Sad Peninsula

by Mark Sampson

  “Hey, we’re buying him drinks.”

  “So buy him a drink, Rob Cruise. And get me one, too.”

  And buy me drinks he does.

  I can’t remember the last time I was irretrievably drunk. You know the feeling — when your friends keep yanking you toward reality but all you want is to sink into the swamp of semi-consciousness. You drift down into a kind of wakeful sleep, but then a friend will say your name, maybe shout it out, and it snaps you up, snaps you back to notice that everyone’s staring at you — Your presence is required here. I’m fine while the beer is flowing, but once the gin/Scotch/double shots of tequila/soju trays start arriving, I begin to phase out of my commitment to lucid conversation. Rob Cruise is a demanding raconteur, especially with the Iraq invasion unraveling on the TV in front of us. He delights everyone with his exploits in the first Gulf War, wants my journalistic insights on what’s happening now, on what will happen. Someone puts a vodka on ice in front of me and I gulp it down, think of my mother and her obsession with the stuff, drift into the hazy fog that was her shelter from grief. Actually it’s not too bad here; I find myself drumming up childhood memories; I had a plastic motorcycle as a toddler and I used to —

  “Michael!”

  Your presence is required here.

  “He’s a fucking asshole!” I say, and instantly can’t remember who we’re talking about. Oh right. Bush. “I wouldn’t trust him with a pair of scissors, let alone the presidency.”

  My words attract angry stares from some GIs at the next table, and I chuff up to say something to them, something like Don’t flex your triceps at me! I actually get up to confront them, then black out for a moment. Come back later to discover myself playing darts with Jin on the far side of the pub: I’ve been taken aside to “cool down.” Jin is so cute the way she throws darts like girly-girls do, using her whole body as if trying to knock down the wall. She touches my arm, and questions bubble up from my core. So obvious what I want from her tonight, my birthday wish. I lean in and she leans away, as if I stink. I chase my disappointment down the drain, tell her how disappointed I am. She says something in return, perfect and perfectly neutralizing. I’m hopeless, bloody hopeless. Follow her heart-shaped derriere back to our seats around the TV. A glass of beer will surely stabilize the situation.

  I zone out and then zone in to find Rob Cruise in a state of agitation. A girl they all know has arrived uninvited to our menagerie. Her name is Kyla, from New Zealand. She used to work at ABC English Planet; in fact, I was her replacement when I joined the school three months ago. She’s brought over a husky GI, her new boyfriend, and this seems to be what’s gotten under Rob’s collar. Obvious history there, none of which I’m aware of. Are we still talking about Iraq? I can’t seem to follow things. Harsh jokes and crushing words. This Kyla chick is thirty different flavours of nasty — glass of whisky in hand, she’s junkie-thin, all spaghetti-strap tank top and garish tattoos, the kind of girl you should probably wear two condoms with. I say something clever to her soldier boyfriend, have no idea what it is. He rebuts and Jin races to my defence. This sets off some kind of debate about the neighbourhoods we all live in. The GI won’t stop talking about his fully Westernized army base — Yongsan Garrison, Yongsan Garrison. Shut the fuck up. Jin does my work for me.

  “Do you know what ‘yongsan’ means in Korean?”

  “No.” Chuckle of proud ignorance.

  “It means to die in a place far from your home.”

  BOOM. Baghdad belches another bomb on the TV.

  Our arguments swirl and grow; we’re all over the map. Black out, black out, come back — “He didn’t even win the fucking election!” — and then black out again.

  I come back again, just barely, and the mood is not good. Kyla has left and Rob Cruise is steaming in her wake. Everyone’s upset — Jin included. There’s talk of moving on: Where are we going? Where are we going? Limelight, Jokers Red, or hop in a cab to Hongdae? No wait, Rob says the word — hill. The Hill. Hooker Hill. Black out, stay with us. Jin is really upset now, arguing with Rob. He’s pointing at me and telling her what she should do if she doesn’t like it. She’s talking so fast, objection tripping over objection, can’t follow what she’s saying but so upset now, entirely encased in those black mysteries, she’s turning to me and I’m turning away, don’t turn away. Come back and fuck! Jin’s gone and I don’t know why. Don’t know why I didn’t leave with her. Why am I even here? It’s my birthday. Hooker Hill. Black out.

  Come back to the wind in my face and neon in my eyes. I’m wholly aware of Jin’s missing presence; it’s like a phantom limb. The street’s a thousand noisy expats shuffling from club to club. The four of us ignore the throngs and scale the hill south from Itaewon’s main drag. The saddest place in the city, an alley of impeccable grunge. Here women stand on stoops outside of clapboard bars. These are no Hollis Street hookers: they are gorgeous, leggy, teeming with feigned joie de vivre and a sly intelligence. They see us coming and speak in flawless English.

  “Hey boys, you wanna come in for some boom-boom?”

  Boom-boom. I’d laugh at the absurdity of it, except Rob is already opening a door for me. We step inside the airless hovel to see benches and old tables with candles on them, flickering in glass orbs. There’s a warm hand steering me from the small of my back. Black out and return to find myself at a table with the boys, bottles of soju in front of me and a stranger’s arm around my neck, her face full of immediate hospitality, a smile as soft as a plum. I take the soju and gulp it down, feel my inner world slosh and list. I want to slump forward to rest my forehead against this table and feel the stranger’s arm, her false intimacy, slip from my shoulders. Just a second to close my eyes, to wait for the universe to —

  “Michael!”

  Fucking Rob Cruise! The girls laugh at me without a hint of pity.

  There’s talk, negotiations. I hear thumps and grunting from the hotel above us. I push away my soju glass, demand they give me no more.

  “C’mon, it’s your birthday. Why don’t you —”

  “Birthday? Oh then I give you special time, big man.”

  A hand moves high up my thigh, offering to venture into my permafrost. But instead it sets off an image of me like a small flame, an image of a man who’s better than all of this, who will not have his wretched dry spell end here. I burst up from the table as if sucked toward the ceiling. A green soju bottle goes airbourne, its contents dousing the hookers like spindrift.

  “Ah, shit, Michael, sit the fuck down!”

  But I’m already hustling around the tables on my chicken legs and out the door. Out the door and down the hill. Run like I’m trying not to run. The world’s spinning. My arms cartwheel in their shoulder sockets as I grab for the air and find nothing to hold on to. My knees sting with the sharpness of the street and suddenly my forehead is grinding against the curb. I am an utter mass of defeat. Wish to go sleep right here, in this strange, filthy alley. But then I feel an arm pulling me up from around my waist and a familiar voice, a familiar accent in my ear. Nova Scotia.

  “C’mon, man. I’ll take you home. I’m not into whores, either.”

  Justin.

  Good man.

  And then I do sleep. Sleep in the leather seat of a cab with Justin riding shotgun, staring out the window as he always does — with that acute intensity, his impenetrable sadness. I sleep and dream of the peninsula he and I no longer live on.

  Fuck. I can’t find Jin’s CD. Must have left it at the whorehouse.

  I wake up the next afternoon and wobble into the bathroom, look in the mirror to discover a spectacular gash on my forehead and our spare pillow laid with care on the floor in front of the toilet bowl. Ah, Justin. Good man. I don’t remember vomiting, but I do remember getting up from the bathroom tiles at some point in the night and toddling off to bed. I take another look at the crusted scrape streaking across my brow. How am I to explain this to my students come Monday?

  I navigate the oceanic wave
s of my hangover to park myself on the couch. Look over to see Justin’s door closed: either he’s still asleep or he’s left already for his tutoring session with Jenny and her mother. Best for me to be alone anyway, marinating in my own flatulence and ruminating on how I managed to lose both Jin and myself on my thirtieth birthday. I wonder if it was Rob’s intention to take me to Hooker Hill all along — to drive a wedge between Jin and the Drunk Me. Could he sense that she still wasn’t ready to do what I wanted us to do, but that I, under the circumstances, wanted to do it anyway and was open to other, seamier possibilities? I could ask him, call him on his handphone. I look at my watch: he’d still be at Incheon Airport waiting to board his flight to Toronto.

  I don’t call him. Instead I sit in the stew of my thoughts and wait for a sense of normality to return. It’s in guilt-ridden moments like these that I identify with my mother’s desire to be drunk all the time. It’s such a passive, careening existence, a life of dulled expectations for yourself and for the world. It keeps all of the sharp corners of your mistakes under gauze, under bubble wrap.

  A couple trips to the toilet and I feel much better, more like myself. An hour or two pass and I’m ready to go outside. I’m thinking about the 7-Eleven down the street where I can buy a big bottle of Gatorade and a Styrofoam plate of kimbop, sushi’s sad cousin. I brush my teeth and put on my shoes, tasks that seem to take another half hour. Then I lurch out the door, down the stairs, and into the falling glare of this late afternoon.

  I find Jin standing on the sidewalk outside my building.

  She jolts in surprise and we both freeze. There’s a brief radiance of body language from her: maybe she’s been standing here for several minutes, arguing with herself about whether to come up and knock on my door. Maybe she had, in the very moment before I appeared, decided that she wouldn’t, wouldn’t bother, and was just turning to leave.

  We stare silently at each other. I notice she’s dressed in her business suit — has already put in a full day at work. Must have wandered down here from the COEX after she finished. In turn, she spots the loud cut on my head. Her eyes flicker to it in a momentary flight of sympathy before resuming their icy rancour.

  We glare at each other for a long time. She’s angry, and I’m angry because she assumes she has something to be angry about. Are we going to talk? Are we even going to bother?

  “Did you enjoy your whore?” she asks finally.

  “Jin, I didn’t sleep with a whore.”

  “ No? I suppose the boys took you to Hongdae instead — found you a pretty little thing in high heels and lots of make-up who’d give it to you for free.”

  So ridiculous. So unlike anything someone like me would like. And yet this is the impression I’ve left her with. “I’m not into those kinds of girls, Jin. They’re not my type.” I say this with a conviction that surprises us both.

  She will not waver. “You have no idea, Michael, how offended I was when I left the bar. You have no idea how much what happened last night, how you say, how you say, enraged me.”

  “I think I do.”

  “No, you don’t” She shakes her head. “What, are you just another slimeball, like those guys? Just another foreigner looking to take whatever he wants from my country?”

  What? Where is this all coming from?

  “I don’t know what kind of man you are,” she continues. “What kind of man are you, Michael? What kind of girls do you like?”

  “I like girls who don’t wear make-up.” My voice floods with determination. “I like girls with long blond hair full of knots and split ends. I like girls who wear frayed jeans. I like girls who paint. I like girls who take Dostoyevsky to the beach. I like girls who can stand in the arctic in winter and still sense the beautiful poppies that grow … that can grow out of all that fucking permafrost.”

  This last bit confuses her. Confuses me, too.

  “I, I like to paint,” she stammers.

  I laugh. Thankfully, she laughs with me. “Jin, do I look like somebody who’d enjoy a hooker?”

  She sighs. “Those boys got you so drunk last night. I mean I know it was your birthday, but really, they can be such a bad influence on —”

  “Why did you sleep with Rob Cruise?”

  She halts. Turns up those double eyelids at me. “Don’t ask me that! Michael, don’t ask. The minute I answer that for you is the minute we are finished. Do you understand?”

  “Jin, I’m sorry …”

  “It takes a long time to build something real. Let me build something real with you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You are not Rob Cruise. You will never be. And that’s why I like spending time with you.” She quakes. “Is that okay?”

  “It is.”

  “ Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “ Good.” She sighs again. “God, you waegookins are so obsessed with sex.” She shakes her head, disgusted. And yet steps up to me then and slips her arms around my torso. Her fingers make a home at the small of my back. We lean in and it’s the lightest, most innocent kiss you can imagine. A mere peck. When it’s over, she pulls back from me, squints one eye, tilts her chin.

  “So what the hell did they do to your forehead? And what’s all this … about permafrost?”

  Chapter 7

  It was the great irony of the rape camps: how there had been Japanese women here, too, keeping their own stalls. “The aunties,” they called them. Professional prostitutes brought over from Tokyo and Osaka. The aunties had worked in the shameful calling back in Japan, were skilled and experienced in the art of pleasuring men. Yet theirs were the least popular stalls in the camps. The soldiers didn’t want to take comfort from professionals and only went to them when the other line-ups got too long. It disgusted Meiko to think of it, how the men, if they had their choice, preferred to rape young, virginal girls from the lands they had conquered. Insisted upon it. But by September of ’44, all of the Japanese aunties had been shipped home. The supply trucks brought only Korean and Chinese girls now, ones that had been moved from other camps. Another sign that the war was going badly.

  One night that autumn, a young soldier stormed into Meiko’s stall at random, clearly drunk and in a state of agitation. When she denied him service, he accused Meiko, accused all of the Korean girls, of bringing diseases into the camp and infecting the men with painful ailments that shattered their morale. Certain of this, he was, now that the Japanese aunties were gone. Convinced in his drunken hysteria that all venereal infections originated on the Korean peninsula. “You are the source of disease,” he spat at her. “ You are the source of disease,” she yelled back. He kicked her in the stomach and she fell to the floor. As Meiko scrambled around on her hands and knees, the boy climbed on top of her, grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her head back. She heard the scrape of his sword as he lifted it from his scabbard. This is it, she thought. But the boy did not slit her throat. Instead, he put the blade under Meiko’s nose and dragged it across her top lip, so deeply that she could feel the metal grind on her teeth. Blood shot all over her face, and the boy threw her head to the floor. “I mark you,” he said, pointing at her with the stained blade. “I mark you as a source of disease.” But then, as if forgetting what he had just said, the soldier leered at Meiko’s rear end pointing up at him as she flailed around in agony. The boy fumbled out of his trousers, dropped to his knees and grabbed Meiko around the hips.

  Ten minutes later, in the hospital tent, Meiko sat caked in her own blood and hyperventilating on the doctor’s bench. The doctor, the kind physician who had watched over Meiko while the soldiers had butchered Natsuki. He was gentle even now as he inserted a needle into her face to freeze the flesh under her nose. Once he did, he began sewing her new wound shut, pulling the long invasive thread through her numb lip until everything was as tight as a wicker basket. He clipped the end off with little scissors before running a thick, malodorous ointment over the wound to fight infection. When he finished, he gently cupped
Meiko’s jaw and moved it side to side to inspect his work.

  “The men are told all sorts of lies about your country,” he said. “Venereal diseases anger them; they know they can’t get shipped home if they’re infected with one.”

  “We were virgins, all of us,” Meiko said in choppy Japanese, trying to speak around the row of hard stitches under her nose. “How could we bring these illnesses here? The men gave them to us, not the other way around.”

  “I know,” the doctor nodded. “I’ve seen every kind of venereal disease in this place. They just revolve around the camp like little trains.” He set the ointment aside. “Speaking of which, did you want me to check you — down there? Since you’re here anyway?”

  She stiffened at the idea, but then allowed him to lay her down on the bench and raise up her tattered skirt. He maneuvered around to look between her spread legs. She waited as he ran his thumb through her poji and over her bruised perineum.

  “You have another infection,” he said after several minutes. Meiko seized up in a panic, squashing her knees together and drawing a breath through her aching face. “Don’t worry,” the doctor assured her, “it’s just mild. You don’t need another 606 injection. Here.” He moved to the glass shelf near his bench and took down a small grey canister as she sat up. “It’s a disinfecting lubricant,” he told her. “Rub it into yourself a few times a day. It should clear you up in a week or so.” Meiko took the canister from him and read the Japanese words on the label: Secret Star Cream. Stupid, nonsensical name, she thought.

  The doctor watched as she sat up. “My name is Yoshimi,” he told her. “And yours is Meiko. Though that’s not your real name, is it. It’s the name a Japanese person gave you. Would you like to say your real name, Meiko? It’s okay. I won’t tell the manager you spoke Korean.”

  Meiko said nothing. Wouldn’t even look at him.

  He swallowed. “I understand. The girl they killed — for speaking Korean — her name was Natsuki. Not her real name, either. Did you ever learn her real name?”