Thirteen Specimens (12 page)

     Look at how cute that girl was, just a humble factory worker, not even one of those model-lovely stewardesses on Korean Air flights. There were millions of them like her, here and in other Asian countries. Did their men appreciate them, realize how lucky they were? Why shouldn’t he have one of them, too? They were not all untouchable exotic princesses...nor was he the lowliest of men. And yet he still felt oddly undeserving. Oddly pessimistic about obtaining An. Were the two of them merely indulging in a fantasy?

     Well, he was this close to her. Just one step further. He must not give in to a defeatist attitude now.

     Ford closed the window, padded back to bed on his bare feet, their blisters swelling with every second (“Seoul, sole, soul,” he thought, drowsily), and this time when he stretched out he fell instantly into dreams that he did not remember upon waking, as he almost never did since becoming an adult.

     When he awoke, the TV was the only light in the room; a look at his wrist watch told him it was just past 11 PM. Another nice long refreshing sleep. He fished around under
his blanket and found the remote, surfed until a movie caught his eye. It was a decade or two old, from the looks of it. When he tuned into the film, it was to see a woman squirming in agony on a hospital bed, her feet in stirrups (but the camera not facing her privates). At first it appeared she was going to give birth, but that didn’t seem to be the case as a group of experts of some kind stared at her crotch dispassionately, doing nothing to relieve her misery.

     Ford rose, flicked on a light, and immediately spotted a centipede with long feathery legs poised upon one wall. It was no larger or more exotically horrible than the ones he found in his own apartment back home, but it was an unwelcome roommate nonetheless. He fetched his free travel guide to Korea, snuck up on the thing and squashed it before it could scurry out of reach. He wiped its smear off the book with a tissue and brought that into the bathroom with him. He dropped it into the trash bucket there.

     The streetlight beyond made his frosted window glow like ice. Would his girl still be ironing, after all these hours he had slept? Well, this was about the time he’d viewed her last night. Once more, he pushed the sliding panes of the window to one side to let in the mild cool air of night. Once more, he leaned close to the opening to gaze toward the contemporary brick building.

     Yes...still there, still ironing. Had she even taken a dinner or coffee break since he’d seen her almost seven hours earlier? No wonder she looked so stressed, unsmiling, a few stray strands of fine black hair hanging in her face. Was nobody there to help or relieve her? He saw no other bodies or parts of bodies entering into the frame of her window.

     She never looked his way. Would she, if he put on the bathroom light? He played with the idea of waving across to her, a nice safe distant flirtation...like emailing a girl in Vietnam.

     A faint crunching sound attracted his attention. A footstep on sidewalk grit? Ford had to practically stick his head out the window to look down toward the little alley, of which the inn formed one wall, pressing himself against the aluminum frame.

     The narrow passage was filled to its brim with gloom, the air conditioners that jutted out barely distinguishable. But Ford believed he saw a figure in the alley, its back turned to him. It was motionless, and its attitude suggested a man relieving his bladder against the wall, though he listened for and heard no streaming sound. Probably some drunk who had ducked into the alley to answer nature’s call. It reminded him that he had to empty his own bladder and he pulled back from the window to do so, leaving it open, knowing that at this angle and in his own sheltering gloom, the girl in the factory would not be able to see him.

     Finished, he washed and dried his hands, then returned to the window for a last peek before he closed it and gravitated back to his bed and the odd movie.

     At first, what he saw seemed unreal to him, as if it were contained within a TV screen, not a window frame.

     There were two figures in the window opposite, not one, and they seemed to be in a sexual embrace. But it was quickly apparent that it was a struggle rather than an amorous coupling. One of the two people was of course the girl in blue jeans and maroon top, the top riding further up her back than ever because of the way she was bent forward over the table she normally ironed at, her arms splayed out across it. The other person was larger, bulkier, a man in black clothing. His face was very dark; Ford’s first impression was that it was a black man. This figure had seized the young woman from behind, his left hand
gripping one of her wrists, pressing his front against her back so as to use his weight to pin her against the workbench. Her face was contorted in terror and pain, her eyes squeezed shut and mouth open. Ford realized that her slender throat was in the grip of the man’s other hand, his arm a restraining bar across her chest.

     “Oh my God,” Ford whispered. “Oh no...” Surely she couldn’t be alone in the building. Couldn’t any of her coworkers hear her cries? Or was any sound getting past the hand constricting her throat?

     The woman tried to twist her shoulders and buck her body to throw him off, jerked her head from side to side, and she reached back awkwardly, desperately, with her free hand in an attempt to claw the attacker’s dark face. At the same time that he snapped his own head back to avoid her flailing claws, the figure used the hand around her throat to tilt her head up against his shoulder so as to limit its thrashing.

    As she screwed her head to the right, grimacing with the effort to spread the man’s thumb far enough away to break his hold, Ford saw the woman’s eyes flash open, and he almost flinched. For the first time since he had spied on her, her eyes appeared to look directly across at his window, and to lock with his own. They seemed to stare into each other’s faces in a moment of mirrored, uncomprehending horror.

     The figure let go of her left wrist, and though Ford couldn’t be sure, it looked as though he were reaching down to the front of his pants to unzip them, or maybe to the front of hers. Whatever he was doing, the young woman was more aware of it than Ford was, and launched into a greater effort of squirming. She whipped her freed left hand around behind her and scratched blindly at his hidden hand.

     The figure raised his head, and he too appeared to look out the window, across the street at the window of the guest house. Directly into Ford’s eyes, and the American saw the attacker’s face clearly for the first time.

     It was dark brown because it was meant to look like wood. A terrible wide grimace or grin was molded onto the visage. Though from here it was too distant to make out, Ford knew it had a circle on its forehead like a bolt driven into its skull, and veins standing out on its temples as if real blood circulated through its rubber flesh.

     Then, the face looked down quickly at the girl. Maybe she had successfully raked him, and the pain had reclaimed his attention. It also seemed to replace his ardor with fury, as if he had countenanced a great rejection more hurtful than the scratches. The figure dragged the girl back from the workbench, twisted her to one side and shoved her down to her knees or at least out of Ford’s view, below the level of the window. He let go of the woman’s throat with his right hand; Ford could imagine her sucking in a loud, wheezing gasp of air. But the man had only let go of her neck so that he could reach over to the iron Ford had watched the woman use in the course of her work.

     Still holding her down out of sight with his left hand, maybe crushing her shoulder in his hand or with his fingers knotted in her hair, the figure raised the iron up past his shoulder, the pointed end facing down. Then he brought the iron downward with force. Raised it again, higher this time, and brought it down even more viciously. A third arcing blow. The figure straightened up, his arms at his sides, having released the girl but still holding onto the iron. Then, the figure with his brown rubber head slowly sank out of view also.

     The iron’s spiral, telephone-like cord swayed and bounced. Was that a wisp of steam rising up, like a
departing spirit? The iron had still been in the figure’s hand...

     “Jesus Christ,” Ford hissed, “Oh Jesus.” He was quivering violently, as if he were strapped helpless in an electric chair and a powerful current ran into him. He wanted to yell out his window at the attacker, in outrage, to bellow an alarm to the neighborhood, but found himself as choked as the girl had been. He dashed out of the dark bathroom, into the main room, with the thought of calling the police. But he didn’t know their number, or how to get an outside call. He must go downstairs, then – wake the owner of the inn, who lived on the premises...

     But he hesitated, his hand still hovering near the phone, thoughts scampering in every direction like insects exposed from their hiding place under a rock. It was too late by this point, wasn’t it? Surely the blows from the iron had killed the poor girl, and now if she were being violated it must be postmortem?

     If he awoke the inn keeper, and he in turn called the police, they would want to question Ford. After his experience with the stern Vietnamese immigration agents and security for Korean Air, he dreaded facing a group of uniformed Korean policemen. They would want to detain him, especially if he had to act as a witness in a trial (assuming they even arrived in time to apprehend the masked attacker). But he had to pick up his visa on October 7th, if it were truly ready as promised, and purchase a ticket to return to Vietnam on the eighth. He could not afford to be delayed. An was waiting for him; he’d already lost days he could have spent with her – in her arms.

     Ford withdrew his hand from the phone. After almost a minute, in which he numbly watched the movie still playing on his TV, he crept back into the bathroom. Timidly, afraid of what he might see – or what might see him – he peeked out at that window with newspaper screening the top of it. Maybe in those newspapers’ articles was a story about some crazed rapist-murderer. Some serial killer who had been stalking Seoul’s streets. Maybe the police already knew about this man...

     The room beyond the window appeared empty. The iron’s cord hung unmoving like a vine. Was the killer still upon the girl, down out of sight, or had he already left the building?

     Remembering the figure he had seen lurking in the alley below, Ford twisted uncomfortably to look down along the guest house’s flank, but he saw no one. If that had been the killer before, then he hadn’t returned to hide in the alley.

     Maybe when he had spotted the figure in the alley before, the figure had also seen him. Why else would the masked visage have turned and stared in his direction during the attack, so boldly, as if to taunt him? So arrogant and daring, that the killer hadn’t fled even when he’d seen Ford witnessing his deeds. As if he already knew Ford would do nothing to thwart him.

     He didn’t see me, Ford rebutted himself. Couldn’t have. His window had been dark. The girl couldn’t have seen him, either. Or had there been just enough dim glow behind him, from the other room, to vaguely silhouette his head in the window? He prayed this hadn’t been the case. Not so much because he was afraid the attacker would seek him out...but because of the idea that the girl had seen him observing her attack, mute and immobile – her last impression of a human being, other than the one assaulting her.

     Ford drifted back into the main room. His electrified shivering had diminished to a barely perceptible hum. Just enough current to animate a zombie. Stunned, his brain
blanked, he gaped into the flickering blue cathode rays.

    He didn’t watch the movie straight through – he kept gliding weightless as a ghost into the bathroom to look out at the brick building, but he still saw no one in the factory room; if the girl had been discovered by a coworker, and if the police had arrived, then no one ever entered into his range of vision. From what he did see of the movie, he realized it was supposed to be a comedy, but he found it loathsome, appalling. This disgusting, disheveled guy was going around like a crazed satyr drunk with lust, losing control and jumping women, raping them (without the action becoming more than R-rated), his activities being monitored by a group of researchers or such led by a smirking beauty. This group even lured some hookers as victims for him. Each victim would be taken to a hospital and observed in their writhing pain by these researchers. Ford gathered that the slobbering sex maniac’s penis was so large it had injured his victims internally. A real laugh riot, this flick.

     Finally, after the movie had ended and Ford had changed channels, he checked on the factory window and saw that it had gone dark. He peeped out at it numerous times after that, barely sitting as the hours dragged by, but the factory room was not lit again. He heard no screams of discovery, no sirens, saw no police vehicles or officers in the street below, even as the sky slowly lightened.

     Maybe if he had acted, he thought – still restlessly pacing with TV remote in hand, his body manufacturing an endless supply of adrenalin – the attacker might have been caught. He assumed the man hadn’t been. Now, if another woman or a number of women were murdered, he would be partly to blame, right?