Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

But here beneath me, K was falling away, the line of her mouth softening, and though someone (even the doctor) could come by at any moment, I crawled around and lay down behind her, so that our bodies were aligned, nestled like spoons. She was warm and still and I gently pressed my face into the back of her neck and breathed in the oily musk of her hair. And it was so that I finally began to touch her. I put my hand on the point of her hip and could feel all at once the pliancy of it and the meagerness and the newness, too. I felt bewildered and innocent and strangely renewed, as though a surge of some great living being were coursing up my arm and spreading through my unknowing body. She was sleeping, or pretending to sleep, or somehow forcing herself to, and she did not move or speak or make anything but the shallowest of breaths, even as I was casting myself upon her. I kissed as much of her body as was bared. I kissed her small breasts, which seemed to spill a sweet, watery liquid. I gagged but did not care. Then it was all quite swift and natural, as chaste as it could ever be. And when I was done I felt the enveloping warmth of a fever, its languorous cocoon, though when I gazed at her shoulder and back there was nothing but stillness, her posture unchanged, her skin cool and colorless, and she lay as if she were the sculpture of a recumbent girl and not a real girl at all.

I said then, I love you, and she didn’t answer. I love you, I said again, in Korean, not whispering it this time but speaking it as clearly as I could, and when she didn’t reply I assumed she was completely asleep. I rose carefully and stepped back and buckled my trousers, wanting desperately to wake her and kiss her on the mouth but instead letting her remain, recalling how restive and sleepless she said she’d been. I would have done anything then to lend her some peace. I would have executed whatever she asked of me, helped her even to escape. I would have willingly injured another human being had she asked, or needed me to. And it unnerves me even now how particular and exacting that sensation was, how terribly pure. That a man pleasured could so easily resolve himself to the whole spectrum of acts, indifferent and murderous and humane, and choose with such arbitrary will what he shall have to remember forever and forever.

I went out of her closet-room, whispering to her that I would return in several hours, with food for her and maybe something to drink, and thinking ahead to an entire evening in her company; but as I gently shut the door I thought I heard a murmur. I couldn’t lock it; to do so seemed at that moment too cruel. Instead I stood quietly for a moment and waited and indeed it was K, saying over and over very quietly what sounded most peculiarly like hata-hata, hata-hata. But as I listened more closely I realized that she was fitfully crying, though in quelled gasps, as if she were trying to hush herself. I was afraid to move, lest she hear me, and so I remained, my ear lightly pressed to the worn wood of the door, until she quieted and was silent again and in fact fell asleep, her breathing deep and certain.

After I left her I found myself in a state of unease and exhilaration. I could understand why she should become upset, that she was perhaps sad for the end of her maidenhood (which I thought then was the most precious ore of any woman), but hadn’t I professed my devotion to her, hadn’t I in mitigation said the words that should let her know what I was intending for us, after the war? I thought I should have also told her that I was now resolved to speak candidly with Captain Ono, that I was prepared to suggest to him my keeping a log of my duties around the camp and infirmary — which I had indeed begun compiling. At least I would not wilt and fade and disappear before him, as I had score upon score of times.

And yet I had no other, further plan; there was no good recourse from her required duties to the camp, there was no actual reprieve I was offering her. I loved her, though I cannot say how that love was or if it was true or worthy in any sense, having never in my life been sure how such a thing should be. I can say I wanted her and could not bear her being with another, and if those are veritable signs, then I should rightly hold her in memory in every way that I am able, and to the last of my days.

Captain Ono, however, was seemingly nowhere to be found; I even sought him out at the commander’s hut, rapping on the door sharply until the new sentry ran up around the side and requested that I stop, saying the colonel was “resting” for the afternoon. The captain had indeed been around, he said, with his medical kit, as he had each morning for some days, and in the afternoons the colonel required strictly undisturbed quiet, as ordered by Captain Ono.

I recalled then the multiple requisitions I had just sent by courier to Rangoon for morphine and ether, as our supply for surgery was curiously dwindling, despite our not having conducted any recent procedures. I had long suspected he was medicating the commander, though certainly not against the man’s will, as one sometimes saw them talking in the evenings on the veranda of the hut, the colonel’s demeanor familiar and jovial, if a bit too loose. The probable fact of this further emboldened me, and as I went around the camp in search of the doctor I felt more determined than ever to withstand whatever insult he might level at me, and somehow influence him to agree to my sole stewardship of “the girl” under some obscure technical or medical rationale.

So sure of myself was I, so certain of my imminent resolve, that the thought of committing an aggression seemed again suddenly quite natural to me, as if I were a man long accustomed to the necessity of such things. I remember suddenly feeling suited to the notion, perhaps even bristling with it as I strode purposefully about the camp, the image of Ono desperate and pained beneath the weight of my will. For I had been quietly considering various revenges upon him, drawing up the ways I would pay him back for his diatribes and affronts, my plans including, too, the most extreme of acts. Had someone asked, I would have denied any such thoughts, but in the core of my heart I was tending the darkest fires. I had certainly despised others before, particularly the boys in the school I attended after being adopted by the Kurohatas, boys who treated me with disdain most of the time and at worst like a stray dog. Each day I vowed to wreak vengeance upon them, see them through some terrible circumstance I’d contrived, or else await the hand of fate. But nothing ever transpired. I never attempted to mark them, and soon enough we passed on to the upper school and there were plenty of others to befriend, both cause and enmity mercifully fading from my mind. I say mercifully because it was never my nature to harbor such thoughts, which have always been near-caustic to me, but in respect to the doctor a vital, searing charge was propelling me, an ashen, bitter hate whose taste I no longer abhorred.

And though exactly how I cannot describe, mixed up with this was my feeling for K, and my sudden sense of her nearness to me. It was a connection aside from what we had just done, what I should say I believed already to be a special correspondence between us, an affinity of being. This may sound specious — one may rightly think here was a young man in the blush of his first sexual love, typically conflating sensation and devotion — but I was not thinking so much of her body or even the desirous tentacled feeling of mine. I was considering what she had suggested about our pretending to be other people, like figures in a Western novel, imagining how we could somehow exist outside of this place and time and circumstance, share instead the minute and sordid problems of such folks, the vagaries and ornate dramas of imperfect love.