Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing AmericaSills, Steven David Justin
General
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America
Sills, Steven David Justin
Fiction
He came upon a crowd of people clustered around an elderly man. The man was a
governmental employee paid as a teacher of Korean traditional dance. He was
promoting the program by a slow and illustrious dance. He wore the traditional
hanbok of the paji and chogori. Sang Huin was inveigled by the dance but the
sun god was putting him to sleep and 15 minutes into the performance he was on
a park bench fast asleep. When he awoke, the crowd that had gathered around the
dancer and the dancer himself were no longer there. Just as Sang Huin, the boy,
had skipped around the kindergarten teacher's desk, sat down to drink his
chocolate milk with his Graham crackers, and found himself a grown man
listening to a university professor's lecture on biology, so the sunlight of
this day's slight 2:00 descent vaporized the people he had been witnessing no
differently than it had vaporized the dinosaurs myriad afternoons of myriad
centuries ago or the body of his sister that had decomposed in a park. It had
all gone-gone but where it had gone he couldn't say.
Like a 5 year old, he rubbed his eyes to wake up. Following an instinctive
response that was a yearning overwhelming his common sense, he felt the impulse
to stretch forth toward Seoul: toward adventure in the masses and bathing the
rational mind in sensual massage. He wanted meretricious sex. Young men
encroached on his mind in droves. Maybe this obsession, if it were such, was
from an inability to communicate in any other way. He did not mind--well, he
did, but what could he do, he argued, when the irrationality of pleasure
seeking sedated one as he journeyed around alone on the rugged terrain of the
Earth. He did not believe in much platonic constraint. When his hormones were
boiling to overflow he "hauled [his] ass" to Seoul. There, a theatre existed
for meeting and touching men near Chongno Samga Road and he had been told that
there was a gay Turkish bath in the area of Myong Dong. Too much creative
energy would be depleted if he were to lasso the wild bore for long. Too much
craziness would go into creating sense in insensible passions. Wasn't marriage
created to give sense to such passions? Hadn't this lifetime contract that his
parents signed in their marital vows caught two of life's myriad souls in the
idea that they could defy a changing universe and be as non-changeable as
rocks? Hadn't their confinement of each other in this materialistic American
dream become the incommunicable cries of two strangers tied back to back by
weeds from their many parcels of land after all substantial conversation had
been exhausted? Yet, his liaisons were not exactly more viable versions of
relationships. He did not want to talk to these men nor, as he knew, would they
to him. Ideally he did; but it was just a fleeting expression or whim. Reality
sang another tune. There was this day's ticket to a symphony in Seoul that
Kwang Sook had given to him because she couldn't go. He had taken it. He loved
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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