Kyung-ran Jo - Tongue

Are you crying? My cheek is wet, warm. It’s as if we’ve touched the deepest parts of each other, the parts that are untouchable.

“I have someone like that, too. Someone who makes me feel like I’m living.”

Chef doesn’t say a word.

“I didn’t have enough time with him either.”

“Don’t. Don’t do that to yourself anymore.”

“If it were easy it wouldn’t be love.”

Chef is quiet.

“Don’t tell me that’s not true.”

“I won’t.”

“You know how there’s a taste that can’t be substituted by anything else in the world? There are people that can’t be substituted by any other person.”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

“This is enough for now.”

“Yeah, this is enough.”

“Yeah.”

We stay silent again.

He unglues his face from my cheek. I watch him letting go of my hands, lifting his shoulders, slowly moving his legs away from me. I close my eyes. Because if I were to see his body, I might continue to recall this vivid sensation, which feels like a hot root pushing through me.

“But you,” Chef says, slipping into his bathrobe, about to step away. “You’re so small.” His voice brims with heartbreaking emotion and the love he couldn’t give in its entirety, as if he were talking to his daughter, frozen in youth.

I hear the door shut.

My heart hasn’t wavered, I whisper into the darkness. But somewhere, something in my being has bent, as easily as a grapevine. I turn over on my side. My body heats up, as if someone has put his mouth around my heel.

HUMANS AND DOGS yearn for attention and love. While humans worry about what others think of them, dogs are more interested in your behavior. Dogs react differently if the other person is more dominant. But if a dog doesn’t get his way, he will gradually begin to use threats, even if he’s the most well-trained dog. Paulie, though confident and wise and graceful, has begun to think up ways to threaten me.

One day after it rains, Paulie plods into the living room from the yard. Mud is covering his beautiful golden-red fur and he smells musty. With mud caking everything but his eyes, Paulie barks once as if to tell me that he rolled in the mud on purpose, jumps onto the sofa, then leaps onto the butcher block. What are you doing, Paulie? I yell. Paulie glances at me and continues on, as if he wouldn’t even consider stopping until he gets what he wants. I don’t budge. I sit on a kitchen stool, not looking at him, pretending to read the magazine in front of me. A dog’s eyes are different from a human’s, but all eyes are sensitive to movement. I toss the magazine aside and stand up. Paulie, hesitating, lies down, his front paws placed side by side. Seok-ju doesn’t come to see Paulie anymore. Of course, he doesn’t come to see me, either. I want what you want, Paulie. But he doesn’t want what we want. You should understand that by now . I gently stroke his head to soothe him. Only the odor of the mud reverberates in the room. I push my hand deeper into Paulie’s coat. His scent’s completely evaporated now. You can’t wait obediently anymore, right, Paulie? You use your nose to understand and remember the world. Right? We’re having a conversation. A depressed dog, like a depressed person, shows physical symptoms—erratic behavior and eyes so cloudy that he wouldn’t be able to recognize his owner. We must be suffering from the same illness, and I think we communicate as best we can about it. But that turns out to be an incorrect belief.

A few days later, when I come home from work, Paulie is rolling a dead cat around like a ball, and when he sees me staring at him, a hand to my mouth, he plops down on top of it. As if to say, I’ve always liked smelly, squishy things. When I manage to pull Paulie away and stick him in the tub, he latches onto my neck. It’s not really a bite—he puts pressure on my neck with his muzzle the way he does when he pushes my knee, but we aren’t playing catch or wrestling like the other times. I feel a sudden terror. Dogs show their unhappiness with their mouths. If they’re pushed into a corner, they bite, even if it happens to be their owner. Paulie is agitated. I need to be calm. I have to be more attentive to his needs. Even though I’ve already turned on the water, I put the showerhead down on the floor as if to show him that I mean no harm. Whether you’re a dog or a human, if your needs are unfulfilled, you will feel like attacking. Is this what I’m really afraid of?

Paulie is still baring his teeth, revealing his beastly side. I turn off the water and slide down to the floor. We sit in a puddle, our bottom halves wet, staring at each other. You can’t do this, Paulie . I grab the scruff of his neck and raise him up, glaring into his eyes. A bite to the neck is a challenge to hierarchy. I sharply slap his skinny nose. If he continues to misbehave, the only thing left to do is stop feeding him. No. I lose my resolve and drop my hand. I shake my head. I have to think about what’s best for this old dog. What would be the best for Paulie? As if waiting for a new challenge, Paulie breathes hard, looking seriously into my eyes. I turn away from him in a firm and exaggerated gesture so that he will understand it, even with his failing eyesight. I want to say, Now we’re over.

I need to be firm. I don’t have the right to keep a dog when all I do is just look at him. I have no right to keep Paulie. Paulie is here not because he wants to stay with me but because he doesn’t have a choice. A dog doesn’t stay by his owner’s side in the face of danger out of love or loyalty. He’s merely waiting for what happens next. Humans think it’s because the dog loves his owner, but a dog is only a dog. I grab Paulie in an embrace. Paulie is only a dog. He’s merely his dog. Okay, I’ll bring you back to him, I whisper into Paulie’s ear. So you can stop being like this, Paulie . The perfect place for this dog is the house he, Paulie’s first owner, is living in. This is the last thing I can do for Paulie.

Before I send Paulie to him, to them, I realize something: Even the most well-trained dog will not move the way we want him to, and a dog feels terror, desire, curiosity, anger, satisfaction, hesitation, and loss just like us. A human instinctively wants to cuddle and protect a smaller and weaker being, furry and soft, with big eyes and a round head. And when Paulie is not acting up, he is so beautiful and gentle and loyal. Even though I know she can’t stand dogs, I dial her number, which I still know by heart, in the hopes that she will feel maternal toward him.

IN THE SUBWAY CAR on line three, I see a woman holding a large globe. I am going to work two hours earlier than usual, to meet the delivery of a big, twenty-five-kilogram perch and ten kilograms of blue crab from Wando Island. The woman looks straight ahead, her overstuffed duffel bag leaning on the seat next to her and the colorful globe on her lap, perhaps on her way to somewhere far. It’s unexpected to see a globe in an uncrowded subway car, and I stare at it as if I’ve never seen such a thing. When you spin a globe it feels like you can go anywhere in the world—the world is as small as your kitchen. But just as you can never see the Southern Cross from the North Pole, you can never see the other side of the world. You can leave whenever you want, but a time may come when staying here is beyond your willpower. The plastic globe sways on its axis with every shake of the subway car.