Chandelier, page 8
Georgia bolted forward and kicked at the shields. “You fucking assholes,” she shouted.
“Shit,” Becca said and ran forward.
Georgia was screaming into a face behind a police helmet: “What the fuck’s the matter with you?!”
Becca rushed up behind her. The student lay there, dazed but propping himself on his elbows. “We need to help him,” Becca said.
They both crouched and supported the student’s arms as he raised himself.
“Are you okay?” Georgia said. He looked at her. His eyes were bloodshot from tear gas, or likely fatigue. There was a lot of shouting around them. He focused on Georgia’s face for a long second. “Yes,” he said in English.
With his hand on her shoulder, he steadied himself and they moved toward the sidewalk, only four steps, when Georgia heard pop, pop, pop as a tear gas canister arced down from the sky and skittered right to their feet.
The smoke jetted out the top and Georgia caught a blast to her nose and eyes, like a splash of wildfire. The student who she’d been helping now tugged on her sleeve. Within seconds, it was chaos. The police were sprinting, at full charge, their shields strapped around shoulders, waving short black clubs. Everyone was scattering, screaming, tripping over each other. Someone stumbled through a bonfire and kicked sparks off hot, burning wood into the panic. The tear gas billowed and crept. Georgia hadn’t had time to pull on her bandana. Her throat stung. She was choking. Her eyes felt scorched. Within seconds of exposure, they’d squeezed up, ducts violently gushing water.
“Becca!” she yelled blindly. “Becca! Ji-tae!”
There was shouting and footfalls and banging. Georgia groped forward, impelled by the direction she’d been going, but everything was jumbled and reversed. Someone tripped over her ankle and she fell, her arm bearing the worst of the impact. She got up. She darted forward again, both hands probing the air until they bumped a surface. A wall. Grainy, poured concrete. Painfully, she forced an eye open and discovered she’d reached the west side of Kumnam, past the sidewalk and at the start of a short alley. It was impossible, too much agony, to keep her eyes open, so she hauled herself along the walls a step at a time. The street was full of gas, searing each inhale. Snot poured from her nostrils. Around the next corner, she found a small alcove so she crouched down inside its hollow to rest, crushing her palms against eye sockets.
“Don’t rub your eyes,” she heard a male voice say. “It’ll just make it worse.”
Everything was still blurry, fog-red.
The voice again: “It’s Ray.”
“Ray. Ray! I need to flush my eyes.”
He had a bottle of water on him. She tilted her head and told him to pour the water over her face so the chemicals dripped to the ground, not into her clothes. Two fingers touched her forehead and liquid rolled across her eyes. Her skin was instantly cooler. She could now see the transparent shape of the plastic bottle, tipped just above her. She squinted and assembled Ray’s face through the blur.
“How the fuck did you find me?”
15
“It was nutters,” Becca said as they drank persimmon tea at Georgia’s place.
Georgia, winded, had stripped down and dumped her clothes in a basin of water, then took a cold shower to rinse the chemicals off. Her eyes still smouldered like coals. Ray brought her a cup of barley water while she slumped there in a towel, raw from tear gas and her numerous falls, as they took turns recounting timelines. There’d been a crush of retreating protesters. Becca was knocked over. They’d lost track of Georgia. The smoke and gas and chaos of people. They’d rushed around frantically. The police had broken up the hard-core resistance and sent extra squads down the side streets, targeting anyone with metal pipes and arresting them.
They’d detained Ji-tae for a moment but let him go.
Ray had joined the protests too, further back, when he saw the police move forward.
And there was Georgia screaming and bashing away.
“Not exactly inconspicuous. Figures. Right in the thick of it.”
“So much for neutrality,” Becca said. She finished her tea and pulled a can of beer from their purchases at the corner store. “You were fucking marvellous, Gee. Absolutely mythic. Like the fucking Medusa. Epic lunacy. Hair all over the place, your eyes like two lava pits, screaming bloody murder at that squirmy cop while kicking away at him. He didn’t stand a chance.”
Georgia watched them all laughing.
Drinks went round. Georgia ranted, her hands now flapping, flitting like butterflies, voice fired up, raging about control and general oppression and the farce of authority. It was all greed and power and the police state, she spat. Her angry, headlong passion. The general feeling of helplessness, the recognition that the many are all sacrificed to the whims of someone’s bloated profit. “All fucking bullshit,” she summed up, shaking her hair still wet from the shower.
* * *
Georgia looked a sensation, as Becca described it. Her skin had reacted to the tear gas, leaving a red rash on her cheeks and forehead. Her bruised hand and a deep scrape on her forearm were more visible than the pulled muscles in her back. She was so stiff that she moved in Frankenstein strides through the school hallways, rigid and groaning. For the next few weeks, the students regarded her with baffled attention. She was an open mystery to them.
Several times before Christmas, Georgia, Ji-tae and Becca drove back to Busan to try out the surf. “Red sky in the morning,” Ji-tae would chime as they started out. Or “When a swallow flies low.” He was an avid weather watcher. He kept track of offshore winds on the internet. Obsessed over the south-east swells. Surfing forecasts were a continual fixation. So many variables contributed to the right waves, he enthused. The cyclone season raised the tide’s drama but Ji-tae had faith in the winter surf. When it arrived, they’d scream running in. It was cripplingly cold, even with their wetsuits. The breakers could be dramatic, rough and challenging. Ji-tae was in his element. A chance at choppy, unpredictable surges invigorated him. The December waves knocked Becca and Georgia all over the place, ass-flat on their boards, chin-first into bulwarks of water. Georgia, having worked the basics out in past months, now attacked the water with a disjointed hostility. She was lining up well, and finding her balance once she’d stood, but now worked too hard at scaling the swell, as if she could defeat it, as if the waves were a maze she could axe her way through, escape from, rather than ride. She got hungrier, looking for openings to convert her luck into skill, but her newfound fury made her stiff and reckless and accident prone.
“Your mind should be aggressive but your body must relax,” Ji-tae counselled after she’d tumbled a countless time.
“Thank you, Yoda,” she said.
* * *
This time, before they drove back to Gwangju, Ji-tae took them to Beomeosa, the hilltop Buddhist temple in the centre of the city. The car moved through apartment blocks on a gentle rise out of the downtown core. Trees and hilly lanes softened the urban scatter. They inched through a jammed parking lot. The temple was popular on the weekend. Families held impromptu picnics on benches and grass verges leading to the temple gates. There were a few restaurants near the parking area, all mobbed by groups of patrons. Waiters dashed about with side dishes of kimchi, octopus, bowls of red soup bobbing with clams and white fish. They strolled toward the entrance, the path lined with black granite steles, many capped with carved dragons or turtles as their base. The sun was just starting to nudge from shadows onto the west side of the temple buildings.
They stood looking at the first gate. Its beams were painted elaborately with bright blue and crimson swirls and bands.
“This is called Iljumun,” Ji-tae said. “The first gate. It’s very important. A barrier from the world. You must leave your earthly desires behind once you pass.”
“Good luck,” Georgia mumbled.
Ji-tae gestured to the curves in the beams rising toward and joining at the peak. “You see the wood parts? This shape stops evil from getting inside. People believe that evil only travels through straight lines.”
Monks filed from a doorway, marched across the open square and disappeared into another temple. A few of them were women. Their rust-coloured robes shifted over grey beneath. They all had their heads shaved. Cast-iron bells hung from the corners of the roof. The clappers, weighted down by fish made of flattened copper, rang limpidly in the wind.
“This sound,” Ji-tae said, “also tells you to stop thinking of the world.”
They roamed around with no goal, besieged by yellow leaves scattering to the forest floor. Several buildings and pagodas were arranged around the central temple. A recent rain had left a sensuous line of displaced mud meandering down the compound’s open ground. Georgia’s arms still ached from the day’s vigorous surf.
“All that fucking paddling,” she grunted. They climbed some steps to an entrance where three giant gold Buddhas sat between hundreds of candles, incense coiling up into the air. The walls were covered with bright murals of flowers and other seated Buddhas. Pyramids of apples and oranges were set out on miniature platforms. The spiritual bling of it seemed weird to Georgia amidst all the humble structures of stone and wood. But the air hung with lazy serenity. Following Ji-tae’s lead, they left their shoes at the top step and moved over the polished floor to a mat made of bamboo, bowing and kneeling down.
The monks chanted.
Becca felt Georgia tapping her knee. She looked at Georgia’s face, gone distraught and grey, her breath stifled with heaves.
“You okay, mate? You look absolute shite.”
Georgia scrambled from her knees for the exit. Becca followed, winking at Ji-tae. A few other tourists watched them leave, but the monks kept chanting, oblivious of Georgia running past her shoes, along the path and beyond the temple porch in her sock feet.
There was a stone bench to the side of the temple where she collapsed.
Becca arrived a minute behind her and waited for Georgia to get her breath back.
“What’s wrong, Gee? You sick?”
She could now see Georgia was sobbing, her cheeks battered red with inner turmoil. Becca pulled her close into her, palms cupping Georgia’s shoulders as she gasped and wept.
“It’s alright, mate,” she said. “The hangover can’t be that bad.”
* * *
They drove home Sunday evening, the east at their backs. Mountainous silhouettes followed their progress. Gaps in trees showed sea. North of Jinju they stopped for coffee and ate the small potatoes rolled in butter. Georgia craved salt while Becca drank water between sips of coffee. Ji-tae needed a few minutes to buy some presents for his parents and disappeared into the display shelves of a shop stacked with gift-wrapped desserts and specialty fish.
The women slouched on a bench facing the parking lot. Through a wide bay window, they watched a family rearranging luggage in their hatchback.
“Sorry I lost it back there,” Georgia said.
“No worries,” Becca said. “We all deserve a meltdown. You okay?”
“I’m a bit overwhelmed.”
“Shit’s fucked up,” Becca offered.
“Maybe the protest set me off. I’ve been trying to keep things . . . uncomplicated,” Georgia said, struggling to put thoughts into words. “The last couple of years I was staying under the radar. Flat, y’know? Monochrome. Everything neutral. Just coasting. It was my mantra. I stayed out of university. I worked at a coffee shop and tried to avoid imposed social situations and drama. But my mother was driving me nuts. She was either super-worried or pissed at me. I had to get out of there. I needed to fulfill a promise. I thought Korea would bring solitude. And these great kids and work and you and Mick. Ray and Ji-tae. I miss the numbness. I’d actually thought I’d lost interest in being interested in things anymore. I’m not making much sense, am I? I’m starting to feel happy again. The highs and lows are terrifying. It’s all freaking me out.” She laughed pathetically.
The hatchback family had finished their re-packing and now posed with each other as a passerby took their picture against the sea’s reddening skyline.
“I saw your wrist when we were surfing,” Becca said.
Georgia nodded. She’d seen Becca noticing, had registered the raw alarm. The subject matter was difficult, the loaded moment difficult to share. Her therapist had said she needed to identify the shadow and comprehend the intensities of her despair and panic. But Georgia had struggled with the process and closed herself off. At what point do you say, Give me help? Life was so intimate when it scraped against death.
“What happened?” Becca said.
Georgia leaned forward and rested her left arm across her thigh. She dragged all the bracelets and beaded strings up to her elbow, and unsnapped Natalie’s leather wristband. There they were, the naked, dramatic scars. One white slash, several centimetres long, ran from the bottom of Georgia’s palm halfway to the inside of her forearm, like a satellite photo of a dried-up riverbed. A second line, much shorter, as if an afterthought, was cut at an angle, like a comma added to sever the scar’s main flow. The word fighter, tiny, but in caps, was inscribed there, tattooed across her wrist, perpendicular to the cuts.
Georgia pressed her thumb along the lines, as if to show the danger had passed, the seams were tight, the darkness could be contained, and the pain locked out.
You could see the blood pulsing in an artery nearby.
“A bit cliché, right?” Georgia said.
Becca took her hand and squeezed it.
Ji-tae was waving at them near the exit, clutching gift boxes as he pushed through the doors.
Part 2
Hugo Walser During His Illness
16
As my taxi arrives at the Ottawa airport, only a few travellers are loping through the rain toward the entrance. Inside: couples, business types, clusters of small families mill about the uncomfortable seating areas. A bored security officer scans another’s revolver with a metal detector. The black wand beeps. They laugh. They reverse roles.
I have time for a haircut, so take a chair. “A number two all around and float it on top,” the barber states with certainty, as if I’m a regular. Why not? He pulls hot foam off my neck with a straight razor and dumps the paper collar in the trash. Restaurants and a bookstore are stagnant. Afternoon departure. A lull in the non-time of airports. International flights require you to arrive three hours in advance, leaving you plenty of time to spend your domestic cash. I watch two toddlers stumble back and forth between their mother and a display case of confiscated and stuffed endangered animals. The children screech, dashing about. The rules to their game are few. Run and touch. Shriek. Run and touch. Shriek. The protective glass near the turtle shells is smudged with applesauce. They’re soon tiring. It is hours from bedtime. I recognize their parents’ strategy. Run the little kiddies on the wheel until fatigued. Though no doubt, when it catches up to them a few hours over the Atlantic, that red glow on their cheekbones will transform into renewed shrills.
Near the departure lounge, there is rescue. A bar is open for business. Darcy McGee’s, one of its franchise locations from the downtown Ottawa mother ship. Faux Ireland coziness fitted like a quaint wood drawer into the glass-and-steel efficiency of a contemporary airport. Amid framed prints of James Joyce in that unfortunate hat, amid black-and-whites of turf fields and stone hovels, amid shelves of glass jars, tankards and shillelaghs, we are to be convinced of the modest, rural authenticity of the universal claim to an Irishness. I won’t complain. Just a half pint and some Bushmills. I will embrace the imperfect stereotype.
Ich bin ein Irelander.
I am joined by a youth in a Hugo Boss suit. Well, likely he’s pushing thirty. He is red-faced, with a military haircut. He’s got a class ring and grips a sleek briefcase.
“Hiya,” he says, swinging his leg onto the stool next to mine. “Where you heading?”
He doesn’t look old enough to shave. But he wants to chat and I’m bored.
“Barcelona,” I say. “The 4:15 connection out of Montreal.”
He nods like he’s done it a few times himself.
The crying has started. One of the racing children, clumsy and breathless, has fallen just short of the glass display, knocking his chin against it. A wizened cobra glares from its trembling container of formaldehyde, its submerged visage warning, Do not wrench me from my land of origin or I will bring this curse upon you. The child screeches back toward his mother, a tiny banshee, all heated arms and self-remorse.
My current drinking partner with the class ring offers info. He’s on his way to Vienna. Something to do with sales. Office furniture. Austrian-made. Ongoing expansion. Increased orders. The internet culture.
“Furniture, right? You always need somewhere to park your ass,” he says.
“Two more is what I say.” I point to my drained tumbler. Class-ring laughs and puffs his cheeks.
“Boy,” he says, “I probably shouldn’t.”
He’s been here three hours already on a stopover from Vancouver. But he takes one and we tap the glasses congenially.
“What do you do?” he asks.
“Architect,” I say, though immediately regret it. Should have gone for a story. Chef or sea captain. Ambassador. Tug on his chain for the thirty minutes of our short-lived time together on this earth.
