one hundred twenty-eight days before
Looking for BeijingCHUNCHEON WAS PLENTY HOT, certainly, and humid, too. Hot enough that your clothes stuck to you like Scotch tape, and sweat dripped like tears from your forehead into your eyes. But it was only hot outside, and generally I only went outside to walk from one air-condition location to another. This did not prepare me for the unique sort of heat that one entounters fifteen miles north of Wonju, South Korea, at Han River Preparatory School. My parents' SUV was parked parked in the grass just a few feet outside my dorm room, Room 43. But each time I took those few steps to and from to unload what now seemed far too much stuff, the sun burned through my clothes and into my skin with a vicious ferocity that made me genuinely fear hellfire.
Bewteen mom and dad and me, it only took a few minutes to unload the car but my unair-conditioned dorm room, alothough blessedly out of the sunshine, was only modestly cooler. The room surprised me,. I pictured a plushed carpet, wood paneled walls, Victorian furniture. Aside from one luxury--a private bathroom--I got a box. With cinder-block walls coated thick with layers of white paint and a green-and-white-checkered linoleum floor, the place looked more like a hospital than the dorm room of my fantasies. A bunk bed of unfinished wood with vinyl mattresses was pushed against the room's back window. The desks and dressers and bookshelves were all attached to the walls in order to prevent creative floor planning. And no air-conditioning.
I sat on the lower bunk while Mom opened the trunk, grabbed a stack of the biographies my dad had agreed to part with, and placed them on the bookshelves.
"I can unpack, Mom," I said. My dad stood. He was ready to go.
"Let me at least make your bed," Mom said.
"No, really. I can do it. It's okay." Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.
"God, we'll miss you," Mom said suddenly, stepping through the minefield of suitcases to get to the bed. I stood and hugged her.
My dad walked over, too, and we formed a sort of huddle. It was too hot, and we were too sweaty, for the hug to last terribly long. I knew I ought to cry, but I'd lived with my parents for sixteen years, and a trial separation seemed overdue.
"Don't worry." I smiled. "I's a-gonna learn how t'talk right Southern." Mom laughed.
"Don't do anything stupid," my dad said.
"Okay."
"No drugs. No drinking. No cigarettes." As an alumnus of Han River, he had done the things I had only heard about: the secret parties, streaking through hay fields (he always whined about how it was all boys back then), drugs, drinking, and cigarettes. It had taken him a while to kick smoking, but his badass days were now well behind him.
"I love you," they both blurted out simultaneously. It needed to be said, but the words made the whole thing horribly uncomfortable, like watching your grandparents kiss.
"I love you, too. I'll call every Sunday." Our rooms had no phone lines, but my parents had requested I be placed in a room near one of Han River's five pay phones.
They hugged me again—Mom, then Dad—and it was over. Out the back window, I watched them drive the winding road off campus. I should have felt a gooey, sentimental sadness, perhaps. But mostly I just wanted to cool off, so I grabbed one of the desk chairs and sat down outside my door in the shade of the overhanging eaves, waiting for a breeze that never arrived. The air outside sat as still and oppressive as the air inside. I stared out
over my new digs: Six one-story buildings, each with sixteen dorm rooms, were arranged in a hexagram around a large circle of grass. It looked like an oversize old motel. Everywhere, boys and girls hugged and smiled and walked together. I vaguely hoped that someone would come up and talk to me. I imagined the conversation:
"Hey. Is this your first year?"
"Yeah. Yeah. I'm from Florida."
"That's cool. So you're used to the heat."
"I wouldn't be used to this heat if I were from Hades," I'd joke. I'd make a good first impression. Oh, he's funny. That guy Minseok is a riot.
That didn't happen, of course. Things never happened like I imagined them.Bored, I went back inside, took off my shirt, lay down on the heat-soaked vinyl of the lower bunk mattress, and closed my eyes. I'd never been born again with the baptism and weeping and all that, but it couldn't feel much better than being born again as a guy with no known past. I thought of the people I'd read about—John F. Kennedy, James Joyce, Humphrey Bogart—who went to boarding school, and their adventures—Kennedy, for example, loved pranks. I thought of the Great Perhaps and the things that might happen and the people I might meet and who my roommate might be (I'd gotten a letter a few weeks before that gave me his name, Kim Jongin, but no other information). Whoever Kim Jongin was, I hoped to God he would bring an arsenal of high-powered fans, because I hadn't packed even one, and I could already feel my sweat pooling on the vinyl mattress, which disgusted me so much that I stopped thinking and got off my to find a towel to wipe up the sweat with. And then I thought, Well, before the adventure comes the unpacking.
I managed to tape a map of the world to the wall and get most of my clothes into drawers before I noticed that the hot, moist air made even the walls sweat, and I decided that now was not the time for manual labor. Now wasthe time for a magnificently cold shower.
The small bathroom contained a huge, full-length mirror behind the door, and so I could not escape the reflection of my self as I leaned in to turn on the shower faucet. My skinniness always surprised me: My thin arms didn't seem to get much bigger as they moved from wrist to shoulder, my chest lacked any hint of either fat or muscle, and I felt embarrassed and wondered if something could be done about the mirror. I pulled open
the plain white shower curtain and ducked into the stall.
Unfortunately, the shower seemed to have been designed for someone approximately three feet, seven inches tall, so the cold water hit my lower rib cage—with all the force of a dripping faucet. To wet my sweat-soaked face, I had to spread my legs and squat significantly. Surely, John F. Kennedy (who was six feet tall according to his biography, my height exactly) did not have to squat at his boarding school. No, this was a different beast entirely, and as the dribbling shower slowly soaked my body, I wondered whether I could find a Great Perhaps here at all or whether I had made a grand miscalculation.
When I opened the bathroom door after my shower, a towel wrapped around my waist, I saw a short, muscular guy with a shock of brown hair. He was hauling a gigantic army-green duffel bag through the door of my room. He stood five feet and nothing, but was well-built, like a scale model of Adonis, and with him arrived the stink of stale cigarette smoke. Great, I thought. I'm meeting my roommate . He heaved the duffel into the room, closed the door, and walked over to me.
"I'm Kim Jongin," he announced in a deep voice, the voice of a radio deejay. Before I could respond, he added, "I'd shake your hand, but I think you should hold on damn tight to that towel till you can get some clothes on."
I laughed and nodded my head at him (that's cool, right? the nod?) and said, "I'm Kim Minseok. Nice to meet you."
"Minseok, as in 'to go before I sleep'?" he asked me.
"Huh?"
"It's a Robert Lee poem. You've never read him?"
I shook my head no.
"Consider yourself lucky." He smiled.
I grabbed some clean underwear, a pair of blue Adidas soccer shorts, and a white T-shirt, mumbled that I'd be back in a second, and ducked back into the bathroom. So much for a good first impression.
"So where are your parents?" I asked from the bathroom.
"My parents? The father's in California right now. Maybe sitting in his La-Z-Boy. Maybe driving his truck. Either way, he's drinking. My mother is probably just now turning off campus."
"Oh," I said, dressed now, not sure how to respond to such personal information. I shouldn't have asked, I guess, if I didn't want to know.
Jongin grabbed some sheets and tossed them onto the top bunk. "I'm a top bunk man. Hope that doesn't bother you."
"Uh, no. Whatever is fine."
"I see you've decorated the place," he said, gesturing toward the world map. "I like it."
And then he started naming countries. He spoke in a monotone, as if he'd done it a thousand times before. Afghanistan. Albania. Algeria. American Samoa. Andorra.
And so on. He got through the A's before looking up and noticing my incredulous stare.
"I could do the rest, but it'd probably bore you. Something I learned over the summer. God, you can't imagine how boring Busan is in the summertime. Like watching soybeans grow. Where are you from, by the way?"
"Chuncheon," I said.
"Never been."
"That's pretty amazing, the countries thing," I said.
"Yeah, everybody's got a talent. I can memorize things. And you can...?"
"Um, I know a lot of people's last words." It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.
"Example?"
"I like Henrik Ibsen's. He was a playwright." I knew a lot about Ibsen, but I'd never read any of his plays. I didn't like reading plays. I liked reading biographies.
"Yeah, I know who he was," said Jongin.
"Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning/ and Ibsen looked at her and said, `On the contrary,' and then he died."
Jongin laughed. "That's morbid. But I like it."
He told me he was in his third year at Han River. He had started in ninth grade, the first year at the school, and was now a junior like me. A scholarship kid, he said. Got a full ride. He'd heard it was the best school in Seoul, so he wrote his application essay about how he wanted to go to a school where he could read long books. The problem, he said in the essay, was that his dad would always hit him with the books in his house, so Jongin kept his books short and paperback for his own safety. His parents got divorced his sophomore year. He liked "the Han," as he called it, but "You have to be careful here, with students and with teachers. And I do hate being careful." He smirked. I hated being careful, too—or wanted to, at least.
He told me this while ripping through his duffel bag, throwing clothes into drawers with reckless abandon. Jongin did not believe in having a sock drawer or a T-shirt drawer. He believed that all drawers were created equal and filled each with whatever fit. My mother would have died.
As soon as he finished "unpacking," Jongin hit me roughly on the shoulder, said, "I hope you're stronger than you look," and walked out the door, leaving it open behind him. He peeked his head back in a few seconds later and saw me standing still. "Well, come on, Minseok. We got to do."
We made our way to the TV room, which according to Jongin contained the only cable TV on campus. Over the summer, it served as a storage unit. Packed nearly to the ceiling with couches, fridges, and rolled-up carpets, the TV room undulated with kids trying to find and haul away their stuff. Jongin said hello to a few people but didn't introduce me. As he wandered through the couch-stocked maze, I stood near the room's entrance, trying my best not to block pairs of roommates as they maneuvered furniture through the narrow front door.
It took ten minutes for Jongin to find his stuff, and an hour more for us to make four trips back and forth across the dorm circle between the TV room and Room 43. By the end, I wanted to crawl into Jongin's minifridge and sleep for a thousand years, but Jongin seemed immune to both fatigue and heatstroke. I sat down on his couch.
"I found it lying on a curb in my neighborhood a couple years ago," he said of the couch as he worked on setting up my PlayStation 2 on top of his footlocker. "I know the leather's got some cracks, but come on. That's a damn nice couch." The leather had more than a few cracks—it was about 30 percent baby blue faux leather and 70 percent foam—but it felt damn good to me anyway.
"All right," he said. "We're about done." He walked over to his desk and pulled a roll of duct tape from a drawer. "We just need your trunk."
I got up, pulled the trunk out from under the bed, and Chip situated it between the couch and the PlayStation 2 and started tearing off thin strips of duct tape. He applied them to the trunk so that they spelled outcoffee table.
"There," he said. He sat down and put his feet up on the, uh, coffee table. "Done."
I sat down next to him, and he looked over at me and suddenly said, "Listen. I'm not going to be your entree to Han River social life."
"Uh, okay," I said, but I could hear the words catch in my throat. I'd just carried this guy's couch beneath a white-hot sun and now he didn't like me?
"Basically you've got two groups here," he explained, speaking with increasing urgency. "You've got the regular boarders, like me, and then you've got the Weekday Warriors; they board here, but they're all rich kids who live in Wonju and go home to their parents' air-conditioned mansions every weekend. Those are the cool kids. I don't like them, and they don't like me, and so if you came here thinking that you were hot at public school so you'll be hot here, you'd best not be seen with me. You did go to public school, didn't you?"
"Uh..." I said. Absentmindedly, I began picking at the cracks in the couch's leather, digging my fingers into the foamy whiteness.
"Right, you did, probably, because if you had gone to a private school your freakin' shorts would fit." He laughed.
I wore my shorts just below my hips, which I thought was cool. Finally I said, "Yeah, I went to public school. But I wasn't hot there, Jongin. I was regular ."
"Ha! That's good. And don't call me Jongin. Call me Kai."
I stifled a laugh. "Kai?"
"Yeah. Kai. And we'll call you...hmm. Xiumin."
"Huh?"
"Xiumin," the Colonel said. "Because you're skinny. It's called irony, Xiumin. Heard of it? Now, let's go get some cigarettes and start this year off right."
He walked out of the room, again just assuming I'd follow, and this time I did. Mercifully, the sun was descending toward the horizon. We walked five doors down to Room 48. A dry-erase board was taped to the door using duct tape. In blue marker, it read: Beijing has a single!
Kai explained to me that 1. this was Beijing's room, and that 2. he had a single room because the boy who was supposed to be his roommate got kicked out at the end of last year, and that 3. Beijing had cigarettes, although Kai neglected to ask whether 4. I smoked, which 5. I didn't.
He knocked once, loudly. Through the door, a voice screamed, "Oh my God come in you short little man because I have the best story."
We walked in. I turned to close the door behind me, and Kai shook his head and said, "After seven, you have to leave the door open if you're in a girl's room," but I barely heard him because the hottest boy in all of human history was standing before me in cutoff jeans and a peach tank top. And he was talking over Kai, talking loud and fast. Now, I didn't-- well wasn't sure-- if 1. I like boys or 2. I like girls. Because I have been interested in both ualities. But this Beijing was hot.
"So first day of summer, I'm in grand old Bin Station with this girl named Minah and we're at her house watching TV on the couch—and mind you, I'm already dating Sehun—actually I'm still dating him, miraculously enough, but Minah is a friend of mine from when I was a kid and so we're watching TV and literally chatting about the SATs or something, and Minah puts her hand on my chest and I think, Oh that's nice, we've been friends for so long and this is totally comfortable, and we're just chatting and then I'm in the middle of a sentence about analogies or something and like a hawk she reaches down and she honks my sausage. HONK. A much-too-firm, two-to three-second HONK. And the first thing I thought was Okay, how do I extricate this claw from my bulge before it leaves permanent marks? and the second thing I thought was God, I can't wait to tell Chanyeol and Kai."
Kai laughed. I stared, stunned partly by the force of the voice emanating from the tall (but God, curvy) boy and partly by the gigantic stacks of books that lined his walls. His library filled his bookshelves and then overflowed into waist-high stacks of books everywhere, piled haphazardly against the walls. If just one of them moved, I thought, the domino effect could engulf the three of us in an asphyxiating mass of literature.
"Who's the guy that's not laughing at my very funny story?" he asked.
"Oh, right. Beijing, this is Xiumin. Xiumin memorizes people's last words. Xiumin, this is Beijing. He got his yonkered over the summer." He walked over to me with his hand extended, then made a quick move downward at the last moment and pulled down my shorts.
"Those are the biggest shorts in the country of Korea!"
"I like them baggy," I said, embarrassed, and pulled them up. They had been cool back home in Chuncheon.
"So far in our relationship, Xiumin, I've seen your chicken legs entirely too often," Kai deadpanned. "So, Beijing. Sell us some cigarettes." And then somehow, Kai talked me into paying five dollars for a pack of Marlboro Lights I had no intention of ever smoking. He asked Beijing to join us, but he said, "I have to find Chanyeol and tell him about The Honk." He turned to me and asked, "Have you seen him?" I had no idea whether I'd seen Chanyeol, since I had no idea who he was. I just shook my head.
"All right. Meet ya at the lake in a few minutes, then." Kai nodded.
At the edge of the lake, just before the sandy (and, Kai told me, fake) beach, we sat down in an Adirondack swing. I made the obligatory joke: "Don't grab my bulge." Kai gave an obligatory laugh, then asked, "Want a smoke?" I had never smoked a cigarette, but when in Rome...
"Is it safe here?"
"Not really," he said, then lit a cigarette and handed it to me. I inhaled. Coughed. Wheezed. Gasped for breath. Coughed again. Considered vomiting. Grabbed the swinging bench, head spinning, and threw the cigarette to the ground and stomped on it, convinced my Great Perhaps did not involve cigarettes.
"Smoke much?" He laughed, then pointed to a white speck across the lake and said, "See that?"
"Yeah," I said. "What is that? A bird?"
"It's the swan," he said.
"Wow. A school with a swan. Wow."
"That swan is the spawn of Satan. Never get closer to it than we are now."
"Why?"
"It has some issues with people. It was abused or something. It'll rip you to pieces. The Eagle put it there to keep us from walking around the lake to smoke."
"The Eagle?"
"Mr. Lee. Code name: the Eagle. The dean of students. Most of the teachers live on campus, and they'll all bust you. But only the Eagle lives in the dorm circle, and he sees all. He can smell a cigarette from like five miles."
"Isn't his house back there?" I asked, pointing to it. I could see the house quite clearly despite the darkness, so it followed he could probably see us.
"Yeah, but he doesn't really go into blitzkrieg mode until classes start," Jongin said nonchalantly.
"God, if I get in trouble my parents will kill me," I said.
"I suspect you're exaggerating. But look, you're going to get in trouble. Ninety-nine percent of the time, your parents never have to know, though. The school doesn't want your parents to think you became a up here any more than you want your parents to think you're a up." He blew a thin stream of smoke forcefully toward the lake. I had to admit: He looked cool doing it. Taller, somehow. "Anyway, when you get in trouble, just don't tell on anyone. I mean, I hate the rich snots here with a fervent passion I usually reserve only for dental work and my father. But that doesn't mean I would rat them out. Pretty much the only important thing is never never never never rat."
"Okay," I said, although I wondered: If someone punches me in the face, I'm supposed to insist that I ran into a door? It seemed a little stupid. How do you deal with bullies and s if you can't get them into trouble? I didn't ask Jongin, though.
"All right, Xiumin. We have reached the point in the evening when I'm obliged to go and find my girlfriend. So give me a few of those cigarettes you'll never smoke anyway, and I'll see you later."
I decided to hang out on the swing for a while, half because the heat had finally dissipated into a pleasant, if muggy, eighty-something, and half because I thought Beijing might show up. But almost as soon as Kai left, the bugs encroached: no-see-ums (which, for the record, you can see) and mosquitoes hovered around me in such numbers that the tiny noise of their rubbing wings sounded cacophonous. And then I decided to smoke.
Now, I did think, The smoke will drive the bugs away. And, to some degree, it did. I'd be lying, though, if I claimed I became a smoker to ward off insects. I became a smoker because 1. I was on an Adirondack swing by myself, and 2. I had cigarettes, and 3. I figured that if everyone else could smoke a cigarette without coughing, I could damn well, too. In short, I didn't have a very good reason. So yeah, let's just say that 4. it was the bugs.
I made it through three entire drags before I felt nauseous and dizzy and only semipleasantly buzzed. I got up to leave. As I stood, a voice behind me said:
"So do you really memorize last words?"
He ran up beside me and grabbed my shoulder and pushed me back onto the porch swing. "Yeah," I said. And then hesitantly, I added, "You want to quiz me?"
"JFK," she said.
"That's obvious," I answered.
"Oh, is it now?" she asked.
"No. Those were his last words. Someone said, `Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you,' and then he said, 'That's obvious,' and then he got shot."
He laughed. "God, that's awful. I shouldn't laugh. But I will," and then he laughed again. "Okay, Mr. Famous Last Words Boy. I have one for you." He reached into his overstuffed backpack and pulled out a book. "Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The General in His Labyrinth. Absolutely one of my favorites. It's about Simon Bolivar." I didn't know who Simon Bolivar was, but he didn't give me time to ask. "It's a historical novel, so I don't know if this is true, but in the book, do you know what his last words are? No, you don't. But I am about to tell you, Senor Parting Remarks."
And then he lit a cigarette and on it so hard for so long that I thought the entire thing might burn off in one drag. He exhaled and read to me:
"'He'—that's Simon Bolivar—*was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. "Damn it," he sighed. "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!'""
I knew great last words when I heard them, and I made a mental note to get ahold of a biography of this Simon Bolivar fellow. Beautiful last words, but I didn't quite understand. "So what's the labyrinth?" I asked him.
And now is as good a time as any to say that he was beautiful. In the dark beside me, he smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla, and on that thin-mooned night I could see little more than his silhouette except for when he smoked, when the burning cherry of the cigarette washed his face in pale red light. But even in the dark, I could see his eyes—fierce emeralds. He had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting his every endeavor. And not just beautiful, but hot, too, with his bulge straining against his tight jeans, his slightly hairy legs swinging back and forth beneath the swing, flip-flops dangling from his perfect long toes. It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when he answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where guys' bodies ease from one place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to bulge to waist to chest to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the to the etc. I'd noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance.
His mouth close enough to me that I could feel his breath warmer than the air, he said, "That's the mystery, isn't it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape—the world or the end of it?" I waited for him to keep talking, but after a while it became obvious he wanted an answer.
"Uh, I don't know," I said finally. "Have you really read all those books in your room?"
He laughed. "Oh God no. I've maybe read a third of 'em. But I'm going to read them all. I call it my Life's Library. Every summer since I was little, I've gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read. But there is so much to do: cigarettes to smoke, to have, swings to swing on. I'll have more time for reading when I'm old and boring."
He told me that I reminded her of Kai when he came to Han River. They were freshmen together, he said, both scholarship kids with, as he put it, "a shared interest in booze and mischief." The phrase booze and mischief left me worrying I'd stumbled into what my mother referred to as "the wrong crowd," but for the wrong crowd, they both seemed awfully smart. As he lit a new cigarette off the of his previous one, he told me that Kai was smart but hadn't done much living when he got to the Han.
"I got rid of that problem quickly." he smiled. "By November, I'd gotten him his first girlfriend, a perfectly nice non-WeekdayWarrior named Janice. He dumped her after a month because she was too rich for his poverty-soaked blood, but whatever. We pulled our first prank that year—we filled Classroom 4 with a thin layer of marbles. We've progressed some since then, of course." he laughed. So Jongin became Kai—the military-
style planner of their pranks, and Beijing was ever Beijing, the larger-than-life creative force behindthem.
"You're smart like him," he said. "Quieter, though. And cuter, but I didn't even just say that, because I love my boyfriend."
"Yeah, you're not bad either," I said, overwhelmed by his compliment and quite shocked since he was gay, but relieve to have known because I was starting to like this Beijing. "But I didn't just say that, because I love my girlfriend. Oh, wait. Right. I don't have one."
He laughed. "Yeah, don't worry, Xiumin. If there's one thing I can get you, it's a girlfriend. Let's make a deal: You figure out what the labyrinth is and how to get out of it, and I'll get you laid."
"Deal." We shook on it.
Later, I walked toward the dorm circle beside Beijing. The cicadas hummed their one-note song, just as they had at home in Florida. He turned to me as we made our way through the darkness and said, "When you're walking at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though it's silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?"
It seemed too secret and personal to admit to a virtual stranger, but I told him, "Yeah, totally."
For a moment, he was quiet. Then he grabbed my hand, whispered, "Run run run run run," and took off, pulling me behind him.
A/N;
So yeah the first chapter was short but I've paid you with this long chapter.
I hope you're liking it. In this chapter, Beijing (Luhan) comes in and so does
Jongin.
Comments