Jung Young Moon - Vaseline Buddha

After that, while watching a program introducing the most skilled tattoo experts in various parts of America, on a channel specializing in tattoos and aired tattoo related programs all day — after I returned from the trip, I wanted to get a tattoo, and although I’ve decided on what shape and size I want, I haven’t gotten one yet because I can’t make up my mind as to where on my body I want it — I felt an urge to go outside, but I made a simple, but in its own way big, resolution that I would never go see the Statue of Liberty, one of the things that represented New York — the resolution could be as big as the resolution to visit New York and see all the works in the possession of the Museum of Modern Art — and I was able to keep the resolution.

After spending the day in this way I woke up the next morning, feeling pleased that I hadn’t done anything that a first time visitor to New York should do as a matter of course even though I was in New York, and I went to the bathroom and ran a bath in the tub, and while taking a bath, I thought that it might be nice to get a small live octopus and spend time with it in the water. There was a big tub in the bathroom, and it seemed that an octopus would look well in it. The octopus could come out of the bathroom and roam around the room if it wanted, and we could stay in the room together without any regard to each other.

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.