Art on Fire, page 7
‘It looks like the skin of a tyre has been peeled off,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’
‘It’s like when the sole of your shoe comes off. The heat separates out the layer that touched the ground. It happens at extremely high heat and velocity. As the centrifugal force increased, the rubber detached. It gets soft when it’s hot. That’s how the rubber grew weak and came off.’
‘Oh, you played a tyre repairman, didn’t you? In a Korean drama?’
‘You really are a fan.’
Jun counted me as his sixth fan.
‘Actually, I worked at a tyre factory for a long time,’ he said. ‘Did you know tyres aren’t round at the start? That’s just the shape they take after all the trimming. You shave the surface of a freshly extruded tyre with a Y-shaped knife. Like this.’
Many speculated about the cause of the wildfires: lightning, firecrackers from a party, even tyres from a truck. Supposedly, when a tyre came off the vehicle, the wheel was exposed directly to asphalt, and that caused a spark. Sparks could emerge from anything to cause fires that spread uncontrollably. We passed ten lost tyres, one hundred wind turbines, and a thousand puzzle pieces of cracked land. Finally we reached our destination: the Robert Foundation. It was four in the afternoon, seven hours after our departure.
The first thing to catch my eye when I got out of the car was the clear sky; it was as if the yellow filter had been removed. The acrid smell had gone away a while ago, but now the visual landscape, too, returned to its state before the fires. The air felt buoyant and fresh, as if it had been transported from the morning I’d left for Incheon Airport. Seeing such a blue sky after all the sluggishness that had been in the air since my arrival, it felt like I’d entered a completely different world.
The Robert Foundation sign looked fairly old. Regardless of whether it was faded by the sun or hit by soot from the infernos, it looked pretty dismal. A tremendous silence accompanied the heat. At 4.00 pm, the zenith of the day had passed, but rays of sunlight still poured down, and the surroundings were silent, as if sound couldn’t travel in this temperature. Like in water. I rang the doorbell once. A thin chime continued for several seconds, but I didn’t hear a reply. I pressed a little harder, but there was still no reply. When Jun got out of his car and rang the doorbell, it was the same.
‘What do you do as a delivery person in situations like this?’ Jun asked. ‘When no one answers the door.’
‘I double-check my options,’ I said. ‘There are several. Ring the doorbell again and leave the package by the door, don’t ring the doorbell and leave it by the door, don’t ring the doorbell and send a text after leaving the package by the door, ring the doorbell and send a photo of the package by the door, send a photo without ringing the doorbell, call the recipient … there are so many options.’
‘Which one is your favourite? Leaving the package at the door?’
‘Leaving the package and ringing the doorbell. I feel uncomfortable leaving the package otherwise; I get nervous not knowing if the recipient got their delivery. Sending a photo is okay, too. I take the pictures right away.’
‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ Jun said. ‘The item is in front of the door now — we just need a picture!’ Jun handed me his phone.
He refused to take the money I was trying to give him, but he did accept the coupon I’d made, scribbled on the pizza restaurant napkin. It read: ‘Coupon — Help whenever you need it. — Fan #6, Yiji An’. The coupon was valid for four months, the length of my stay in the US.
The door still hadn’t opened. The Robert Foundation hadn’t selected any options for my delivery. I briefly envisioned a scene in which a crude voice came streaming out of the speakers to say, ‘We didn’t order anything!’ Jun pretended to tap on the door with the end of his umbrella.
All I could see over the thick iron gate was a straight path. I didn’t see any of the Joshua trees that were so common around here, nor any signs of life. I felt like a blundering tourist who’d shown up at a movie set after filming was over, right before it was about to be disassembled. If not for the nameplate on the gate, I wouldn’t have known this was the Robert Foundation. Unless they were all asleep, how could they not have heard three separate doorbell rings? The delivery was complete, and we were ready to leave, but we couldn’t start the engine.
I rang the doorbell once more, and finally the gate opened. Jun got back into the car, and I did too. We drove for a while. After we passed through another iron gate (thankfully, this one opened automatically), I began to detect signs of life. To our left was a large swimming pool. The walls of the pool were a bright sky blue, full of water, flamingo floaties bobbing, sunbeds all around, towels rolled up beside them like kimbap. The scene relieved me. Five hundred metres past the swimming pool, a building emerged like an enormous roll of toilet paper. The Robert Museum of Art! I’d seen it on the Foundation’s website.
Jun pulled over in an area that said ‘Guest Parking’. He completed the delivery safely, leaving with excessive faith in the power of the coupon I’d given him. Now separated from him, I walked alone towards the museum through a long covered walkway. The late afternoon light hit the ground at an angle, so half of the walkway was illuminated and the other half was cold and dark grey. As I followed it, I saw an array of attractions to my left. I passed a fountain gushing with water, a sculpture of a rabbit with two erect ears, and even a pond with stepping stones. I think I walked for ten minutes and still hadn’t reached the end of it. It wasn’t leading to the building I’d seen in the guidebook, but I didn’t know if it would make sense to leave it, because there were Robert Foundation notices posted along the path.
It was surprising that I hadn’t run into anyone yet. They had to know I was here, considering that the gate had opened for us, so why had no one come to greet me? The nerves and exhaustion that had been buried for a while slowly awakened, threatening to devour the sense of calm I’d finally reached. And then, at the end of the corridor, something disturbed the light. I heard a low whistle, then a sound like horse hooves fast approaching. As I turned my head towards the sound, I saw a black shadow running towards me at full speed. It came at me like a bullet. I had no time to assess the situation. I froze.
An umbrella opened in front of me like a shield. If it hadn’t unfolded in front of me, the dog would have hit me, and I would have fallen. Luckily, the umbrella protected me. An umbrella big enough to cover two people. The familiar smell of sweat hit me.
4.
The day I arrived, the heat had been merciless, extorting energy from every pedestrian, car, small tree — everything under the sun. The Robert Foundation was in the middle of it all. A vacant figure, yawning slowly.
Maybe no one had heard me ring the doorbell because it was the hottest day of the year? With that level of heat and fires, there was no way I could stay sane. In fact, if I weren’t a little bit crazy, I wouldn’t have made it to where I was. So even if the Robert Foundation’s staff were slow, defying norms and common sense, I felt like I’d made an implicit commitment to understanding their actions as human nature. Despite holding myself to this, only a few hours after arrival, I found myself questioning whether it was the right choice.
The black umbrella had only been unfurled once that first day, to protect me, but it kept opening in my dreams at night. In the hazy world of dreams, Jun appeared from behind me, shielding me with the umbrella. The dog bounced off it.
‘Oh, you’re a guard dog, not a genius dog,’ Jun said.
In my dream, I stood at the beginning of the corridor and the dog rushed towards me as the umbrella opened, then I turned the corner and stood at the beginning of another straight path, and the dog ran towards me as the umbrella opened, then I turned another corner … then an unfamiliar image came into view. High ceiling, crown moulding, walls with vertical mint-coloured stripes, and a black umbrella resting modestly beneath me.
It was now morning.
Thanks to that umbrella, now rolled up and leaning against the wall, I had survived the previous day’s attack. A few minutes before the incident, Jun and I had said our goodbyes and headed in opposite directions. After parting, Jun had realised that my umbrella was still in his hand, so he ran after me and discovered the dog. If Jun hadn’t run up and unfurled the umbrella, the dog would have kept ferociously charging at me. The speed at which the umbrella unfolded was also the speed of my dream last night. The smell of Jun’s sweat, the sound of my heart pounding … clearest was the image of the dog changing direction just as the umbrella opened. The dog suddenly stopped and disappeared in the opposite direction.
Two employees were chasing after the dog, but had no control over him. After he ran off, one of them went to look for him and the other asked if I was okay, but she didn’t look okay herself. Her face was so white, it looked like her soul had left her body. Her name was Sam — the Sam I’d spoken with on the phone.
Sam was cold, acting as though I was an uninvited guest, an intruder. But I’d told her that I would be arriving today, so they should have been expecting me. Regardless, Sam seemed to be at a loss, as if I were some unforeseen variable she had come up against. Who on earth was to blame? I was just one person, but everyone at the Foundation seemed to be at a loss as to how to deal with me.
Sam told me she’d been worried because the Foundation couldn’t get through to me all day, but she said it in a cool tone of voice that didn’t hide the embarrassment layered underneath. She apologised an hour later, but she couldn’t erase what had already been said. She treated me as though I had dug a trap to ensnare her, asking why I hadn’t waited for their driver to pick me up, if I wanted to get her in trouble. My fear of the dog gave way to disappointment and fatigue, but then Sam began to cry. She wept like a child overwhelmed by confusion. It was much better than a formal apology. I realised that Sam was very unstable and had a thin skin, which made it easier to deal with her. Feeling some compassion for her helped reduce my frustration a little bit.
It was Sam who walked me to my room on the first night. After a good cry, she regained her senses and told me that the person responsible for collecting me had not arrived yet. She told me that this person had gone to Los Angeles to pick me up. We’d missed each other, in the end. However, she’d got through to them and said that we’d be able to meet tomorrow.
A short distance from the museum sat a long, low building about the length of six subway cars. Inside, down a hallway and past a small living room and study, was my room. The walls of the hallway were completely covered with photos. They were all of Robert the dog alongside different people. There was also a bunch of alphabet blocks, arranged to form the words: I AM INDEX. Running alongside the wall, over a metre off the ground, was a fifty-centimetre-wide ledge. It was clearly for Robert. It had no railing and was covered with an antique patterned carpet, and curved down to the ground wherever it met a doorway. Papillons are small dogs, so Robert’s eyes were inevitably below my knees, but using this walkway, his gaze was level with, or even above, mine.
I thought that my room would be ready by now, but it wasn’t. I was puzzled to see several staff members come in and make the bed. I asked Sam if artists always stayed in this room, mainly to confirm that I was, in fact, one of the residency’s artists and not an unwanted guest. ‘You have to use this room,’ Sam replied. She thought I was asking to stay elsewhere.
The room was quite spacious. There were windows on two sides, and a print of Canyon Proposal on the wall. I’d never seen it so big. The size was overwhelming. The moonlight, the Grand Canyon’s heavy silhouette, the lovers on the cliff. If you were familiar with the wide version of the photo, Robert in the Canyon, you couldn’t help but think about the photographer just outside the frame. Reflected in the side mirror of the car — hidden in this version — was Robert’s gaze. It almost felt like someone was outside staring at me, watching me as I entered the room. Next to Canyon Proposal was a black acrylic panel, the same size as the print, and if you looked closely, you could see that the name ‘Robert’ was embossed on the plastic in a subtly different colour, like a constellation of stars. I could have slid the panel to the left to cover Canyon Proposal, but I kept it as it was. I was lucky to lie in bed and look up at two lovers under the moonlight.
The room had everything I needed. There were two windows, four adjustable lights, four different types of chairs, and four pillows on a king-sized bed. The closet contained additional pillows of varied firmness and filling type, labelled 1 to 5. A note said that I could request more pillows if I wanted. There was nothing ordinary about the room: the fancy closet, a real chest of drawers, even the notepad and pen laid out on the desk. Everything felt deliberately placed. It felt like I had to stay in place, too.
When I set my cross-body bag on the table, Sam picked it up and said, ‘I’ll put that on the bag hanger.’ I looked around, wondering where I was supposed to put my other things.
Pointing to a hook on the wall, I asked, ‘Is this where I put my hat?’
Sam replied, ‘Yes, that’s why it’s there. The hook is there for you to hang your hat.’ Her answer made me feel a little embarrassed.
‘We clean your bedroom every day,’ Sam explained. ‘We do your laundry every day, too. If you don’t want us to do that, put a check here. These are the pyjamas we provide for guests at the Robert Foundation. You have three sets, so don’t worry about getting them dirty.’
The pyjama set consisted of a button-down shirt and pants with a drawstring. The thick cotton fabric looked sturdy. The collar appeared to have been ironed flat, but later I realised it was sewn to the body of the shirt. Even the collar and seams of my pyjamas were required to stay in order.
Everything had its place, but I wasn’t clear about my own. I felt as if the room was trying to spit me out. There were trivial (but really not so trivial) signs of indifference everywhere. Like the desk calendar. Months had passed since November 4 — the last date circled. I flipped forward several pages until this month was showing. If you invited someone to your residency program and set up a desk calendar like this, weren’t you supposed to make sure that the right date was showing? Compared to the level of detail they’d invested in my pillow options, this was so apathetic, it almost seemed rude.
I was told that my luggage had to be checked by security outside the building. The process took more than three hours. How was I supposed to believe that security here took longer than in the Los Angeles airport when the only bag they were looking through was mine? Sam explained that there had been a recent bombing in this area, but I was doubtful. It was only after I had a dinner of Mexican food, showered, and changed into the pyjamas provided for me that the bag returned, looking like a fallen soldier. It wasn’t just the bag — my reflection in the room’s beautiful mirror looked worn-out, too. Compared to when I had left the airport a few days earlier, I’d aged.
By the next morning, things were running more smoothly, which made me think that I’d just had a brief nightmare, that whatever was haunting me the previous night had passed by. The biggest difference was in Sam. When she rang the doorbell to my room and I opened it, she greeted me with ‘Good morning!’ in a voice a whole octave higher than the day before. Her facial expression was similarly cheery.
‘Breakfast is until ten o’clock,’ Sam said. ‘Come down to the cafeteria whenever you want.’
She then placed a shiny silver tray on the table. Of course, she didn’t forget to add, ‘This is where the silver tray goes!’ but because her voice was so much brighter than the previous day, it sounded like she was announcing the rules of a fun game. On the tray was an envelope with a red seal and a placard that read ‘Today’s Weather’, folded up like a little tent.
‘Is your friend from yesterday okay?’ Sam asked.
She even felt relaxed enough to ask how Jun was doing. There was something reassuring about her confidence today. The person responsible for me was finally back, she said. I asked for the wi-fi password. Sam flipped to the last page of the guest manual on the desk and showed me the longest password I’d ever seen in my life. The meaningless combination of letters and numbers was so long that I wanted to give up typing. I had to make sure each letter and number was in the right place. After failing twice, I finally managed to connect to the wi-fi. As soon as I did, a message Jun had sent me the night before flew in as if it had been waiting.
‘It’s too long to use as earphones.’
A photo followed, depicting a long, thin piece of dental floss coming out of a round white case. At first, I wasn’t sure what he meant, but later understood when I found an identical-looking earphone case inside my toiletry bag where I was supposed to have floss. I’d accidentally given Jun my floss rather than my earphone case. It was just like the mix-up between An Young and An Yiji. I’d never considered it before, but wireless earphone cases and plastic floss dispensers bore a surprising resemblance to one another in colour, shape, and even texture. An umbrella was not the only thing Jun and I had exchanged as we parted ways. Jun video-called me. He jokingly placed the ends of a stretched-out piece of floss in each ear as he hummed a line from ‘A Day in the Life’. It seemed that the real reason for his call was to check that I was okay.
‘You’re still alive?’ he asked.
‘For now!’
Jun said that he hadn’t made it to Las Vegas yet, that his fatigue and all the dry lightning strikes had forced him to stop at a small hotel adjacent to the freeway. I was impressed by the antique decorations visible behind him.
The envelope on the silver tray was sealed with red wax that made a crackling sound when I opened it. There was a thick sheet of paper decorated with gold leaf inside, and on it an extensive letter was typed in tiny letters. Font size seven? Six? That’s how small the letters were.
