Chandelier, page 1
Chandelier
Chandelier
David O’Meara
2024
Copyright © David O’Meara, 2024
1 2 3 4 5 — 28 27 26 25 24
all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, info@accesscopyright.ca.
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cover design and typography: Rafael Chimicatti
cover image: Maryna Yazbeck
Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.
This book has been printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper.
Printed and bound in Canada.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Chandelier / David O’Meara.
Names: O’Meara, David, 1968- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20240380800 | Canadiana (ebook) 20240384989 | ISBN 9780889714762 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889714779 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS8579.M359 C43 2024 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
For Dorothy
Part 1
Georgia at Sea
1
Breakfast was a buffet exhibition of fish and vegetables. Sugary pastries. Orange juice and coffee. Georgia managed to eat some rice, persimmons and the spicy kimchi, flushing it all down with three cups of instant coffee. She felt fuzzy and whacked-out. She felt like her head had been wrapped in a bulky towel and thumped with a rubber mallet several times. Everyone milled about the conference tables clutching paper plates. There was a lot of hushed chatter, suspicion and speculation, as if they were part of some social experiment. Blended with jetlag, it drove her spinning. She was having trouble keeping track of everything; the people she met and their countries of origin: England, Ireland, Australia. A woman from Jamaica. She met Phil, a middle-aged guy from Atlanta. James from San Francisco. The conversations were all the same. When did you get here? What is going to happen next? Where will they send us?
She took out the journal she’d bought at the airport bookstore. Its thick red cover was still in plastic wrap. Her therapist had suggested she write down her thoughts if she was feeling overwhelmed, if the information was arriving too fast. So, Georgia started a list of names. She could cross any of them out later.
Eve, another Canadian, located Georgia and sauntered over. She was wearing some kind of spandex jogging ensemble, complaining about thrombosis and fretting over her chances of finding peanut butter in South Korea. “I can’t understand a word the instructors are saying, can you? Their English is terrible. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this year without my sweetie-pie.”
“Who is that?”
Eve showed Georgia a picture of her white terrier.
Eve would be the first to be purged from Georgia’s list.
At the education centre, they had orientation classes. Lectures on Korean culture, language and history. A lot of the presenters just handed out sheets that they read from, so Georgia decided to skip the second half and suntan on some grass by the river. A few others joined her. Phil and James. Ita from Dublin. Ray, who was from Birmingham, England, via Tanzania. He had rolled up his pant legs and waded into the water. Georgia was bumming smokes.
Phil and James tossed a baseball back and forth.
“Where did you get the gloves?” Georgia shouted.
“We brought them,” James said.
“Isn’t that cute. You found each other,” she said, slathering her shoulders with sunscreen. She was a basement dweller and consistently turned lobster in the sun.
“The water seems pretty clean. Anyone want to swim?” Ray said.
“You first,” Georgia challenged.
He considered the dare and stood looking at the water. Georgia leapt up and charged past him down the rough beach, exploded into the shallows before plunging into a deeper area beyond.
Ray hurdled after her, kicking up chaotic torrents of water.
“You idiots,” Phil shouted from the grass.
They splashed around laughing, soaked in their clothes, the water a refuge from the naked pulse of the afternoon sun. Georgia waded toward a sandbar. The anvil of her jetlag had lifted. “That’s kind of gross, isn’t it?” she said to Ray as their ripples grew calmer, the silt dispersing. Mud was sucking at her foot. There were pop cans. A dead fish. Rotting branches. Screaming and cackling, Georgia chased Ray off the beach.
They’d posted the list of their teaching placements. Everyone crowded around the pinned display of results. Beside Georgia’s name was “Gwangju.”
She checked with Ita. “Where are you going?”
“Chinju. No idea where that is,” she said.
James was going to Busan.
They found a map. It didn’t help with any reality, only general scale, gazing over their life from a projected height, the roads into pink cities, the coastlines and green summits marked with a cross. They hardly knew where they were going even then. Just into mysterious streets and rooms, away from these two-day friendships. Buses would be arriving in the morning. There was nothing left to do but wander about and say goodbye. They chatted in the sun, waiting for the closing ceremony. Dragon dancers performed for them in the university square. The air shook with drums. People found other participants assigned to the same city as theirs. Ray was going to Gwangju too. Georgia squealed and laughed and hugged him.
Someone suggested they all get a drink and a group headed to a corner store with a makeshift tented patio. There was a yard to the side, with trampled dirt between high grass and a water tank. Several plastic chairs and stools were placed around tables. They’d go inside for beers and carry them back. Soon, the owner was serving everyone, clearing empty bottles, selling cigarettes and some phone cards. He was making a killing.
“Do you want a beer?” James asked Georgia.
“I don’t drink.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I’d murder for some weed though,” she said. “I wonder if I can find a hook-up in Gwangju.”
“Good luck,” he said.
The intel seemed to be true: you couldn’t find marijuana in Korea. There were seismic fines and jail time. Georgia had heard a rumour that there was some distribution through the internet. Seemed risky. She figured she might have to go without.
When the smiling store owner returned, grappling three big beer bottles in each hand, Georgia watched as the group passed the drinks around, jealous of the available exit routes out of their heads. Everyone had been given an envelope of advance Korean cash and was throwing it around like it wasn’t real. No one knew the value of the change they got back. No one cared. They were getting drunk in the sun in the waning afternoon, cooking up plans to visit each other, sharing cell numbers, posting selfies on their Instagram feeds and wandering off to piss behind some crates.
“Escape or adventure?” Phil asked as he shared another cigarette with Ray and Georgia.
She filled her lungs and let the smoke roll lazily out between her lips. “What do you mean?”
Phil’s theory was that the people who came to teach overseas fell into two categories: those looking for an adventure or those trying to escape.
“I’ve met a whole bunch of people these past few days,” he said. “A lot of us want to travel, maybe work off a debt while we’re doing it. But a number of people are just trying to get away from a problem they want to leave behind.”
“Example,” Georgia stated.
“Barbara over there,” Phil said, pointing to a grassy side of the patio a few tables away. Barbara was in her forties, wore retro sixties glasses, was tanned with a black tumbleweed head of hair. She had a smoker’s rasp and a guilty laugh. Georgia had only talked to her briefly over the last two days.
“Messy divorce,” Phil said. “Police. Lots of legal shit.”
Georgia watched her puff at her cigarette, imagining some frenzied argument with a nasty spouse.
“I talked to this guy—David?—yesterday. Did you meet him? Short dude with the tribal tattoo?” Phil pointed to his forearm. “Says he did time for theft. Mostly electronics. TVs. But he tapped a few cars too. Loves to talk about it. Just ask him. His father made him apply here just to keep him out of jail. He did the ESL teaching course and got a certificate two months ago.”
“He’s better qualified than me.” Georgia laughed.
They glanced around to see if David was nearby.
“He’s probably going through all our luggage now,” Ray said.
“Where’s your car?!” Georgia said with fake alarm.
They were laughing, smoking. Phil. Ray and James. They ripped through more beers. Georgia was enjoying the nicotine buzz and the cool evening air. Talking empty talk without any meaning to it. There was no connection to her life. She felt untouched. She’d slipped off her old skin and left it in the grass. The abandoned trajectories. She hadn
Months and months.
“What about you,” Ray said to her. “Escape or adventure?”
She looked at him. “Neither,” she said. “This was my friend’s idea.”
“She here?”
Georgia watched the crowd of half-inebriated westerners, trying to imagine Natalie among them; what she’d say, what she’d think, if she could have come all this way. Georgia kept conjuring her friend’s scissoring stare, the radiance of her sardonic grin. Nothing had weakened her contours. What madness they could have had. It would have been a sight.
It would have been a whole different world.
“No,” Georgia finally said. “She couldn’t make it.”
“Where you coming from, Ray? What’s your story?” James mumbled, handing him a beer.
“I was just trying to get away from all you white people.”
2
In the late afternoon the bus left for Gwangju with a dozen ESL teachers scattered toward the back. She didn’t recognize the other westerners, other than Ray, who joined her in a seat and listened while the organizer described the next day’s itinerary. The sun dropped and disappeared across the low hills and it was dark highways and concrete apartment blocks, the traffic signs lit up by headlights, the driver’s serious face studying the road in the glow of his console as they drove south. Exhausted and humbled by the midday farewell drinks session, other participants nodded off, or stared quietly through windows, overwhelmed by the transitions. Two hours passed. Darkness hid the new marvels Georgia had travelled to find. She was grateful for the silence and time, not wanting to arrive, or go back, only to be suspended between, erased for now from who she was, there in a capsule of nightfall and fibreglass and steel. She adjusted her overhead light and opened the red journal. The first time her therapist recommended buying a notebook, Georgia had filled one with black stars, those satisfying five-pointed doodles of obliteration, adrift in a self-annulling void she felt everything had become then.
“Are you using the journal?” the therapist had asked.
“Yes.”
“What are you writing?”
Georgia showed her.
The therapist looked blankly at the barbed scribbles.
“Have you shown this to anyone?” she asked.
“Like who?”
“Anyone. Your parents . . .”
“No.”
“Well, it’s progress. I think that’s good. But try to express different views.”
On the bus now, she began to stroke black marks across James and Phil and Ita, ferried to other destinations in the South Korean landscape. No one left but Ray. The list was pointless now. She tore the sheet along the margin and exposed a fresh white one. A start needed to be made. She resisted thinking too much and moved the pen over the top of the page, trying to keep it legible in the shaking from the bus:
I’m going to tell you about what I did and how I felt about it. But what with all the stupidity and hurt feelings and pain and regret, I don’t know if I’m up for the job.
She got no further. The variations of possibility stopped her. She watched a fan oscillating above the driver, blowing the sluggish air around. Fields and the lights of towns danced past. When they steered into a hotel parking lot, Georgia wished she’d slept like the others. Outside, a reception waited for them, with various officials, members of the school board and persons assigned to be co-teachers. Georgia met Mr. Yung. Bowing, he introduced himself and informed everyone they’d be driven to have blood tests and eye exams tomorrow, for insurance purposes.
“I’d like a haircut too,” Georgia said.
Mr. Yung looked at her with confusion. Then he saw her start to laugh.
“I think I am very lucky to meet you,” he said.
Mr. Yung was an English grammar teacher at Georgia’s assigned school. He was fifty-eight, wore thick glasses and had the distracted look of being constantly harassed.
At the welcome dinner, they were given maps of the city. Georgia looked at hers. The city core was ringed by expressways. Neighbourhoods of crosshatch streets. An airport to the southwest. A river.
“Where are we?” she asked, her hand hovering over the map.
Mr. Yung reached across the table, pointing.
“Here.”
Teachers and school officials stuffed themselves with marinated beef, fish and vegetables in an array of small metal bowls. At a long table close to the floor, they knelt or sat cross-legged on little pillows. Bottles were passed around. Beer and soju. Georgia felt waves of exhaustion and picked at the cabbage and beans, apologizing mournfully as she declined the alcohol.
Now the westerners decamped to a bar. Despite spending the day together, they’d hardly spoken, between the official speeches and tours.
Georgia eyed the group, her assorted colleagues randomly conjoined to a shared orbit for the future. Jean, from Vancouver, struck her as uptight, controlling and maybe a bit severe. She kept labelled folders to organize her things, with different coloured pens, seemingly task-coded for priority. Likewise, Ron from Massachusetts set off alarms with his faded Hawaiian shirts and fleeing eye contact.
There were two Australians, Mick and Becca. Mick was older, pushing forty, but she knew she’d like him the first time they met.
“Where you from?” he asked Georgia.
“Canada.”
“Snowy bastards.”
Ray snorted.
“Any word on where anyone is living?” Becca said to the air.
“Board said they’re looking for apartments,” Ray said.
“Look,” Mick said. “We talked to my co-teacher, Mr. Shin, and he said that maybe a few of us could get something together.”
The bar they’d chosen was dark and empty. Mirrors, bannisters and vinyl. More bottles of beer arrived. Georgia watched everyone getting leisurely stewed. She was smoking like a forest fire.
“Are you straight-edge?” Ron asked, noticing her untouched tumbler.
“I gave it up.”
Becca, the Australian, threw her hand over Georgia’s shoulder and hugged her conspiratorially. “We’ll have to fix that. Won’t we, mate?”
* * *
Outside, later, she was still sober and exhausted.
“You want to share one?” Georgia said to Ray. She shook the cigarette pack. It was a Korean brand. They’d run out of American Lucky Strikes. They lifted themselves onto a concrete wall and lit up.
“You’re going through a lot of these,” he said, holding the cigarette awkwardly, like a specimen.
“I’m used to doing a lot of dumb things.”
“Issues, is it?”
“I collect them. Start a list.”
“Are you doing okay?”
“Of course. Look at me.”
Georgia struck a pose, the cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, her eyes crossed. They sat there laughing. A moped buzzed past, the driver looking at them like they’d just landed from Mars.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Georgia said. “I’m not a teacher.”
She told Ray how teaching overseas had been her friend’s idea. This was Natalie’s adventure, not Georgia’s. She felt like she’d stolen the blueprint. The chaos was rented; she was a fraud. These last days were beautiful and wild but Georgia had no idea what she was doing here. Maybe she should pack it in while there was still time. She was talking, her mind headlong with indecision.
“Sorry,” she said.
They sat there.
“Don’t go, love,” Ray said. “You’ll see. It’s going to be brilliant.”
“I feel fucking lost.”
“You can’t be lost. You’re right here, aren’t you?”
3
She’d been assigned to a middle school of burgeoning teenagers. Georgia felt like an imposter. She foresaw disruption, chaos and hormones. Only a few years older than her students, she was still affiliated with teenage rebellion. The universe was reversing its rule already. There would be eighteen different classes with fifty students, each class once a week. Nine hundred students. It should have been a cinch: prep one lesson each week, teach it eighteen times. But the reality was that every class was different and the lesson needed to be adjusted for each class’s capabilities, maturity and interest. It took some time for her to figure this out and make it work. Over the first weeks, she made a new list. The best classes. The worst. The keeners and the clowns.
