’d pour it down the sink. Miron did his version of the DJ, and I laughed. The truth was we were incredibly sad. You could call it chauvinist, possessive, egocentric, lots of names, but the whole wedding thing weighed us down. I asked Miron to read me a chapter from that book of his, the one he writes whenever he flips, and is supposed to replace the Bible. Actually, I’d asked him a million times, and he’d never do it. When he’s flipped he’s scared someone will steal his ideas, and when he’s sane he’s just embarrassed. “Come on,” I said. “Just a chapter, like a kind of bedtime story.” And Miron was so depressed that he agreed. He pulled a bunch of his scribbled pages out of his shoe drawer. Before he started reading, he looked at me and said, “You realize it’s just the two of us left now, don’t you? I mean, Uzi will still be one of us and all, but he won’t be on Nimrod’s rounds.” “How can you tell?” I said, even though in my heart I’d thought of this even before he said it. “Listen,” Miron said. “Even Nimrod knows it isn’t right to pick on someone who’s already married. The way he flips us out isn’t always the best idea either, but the truth is that he wouldn’t be doing it to us if he didn’t feel deep inside that we agree. There’s nothing we can do about it. We’re screwed, Ron. There’s just me and you, one week each, like kitchen duty.”
Miron picked up the pile of pages and cleared his throat, like a radio announcer who chokes in the middle of reading the news.
“And if one of us suddenly goes?” I asked.
“Goes?” Miron looked up from his pages, confused. “Goes where?”
“I don’t know,” I said, smiling. “Just goes. Imagine what if tomorrow the woman of my dreams comes on to me in the street, and we fall in love, and I marry her. Then you’d be the only one left to flip with Nimrod, full-time, alone.”
“Right.” Miron gulped down the last drops of his coffee. “Good thing you’re so ugly.”
LIZARD
Kim Yŏng-ha
Translated from the Korean by Dafna Zur
Kim Yŏng-ha (1968–) began writing career with his first novel I have the right to destroy myself, which won him the much-coveted Munhak-dongne Prize in 1995. Since then, he has gained a reputation as the most talented and prolific Korean writer of his generation, publishing five novels and three collections of short stories. In autumn 2008, he resigned all his jobs to devote himself exclusively to writing. Kim also translates novels written in English, most recently a Korean adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As a child, he suffered poisoning from coal gas and lost all of his memories from before the age of ten.
1
Kiss the snake on the tongue. If it senses fear it’ll devour you instantly. But if you kiss it without fear it’ll take you through the garden, through the gate to the other side. Ride the snake to the end of time.
—JIM MORRISON, from the movie The Doors
Want to hear the one about the smoke woman? he asks me.
Sure, go ahead.
He’s smoking a cigarette. Watching the smoke seep out of his mouth, twist, coil, and drift off.
Okay. One day a man’s body turns up. The officer at the scene finds the place littered with cigarette butts. The place reeks of cigarette smoke—it’s so strong it covers up the smell of decomposition.
So? … I look at him wide-eyed, urging him on.
So how’d he die? Good question. The officer investigates different possibilities. First, he schedules an autopsy. Which is more involved than the usual exam—in an autopsy, you actually cut into the body as well as looking around it for clues. And then the officer discovers something very interesting.
What’s that?
The man was naked from the waist down. And there was a large quantity of semen.
I’ve heard that men ejaculate when they die, I say with a shiver.
He shakes his head.
That’s if you’re strangled. But there were no signs of strangulation on this guy. If you’re strangled, your neck is all black and blue. None of that on him, though.
So? …
So the officer starts to suspect there’s a woman involved.
He could have been masturbating, you know.
No he couldn’t. First of all, nobody dies masturbating. Second, the semen was too spread out. Strange as it all seems.
I know nothing about how men masturbate, but he was so confident in his answer that I had to give in. He’s always like that. No doubts about anything. Language seems to come so easy to him. No hesitating, no beating around the bush. Talking to him is like watching a movie or reading a novel. All of a sudden he feels like a stranger. How long has it been since he started coming into my room? How long since he spread himself so naturally over the far corner of my bed? Oh, well. It’s all because of the lizard. I turned to look at my white walls. They’re bare, except for the looming lizard.
What are you thinking about? He’s noticed I’ve turned my head.
I look away from the lizard.
<
br /> Nothing.
Men are always asking women what they’re thinking. But women don’t think the way men do. Men think with their heads, but women think with their bodies. That’s why they can’t be as articulate as men. Really, it’s something that just can’t be explained. All I can do is feel the traces of the man and the lizard. That’s why “Nothing” is the only answer I can come up with.
Go on with the story, I tell him.
But he just offers me a weak smile and shakes his head.
Later.
He dresses and steps out. And off he goes, leaving me with a lizard, a dead man, and a large quantity of semen. I have no idea where he’s going. He asks no questions, gives no answers.
I first met him in the fall of 1995. It was cold for that time of year, and extremely windy—a street sign blew over on someone’s head that day. I was teaching English to junior high kids at a cram school in Kangnam at the time. I was about to photocopy some handouts and in he walked.
Are you still looking for teachers? he asked.
The funny thing was, I’d seen him get out of the elevator and plod up to the door, and still he took me by surprise. Maybe because he didn’t look like he had any intention of working at a cram school. What was it about him? He was, after all, wearing the cram-school outfit—navy blue shirt and black pants—so what was it that threw me off?
I guess you could say there was something otherworldly about him. There are people like that. People you bump into on the street and come away feeling like you’ve bumped into a ghost. People you walk right up to prepared to pass straight through. People who will turn into a heap of ash if you give them a little nudge. You can see them in the subways, too. They look like they’ve been sitting there for centuries and aren’t about to go anywhere. People who make it seem that the subways will run forever, just for them. There are people like that. And he was one of them.
