Table for One, page 21
8. PIERCING
The dark blue metal tail quivered between the tweezers’ pincers. The piercing technician held the shattered, centipede-like fragment with the tweezers before dropping it onto a dry piece of cotton.
“The earring broke in half inside your ear, and now there’s an infection,” she said. “Don’t touch it until it heals.”
Moments earlier, she’d removed the whale’s vertebra, the length of which had cut a hole through the upper part of my ear. The inside of the piercing was completely filled with bacteria-laden pus. Signs of injury remained in places where the whale’s corroding body had touched my skin. Bloody rust that had been hiding beneath the whale, brown as the skin of a bad apple, oozed from my ear. Restless yellow desires that once festered inside the infected protuberance flowed freely now that the bulge had been popped. When an alcohol swab touched my cartilage, my ear rode the wave of encroaching disinfectant like a surfer, and I could hear it hum. The sound was as wretched as two tightly fitting wardrobe doors rasping as they closed. The sea disappeared into the mismatched beat: the discordant whine of grating cartilage. I couldn’t smell any ocean waves here. Instead, the painful scent of hydrogen peroxide flooded the room as yet another whale left my body. Once the whale was entirely gone, only a damp hole remained.
It was fun to put holes in my body. An earring post was less than twelve millimeters long, but there was nothing that couldn’t hang from the end of it: an agile tail, a sturgeon fin, roaring beasts from an Altaic cave painting, even splendid wreaths and blazing sunspots. It didn’t take long to stick the metal in. After two or three seconds, the flesh had an opening in it, and I only needed another thirty seconds to stick an earring in the hole. But it took two weeks to a month for the metal post to lay its roots in my skin—and once again, I was taking the earring out after waiting all that time.
The problem was that the metal hadn’t completely taken root. I’d only just learned this, but my skin was prone to keloids. My cartilage around the titanium whale couldn’t overcome its natural sensitivity. My body had been surprised by the sudden irritation of a piercing and violently pushed out the earring. The whale, firmly fixed to my cartilage, had broken in two inside my ear, and then a round bump emerged around the area, like my body was a criminal trying to cover up a crime.
I wrapped the pus- and scab-covered whale in tissue paper, put it in my pocket, and went to the doctor. This was my seventh whale. It was also the last whale left in my body, because I’d already removed all the others. The smell of blood followed me as I left the clinic. It was the scent of my guilt about giving up and removing the piercings.
Every time I saw J, we got piercings together. Ultimately, though, my pus-filled wounds were all that remained as evidence of our acquaintance. Every whale stuck in my skin eventually broke into shards and left me. The loss of whales is an important matter, but J doesn’t answer the phone when I call to tell her. She hasn’t just been unreachable for a day or two. She never answers anymore.
* * *
“There’s nothing strange about it,” J told me. “My body’s just gotten used to the piercing. It’s part of me now, like fingernails or toenails.”
If you classified J by species, she would be a crustacean. A crustacean whose wounds hardened into rocks—nodules stuck to each joint of her body. Illuminated beneath the flashing multicolored lights, sharp daggers stuck out from their burial places across J’s body. The pieces of metal, each a different shape and in a different location, made their existence known each time the lights moved. Two in her right ear, one in her left ear, one on the edge of her right eyebrow, one in the middle of her forehead, one in her philtrum, one on her tongue, two on her lip, right above her crooked teeth, and who knew how many more bits of metal were hidden under her clothes. J’s ears, bound with rings like a spiral notebook, shook every time she nodded. Bones weren’t what supported J’s body. Metal was. And the holes didn’t just cling to her—J clung to the holes.
“How many piercings do you have?” I asked her.
“I haven’t counted, so I don’t know,” she said. “I feel like I find a new one every day when I wake up.”
She stuck her tongue out briefly, and the arrow-shaped piercing sparkled. The arrow’s triangular head pointed toward J’s vocal cords. Everything J said followed the direction of the arrow and swam back down her throat. So did her breaths. Laughs, sobs, and sighs were all reabsorbed into J’s esophagus before they could reach the ground. J never had an expression on her face. She was always composed, maybe smiling, maybe not. The day we first met, I’d given J five thousand won because I wanted to swim up her throat, too. It seemed like I’d be taking a weight off myself if I could drop all my words, all my breaths, and all my time inside her mouth.
“You know what I ate for dinner the day I got the arrow piercing?” she asked. “Ramen. Spicy ramen, boiled with slices of gochu pepper. It was a little uncomfortable because the noodles kept touching my arrow. But the flavor was fantastic—maybe it was because there was a hole in my tongue and oxygen could flow through it. I emptied the entire pot and even smoked an after-dinner cigarette!”
As she talked about getting the inward-pointing arrow, J took off her T-shirt. A bloody stench emanated from her body. It wasn’t the pungent smell you come across at a fish market stall. It was a reddish odor, red like the liquid that rusty metal secretes on rainy days.
“I pierced it with a needle,” she said. “This one hurt more than the others.”
J’s nipple looked as mournfully pale and frightened as someone with a pillory around their neck. The silver ring hanging from the middle of her round breast reminded me of a torture device. A small lock dangled from the curved ring. My brow wrinkled as I looked at that point where flesh and metal intersected. J leaned her small body toward me. I took a hesitant step back. My whole body itched.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I didn’t know why I was being so flighty, either. Strangely, I didn’t desire her. It was like J’s body had given me a metal allergy: the moment I saw her, a sharpness shot through my every nerve.
“You’ll get used to it soon,” she said. “Even if clients think it’s weird at first, they like it later.”
J sometimes had bruises on her body. When the deep blue blotches on her skin drifted toward the color of a rotten apple, a new piercing was sure to make an appearance—something like bullhorns or a scorpion or a geometric shape. Whenever she got a bruise, she got a promotion. No, maybe every time she got a promotion she got a bruise. When I said she worked for a “pyramid scheme,” she would correct me with the phrase “multilevel marketing,” because she hated the desperate aura that “pyramid scheme” gave off. Every time she pulled a new person in, she moved up one level. The hawk beak wedged into her right arm was a piercing J had gotten after one such step up the corporate ladder. Two months later, when J rose to “silver,” a starfish appeared on the right side of her forehead. In this strange animal hierarchy, J was moving up.
“If I leave now, it’ll all come to nothing. I already have my foot in the door,” she said. “Now I have to get to ‘diamond.’ ”
J was trying to get rid of her debt when she met me. Even so, I could only pay her fifty thousand won per night. I was glad that the relationship didn’t benefit just one of us.
* * *
Her phone number has been deactivated. For several weeks, all I get is a dial tone when I call. I’ve even questioned whether or not I’m calling the right number. During the three months that I met with J, the kid’s number changed something like four times. But because J was always the one to call me, the new numbers evaporated from my mind before I could remember them. All I can do is wait. I walk toward the street where I often met J. It’s in a red-light district, down a city alley. J is probably still moonlighting there, and soon we’ll be able to see each other.
The trees lining the road strain their necks toward the city din. J’s face glimmers through the leaves. The seafood stew restaurant at the end of the road is still here, the restaurant that advertises service “twenty-five hours per day” and whose sign is missing a letter. J easily emptied a bowl of stew at dawn every time we met. From our first meeting until the last time I saw her, we always ate seafood stew together. I felt bad, purchasing J’s body for a few small bills, so I’d buy her stew in the early hours of morning.
The street continues until it reaches the intersection outside my wife’s animal hospital. My wife typically eats lunch at the restaurant across the street; later, she emerges from the café next door holding an Americano. She swallows an antacid in the pharmacy where she’s a regular and buys an afternoon snack in the adjacent bakery. I still know many things about my wife, like the fact that her car is parked in space 2-1 in the underground hospital lot, that after work someone is always waiting for her at the intersection, and that the someone changes every few months, sometimes every few weeks.
It’s been a year since I separated from my wife. After moving out, I opened the thirty cardboard boxes I’d used for packing—boxes that formerly contained packs of ramen in bulk and were now filled with thick hardcover books. I piled the books against the wall of my two-hundred-thousand-won rented room like they were a fence. It felt like I’d been transported ten years into the past. The earth had revolved around the sun ten times over the past decade, but I’d only spun around in one place. It wasn’t that I hadn’t made the occasional attempt to do something unconventional. I’d even gotten a job as a copywriter at an advertising agency and begun to follow a well-trodden career path. I married my wife when that path seemed to be taking me somewhere successful. But not long after the wedding, I realized that I’d just been handed off to another relay race runner. From my single mother to my oldest sister, to my second-oldest sister, to my third-oldest sister, and then to my wife: I was a baton constantly passed between sprinters.
The room was small but had a high ceiling. Above my head was a long window that let in narrow beams of sunlight every morning. As rays came through the window’s crossbars, tiny as squares on graph paper, I curled up in the light and read. If the sun shifted, I picked up the small table in front of me and moved to a part of the room that was still bright.
Even though we’re separated, my wife’s workplace and the apartment where she must still be living are hardly five hundred meters from here. My life didn’t change much when we parted. I wake up at the same time and go to sleep at the same time, go grocery shopping once every four days and soak rice for thirty minutes before cooking it. Whether my wife is here or not, I fall asleep in the fetal position, all by myself. Other than when I go outside a few times a month, I eat alone and stay in my room.
But if something has changed, it’s that I no longer pay attention to what day it is. My wife had an exacting personality, and she made me comply with expiration dates on items in the refrigerator. After four days, still-fresh vegetables and meat and fruits were kicked out of the fridge, and we organized a large-scale fridge cleaning twice a week. But I don’t check expiration dates anymore. I know that I’ve already passed the expiration for my former daily life. I’m decaying, out of orbit from my past sense of normalcy.
I lean my face against the glass of the animal hospital wall. I see a number of canine eyes waiting for treatment by my wife’s skilled hands, but I don’t see my wife. Across the room, the dog groomer looks furtively in my direction. Since I don’t see my wife inside, I know she must be in surgery. Soon she’ll be ravenous—for both food and sex. As I think of her white gloves and her white gown, I feel a chill down my back and my chest thumps. I separated from her one year ago, but my memories haven’t moved on. They’re still renting a home from my wife.
* * *
A week before Male died, she fixed two dogs that were in heat. On days like that, she always finished a whole bowl of rice by herself. Our house was thick with the smell of the meat and fish that we were continually flipping on the grill. My wife chattered on as we cooked. “I told you to soak the meat in water—you didn’t get all the blood off. Why is it so smelly? And it’s pretty tough, too. I asked for sesame leaves, not lettuce. You didn’t put ginger in the marinade, did you? How about next time we use a gridiron? The meat will be softer that way.”
My wife always ate a sumptuous meal after fixing the growling dogs. It was as if she were trying to recover the sexual desire lost during the procedure. She grabbed bluish vegetables with her chopsticks and wrapped them around several chunks of thick meat. As over a pound of flesh entered her chomping mouth, I sat across from her and ensured that the marinade and vegetables and water didn’t run out and hinder her enormous appetite. I choked just smelling the meat, but I couldn’t imagine getting up first from the table for two: our twice-monthly ritual. I didn’t like it when she raised her voice or glared at me with her wide-open eyes if I tried to avoid our communal meals. But that wasn’t the main reason I sat with her: the real reason was slightly more practical.
After she set down her spoon at the end of dinner, I would push a piece of paper toward her, breaking down my living expenses. Then I received my month’s allowance, and money for cigarettes. I’d spent two years staying at home doing nothing, but she’d never expressed disappointment. She didn’t try to convince me to look for work, and she didn’t give me weird looks, either. Even when I’d floundered as a salesperson at a pharmaceutical company, unable to make it three months before giving up, and when I’d been kicked out of my prep classes for the entrance exams at other companies, she didn’t care. None of it had to do with her. That also meant that I didn’t have the obligation or right to interfere with her life. My wife calmly weathered everything—my long unemployment, the incomprehensible cipher-like poems I wrote, my lack of smarts and inability to relax, even how bad I was in bed. In turn, I had to deal with her frequent nights away, her daring affairs, and her one-sided decisions. Our rule was that the marriage wouldn’t break down until one member declared that he or she was giving up.
As long as no one tested this unwritten law, our household stayed calm. The atmosphere was just a little unsympathetic. When she wasn’t home, Male was my only family member. Our three-month-old cocker spaniel, Male. According to my wife, Male wasn’t a purebred. She readily accepted lost dogs like our new puppy, but you couldn’t expect her to show compassion beyond simply taking them in. When I asked what we should name the dog, she’d impassively replied, “Male.”
“Do you mean we should make that the dog’s name?” I asked. She was indifferent.
“Well, is it male or female?” she asked.
She was an expert: she could tell a dog’s breed just by looking at its nose. But honestly, to my wife, there were only two kinds of dogs: dogs that were docile and dogs that weren’t. If a once-docile dog entered heat or wanted to mate, it typically became distracted and aggressive. So really, the division was between dogs that had been fixed and dogs that hadn’t. My wife was a recognized spay and neuter expert. The customers who put their pets in her care loved dogs, although she didn’t really like them herself. There was a difference between knowing dogs and loving dogs, but it didn’t really matter.
She got a wound on her arm not long after we took in Male. Male was beginning to show signs of rut, like leaning against the wall and barking loudly. That day, as soon as she entered the doorway, he ran up and rubbed his body against her.
“This idiot is horny,” she said.
She pushed Male away. At the same time, she picked up the umbrella she’d set down in the entryway. There was no stopping her. The thick-handled umbrella trembled in the narrow hallway like it was being struck by lightning. Male seemed to be snarling, but because the sound was so brief, it was hard to determine whether what I’d heard was real. Moments later, Male was lying on the floor, immobile. She kneeled and poked Male’s throat. For a second, she seemed to have stopped breathing, too. An angry blue riverlike vein protruded from her brow, then it receded. She brushed off her hands and stood up.
“You should have told me beforehand. If I’d performed the surgery, this wouldn’t have happened!” she shouted.
Bang. I heard the bathroom door close, but I just sat where I was. Male’s eyes were completely closed. No quivering motion hid beneath his eyelids. I strode toward the bathroom and twisted the door’s handle. The cold, shrill click of the lock blocked the space between us. I put my ear to the bathroom wall and heard her washing her hands. There was the sound of bubbles lathering, of her clean fingers exposing themselves between the bubbles, of tepid water dissolving the bubbles. She was calm and organized as ever, but caught in a rhythm incompatible with everyday life.
That night, I leaned against her bedroom door like a child and opened my mouth.
“I want to have a funeral. For Male,” I said.
“What?” she asked.
“People do that nowadays when dogs die. I want to organize a funeral for Male.”
“Dogs are dogs,” she said. “I could save three or four others for the cost of a funeral.”
“If you lend me money, I’ll …”
“I’m going to make a phone call. Leave, please,” she ordered.
I didn’t have any money, but I used what I did have to hold a funeral. I wrapped Male up in a blanket and set him down in my room. He was still warm, and I couldn’t bury him before his temperature cooled. My whole body was exhausted, taken by a sudden rush of fatigue. After sleeping for a long time, I woke up the next morning and felt like I could still hear the sound of Male moving around. But the day after that, and the third day, Male still hadn’t woken up. On the fourth day, Male’s body disappeared. Along with the blanket it was wrapped up in. He evaporated with the blanket. One of two things had happened: either Male had reincarnated and walked away, or someone had thrown him out.
After two days, I discovered Male in one of the apartment complex’s public trashcans. He was in the food waste bin. I pushed a trash bag to the side and pulled out Male. Apple peels and gluey paste from the end of a rice scooper clung to his fur. My insides were churning. I felt like I was going to throw up, but it wasn’t because of Male’s miserable body. It wasn’t because of the nasty smell, either. The thing that shook me was the phallic bump coming out from below his midsection. Is the bastard in heat? Is the bastard in heat? Her biting voice rolled around in my ears. Everything turned yellow before my eyes. My center of balance rushed to my crotch, and the sky swirled. From far away, I could hear the sound of her feet. Her feet tapped on the ground as she walked toward me, carrying scissors with bluish blades and a knife in her hands. Snip, snip. The moment Male’s genitalia was cut off, my legs lost their strength. My pants felt clammy.
