Beauty Looks Down on Me Read online

  “I worked in the oldest and most forlorn building in that district. Water would drip down on rainy days from the low cement ceiling with exposed the pipes. It felt like cold water was leaking from my entire body all day long while I sat in the tiny booth of that miserable parking lot, where all I had for company were cars lying in neat lines, like corpses. It was on one of those days that a black car rolled in, glimmering from the rain. Catching a glimpse of me out of the corner of his eye, the driver steered toward me instead of proceeding down the ramp to park. I made an effort to put on a polite smile, but that only seemed to upset the man further. ‘That’s odd,’ the man said brusquely, the whites of his wide eyes popping out. ‘Didn’t I see you at a flower shop outside the city just now? You were getting soaked in the rain without an umbrella, weren’t you? I definitely saw you bringing the flower pots back inside—so how can it be that you’re sitting here?’

  “Something similar happened not long after that. A coworker who had come to relieve me was all worked up. ‘She was sure it was you! The woman who works the booth on the first floor just came from the hospital, and she said she definitely saw you. She said she was surprised to see you being wheeled into the operating room. You know how you stick out. It would be hard to mistake you for someone else.’ ‘Where could I possibly go while I’m on my shift? Besides, I’ve never been sick enough to be hospitalized.’ When I told her this, my coworker laughed, ‘What are you saying, there’s more than one of you?’ She added, ‘Is it because all dwarves look the same?’ I got fired about a month later. Quite a few people must have told the manager that the sight of a dwarf sitting completely still in a booth is just too disturbing.

  “That’s when I found myself daydreaming again. Let me explain.

  “There are several me’s spread out all over the world, living in different places and at different times. They’re all very different. There’s a me who gets angry easily, a me who is very shy, a me who is a very good with words, a me who is foolish. There’s a me who is beautiful and a me who is hideous. They all exist separately, but if at one point they all think the same thought, we suddenly become apparent to other people. If all the me’s feel lonely, for example, then I start hearing about them from people: ‘I saw a vulgar you cursing up a storm in the market yesterday trying to haggle over the price.’ ‘I saw an elegant you at the opera, completely absorbed in the performance, crying up in the balcony.’ ‘I saw an old you in a greenhouse picking a cucumber, hunched over at the waist.’ ‘I saw a serene you wearing a wide-brimmed hat, reading a book on a park bench.’ ‘I saw a crazy you covered in blood and chasing after your man after he gave you a beating.’

  “But people forget these incidents soon enough. Lots of people in this world look alike, and people believe that it’s absolutely impossible for one person to appear in several places at once.”

  “So are you saying this isn’t just you daydreaming?”

  “Yes, everything I’ve just told you is part of my daydream. If you let me use many rooms, I think I’ll be able to settle each of my many selves in a room of her own and fall asleep feeling very light.”

  “This is absurd.”

  “Because it’s a daydream. Since that incident, I’ve wondered from time to time if the childhood game of dividing yourself up into many selves ever stops.”

  After finishing her long story, the woman lowered her eyes and raised the mug of beer slowly to her lips.

  She’d gone to the trouble of applying makeup, as if to prove she was an adult, but it made her face look very unnatural, as though someone had painted heavy makeup on a doll. Her reddened cheeks would have hid her deep-set eyes were it not for their unusual sparkle. She seemed stronger than she looked, judging by how easily she lifted the mug full of beer between her first finger and thumb, so short and chubby, like a child’s.

  “People often think dwarves have a special talent. Because of the defect in our physique, they think we exist in a realm beyond the rules of the physical world. But we just haven’t grown, that’s all. Nobody else was born with my condition in our family, except for my first cousin.”

  The woman said that W was her hometown, but even before she’d turned twenty years old she’d begun to wander from place to place. She’d already helped out at an inn run by a relative in a university district in Seoul, and she’d enrolled in quite a few training programs, trying to learn one skill or another. She’d held a variety of part-time jobs, all of which entailed answering phones or working the register.

  “There was nothing I was particularly good at. It wouldn’t take long for me to get fired.”

  “I had one employer but they fired me six months later.”

  She gently pressed the back of my hand with her palm, as if in consolation; it was a friendliness offered beyond what I’d expected. She went on.

  “If there’s anything I am good at . . . It’s not climbing ropes or tricks like that. It’s strange, but when I talk to someone for a long time, it seems like I start reading the other person’s mind a little. When you came to W, was it to meet somebody?”

  I told her no.

  “I guess you could say I was trying to get out of a rut. Like when you go on a trip. Have you by any chance heard of the temple you get to by boat? It’s near this city. I was thinking of going there tomorrow.”

  When I asked her if she’d come along, she nodded. I felt an odd sense of relief and then began to tell stories from a long time ago as they came to me.

  “I went there one winter. It was fifteen years ago. There were seven of us, and we were all cheerful from the moment we set off for the trip. The winds over the river were fierce but we were drinking on the boat, so everyone was in a good mood.”

  This was around the time that the housemother was running the small inn down the alley. At the start of winter vacation, the boarders, having gone their separate ways, had decided to pay her a visit. All seven boarders showed up and sat together in the inn’s living room. It was dark, with only a single window no bigger than the palm of your hand in the hallway, and the air was musty with a heavy, indistinct odor. Everyone else had found rooms in other boarding houses except for the business student with only one outfit per season, who was sharing a room with J there at the housemother’s inn. He was telling a story that day about a job interview he’d had. He’d accidentally burned a hole in the sleeve while ironing his one and only suit jacket, and ended up going to the interview with his jacket sleeves rolled up. The interviewers had asked him if he often sweated excessively, and kindly encouraged him to relax. In the end it turned out that among the six of them who were about to graduate later that year, he was the only one who had secured a job. When one of them said he always thought that I’d be the first one hired, everyone except for me, for some reason, burst out laughing. Another guy added that the two of us had gone to the same school the same year and majored in the same subject, and wasn’t my GPA higher than his? The laughter wouldn’t stop even when the housemother entered the room, carrying a serving tray with both hands. I said the business student could now throw out his ratty clothes and get a new outfit with the arrival of every new season, but my words were completely drowned out by their laughter.

  There wasn’t any fruit or tea on the housemother’s serving tray but an assortment of items like wrist watches, student IDs, and rings. I saw buttons, hairpins, even a necklace that someone must have taken off and then forgotten about. “See if anything catches your eye.” She added that they were nothing fancy, just items that guests hadn’t remembered to pick up after leaving them in deposit for a night’s stay at the inn, sounding as if she were apologizing for insufficient hospitality on her part. One of the boarders made a joke by saying, “Hey, maybe I know one of these guys,” as he fished through the different ID cards on the tray before yelling out, “Hey K! This guy has your name! Your year of birth is the same too. Hey, maybe you’re one of those deadbeats who ran off without paying!” The housemother put an end to the matter by saying she’d ne
ver have given anyone a room with just an ID card as collateral. One of them jokingly suggested that when they went to take the boat to the temple, they should each carry one of these strangers’ IDs with them, just for fun. They were all laughing, each trying to pick out the stranger’s ID with the name and age closest to his own. I was the only one who hadn’t known in advance about this trip. That’s when I began to wonder, how long have things been this way? How long had things been going on right under my nose, without my noticing? And since when had I been excluded from their circle?

  “So you got on the boat with those IDs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted to throw it from the boat. I wanted to pretend I was throwing myself into the river. I think I was getting a little tired of myself.”

  “But it was someone else’s ID.”

  “You’re right. But when I saw the ID drifting away in the water, my body felt strangely lighter.”

  The woman looked at the wall behind me, her face void of expression.

  “And right after that, I think, I jumped into the river.”

  The sparkle in her eyes, as she held my gaze, rippled gently under the lights, like water in a pool.

  “Everyone on the boat must have thought I jumped in after the ID because I accidentally dropped it in the water. Everyone else was sitting along the opposite side of the boat looking down-river and only the business student, wearing his black coat over his jacket, to my right. I looked back at him because he called my name. The business student put on that knowing smile of his. That very moment, I leapt into the water. As if on cue.”

  “Why don’t we order some more beer?”

  Her tone of voice was tender, as if trying to console a child. I was covered in cold sweat for some reason. I spoke in a hurried voice, as if I were running away from something.

  “Okay. Now why don’t you tell me more about yourself. You know . . . who did you used to have a crush on, things like that.”

  A smile lit up her face.

  “There was this guy who used to call me Gelsomina. He told me that she was a character in a movie. The dwarf wife of a gypsy strongman. This guy played the guitar for a living. He’d show up carrying his bulky guitar case at a restaurant where I used to work part-time. He’d come in late at night and order coffee, telling me that anytime a tired-looking man carrying an instrument came by for coffee late at night I should make the coffee especially strong and hot, because the man was probably a poor, talentless wage slave who was about to be fired any day now. It would be even better if I gave him my prettiest and purest smile, since there was no greater consolation in this world than the presence of a kind, warm-hearted woman. I’d sit across from him and tell him stories, the way I’m telling you now. I’d let him know that the reason I never grew very tall was because I’d been divvied up into multiple selves. I’d tell him I wouldn’t be lonely because there were so many of me in this world—that loneliness might mean longing for one of my other selves. I always paid for the man’s coffee. It’s strange. I have a soft spot for people who need something from me. I don’t know whether he listened to my stories, but, at the end, he’d always say the same thing: ‘You really look like sad little Gelsomina. That makes me Zampano, the violent man who lashes out at you with an iron chain. I was beating you last night in my dreams. I’m sorry.’ He would bury his face in my shoulder and mutter, while sobbing to himself, ‘I’m sorry. I’m a useless bastard.’ After awhile, the guitar player didn’t come in for coffee anymore. Maybe he did finally get fired.”

  “I don’t know, people tend to get sadistic toward those who are submissive. If someone treats you kindly, sometimes you want to stomp all over them. Like when you know full well what the other person wants to hear, but it’s the last thing you want to give in and say.”

  Her eyes opened wide, as if she had no idea what I was talking about. I emptied my beer mug in one gulp. I was swaying back and forth; the scene before my eyes was losing focus.

  “Did you ever hear him play the guitar?”

  “Yes, after closing time. He told me that this song was about how all human beings are strangers to each other.”

  People are strange when you’re a stranger.

  Faces look ugly when you’re alone.

  Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted.

  Streets are uneven when you’re down.

  No one remembers your name.

  When you’re strange. When you’re strange.

  “One of my cousins loved that song, so I know it well.”

  “The cousin who’s short like you?”

  “He was doing business in the city, but then he quit and returned to his hometown. Now he’s running a roadside restaurant near a gas station.”

  It occurred to me that it must be the restaurant at the foot of the steep slope leading up to J’s inn.

  “The truth is, he was in prison. He was sent away several times, after getting expelled from middle school. He lived in a university district around that time and he said he learned the song from some college student.”

  “Why did he get expelled?”

  “He was sniffing industrial glue with his friends in a deserted lot at the end of an alley and caused a fire somehow. The police were able to track down witnesses, so the school found out about it. He could no longer stay in town.”

  “Do you by any chance know a tall man who always goes around in a black coat?”

  She shook her head, her eyes wide.

  I let out a long yawn. I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t keep my eyes open much longer.

  “The two of us used to live in the same house a long time ago. I ran into him at a teahouse, and he mailed me some keys. That’s how I ended up going out to buy a map of W. While I was looking for a crosswalk, I remembered something my girlfriend always used to tell me; that I’d staked my whole life on the belief that I’m the only one who’s right, that I didn’t have a clue about the world.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  My eyes were growing so heavy, I could barely answer her.

  5

  I COULDN’T SLEEP well, with the windows rattling all night. The wind sounded like the lashing of a whip, mixed with the sounds of crying, and all of the sudden, I thought I could hear footsteps. That’s probably why I had a dream of being dragged away and beaten by a gang. After waking from the nightmare, I stayed still for a long time and looked up at the ceiling, at first confused about where I was. My whole body was soaked in sweat. It wasn’t the strangeness of the position of my body, the smells that surrounded it, the texture of the bedding, the stuffy air, or the stillness that felt like being underwater. I felt powerless with despair. It demanded that I surrender to the fatigue and made me so immobile I couldn’t even lift a finger.

  I was thirty-five years old when I got my first job. I was hired as the assistant to the head of a law firm. All that I had left at the end of my short career was a used car I couldn’t pay to give away and the verdict of the general public that I couldn’t cut it in the modern work environment. When S learned that I’d left the firm, she teared up. “How can you be so self-centered,” she said, piling on one more judgment against me. Until then, I’d never thought deeply about how I was perceived by others. I’d always treated the question “Who am I?” as nothing more than a prompt on a personality test, amusing at best, and dismissed it as an idle thought fit for adolescents. I was pained by the sight of S’s tears, but not because I felt like I’d disappointed her. It was my realization that who I am matters less than how I’m perceived—that there was no way of getting beyond that characterization once people made up their minds. It was around then that my nightmares became more frequent.

  The woman was still sleeping. I could hear her faint, regular breaths, so in sync with my own heartbeat that it sounded as though the two might harmonize to form a chord. I couldn’t remember exactly how I’d gotten back to J’s inn the night
before. I remembered the woman going up and down the stairs in a flurry of activity, getting the old inn back in operation. She turned on the heating system, tested the toilets, checked for hot water, hunted down a flashlight and some other tools, and fetched fresh supplies like towels and toilet paper. Like some kind of an errand fairy who had developed the ability to divide herself into many selves, she went back and forth, up and down, completing several tasks at once. She had the remarkable ability to search out a role for herself, regardless of situation, and win recognition for being useful. At the same time she had a sense of slightness about her, making it easy for people to take her for granted. Even if her multiple selves came together, she’d still not achieve full height.

  It occurred to me that I might have seen her splitting into many different selves the night before while I was drunk. I recalled seeing two dwarves sitting across from me at one point. I thought this was what one of them had said: “It’s been a long time. I didn’t mean anything by it. When I heard that he’d run into K by coincidence, I just really wanted to meet up with him. I was curious about how he was doing.”

  I waited for dawn to break and went out to the backyard where I saw my car parked all by itself, splattered with dirt leaves, as if it had been rolling around in mud. I couldn’t see very clearly—the sky, the woods, and the air itself were all tinged by reddish fog. Yellow dust from China had descended upon us.