Thirteen Specimens (14 page)

     Both the older and young women had those red dots painted on cheeks and forehead...but more importantly to Ford, two of the male characters seemed to have a knobby growth on their foreheads, reminding him of the rubber mask he had seen in the store. These characters were “Paekjong” and “Jung”. He tried to conjure that rubber mask in his mind, to compare it to these two faces, but because of the basic resemblance the masks all shared with each other he couldn’t be sure which of the two it might have been.

     In the upper right corner of the background were the words, “Korean Traditional Mask” (in the singular). In the upper left: “The Mask Play of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism”. The exhibit was furthered described as, “Important Intangible Cultural Asset No. 69”.

     “Hahoe”...that was surely what the man in the store had said, when Ford had expressed interest in the rubber mask.

     “Exorcism,” he muttered to himself. Then, the idea to look into the history of the masks on the internet rose in his mind, and he stepped up into the kitchen to seat himself before one of the twin computers again.

     Ford found plenty of references to “Korean Mask Dance Drama”, and even a little legend behind the making of these masks. The legend was that a man named Huh (“Huh?” Ford thought) had rigidly isolated himself and begun making masks after a deity appeared to him in a dream. A young woman who loved this Bachelor Huh spied upon him in his pious isolation, and this triggered a terrible curse, causing Huh to spit up blood and perish. As a result, he was unable to complete his final mask, that of “Imae”, and that was why this mask possessed no lower jaw. Pandora, Eve, this girl – in their curiosity, the women of myth always seemed to unleash misery upon the world of hapless men.

     One site offered a background on the mask play. It had been performed at periods of “bad luck” or during certain festivals every ten years, and was intended as a shamanistic rite to banish evil spirits. Hence the “exorcism”. From their grotesque aspect, he had thought some of the masks themselves might have depicted demons to be exorcized, but as he read on that didn’t appear to be the case.

     Ford learned that when not in use, these sacred masks were carefully stored away, and prior to their removal an actor would offer a sacrifice before the chest containing them. If one treated a mask disrespectfully, he would be struck by an arrow (fired by whom or what, Ford couldn’t determine). No wonder the man at the gift shop had appeared reluctant to sell him even a rubber version, he thought.

     The masks’ lower jaws could be moved by the actors to change the expression from mirthful to angry. Because of their spiritual power, a mask was believed to laugh after the actor laughed...and to become angry after the actor wearing it portrayed anger.

     Ford located a site that gave a detailed summary of this play. The set-up concerned a young bride who unexpectedly died before her wedding. A wedding ceremony still had to be performed so that her restless spirit might be appeased. This story reminded Ford of something he had read about the crash of a Korean Air jet in 1997 in which 228 people were killed. Shamans had been summoned to marry off the spirits of some of those victims who had been unmarried at the time of their death.

     In Act 3 of the play, the butcher
Paekjong dances onto the stage and is soon joined by an ox, who dances with him. But then the butcher slays the ox and repeatedly hacks at it, cutting off its testicles and tearing out its organs. He holds aloft the heart and then the liver in order to attract a buyer. About the liver, he says, “Surely you know what this is good for? For a man, what is more important than strength? Even Confucius married and had children.”

     The butcher staggers offstage, maddened by the crash of thunder, growing increasingly insane with guilt.

     Paekjong’s mask was described as conveying a sinister, murderous expression when the actor tilted his head forward. But when he tipped it back, the mask took on a deranged grin meant to express the butcher’s remorse for the animals he slaughters.

     Ford studied the leering dark face of
Paekjong closely. It was one of the two he thought best matched the rubber mask he had seen in the gift shop. A
butcher
. But then he looked into the character of the other suspicious mask. Jung – ha. No relation to Carl, he thought. He had a book edited by Carl Jung at home, titled
Man and His Symbols
. He recalled it mentioned the ritual use of masks here and there, along with addressing Jung’s classic subject matter such as the collective unconscious, synchronicity, the female anima and male animus...

     He found the character named Jung in Act 5.

     The female character Bune enters the stage, her face heavily powdered and made up like a bride’s. She squats to urinate, and is spied by Jung, a wandering monk. The monk is so aroused by this that he gathers the soil she urinated on and sniffs it. To Bune he says, “Hello, pretty maid. I may be a monk, but I'm also a man. Come dance with me.” He then rapes her...and ultimately takes her onto his back and runs off with her.

     Ford was reminded of that appalling movie playing on his TV while the factory girl was being attacked, its horrible rapist of a hero. Yes, he thought, studying the grinning, crescent-eyed mask of the depraved monk, that lump bulging from his forehead like a brain tumor pressing outward, a diseased fruit, ready to burst. Maybe it had been this one.

     Ford knew what he had to do today. He set two tasks for himself. Find an ATM to get more money...and find that little store with the Halloween masks again. He had to see if that rubber mask he had admired was missing. He had to know if – in some kind of serendipity, or synchronicity –  the mask he had seen in that shop was the same one worn by the man who seemed to be playing the roles of Paekjong and Jung at once. Because Ford was still undecided about which of those two characters the rubber mask had represented. It might have been a synthesis of both...two characters in one skin.

8: The Citizens

     While wandering about Seoul in an effort to fulfill his second task, Ford experienced mounting frustration in fulfilling the first.

     ATMs in a convenience store and outside a bank gave him nothing but indecipherable slips of paper. (He was relieved, at least, that they spit his card out again.) He remembered that the tourist book he’d been given suggested subway ATMs, and he descended below the street in search of some, found a few, received only more cryptic receipts for his growing collection. While in the subway he tried to calm himself with a little diversion, browsed briefly in a comic book store. The graphic novels he looked through were violent, disturbing, and he supposed they were Korean though they looked Japanese to him. Again, without knowing much about this country’s history he sensed the Japanese had influenced the Koreans heavily, but their presence in Korea couldn’t have been entirely agreeable: one thing he recalled hearing about was the Korean “comfort women” the Japanese had pressed into sexual slavery.

     In entering and then leaving the subway, he became a little exasperated to note that – while the cars here drove on the right side of the road as in the US – people climbed up the left side of a flight of steps and descended on the right. This seemed backwards to him and he nearly collided with others a few times, though he might have been a rock in a stream for all the attention he received as they flowed around him. Another thing began to nibble at his patience. People walked slowly here. Couldn’t they sense him behind them, wanting them to speed up or let him around? Once he actually let out a loud sigh and the man in front of him glanced over his shoulder. He wanted to bark at a few of these people, “Come on, I’ve got things to do, I’m an American!”

     He went into a branch of Citibank, hoping the familiar American name would bode well for him, but a pretty young woman could only smile and apologize with that familiar, sweet but professional politeness that he found increasingly cloying. When he asked her if there were a Bank of America about, as they owned the chain of banks he belonged to back home, she sketched him directions. Initially hopeful, in following the directions he became hopelessly lost.

     Either they were fawningly polite or they rudely ignored him in the street, although he knew his presence was conspicuous, to say the least. “Look at me!” he wanted to snap in this or that icily closed face, to draw the gaze of those downcast or averted eyes. He had never felt so much like a ghost in his life; unseen, unrecognized. Occasionally flocks of schoolgirls, appearing Japanese in their short tartan skirts and jackets, drifted by and he eyed them with a weak, irritable lust. The
otherness
that had intrigued him so recently now chafed him. The city was just familiar enough to taunt him, just alien enough to disorient him. Dis-
Orient
, he thought. Ha.

     Hours were passing. His feet weren’t breaking in his new shoes – his new shoes were breaking his feet. They clumped along, big and black and noisy like Frankenstein’s boots. Like a soldier’s. He didn’t care any more how he came across to them – warmongering American, Ugly American, uncouth vulgar self-important American. Whatever you say.

     What was the fucking problem? The book said the ATMs here were global...they said he should be able to get his money out of them, damn it. He was punching up the English directions on them. But the scraps of paper they thrust out like mocking tongues were not in his language.

     In his search for both a responsive ATM and – presently, just an afterthought – the elusive gift shop, he came across two pitiable beggars. The first was in a motorized wheelchair, paraplegic, and a tape player somewhere (in the back of his chair?) was oozing maudlin music as a kind of soundtrack for him. Ford gathered all
the change he had in his pocket and dropped it into a slot in the wooden box affixed to the front of the wheelchair. If the ATMs wouldn’t give him money, then he might as well feed money into what looked like the shoddiest ATM in Korea. As he lifted his eyes, a man on the street nodded to him, obviously with appreciation, but whether this man was accompanying the cripple or simply a pedestrian impressed with Ford’s brusque gesture of compassion, he didn’t know. In either case, the nod did soothe his irritation a little bit.

    The second beggar, later on, was much more grotesque. He, too, played tear-wringing music on a tape player resting on the pavement, but rather than sitting twisted in a wheelchair, this man lay on his belly on a board fitted with wheels, dragging himself along. Weirdly, his pants looked to Ford like they were made of black rubber, and they looked like they didn’t have legs inside them. Ford didn’t see a pot or bucket to drop money in as he strode by, but he saw plenty of other pedestrians ignoring the man as they passed him, so he felt a little less guilty.

     When not seething, feeling thwarted at every turn, Ford waxed philosophical. Here he was focusing so intently on a prosaic matter like getting some cash out of a machine, and almost forgetting entirely that he had seen a human being
murdered
. At first, he had believed he was facing all these trials and challenges bravely, thinking fast on his feet, since having been evicted from Vietnam. But now he wondered if he was not so much resilient as merely somnambulant, trudging numbly and fatalistically along through his situation like a sleepwalker.

     What was the correct reaction, the appropriate behavior – sit down and pray for the girl’s soul, so as to pay proper respect to the enormity of this loss?

     He knew what he could do. What he should do. Call the police.

     An anonymous call from a pay phone, at least? But what if they could find out how many English-speaking tourists were in Seoul (he argued with himself weakly) and track down their whereabouts? As he marched on robotically, he decided that once in Vietnam he would do a web search to find the proper email address, and then send a detailed message about what he’d seen to the Seoul police department. Surely they wouldn’t extradite him as a witness! Or, because he would need to pass through Korea again on his return trip home, maybe he’d just wait until he was back in the States. That would be soon enough, right?

      At another tourist center, he asked a woman with a plaque labeled ENGLISH in front of her about Bank of America again, and was given a real map with the area circled in ballpoint. Still, he soon found himself befuddled when back on the pavement. With each misplaced step, the pain in his blistered feet increased.

     He entered a street gouged open its length like a chasm, apparently a subway line being repaired or laid in. The shops facing this street were dusty, shabby. He paused to gaze into the window of one of them. It took him a while to understand what he was seeing, preserved in liquid inside several very large glass containers and a row of relatively smaller bottles, like the deformed babies – or “pickled punks” – in carnivals he remembered from his boyhood. Some of these masses flowered into uncountable threads, looking like a human nervous system branching out from a central spine – extracted in one piece, every nerve ending intact, and stuffed into a bottle of formaldehyde. Other masses looked vaguely anthropomorphic, like unformed homunculi, waiting to be removed and grown into full-sized, human-like golems. Mandrake roots? No...ginseng roots, he realized.