by James Zerndt
“Now’s not a good time,” Joe tried to explain. “I’m sorry.”
The girls didn’t budge. They just stood there smiling at us.
“I’m sorry, but we have to go now,” Joe said and this time used his hand to point toward the exit. It did the trick. The girls gave small disappointed bows and skipped back to their table.
“Thank you,” I said once they were out of earshot.
“You want to leave?”
“Please. Yes.”
We went and sat outside on the front steps.
I must have looked like a deflated balloon.
“You really think I should?”
“I don’t know, Billie. But it’s not going to get any better, is it?”
“No, but...”
“Then let’s not do it. Let’s go home. We can always come back.”
I knew he was talking about the apartment, but just the thought of going back to the States, of telling my parents I was pregnant, of seeing Joe saddled with a baby and both of us having to work crap jobs the rest of our lives, something about lying and travelling all this way only to have to turn right back around...
“Let’s just get it over with.”
“You’re sure?”
“No, but I don’t see any other way.”
“We can wait, Billie.”
“C’mon. We need to find a bank. You‘ll need to get some money out. I think we need about 500,000 won. I won’t know for sure until we get there. Better take out 600 just to be safe.”
I got up, walked over to a line of waiting cabs.
We rode in silence until the cab driver pointed to a large white building. I waited outside the clinic while Joe went to the bank across the street.
I paced.
I smoked a cigarette.
Then another.
All very cliché.
When Joe came back, he handed me a ridiculously large wad of bills. It was only about five hundred U.S., but because it came in 10,000 won denominations it felt like a lot more.
I stuffed them into my pocket.
“Thanks.”
“You okay?”
“What do you think?”
“We don’t have to do this, Billie. Let’s wait until next weekend.”
“Whatever, Joe. Like we’re going to have a baby together. Let’s not kid ourselves.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Because we’re too young. Because I want to see the world. Because I’m selfish, okay? We don’t even have real jobs, Joe. We’re not even supposed to be here, remember?”
“Okay, I got it. Let’s just settle down.”
I could feel myself turning against him. I didn’t want it to happen, but it was. I’d felt it before with other guys. A stranger had taken over my body. And Joe was suddenly a stranger, too.
“Next you’re going to tell me to relax, I suppose.”
“I’m not telling you any--”
“Listen,” I said, under-handing my cigarette into the street. “I don’t want to have your baby, okay? I don’t fucking want it, so just leave me alone. Got it? I’m a bad person, okay? Whatever you want to think. I don’t care anymore.”
“You don’t mean that.”
I didn’t. Not really. But I had to believe it, or I wasn’t going to be able to go through with it.
“I don’t want to be stuck with you the rest of my life. I don’t know how else to put it so you’ll understand. I’m tired of you. You bore me, Joe. Okay?”
I walked toward the clinic doors. My legs were shaking. I knew the feeling. It was familiar. Next the anger, like a hot ball, would travel up into my gut where it would stay for the coming months.
“I’m going inside now,” I said, standing with my hand on the handle. “You coming or not?”
“In a minute.”
“Great. No hurry or anything, Joe.”
While I signed in, all I could think was how I never should have let Joe talk me into coming here. That none of this would have ever happened.
But then I realized something.
It wouldn’t have mattered.
The baby must have been conceived before we left Portland.
I would have been screwed either way.
*
The Korean nurse behind the front desk looked down when Joe came in. I was sitting on a couch, flipping through a Korean Vogue magazine. I didn’t look up when Joe sat down.
“You already set it up?”
“Yep.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. Must be a slow day for abortions.”
“Does the doctor seem okay? I mean, do you feel comfortable with her?”
“She’s definitely less judgmental. But, then, Jesus himself would have been less judgmental than that other prick.”
Joe wanted to stay with me when they took me into the operating room, but they wouldn’t allow it. I didn’t really want him to hold my hand or anything, but I did want him to watch.
To feel in some small way what I was going through.
But it was no use. They led Joe to the back of the room, told him to wait behind this ugly wool curtain. As I laid on the gurney, I could see him watching me. He seemed so very far away. Then they gave me gas and the lady doctor said something, I can’t remember what, and I smiled before my head lolled toward the side. Toward where Joe was waiting.
A tear slid off my nose.
I watched the nurse carry out a shiny, silver bowl and place it under the gurney. I knew what it was for. That’s the last thing I remember thinking before I was out.
Joe later filled me in on what happened next...
A machine was switched on. It was loud. Like “a giant vacuum” as Joe put it. Which is pretty much exactly what it was. A very loud, very expensive, vacuum. Joe said he remembered how I used to mouth the word vacuum to him when we first met. It was just a stupid joke because when you mouth the word vacuum, it looks like the person is saying fuck you. That was the funny part about it. That’s what he said he was thinking about while I was out. And that thinking about it made him cry.
Good.
Then the nurse apparently saw Joe hovering behind the curtain and closed it, so he didn’t see the rest. He said he laid down on one of the gurneys and cried some more.
Again, good.
When it was all over, I was shuffled behind the curtain with Joe. I must have looked like a mental patient with the hospital gown and the drugs.
But drugs or no drugs, it still hurt like a son of a bitch.
I was hunched over, clutching the hot water bottle they gave me to my stomach. It seemed incredibly insufficient, like all I had was a bad stomachache.
The doctor and nurse refused to speak to Joe. They didn’t even look at him when they checked on me. Every time they left the room, they turned the light off. I was supposed to sleep, but there was no way that was happening.
I wanted out of there.
Joe lied down next to me on the gurney, moved a strand of hair sticking to my cheek.
“You okay, Bill?”
“It hurts.”
“Bad?”
“Uh-huh. It hurts.”
“You’re going to be okay. I promise.”
“Let’s just go home, okay?”
“You need to sleep first. You’re all drugged up.”
“Where are my pants? I want my pants.”
“I’ll find your pants and then we’ll go. I promise. Just try to relax for a little first.”
“I want my pants, Joe.”
My words were slurring. But I really wanted my damn pants.
Who takes a person’s pants?
Joe looked under the table, under the chair, behind the curtain.
Nothing.
Where were my pants for chrissakes?
Then, just as I was about to lose it, the nurse walked in, handed Joe my pants and shoes. The way she did it, with this grave look on her face and her head bowed, I thought, Jesus, you’d think someone died or something.
/> That’s exactly what I thought.
I kid you not.
How poetic of me.
Moon
Everybody is gone for the night except for the cleaners. Moon doesn’t want to go home. There’s nothing there for him but a tight-mouthed little tree anyway, so he decides to stay and look up something he overheard the teachers talking about.
MySpace.
It sounded similar to Korea’s CyWorld. Moon doesn’t have a page, but his wife does. She even has a mini. At least that’s what he thinks it’s called. An avatar. Something like that. Hyo will probably have one someday.
Moon types in Joe’s name.
There are some photos of Joe playing guitar. Joe posing on a ladder in front of a house. Joe wearing a dust mask, covered in paint. He must have been a house painter. Under Music, there’s a band called Fugazi listed as his favorite. Moon, out of curiosity, writes the name down.
He tries Billie’s name next.
Sorry, this profile is visible only to friends.
Moon’s about to give up and head home to his Hyo-less apartment when he takes another look at Billie’s profile picture. It’s of her and Joe. They’re both smiling, wearing graduation hats, black gowns. Behind them there’s a banner.
LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL CLASS OF 2001.
It doesn’t make any sense. How could they have graduated from college if...? They couldn’t have. That’s how. Moon digs out their applications again, pulls their resumes. Graduated from Reed College 2001. There are even copies of their degrees. Hard to tell with a photo copy, but they looked legit. Moon stuffs everything back into their folders, stuffs the folders back into his desk.
They’re con artists.
And they fooled everyone at the school.
Yun-ji
Yun-ji took her time walking home. Her entire body was still pulsing as the lake water dripped down her back, down into her jeans and the padding there. She walked with her hands wrapped around her stomach, looking back every now and then to see if she was leaving a trail of water. Or anything else.
But there was nothing.
She should feel something. Something horrible. And painful. That’s what she was thinking. That there should be some sort of sign. She should be curled up on the ground, screaming in pain, blood everywhere. That’s what she expected anyway, but there was none of that. Just the slight chill of water dampening her shirt and a heartbeat that wouldn’t stop pounding away inside her ears.
Covenant.
The word haunted her.
She had broken the agreement she’d made with Him.
Shattered, more like.
Yun-ji couldn’t take it anymore. As she walked, she slipped a hand inside her jeans as discreetly as possible. The padding was damp. She squeezed it, slid her hand back out. There had to have been some mistake. Her hand wasn’t covered in blood like she’d expected.
How could it be possible?
Maybe it didn’t work. Maybe something went wrong. Or right. Maybe something went right and her baby was okay. The mere idea flooded her with relief.
Covenant...
Or divine intervention.
That was it. She was meant to have the baby. How could it be anything else? Something otherworldly was going on here, some invisible hand had been protecting her baby. There was no other explanation for it. And, well, if there was Yun-ji wasn’t interested in hearing it. For all she cared, God Himself had just spoken to her. No. God had just screamed at her.
YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE THIS BABY WHETHER YOU WANT TO OR NOT!
“I want to,” she said under her breath and rubbed her belly. “Just, please, let it be okay.”
When Yun-ji got home, she found the batch of gimchi she’d tried to make sitting out on the counter. Her mom had brought it in. Yun-ji had forgotten all about it and now the whole apartment reeked of rotten cabbage.
Yun-ji tossed everything into the garbage.
Hopefully it wasn’t some kind of omen.
Billie
I stayed home on Monday.
Joe says Kim threw a fit. I guess she had to teach all my classes. Which isn’t what the parents want to see even though Kim speaks English perfectly well. She called me every hour, trying to get me to go to the doctor (never again), asking when I thought I’d be able to come back.
Basically, we’re not supposed to get sick.
Let alone pregnant.
It was weird being home alone all day. I went to the video store and rented Some Like It Hot with Marilyn Monroe. I’d never seen a movie of hers before. It was okay, I guess. She’s sort of like a super-sexy retard.
I also finished that book of poems I started reading on the plane and came to the conclusion that I am not a poet.
I have nothing to say.
Which is probably the reason I can’t finish any of them.
And if I start writing abortion poems, somebody please shoot me because there’s nothing more cliché than a woman writing about abortion. Well, maybe a woman writing about her period. Or food. Bacon I can understand, but why do they always have to write odes to goddamn fruit or chocolate or whatever?
Kim Addonizio.
Now that chick is cool.
But I’m no Kim Addonizio.
And I’m no Billie at the moment either.
I’m pretty much nobody right now.
I went to the park in the afternoon and walked around the lake three times in a row. It felt good to move. To breathe. I could have gone around a fourth time, but Joe was on his way home. When I walked into the apartment and saw him sitting there at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette, I realized something.
I didn’t want to see him.
Which is not good. Not good at all.
Anyway, I went back to work today and here’s what I’m beginning to realize about this whole teaching thing: I suck at it. Every time I pass by Joe’s room, I see his kids singing and playing. Or listening quietly as he reads them a book.
He’s a nursery-rhyme juke box.
And all I can seem to manage are little snippets of lyrics... “A, A, A is for Apples and Bananas! O, O, O is for Opples and Bononos!” But then I always get it mixed up, and the kids end up without any Upples or Bununus or Whatevers.
I’m trying though.
I really am. And who knows? Maybe if I stick it out, I’ll get better at it. Or at least hate it less. Or feel less like I’ve been trampled by an elephant by the end of every day. That would be nice.
This week the main attraction in the play room has been Barney. Music and Movement, they call it. The idea is to get the kids dancing and singing to a video. Before Joe and I started today, all three of the secretaries gathered outside the glass doors to watch. At first I thought maybe they were monitoring us, making sure we didn’t eat the children or something, but I think they just wanted to enjoy the show. Joe and I are Americans, so we had to be good entertainers. That seems to be the running logic anyway.
Even though dancing was just about the last thing I felt like doing, I actually felt like I was doing a pretty decent job of mimicking the freaky dinosaur. But, and this was becoming less and less of a surprise, when I surveyed my audience all eyes were on Joe.
And for good reason.
His eyes were lit up in complete and utter Barney-adoration, his mouth wide with wonder, his lips frozen into a giant O. The kids, of course, were enraptured. And I basically became invisible. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean I could have dry-humped Barney right then and there and nobody would have batted an eye.
I love you. You love me. We’re a happy...
God help me.
*
After work we made a trip to Samsung Plaza.
The courtyard was filled with milling teens huddled together in small groups, most of them still wearing their school uniforms. I’ve noticed that the girls like to travel in pairs and hold hands or walk arm-in-arm.
Some of the men do this, too.
As we walked, Joe hooked his arm under mine, pulled me
close to him. And I hate to admit it, but I cringed when he did this.
“It’s like the 1920s here,” he said as we strolled under the circus of lights, neon towering all around us. It felt like we were walking around inside of an old impressionistic painting. I could almost picture everyone twirling umbrellas and wearing top hats.
“What’s sad is I can’t even look at them holding hands without sexualizing it,” I admitted. “But I know it’s totally innocent.”
“I don’t know that,” Joe said and smiled as we immersed ourselves in the crowd. Most of the women were either talking on cell phones, texting, or checking their make-up in small compacts. The men all seemed to be posturing, staring off vacantly into the distance and smoking cigarettes like they’d just been invented. There was a buzz to the place though. Not at all like the malls back home. This was a pre-pubescent and giddy shopping mall.
A mall that still knew how to blush.
Once inside we found ourselves being bumped and pushed by the ceaseless flow of shoppers. There’s a system here though. A system we obviously haven’t figured out yet. Like just yesterday I saw a bus come roaring down the street and nearly miss an old man who had stepped out into the street. The bus never even slowed down. It just honked its horn and picked up speed. The amazing thing was the complete lack of anger on the old man’s face as he simply stepped back onto the sidewalk. I think he may have even smiled and waved as the bus sped off.
We eventually made it to the grocery store only to find it even more crowded than the mall. A feeling of intense claustrophobia quickly crawled over me as Joe walked ahead of the cart, throwing in whatever we might need for the week. The amount of meat and seafood in the place was staggering. Six-foot tall sheaths of seaweed alongside glass cases filled with different varieties of gimchi. Everything was still making me nauseous.
Then there were the young girls wearing space suits.
One of them was selling cereal and wearing knee-high silver boots and a short vinyl mini-skirt. Her top was vinyl, too, and she wore these long Katherine-Hepburn style gloves. It was like somebody took the 1960’s and put it through a translation machine.
Only what came out was horribly mangled.
One of the girls offered some cereal to Joe. It was in a shiny, silver bowl. Exactly about the size and style of the bowl they placed under my gurney in the hospital. The girl said something to Joe in Korean as we passed, but stopped once she realized he was a foreigner. Joe looked away and kicked at the cart with his shoe like a schoolboy. Then, like he just remembered the extremely earthbound girlfriend next to him, turned to me and asked, “Are you okay?” It was about the hundredth time he’d asked in the last hour.
