The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [16]
No, she says. I’m only the observer. It’s not my experience.
This your problem. You only look with your eyes.
I don’t understand.
Oklahoma, he says loudly, as if it were a charm for making things disappear. Maybe you go back there. Maybe you already there, no need to go.
She is silent for so long he wonders if the charm has worked.
I meant well, she says. I came to apologize. You don’t have to be cruel.
Cruel? What means cruel? Spy on old man, make notes, is this cruel?
All right, she says. If that’s the way you want it. She turns toward the door; he feels a breath of scented air across his face. I’m leaving for Beijing in a month, she says. I didn’t want it to end this way. I wanted you to be proud.
He turns away from the sound of her voice and grips the edge of the sink. Proud of what, he wants to ask her. Of these useless bits of meat?
Is that all you have to say? she asks. Is it over?
Over? he thinks. How can it be over?
Yes, he says. It is. Yes. Now please go.
It is true spring, the last days before the air grows thick and oppressive; back in his room, he leans his face out the window and takes long breaths. Old head, you should take walks, he thinks. Like you used to. Take a taxi and go to the Services for the Blind again. He feels absurdly happy, light-headed; as if there was a towel around my mouth, he thinks, and I was breathing through it but didn’t know. And now it’s gone.
The book lies open on the bed next to him. Every once in a while he turns a page and passes his hand over a line, careful never to read two in sequence. Typical adjustment procedure, Taylor (1987) indicates that, Evidence of earlier trauma, Manifestedin such behaviors as. It has been years since he has read Braille, but it comes back to him easily. Words, only words, he thinks, they come and go so swiftly. What is the use of them, after all? Subsequent visits indicated an increased level of. He laughs, letting his head fall back to the pillow. As if it means something, he thinks. As if I am in there somewhere, waiting to get out.
Now that she’s gone, what will you do? he wonders. Will you go on dreaming?
No. I won’t walk through that door again.
Lao Jiang’s granddaughter will talk to me, he decides. Soon she will become bored with dried salamanders. She needs some stories in her life. Like this one: how a book can become a bird. He reaches for the report, closes it, turns and flings it out the window; pages snap and flutter as it falls. Zhu ni zhunyi gaofei, he thinks. Take life. Now it is time to fly.
For You
January, the depths of winter: nights longer than the days.
Rising at four, the students bow to the Buddha one hundred and eight times, and sit meditation for an hour before breakfast, heads rolling into sleep and jerking awake. At the end of the working period the sun rises, a clear, distant light over Su Dok Mountain; they put aside brooms and wheelbarrows and return to the meditation hall. When it sets, at four in the afternoon, it seems only a few hours have passed. An apprentice monk climbs the drum tower and beats a steady rhythm as he falls into shadow.
Darkness. Seoul appears in the distance, a wedge of glittering lights where two ridges meet.
Sitting on the temple steps, hunched in the parka he wears over his robe, Lewis closes his eyes and repeats to himself, my name is Lewis Morgan. My address is 354 Chater Gardens, Central, Hong Kong. My wife’s name is Melinda. He tries to see her face again, the way it appears sometimes in his dreams, and usually he can’t.
On Monday evenings he accompanies Hae Wol Sunim down the mountain to the local outdoor market. While the monk buys the main provisions of the temple—barrels of kimchi, hundred-pound sacks of rice—Lewis goes to the Super Shop for the extras the international students need. Vitamin supplements. Vegetable oil. Peanut butter. Milk powder. Nescafé. When the old woman at the register sees him, bundled in his gray robe and