Chandelier, page 28
Her timing was lucky. Just chance, she told Ray. Her father had returned to the condo for his mail. He heard her fumbling around and found her by the landing to the back door. He blocked the bleeding as best as he could before screaming into his phone for an ambulance. He kept repeating “No, George, no, George” over and over as he held her arm. She remembered being very warm and tired. There was a dazed housefly hammering against the window of the door, getting caught in the curtain, circling the landing, and slamming back into the glass again. She remembered it vividly. In the middle of the panic, just before the paramedics arrived, she watched her father very calmly reach over and grab it in mid-air.
“I still don’t know if that part’s true. Or my mind, or my adrenalin, made it up. But when we got into the ambulance and they were locking the gurney into place, I asked my father what he did with the fly. He didn’t understand. He looked at the paramedic. They looked at each other. The fly, I said. In your hand. He opened it but there was nothing there.”
36
She woke to a soft knocking on her door and Ji-tae whispering he was ready to leave for the beach. Checking the clock, she did the math. Only three hours since she’d flopped into bed. Lifting her head from the pillow, Georgia grunted through phlegm. She dizzily scanned the room. Faint indigo between the shutters. Ji-tae was squatting by the bed, fully dressed in sporty Lycra, assessing the unlikeliness of a quick departure.
“Here is the coffee,” he said.
He gently handed her a steaming traveller cup, tip-off that it was not going to be a leisurely rise-and-shine with unhurried breakfast and some contemplative dallying.
“Oh god, Ji-tae,” she groaned. “I don’t think I can do it.”
“There is no option,” he said. “I need help to carry things.”
“Take someone else. Take Becca.”
“Everyone is in a coma. Vegetable state, like a potato. You are the man.”
“I’m the potato,” she protested.
“You are better. You are the surfing potato.”
“Give me five minutes,” she said, though she felt like she needed five years. Wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, she dragged herself into the bathroom and threw water on her face, took a pee and gave herself what Becca called a “Pommy shower”: a few vigorous swipes of deodorant as a substitute for washing.
Back in the bedroom, she dressed in a one-piece swimsuit, pulled her jeans on and grabbed her jacket.
No one else stirred as they went through the door.
Bastards.
Outside it was cold. If there’d been any wind, it would have felt like tundra. The weak light glittered on dewed edges of buildings and street signs. Dull silver to the east. A tin radiance. Ji-tae drove several blocks, retracing the route to downtown where they stopped in an alley with lock-ups behind metal shutters. With a few spins of the dial, Ji-tae freed the combination lock and waved Georgia over. A strip light winked awake, its garish LED glow revealing a jumble of boxes and paint cans, a work bench, circular saw, dirt bike (back tire missing), numerous empty Budweiser cans and a dusty shop vac. The morning felt illegal as they laboured to avoid thumping or rattling anything while they transferred a set of surfboards and three wetsuits Ji-tae’s friend had arranged for pickup by the entrance.
Down by the beach, the shops were still closed but lights were coming on. As Ji-tae laid the boards out and waxed them up on the sand past the parking lot barriers, Georgia heard her cellphone buzz. Ignoring it, she shimmied into her wetsuit. She tugged the neoprene legs on, then the arms, and zipped it closed. In the reflection of the car window, her hair tilted in a mad bulge: half Medusa, half Pisa. A cold wind whisked the coast. Ji-tae handed her a pair of swimming gloves.
“The water is not . . . nice,” he said.
She made a face.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll catch up.”
Ji-tae beamed. Without a pause, he turned toward the shore, jogging with his board across the wet sand.
“Are you anywhere?” he shouted.
She watched him leap through the morning tide, pulling comic faces at her as his body adjusted to the temperature. The gloom lifted and became a cloudless day. Early dog-walkers tossed sticks down the sodden beach or into the close plunge of a wave. The dogs would dash and snatch, shake themselves dry. Only a half-dozen people were out in the water, swimmers limbering up. Georgia saw no boards until the silhouette of one popped up from a timid breaker farther out. Ji-tae was already paddling to a set of white crests reflecting the sun on the southern end of the bay. He shouted something and waved. She tucked her board into her armpit and reluctantly plodded down the sand to the froth of the chilly, retreating tide. It would have been very nice to get in the car and go back to bed.
The surf didn’t cooperate. It wasn’t happening, whatever made the sea shove, turn and lift. It looked like nothing to Georgia; it seemed impossible to guess how the conditions could change. She’d been learning through the winter months that surfers are part-meteorologists too, obsessively studying the changes on the water’s surface, assessing each swell with eye and feel. They had come to expect, even value, inevitable variation. No surfer will champion any one beach, since they change over time. Every location reorders itself. The sun’s energy heats the Earth’s surface unevenly; the atmosphere shifts, rearranging the air from areas of high to low pressure, so over time, the winds kick up in places while they flatten in others, the sea in constant renewal. The land waits to receive the tide, to lift it up into shelves. She understood that once ripples formed, the wind had something to push against. Thousands and thousands of separate random waves were surging against each other out there. Their origins, their destinations, were barely predictable. Some waves that plunged against California’s coast started as a current in the Indian Ocean. She liked to imagine it, a distant storm, days away, gathering the ocean to a swell, gusting over the endless fetch.
But here, the scarce currents moved toward the shore. The water was still quiet, but it looked darker, more brooding. Ji-tae and Georgia surfed for less than two hours. Often, she’d get up, play the flow until it petered out, stepping off the board like stepping down off a bus. Haeundae was really a beginner’s beach for surfers. It had been a perfect place for Georgia to start back in the fall, to get some practice in, enough quieter tides to test balance and technique, with some decent breakers if she needed a challenge. But Ji-tae was disappointed. He wanted height: six-, seven-, eight-foot waves, big rollers with a high face where you could catch real speed and adrenaline. So, when he’d heard there’d been some drama in the latest tides, barrels even, these last few days, he’d been keen to find them. One day they would come.
No such luck now. Someone had been exaggerating. Or the weather had calmed, the water had lost its defined momentum, the surf disorganized, sloppy and meek.
Georgia watched him paddling to lineup for the next surge, checking the horizon, determined that something would collect into a proper set. She admired the hope and enthusiasm. It was dedication, wasn’t it? Obsession. The dream of something better. All these ridiculous mornings and evenings chasing a circumstance you don’t control but can only prepare for. Learning your balance, testing and refining your skill for when the good chances come. So here they still were, splashing about and climbing on their boards, boogying through the slovenly sub-par surf for a golden instant of rush. The small waves were hard work too, but without the exhilaration. You have to hustle for speed, carve out any drama and wiggle around on the lip to keep momentum. She persisted in this swoon, scissor-kicking the tide, creating momentum, jumping up and balancing out, finding a gentle lip to ride here and there along the jumbled surface. By lunch, she was exhausted and starving.
“I could eat the arse off a skunk,” she said to Ji-tae as he slipped off the beach break into the waist-high ripples. There were more swimmers now, more surfboards, but the water was still limp and lifeless. He laughed and nodded, studying the horizon again, as if the promised waves were tantalizingly just beyond, ever on the verge of rising into something momentous. Reluctantly, he unclipped his leash and they carried their boards up to a stretch of restaurants near the beach that made monster profits in the summer months. In the glass windows, photos of bibimbap and beer competed for their attention. They found a group table in a brunch place they’d frequented a few times before.
Ji-tae texted Becca with their location. Warming up with some barley tea, they talked about the surf, Ji-tae analyzing the lack of spectacle in the water, checking his app for the promised swells.
“Yeah, I’d love to try one of those big barrels,” Georgia said.
Ji-tae told her about Noosa in Australia and how terrifying it looked in his novice summer. Even to get in the lineup was impossible, so he’d stayed on the fringes. The water moved fast, it hit hard and there was a lot of egos among the surfers. The pack was viciously competitive, and when there were superior swells, an accepted hierarchy was enforced.
“They are very serious,” Ji-tae said. “They paddle past you. Push you out. You can’t join the club unless you have a special talent.”
A gust of wind went down the sidewalk. Some traffic cones tipped over, skittering a few feet farther. Ji-tae poured more tea into their ceramic cups. Georgia told him the details of her mother’s calls, everything she had said, Ji-tae’s face half shock, half empathy. Then he said, “What will you do?”
“Me?”
“About your family?”
“My mother wants me to come home.”
“Will you go?”
Georgia watched the sea. The waves tugged and shoved, but had order, a rhythm. Not like each day, the days before, and the ones that follow. When she left Canada, she thought she would escape something. All the stupidity and hurt feelings and pain and regret. Anger. The aura of her mother’s neuroses. She could feel, even here, even now, her father’s reproach.
What had she once said to him from the hospital bed?
I lost my way and I hate being alive.
A delivery truck backed through a sloppy parallel park. Georgia and Ji-tae watched. A light rain had started. Hurriedly, the driver hopped down from the cab and dropped the tailgate, untying a tarp. A teenager in a rubber apron helped him unload several blue plastic crates.
“Maybe,” Ji-tae said, “your mother needs you.”
* * *
The gang arrived. The restaurant was jammed but they squeezed past the waiting area to find the table. Enormous glasses of juice were ordered. Orange, mango, grapefruit, variations with kiwi and passionfruit. The restaurant was mad for juice. It was some kind of thing. Three employees toiled away behind an industrial juicer, peeling, cutting up fruit and feeding the machine with sections of citrus colours. Their aprons were spattered with the spray of their labour like war surgeons. More crates were hefted through a doorway. A bin of peelings and pits were lugged out. The background music cycling through the speakers was interrupted continually with the snarl of the juicer’s hidden mechanisms reducing fruit to liquid, like a chainsaw sectioning firewood, then chipping it to pulp.
On laminated pages, there were photos of select breakfast plates: quinoa and tofu cakes, granola bowls, seaweed salads, all served with side plates of kimchi. Mick flipped through the menu. “Where’s the meat section?”
“Hold on to your arteries, Mick,” Becca said. “They serve something called vegetables here.”
“The what?”
“Veg. Uh. Ta. Bulls.”
“Sounds depressing. Can they wrap it in a sausage?”
“This place is very healthy and popular,” Ji-tae said.
Every few minutes, Georgia could see him checking the weather beyond the door.
“I feel like a scratching post,” Mick said. He looked exhausted, hungover. Ray and Becca too. They scanned the menus.
The food arrived. The rain began to drop in wind-blown sheets. The waiter refilled their coffees. Ji-tae introduced the idea of staying an extra night. He’d been transfixed on the horizon where dark clouds scuttled low over the waves. An offshore storm was coming. It could mean good surf. They could test the waves in the morning and surf all day. The townhouse was rented until nine a.m. They could load the car, then drive back late Sunday evening.
“I can stay,” Becca said.
Mick declined. “Sounds like exercise,” he said. “I’m allergic, mate. Exercise makes me sweaty and short of breath.”
Ray had to back out too. He had work to prepare for Monday and was already committed to being home in Gwangju the next morning.
“Don’t let us stop you though,” he said. “We’ll find a bus or train tonight.”
“Last chance,” Becca said.
“If the waves are good,” Ji-tae said, “we’ll try right after lunch.”
“After lunch?” Ray said. “Doesn’t your side stitch up? Or your head pop off or something like that?”
“I think your penis shrivels,” Becca offered.
“Not mine. Rock hard. All the time. Like a tree branch,” Mick said.
“One of them little twigs, y’mean?” Becca said.
Ji-tae said, “Very small tree. Like a Japanese bonsai.”
37
The storm came as they finished lunch. Wind worked hard and heavy down the western channel of the strait, rattling windows, popping awnings, postboxes knocked over. They listened to the downpour roaring against the roof. The building shuddered. Something metal collapsed outside. No one left the restaurant. In an aquarium light, they drained more tea. Mick ordered a beer. A server pulled the thin curtain back; the windows were steamed up; nothing could be seen beyond the thick ripples of water pulsing down the glass. The floor was a puddle. One of the staff kept a mop going, continuously, over the soaked tiles.
Georgia stood in line for the washroom. Restless, she checked the time, and thought about returning her mother’s last call. It would be evening there, she imagined. Her mother would be up doing what? Fussing, no doubt. Bouncing off the walls over something. She should call her, but Georgia needed to delay the fretting, the constant pressure to pledge her emotional state to some source of happiness that never existed, like an Eden they’d been cast from.
When she returned to the table, Mick and Ray were at the entrance, paying the bill.
“The forecast is heavy tonight,” Becca said. “There’s an express bus in an hour. Mick and Ray are getting out of Dodge while they can. Ji-tae’s going to drive them to the station. You still want to stay?”
Georgia looked at Ji-tae.
“Can we get in the water?”
He shook his head. “Not tonight. Too dangerous.” He’d seen the live webcam of Haeundae. Hurricane winds, maybe. Red flags everywhere. Totally off-limits. “But it’s expected to peak after midnight. This is good. It might be ideal in the morning. Maybe barrels!” He smiled extravagantly.
* * *
Georgia waited under an awning while Ji-tae dashed through the downpour for the car. After they packed their things, he’d drive Mick and Ray to the station. Everyone else was lined up for the washroom inside the restaurant. While she waited, Georgia studied the sky. Water spilled in chaotic rivulets over the awning’s fringe. Potted trees knocked back and forth, their branches wildly gesticulating. Curtains of rain fragmented down through the spaces between the high-rises near the sea. She tried to imagine the beach out there. The scattered plastic chairs on the wet sand. The stacked waves. The dark, cold tide; the sea’s animate violence with its loss of structure.
She closed her eyes.
This is where I am, she thought.
Wind and rain bashed at the nylon awning.
Ray came out onto the steps. She stood there smiling at him.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing. I’m sorry. I’m an idiot.”
“How do you mean?”
“I just can’t seem to appreciate it. I always feel like I’m doing it wrong.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know. One of my unfinished lives.”
Ray said, “Shut up, please. You’re amazing.”
They hugged. The others appeared. Ji-tae pulled up in the car and the boys climbed in. Their wheels threw water onto the curb.
“You go ahead. I’m going to walk back,” Georgia said to Becca.
“It’s bucketing, mate.”
“I need some air.”
* * *
Downtown, under a beleaguered umbrella, she roamed the still-shut kiosks of a small covered market, looking at window displays of kimchi, vegetables, scarves and slippers. She’d swayed in front of a shop that featured ginseng roots displayed in glass urns like science fiction aliens waiting to come to life. It was next to an internet café that sold coffee. To dry off, Georgia bought one and because she was there, decided to check her emails. There were three tables near the window. Two rows of computers filled the rest of the room. She paid for half an hour on a corner terminal and set her cup down beside the mouse.
Bunching her pack near the hard drive, she logged into a server and punched in the café’s I.D. code. A little timer appeared on the bottom right of the screen, counting down from thirty.
Her mother’s email was there. Titled “Hugo” in the subject box with an attachment. In her mother’s characteristic expediency, there was no other comment.
Georgia clicked on the attachment and enlarged the screen.
The footage was not quite four minutes long. Starting as wasteland, a boardwalk emerged under street lights. More objects became clear. The trunk of a tree and the end of a park bench. The overhead angle, black-and-white texture, were surprisingly defined for closed circuit.
