The warning came when we were walking in the grounds of the Palace of Fine Arts for the third time. At first I tried hard not to see her again, because our meeting on Lombard Street made me realise that she was more dangerous than a serial killer. Travel often greets me with surprises, temptations and the unusual. But in all my experience, nothing dangerous. And going back home is returning to what belongs to you. There’s nothing extraordinary about it, but at least it’s yours.
Karina wasn’t dangerous because she was foreign; on the contrary, I felt like I’d known her for a long time. I’d always had her in my imagination, conjuring up her life, composing how she thought, how she talked, how she walked. That frightened me. And unfortunately, I succumbed to Karina whenever I heard her voice on the phone.
‘When I go home to Singapore, I’m getting married,’ I said as we strolled. A desperate effort to protect myself.
‘I see.’ She didn’t sound surprised. ‘You don’t look like the marrying type.’
‘I’m not. But I’ll try.’
‘Is that so?’ She blinked, but her expression remained as cold and impassive as a statue. ‘Let me guess. A clichéd little tale of the naughty boy who finds true love. You found the girl who finally rescued you.’
‘Partly right. On the one hand she did save me.’
‘Helped you find a home and a sense of security?’
‘Something like that. But, on the other hand … ’ I paused for a moment, later cursing my honesty. ‘I don’t love her. I’ve never loved anyone real.’
From a distance we stared at the lake and its reflection of the domed rotunda, a relic from the reconstruction of the city after the great quake of 1906. The lake, slowly and cunningly, transformed itself into a murky-looking glass that brought forth Karina’s face. For days afterwards, and in the years since, I would look into a mirror and find the image of her face reflected there. Sometimes she splits, becoming two, sometimes three, and eventually infinite.
The holy book has warned us not to build houses on the sand. Unfortunately, there are no warnings about buildings on water. Let alone on mirrors.
‘People say there’s no place like home,’ Karina ventured.
Yes, I agreed, amen. But after that, for the first time, I kissed her. She returned my kiss savagely, forcing me to close my eyes. In the dark I felt her embrace me, then push me hard. My feet found a foothold, but I fell, fell far. A river. I tried to swim but my body immediately became heavy. Quicksand was all around me, dragging me down.
Gasping, I asked, ‘Where is your home?’
‘I told you – Kansas.’
She was still kissing me, but her voice faded, as if she were on another plane of existence. Half dreaming, I heard my own voice, ‘Take me there.’
Karina stopped kissing me. That’s when she issued her warning. I was still gasping for breath as she said, ‘I’m no lifeguard. I can’t swim.’
This is the message I sent to Isaac Ginsberg through his personal website. It was entirely likely that his agent would receive it and delete it. But it couldn’t hurt to try. Maybe he was kinder than he needed to be.
Dear Mr Ginsberg,
A close friend sent me your novel as a gift. I couldn’t put it down. Once I finished, I immediately became your newest fan.
I apologise in advance for my presumption in sending this letter, but something in your novel keeps bothering me. I am well aware that, as you state, all the characters in your novel are fictitious. But I know an American woman of Vietnamese descent who, as in your novel, is also named Karina. To be sure, I did not make her acquaintance in Saigon, where your story is set, but in San Francisco. And the Karina in your story has the family name Le, while the Karina whom I know is Karina Lam. But aside from these similarities and differences, one thing makes me feel as though all this is not coincidence: wigs.
She never let me see her real hair, which she said was a wavy black and difficult to manage. But I never asked why she didn’t dye and straighten it so that she wouldn’t have to bother with a wig. Rather than focusing on wigs, I preferred to torture myself by imagining the other men in her life, past and present.
We never spent time at her place. She didn’t allow me. We always stayed at my apartment, or – when a friend crashed at my place for two weeks – in a cheap motel. That’s where, when she was dressing in the bathroom, I found a notebook lying on her side of the bed. On the last page I saw a row of email addresses. There wasn’t a single female name among them, I’m sure. She caught me, then snatched up the notebook. I’d never seen her so angry.
‘What’s this for? Collecting email from fans, huh?’ Filled with jealousy, I barraged her with petulant questions. ‘Are you still in touch with them?’
‘Why are you so possessive all of a sudden?’ She stared at me sharply. ‘Can you imagine me without fans?’
‘You belong to me. You’re my fiction.’
After uttering these words, I knew that my fears had been realised. Karina was a story I kept in my head, without beginning or end. For years I’d tried to make every woman I met resemble her. But I’d believed that she never really existed. The story would have been safe if I hadn’t met Karina. But it was too late. I had started it. And now, an end that I couldn’t imagine was slowly unfolding.
Karina, meanwhile, looked unsurprised. As she put her things into her purse, she commented, ‘Interesting. What if I’m not your fiction, but someone else’s?’
But whose? How could Karina be the product of anyone else’s imagination, and for so many years? The mere thought of a rival seemed absurd.
‘I can’t be your secret lover.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m too high-maintenance.’
Now she was ready to go. Before opening the door, she kissed me. ‘Go back to your fiancée.’
That’s what I thought I did. But I knew, after meeting Karina on Lombard Street, that there was no way home.
Unexpectedly, the author replied to my letter two days later from an odd email address: [email protected]. Far from ignoring me, his note was friendly enough and sympathetic.
Dear Husein,
Thank you for your message.
Regarding your question about the statement that ‘all the characters in this work are fictitious’, you and I know that such a declaration isn’t to be believed. Real people are conjured into characters, just as we insert fictional characters into real life. There’s nothing unique about that.
If I can rearticulate your note, though, your main question becomes: who is Karina? I can’t answer, because even though I quite understand your anxiety about her, it’s not the right question to ask. Almost, but not exactly. I will explain things to you, explicitly, hiding nothing – if you can put forward the right question.
Everything is in my novel. Pay attention to what isn’t present. After that, write to me again.
Isaac Ginsberg’s message moved me to reread his novel, but my efforts produced nothing but a plot summary. To simplify, it’s the story of Jeffrey Winston, a young American, neurotic and – in my opinion – insufficiently rebellious (he comes from an educated white family with the resources to put him through Harvard). Keen to investigate history and establish his own political attitudes, he applies for a Fulbright scholarship to Vietnam. In Saigon, Jeffrey becomes a close friend of Trung Nguyen, a young actor and director who aspires to go to America. At the same time, he falls in love with Karina, a nightclub singer. Although Jeffrey imagines Karina’s life behind the stage, envisioning a melodramatic story à la Miss Saigon, even at the story’s end we never learn who Karina really is. Jeffrey doesn’t share his obsession for Karina with anyone, including Trung, who is thoroughly uninterested when he hears Karina’s name.
There was nothing illuminating in the novel. It was as though the narrator, who only allows us to enter Jeffrey’s thoughts, had conspired with the author to hide Karina.
I wrote again to Isaac Ginsberg. Honestly, but impatiently, I admitted that I cou
ldn’t find any clues in the text. This time I revealed more details about the Karina I knew, hoping that he would sympathise with me and want to divulge more about his Karina. I recounted how we met on Lombard Street, our first kiss at the Palace of Fine Arts, and wrote about other places from the history of our relationship. He replied briefly:
Read it again. Do not give up.
His short answer angered me. He was ignoring my experiences, so real and intense, for the sake of playing his own game. Fiction writers can be exasperating, if not exactly cruel. They work hard to create labyrinths, look for easy targets to lure inside, and then sit back and enjoy their victims’ suffering over a cup of coffee and a doughnut.
Since Ginsberg was completely unhelpful, I decided to take a different route.
Are you still with me? Do you want to know about the route that Husein took? I’m concerned that you’re getting bored. This route, as I mentioned early on, led Husein to a truth (he likely considers it so) that is painful. A route that only further agitated him and failed to lead him – as it might fail to lead you – anywhere. If you don’t want to waste time, feel free to skip what follows and continue on to page 288. If you genuinely want to know, however, please turn to the next page. Just a word of advice: beware of your curiosity. You’re becoming more and more like our friend.
Karina never knew that a few days after my fit of jealousy at the hotel, I snuck her notebook out of her purse and copied down all the email addresses. There were eight. At the time what I did was nothing more than an act of obsessive behaviour; I honestly believe that I was the only man Karina met while in San Francisco. I simply saved the list of addresses for record’s sake, and had no interest in contacting their owners one by one to ask about their relationship with Karina. But after losing Karina and then rediscovering her in a novel two years later, I felt a need to examine my notes again.
I sent a letter to eight addresses. I was prepared to be ignored, to be seen as crazy, but two of the men answered my email.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Dear Husein,
I’m taking the time to reply to your letter because I sympathise with you. My sense is that we have had the same experience. This may sound quite painful, but it looks like you’ve been deceived. The woman who said her name was Karina has stolen from you, like she stole from me in Seoul three years ago.
If you’re really serious about hearing my own Karina story, we can talk over Skype.
Seoul, 2004 (reconstruction of the story of Johann’s encounter with Karina based on a Skype conversation)
After years of wanting to get out of Konstanz, his home town, Johann finally landed a good job in Berlin. His company then sent him to Seoul for two years. There he occupied himself with work and having fun. Every Friday night he’d go out drinking with his Korean friends in the Hongdae neighbourhood, sometimes joining them for karaoke. One night, a woman in a dark brown wig appeared among them. Her name was Karina. She sang the old song ‘I’ve Never Been to Me’. Her face was sad.
Johann escorted the woman, full name Karina Lee, in a taxi to her hotel. She came from Hong Kong, and wrote for a travel magazine that was covering one of Seoul’s springtime festivals. Johann ventured to ask why she looked sad when she sang. Karina answered that she was weary of circling the world and that she’d never been to herself.
They separated in the lobby, but the next day Johann couldn’t keep himself from meeting Karina again. I’m married, Karina said suddenly, a signal that she was shutting the door.
But Johann felt the door open again, just wide enough for someone to enter. The two had gone out for a coffee and in the taxi Karina revised what she had said before. She didn’t circle the world; the world circled her constantly, crushing her. Her life was composed of scattered fragments, sometimes adrift, sometimes colliding and crashing. Johann was swept along with the flow of Karina’s story and sent into turmoil – her story provided him with his own.
Johann met Karina every day from then on. She played with strings of words that he often didn’t understand, but he was sure there was a space for him. Karina wanted to let him in. That’s what Johann believed, until the seventh day, when they stood in front of her hotel room. As Johann tried to kiss her, Karina closed the door.
The next day, the hotel receptionist gave him the bad news. Karina had moved on. But the game of opening and closing doors had not yet finished. Johann sent Karina a long email, to which she gave a brief reply: Dear Johann, thank you for the wonderful time in Seoul. Hope all is well, Karina.
*
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Husein,
I’ll get straight to the point: A few years ago I met someone at a costume party in London. She wore a wig. I think her name was Karina, but I wouldn’t rely too much on my memory. I was really drunk that night. She was drop-dead gorgeous, wore a Japanese schoolgirl costume and claimed to be from Tokyo. Quite convincing, but to be honest I don’t care where she came from. What’s certain is that she fulfilled my wildest anime fantasies. After the party we ended up at her hotel.
Sorry, but I don’t feel comfortable going into further detail about the experience, but obviously I was blown away. That night changed a lot of things that I’d believed. I didn’t expect it at all. She was so beautiful. Even now I don’t understand why I didn’t stop myself when I got to know her.
Warm regards,
Steve
Continue on to the next page.
With Karina, many things happened for the first time in my life. That kiss, for example. Never before had I drowned in a kiss. And, as if coincidentally, after that kiss, a strange incident occurred. Karina fell into the sea – in the real sense – when we were taking a walk along San Francisco Bay, near Fort Point. She slipped in her high heels. I immediately remembered her confession that she couldn’t swim, so without thinking I took off my jacket and jumped in to save her. With difficulty I managed to get her out of the water and carried her to her car. Her lips had turned blue, her eyes were closed tight. Seeing her wig soaked, I almost cried, hoping she was all right, hoping I could preserve her perfection.
That day was my first experience with left-hand drive. I brought Karina to my apartment. One hour later, she came to. That same day was the first time we made love.
At midnight in my room, I finally stopped staring at her lying beside me.
‘Surreal,’ I murmured.
She turned, asking me to repeat what I’d said.
‘Surreal,’ I said, more loudly. After our lovemaking, I couldn’t find any other words to describe her. ‘I’m obsessed with you.’
‘You’ll stop at some point.’
‘When?’
‘Imagine us together, in our daily routines. I’ll become very boring for you.’
‘You’ll never be boring.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because of your promise. With you I’ll never be safe.’
‘How can you believe something that’s, like you said –’
She turned her back to me, pulling the blanket around her.
‘What?’
‘Surreal.’
I rose from the desk after my eyes grew weary of staring at the computer screen and lumbered towards the bathroom. I washed my face in the sink and looked in the mirror, seeking my earlier self, the self that had existed before Karina disrupted my world. I’d forgotten it; after San Francisco, I never appeared in the mirror again. Karina had taken control, given birth to clones of herself.
I tried to seek salvation in crowds. I decided to go to a bar alone and get drunk. Onstage was a female singer. Her eyes were small, like Karina’s. But she wasn’t wearing a wig. And I kept returning to the superfluous questions in my head.
What did Karina want? To travel the world and deceive others, including me?
I heard Karina whispering to me, as she had when we talked in the club: It’s so retro and
it’s fun, darling.
The next day, I received an email I didn’t expect. It was from Isaac Ginsberg, the novel’s author.
Husein,
I haven’t heard from you. Are you lost? I trust that before long you will put forth the correct question about Karina. Look for what is absent.
Warm regards,
Isaac
*
‘What do you really want, Karina?’
‘I want to become …’ She tapped her martini glass with her slender fingers. ‘An author.’
‘Write a novel?’
‘Maybe. The main thing is to create fiction.’
‘About what?’
‘About a beautiful woman named Karina.’
Who had that conversation? Karina and Jeffrey, or Karina and me? I’d now memorised every trace of the Karina in the novel. I could readily recall each of her conversations with Jeffrey, since my memories of the dialogue, movements and even the spaces occupied by Karina in the book overlapped with my memories of San Francisco.
Jeffrey remained in constant awe of the woman before him. A woman who wore a wig, a woman whose home he had never visited, a woman who aspired to create fiction.
I only needed to replace Jeffrey’s name with mine, then Karina would migrate from Saigon to San Francisco.
It is easier for me to show Jeffrey as Jeffrey, the naive young American, when he interacts with others – Trung Nguyen, in particular. I always skipped over the passages where Jeffrey meets with Trung. They were tedious.
‘I’m sick of talking about post-war trauma,’ said Trung, throwing himself on the sofa. Jeffrey was at the table, preparing ice cream for dessert.
‘The reforms of Doi Moi mean I have to talk about other things. About desire.’
Jeffrey scooped vanilla ice cream into a bowl. He moved from the table to the cupboard, looking for a bottle of honey. ‘Desire for what?’ He set bright red strawberries atop the ice cream.
The Wandering Page 25
