Vaseline Buddha (15 page)

And I thought it would also be nice to wake up from a little nap in a room with an octopus in it, and be lightly, pleasantly surprised upon seeing the octopus on the sofa or the bed. Then I could perhaps take the octopus where it belonged, to the sea. But after finishing my bath, I thought that there were ideas that were good in themselves, but not good for carrying out into action, the idea about an octopus being one of them. Seeing an octopus roam around the room may bring me a light thrill, but the octopus would shudder at the selfish act.

After agonizing for a long time over what to do or what not to do that day, I ended up leaving the hotel without a destination in mind, and followed a sign indicating that there was a park nearby,
and arrived at the park in the end. In the park, there were people pushing strollers, people sitting on benches, and people walking, holding hands, as if to say that the park was no different from any other park. But there were also people protesting there, half naked and carrying pickets, people against using animal fur and animal abuse. They were talking about how much people abused animals and getting people's signatures, and although I supported them in my heart, I thought that I couldn't join them in something so meaningful. All I could do regarding all efforts seeking change was sympathize in a detached way from a distance.

I went on walking, leaving behind the people who were against animal abuse, and suddenly, I wanted to go to an amusement park in Coney Island—was it because of a memory of a certain movie that seems quite dull now, or because of the thought I'd had about an octopus?—and took a subway there, but seeing that the gates were firmly shut, although I wasn't sure if it was because it was too late, or because it was winter, I turned away in disappointment—but on the platform at the subway station, I saw a black girl turn round and round to unwrap the long scarf she was wearing while her mother held it by the end, which was very touching, and enough to make up for the disappointment in Coney Island—and returned to my hotel room. No, that wasn't all. Before I did, I wandered around a street in Coney Island that seemed a bit dangerous, and saw a good number of people lined up in the darkness, each carrying a wooden chair somewhere for some reason. I felt very lucky at that moment, because I could imagine, without any grounds, that they were taking them to the night sea to bury them underwater, which was the sort of thing I wanted to see while traveling, or in everyday life.

Actually, watching the people carrying the chairs simply for some reason, perhaps for an event to be held the next day—no, actually, there were only two black men carrying wooden chairs—I imagined that they could be doing it to calm some monsters that appeared every night in the nearby sea and devoured chairs, and chairs were one of the things in the world that stirred up my imagination. Once I imagined creatures from a planet somewhere in the universe, more intelligent than humans, invading the earth and taking away all its chairs, or visiting the earth for the peaceful purpose of obtaining a few chairs from it, in order to further their research on chairs. When I thought about aliens I imagined aliens on the earth pulling pranks, such as pulling all the screws out of all the things humans have made, or shooting a strange beam to leave only the shadows or outlines of all the life forms on the earth.

And once, I was on my way to a port in the morning to make a reservation on a ship headed to a Scandinavian country, just to go a little further north from Amsterdam, but I suddenly felt no desire to go after seeing a doll drifting down a canal, and decided to give up going to Scandinavia and leave the Netherlands immediately—or did the doll come into my sight as I was thinking that I should leave the Netherlands?—but a little thing that happened as I was making my way to the train station led me to stay longer in the Netherlands. I was passing by a bus station when a young Caucasian woman coming toward me smiled at me, no, she was already smiling before she approached me, and asked me cautiously if
I could give her two dollars, and the moment she opened her smiling lips wide to say that, I saw, through her uneven teeth—one of the teeth was missing, and another was sticking out—a big chunk of spinach, like a gold tooth someone had put in to show off, in the bright sunlight. And there was a brown stain on her pink blouse, slightly puffed up around her stomach, as if she'd spilled some food on it, and there was some blood on her arm, as if scratched by thorns on a tree, not a lot but a few drops of it, not yet fully congealed. I thought that she must have come before me after stealing spinach from someone's garden at the center of Amsterdam and filling her belly with it, and then making her way through a thorny bush, such as a rosebush.

After thinking for a moment I took out two dollar bills from my wallet and handed them to her, after which I learned that the two dollars I'd given her were a compensation for showing me her teeth, with spinach stuck in between. It also occurred to me that it was because it had been too long since someone had smiled at me without an ulterior motive—even if she did have an ulterior motive, it was for no more than two dollars. She remained standing there smiling, and the somewhat awkward smile wouldn't leave her lips, as if stuck there, as if her facial expression had gotten stuck at the smile. And the smile was something that could be produced only by someone who was captivated by herself, and it seemed that she had long lost interest in the bills she'd received. I took a close look at her face, and everything about her looked funny, the lipstick smeared around her lips, the nose ring she was wearing, the hair that looked as if it had been dyed red, her face itself, the dress with too many flowers on it. She was mumbling something incoherent, and seemed drugged up. I thought a bunch of flowers would suit her, so I wanted to give her a bunch of flowers, but I didn't see any flower shops nearby.

Our encounter was brief, and we parted ways smiling, but thanks to her I could remember the Netherlands as a country in which a woman who smiled, baring her teeth with spinach stuck between them, and had a few little drops of blood on her arm as if scratched by thorns, and had lost her mind, or was drugged up, initiated a conversation with me, and I could stay in the Netherlands for a few more days, feeling refreshed. And during my additional days in the Netherlands, the country seemed almost lovely. It was also because a somewhat strange thing happened while I sat in a café the day before I met her, when a man came up to me and said something in Dutch, and when I told him in English that I didn't understand, he asked me in English if I wasn't a classmate from his school days. When he asked me that, I almost said yes, a little surprised, no, not really surprised, but pretending to be surprised. In the Netherlands, of course, there were a lot of children who were adopted from the East, and he must have taken me for one of his old classmates, and in the end he apologized and left, but that, too, pleased me, and I recalled how once I wondered what it would've been like if I had been adopted into someone's home when I was little, and thought about it briefly. And afterwards, when I met the woman with spinach stuck between her teeth, I couldn't help but feel quite close to her, and the encounter pleased me quite a bit. Such trifling things brought me pleasure, and it was also pleasing to see myself becoming very pleased by such things.

Another time, in a foreign city, Paris, I think, someone asked
me if I weren't from a country in Central Asia, and although I don't remember how I answered the question at the time, I do remember that I recalled a country called Turkmenistan, whose capital's streets, which I saw on television, were lined with massive new buildings that seemed to embody the socialist ideal, which I would have been quite satisfied to see if I were Stalin, but were too empty and deserted, and felt almost surreal, and said that I was from Turkmenistan, and thought that it was a good thing to be of ambiguous nationality, and an even better thing to lose your nationality altogether.

(The things that took place in my life were, like the above, things that couldn't be called incidents, things that fell short of being incidents—except, of course, my recent loss of consciousness and collapse at home—things that would turn into nothing if I didn't fix them in my memory by putting them into writing like this. By putting into writing the faint, fragile memories in this way, I'm fixing them, stories that can change again later in a different way, like printed photographs.)

The next day I returned to the café where I'd met the man who asked me if I weren't an old classmate and had coffee there, hoping to see him again, although it would be okay, of course, not to see him again, and tell him how much his blunder had pleased me. And I thought I could make a movie, combining the scenes in Amsterdam in which I met the woman with spinach stuck between her teeth and
the man who mistook me for an old classmate, with my experiences in New York, as well as things I experienced or imagined in other places while traveling, because I felt as if the woman with spinach stuck between her teeth and the man who mistook me for an old classmate came up to me, like characters in a movie, and posed a riddle and then disappeared, leaving me alone in the movie. It would be a very strange movie without a storyline, whose scenes would linger in the mind despite, or because of, its lack of a storyline. It's a strange thing to dream of making just one movie that's very strange, but it made me happy, as if I were having an enchanting dream. The previous night I'd dreamt about a naked woman whose thighs and chest were embedded with pieces of translucent mother-of-pearl, put together like a mosaic in the form of a woman. I was tangled up naked with the naked woman, which seemed quite erotic. It was an erotic experience that told you that you could have a truly erotic experience only in dreams. And the woman's face was as black as ebony, and naturally led me to think of the word death. I thought I could put that dream, too, in the one movie I could make.

During my additional days in Amsterdam, I mostly sat in a café from which I could see the canal, writing down words such as stained stain, sleeping sleep, dreaming dream, drained drain, and smiling smile. And the words became the phrase, a smiling smile that arises on a drained drain of a stained stain in a dream dreamt by sleeping sleep, upon whose completion I left the Netherlands.

Reading what I've written so far, I think about how I should move forward, or make it move forward, about all its possibilities. It's always a pain to read over what you've written. Writing isn't without moments of joy you can't feel in doing anything else, but such moments are much too rare. And the moments vanish as soon as they come.

It seems now that I am completely lost in what I've written. That was part of my intention, of course, and so it wouldn't be a bad thing to get completely lost in my own story. But getting lost and wandering in a story makes you more clearly aware of yourself as you're disappearing somewhere, in a way that's both similar to but different from getting lost and wandering in a forest or the streets. I feel as if I'm somewhere that doesn't exist, as if I exist somewhere that doesn't exist as a nonexistent being, as if I'm disappearing.

And I feel that this story has already become a failure, in that I tried at first to keep the anecdotes from turning into stories but didn't succeed. But that was expected to a certain extent, and won't be a problem. I may even feel a small private sense of victory in letting this story come, in the end, to a failure.

But still, rambling on—I think that the fact that time is probably the only thing I can waste makes it possible for me to ramble on—is making me very uncomfortable, and even bringing me displeasure that doesn't come with great pleasure, but that's probably something I need to risk as well. Anyway, another problem, although not more serious, is that I'm losing more and more interest in this story I began to write without much ambition, or if such a thing is possible, losing interest I never had in the first place, which is because I have a hard time doing something with an earnest desire, or with a desire disguised as an earnest desire. One of the biggest practical difficulties I have in writing is that too often, I lose interest gradually or suddenly in what I'm writing. But what I've lost interest in is not just this story. I've lost nearly all interest in nearly all things. Perhaps the only thing I have left to do is to write about the slightly interesting process of losing interest in something. Nevertheless, the paradox of writing in order to not write anymore, the paradox that I could write until there's nothing left to write, that it would be difficult not to write until then, will keep me writing.

I have no choice but to keep going, whether I get lost in my story or find my way. I fumble as I write, as if reading Braille, fumbling in my mind. Perhaps I can write without ceasing, as if I didn't care, somewhat carelessly, because I'm not genuinely interested. For there's a kind of interest you can show because you're not genuinely interested, a kind of concern you can show because you're not genuinely concerned, for there are such things. I could probably go on writing this, for I know too well that it is perhaps perfectly useless.

If the purpose of travel, in a way, is to shatter illusions about an unknown world, my travels are true to their purpose in that respect. A logic could be developed, a logic that's perhaps forced, that it's best not to travel at all in order to maintain an illusion, and in fact, when I considered traveling, I was always conflicted between maintaining an illusion by not traveling, and seeing an illusion get shattered by traveling. I feel the same way about Turin, which I felt an urge to visit at one point, which brings the dilemma of whether to go to Turin, a city where the illusions I had about it were sure to get shattered the moment I set foot there, and see my illusions surely get shattered, or not go there and maintain my illusions. Perhaps the dilemma could be solved by maintaining my illusions for a while by not going to Turin for some time yet in the future, and then going there and seeing them get shattered.