Cockeyed (14 page)

My impulse was to flick a light on, so I wiped the walls with my hands, like Marcel Marceau in search of a switch. As I felt about, I discovered a little side table tucked near the door, up against the wall. I pawed the surface for a lamp, unable to find one. A short stack of mail revealed itself to my hand, three envelopes with plastic windows. I snatched the lot and left, shutting the door behind me. Now I could add theft to my
growing list of charges, which probably wouldn't do anything to bolster my prison rep. And what a rep it would be.

“Whatcha in for?” my new cellmate would ask. In his hand would be a toothbrush, the one he was sharpening against our cell wall.

“Theft,” I'd say, puffing with pride.

For a moment my new cellmate, Critter or Elmo or The Crank, or whatever his name is, he would stop production on his new shank and turn to inspect me, the new fish.

“Oh yeah? Whadja get?”

I'd say, “Two to five on a bum beef,” and hope to sound schooled in the lingo of the clink.

“What the fuck's a bum beef? I meant whadja get, whadja steal, fish.”

“Fish? No, can't say I got a fish,” I'd admit, “although I did catch a trout once. I didn't have a licence, either.”

“No, no!” he'd bellow, as if commanding his old dog, Otto. “You, you're a fish, that's what a fish is, a new guy. Get it?” Each of his phrases would finish with a little jab of the toothbrush in my direction. “Whadja really get, fish?”

“Do you mean what did I steal?”

“Okay, whadja steal?”

“A phone bill.”

“A phone bill?”

“Yeah. Oh, and a chance to win millions, but I never got a chance to open it.”

With my incriminating evidence in hand, I retreated to the street and its buzzing lights. There I held up the mail and tried to read the addresses in the little windows. The street-light,
no better than the lamps in the ambient Rat, was either too dim, or it glanced off the plastic and obliterated anything legible. Back to the unknown townhouse I caned my way.

As I walked, I gave myself a stern talking to. Slide the envelopes back through the slot and call it a night. Get out while you can, I advised. I agreed with myself. I returned the mail through the mail slot and, ready to go home, stood up straight, opened the door, and walked inside for another look around.

If a cause for my situation could be anything other than desire, I'd blame my night on grain silos. Getting lost inside a townhouse was poetic punishment for my own deceptions. I was wandering in the dark, bumping into somebody's TV, then their couch, and then some thing sharp and rigid on the floor I couldn't identify. In effect, I was a man aimlessly picking at the edges of a ridiculous, empty deception. One with a staircase, I discovered.

As I felt my way back to the door, ready to go home, I happened upon a bottom step which, I assumed, led up to the bedrooms.

Up the stairs I crept, slowly, painfully, one creaking step at a time. I came to the landing. The landing was good. And on the seventh day, when I reached the top step, I rested. I listened. Not a sound, which could be the sound of somebody waiting, the right somebody, I hoped. The air smelled of hot-dogs. I took a step into the hallway. Down I planted my boot on something soft. A doll wailed under my foot.

Without thinking, I grabbed the toy and stuffed it into my satchel. That seemed the most expedient way to suffocate it,
but my bag wasn't enough. Down the stairs I ran, then bolted out the front door, with doll-child crying.

The ride was over, I'd been nicely tossed, and I'd had enough. I resolved to go home, if I could find it. Under no circumstance was I going back inside to replace the doll. I removed it from my satchel and left it on the doormat.

Who knows if I was in the right house that night. My lady in waiting hadn't mentioned a child or a kid brother or sister, but then again I hadn't mentioned a few details of my own. On the coaster she'd given me was an address but no phone number. In the sober light of morning, I felt no temptation to navigate my way back. Instead, I phoned Tracy. She was home and hoping I would call. We talked for hours over breakfast, as if in the same kitchen. It was one of many dates to come.

I like to imagine a family getting up that morning, and one of them opening the front door to fetch the newspaper. Next to it is the doll, asleep on the front steps, like a drunk who didn't make it all the way home. Nobody can figure it out. Perhaps little Cathy left her Wailing Hazel on the porch yesterday. Or maybe Cathy's dad, Critter, dropped it while unloading the family monster truck. Or maybe the doll is given the mystery it deserves, like some ownerless white cane left at the station.

“Batman?” I asked. “Is Batman here?”

Children darted back and forth across my tunnel vision. Again I hailed Batman, louder this time, with a little more authority in my tone.

“Everybody stop, please, please stop. I'm looking for Batman.”

It occurred to me that I might never utter this phrase again, not without straps and a gurney holding me down.

It was my first day teaching in South Korea. Among other things, I could hear lips sputtering like the engines of cars and planes, a soundtrack for the ongoing chases around the room. Only a couple of kids sat around a large, yellow table and quietly disappeared into their stashes of paper and pens. So far, roll call involved nobody but me.

As a boy flew by, I caught his elbow. Maybe I was in the wrong room. Taped to the door, an illustration of a piece of fruit identified each class. In my eyes, though, an apple could be a strawberry. The globby smear looked red, but that's about it. I couldn't even be certain of the colour.

“Is this Apple Class?” I asked and pointed to the drawing.

“Apple teach-ah! You Apple teach-ah!” he agreed.

“Yes, good. Do you know who Batman is?”

“Batman!” he agreed, and performed some superhero gestures. That's what I thought I saw. Maybe he suffered a violent tic. I couldn't tell.

“Okay, Batman, I'm Ryan.”

“Lion?” He was ecstatic. “Lion teach-ah! Lion King!” He growled, roared, then swiped my thigh with an imaginary paw.

Because teaching English was my new job in Pusan, I made my first attempt to concern myself with Batman's pronunciation, confident, however, that I really couldn't care less.

“No, not Lion. R-r-ryan. R-r-ryan. See? Now you try.”

As he ran away, he belted out my name.

“R-r-r-r-l-lion King teach-ah Lion the King his teach!”

Both Tracy and I had arrived in Pusan late the previous night. At 7:30 the next morning, I took charge of my first students, gobsmacked and clueless what to do. Had I the resources, Apple Class would be bobbing for Ritalin after roll call. No such luck. I didn't know any educational games, either. A few promising titles came to mind. “Which Plant Am I?” suited my pace, or, better, we could play “Sleep Clinic.”

Schooling a kid named Batman was a surprise, and it wasn't. I say I taught English in South Korea, but that's too noble a job description. Really I made American cultural products and franchise crud more accessible. It didn't take long to figure out. Waiting on my desk, next to the class list, was a textbook. The first chapter focused on a movie called
Dinosaur Park
. It wasn't an ad, of course, no, but a helpful narrative about, what else, verbs. Giant lizards, both extinct
and resurrected, need a constant supply of past tense. Add the Lion King and Batman to that English class. Somebody's native culture was losing to the usual superpowers, kaplowy and hakuna matata.

Of the little Korea Tracy and I had encountered so far, much declared the firm economic presence of the west. Everything was familiar but new, mistranslated, and garbled, as if we'd moved overseas to live in a nifty satire of America. As we drove from the airport, Tracy saw restaurants with English names in neon, everything from Bone to Poem to Smog. I, for one, loved to grog at Smog. Forgotten Hollywood personalities crowded billboards with their big white teeth. According to Tracy, Meg Ryan seemed especially popular. Meg's face adorned the city enough that we had to wonder if she'd led a coup.

Postered about the streets were ads for bands, too. Tracy rattled off some names as we drove by. I'd forgotten most of the groups long ago, along with any desire to wear sweat-bands or cock-rock iron-on shirts. Kam-sa-ham-ni-da, South Korea! We are the Scorpions, and we rocked you like a hurricane! Maybe they taught English on the side. Everybody relied on the industry enough.

Then came the images of some older, other Korea, the one being edged out. Tracy described the scenes to me. She saw squat neighbourhood temples between international banks, sidewalk noodle and soju tents in front of Subway, and, between megamalls, the slender alleyway entrances to original public markets, their fresh fish and eel aquariums stacked like retainer walls against brightly painted chain stores.

All this in one night's drive from the airport. Arriving at our new home, a sign and a fence warned about the undetonated landmines in the neighbouring hillside.

This isn't to say Pusan lacked its own modernity. Taking in the neighbourhood on our first morning, Tracy and I passed groups of high school students who sported pink, furry, oversized gloves, purses, puffy jackets, and aviator helmets. The candy-floss look belonged to a new Korean tweeny band called H.O.T., or High-Five of Teenagers. Dig it. A spiffy style, some would say, although far more suitable to snowy northern British Columbia than a country with punitive humidity. Still, the puffy gloves were handy. My older students begged to shammy the chalkboard with them, or, if need be, with their jackets and purses and hats, everybody rubbing their wardrobes against the day's English.

Even the soundscape gave new meaning. My first morning began with a garbage truck bleating opera through a scratchy megaphone. Tracy and I lived in a renovated office several floors above the school. From our bedroom window, she watched our neighbours scramble roadside with their trash and receive a fresh roll of toilet paper in return.

Overseas, in all these extremes of the familiar and the new, I would test my relationship to blindness and Tracy. Here I would become a caricature of myself by exhausting the limits of my sight and my denial. My brother, Mykol, had foreshadowed the problem well. As a going-away present, he made me a card. Cartooned on the front was a bald, spectacled, and gangly Ryan, pigeon-toed and squinty. On the chalkboard behind me, my name appeared as only I write it. All four letters
were different sizes, scattered, and at different heights on the board. That's what happens when you see as little as I did then. Batman and I had something in common already. We were both imported cartoons, and, most worrisome, I too had a secret identity. For the next six months, I would pretend I could see.

Now that I'd found Batman, I returned to the roll call. My micro-island of good sight dropped down a line and revealed the next name two letters at a time. Another Batman. I checked the next name, and the next, and counted four more to go. The roll call wasn't alphabetical. Below the Batmans bulged a pile of five Arnolds. A dull ache began behind my eyes from reading. Adding to it was the noise, the firefly movements of children, the jet lag, and the immediacy of my situation. How would I manage all of this with such dismal eyesight? What was I thinking when I signed on for manic seven year olds? I honestly hadn't considered my body among theirs, not until reality flew around the room making car and airplane noises.

I called the next Batman, but nobody answered. Because pleading didn't work, I trawled the room with my arms open like a fishnet. Finally, with all twenty kids corralled around the yellow table, we got down to who was who, and who I would be.

Ours was a specialty private institution called a
hagwan
. Extra school, you might say. We taught English, math, and arts, employing local teachers, except Tracy and me, the ex-pats. Our two positions were most of the branding and marketing, a couple of western white faces smiling on the school's
brochure. Such faces suggested we don't just teach English here, we teach real English, the kind that passes through glossy North American lips. The kind of lips Meg Ryan uses. Upon enrollment, everybody adopted his or her favourite English name. Fantasy Island never offered so much.

Along with the Batmans and Arnolds, all of whom were reborn as Batman or Arnold One through Five, I taught bouquets of Lilies, Daisies, and Roses. I taught gangs of video game characters, a few hopeful Meg Ryans, an equal number of Michael Jacksons, and even a couple of Kevins, as in Costner. Those kids had sat through the Robin Hood flick a few too many times. When I called their names, each said, “Here, teach-ah!” then perforated me with imaginary arrows.

Between the two Kevins on my Apple Class list, I found what I thought was a lost third.

“Cabin?” I called.

“Here, teach-ah!” he replied, then stood up on his chair and shot me.

“Thank you.”

I checked the list again. The previous teacher had spelled the name just the way I'd said it.

“Do you mean you want the name Kevin, Cabin?”

I said each name slowly and exaggerated the difference. I still didn't care one way or the other, but since I didn't know what else to do with my class, Cabin's name seemed a good enough pastime as any.

“No,” he said. “Cabin.”

“Cabin Costner?”

“Yes, teach-ah.”

“You mean Kevin, Cabin.”

“No, teach-ah, Cabin, Ca-bin.”

His impatience was noted. Before I took another arrow, I asked a girl next to me for help. “May I use your pen and paper?”