Jung Young Moon - Vaseline Buddha

It seemed that it could be fun to be arrested by the French police, in the event that I hit a swan in the palace pond of an old French king and made it swoon or die, and have a French newspaper print a small article on a foreigner from the East who incurred the anger of the sensible people of France by hurting or killing, with no reason at all or with a clear objective, one of the elegant swans long beloved by the royal family, the aristocrats, and the people of France. And it seemed that it wouldn’t be so bad to be in the paper for something like that. Perhaps I could be arrested by the police and make false statements to my own disadvantage, or plead the Fifth and say nothing to the end, thinking to myself that what I did was express anger on behalf of all the immigrants and foreign residents who have been persecuted and are still being persecuted in the country of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and then go to a French jail or be deported. Once that occurred to me, I felt strongly tempted to carry it out into action. At that moment I was fully ready to pay the price for a misdeed I hadn’t even yet committed and saw it as a necessary step that criminals must take. But it was something that required great courage, and entailed the very tiresome process of repeated failures until actually hitting a swan and making something happen to it, and it was for that reason that it was difficult for me to carry out in reality. Still, although I was tired and exhausted from the midday heat of summer, I kept on thinking that I should, not submitting to it, in a way, commit an atrocious act of some kind. But it helped to have had my fill of such undesirable thoughts about swans. By having various thoughts about swans, I could keep myself from actually doing something to them. Thinking a lot about something was a great way to keep yourself from carrying your thoughts out into action, although, of course, it depended on the way you thought. By thinking a certain thought, you could think that you’ve carried the thought out into action, or done something more.

For a long time I watched, from a spot where the garden of Versailles could be seen at one glance, an autistic looking child flailing his arms in anger, and listened to him screaming his head off, thinking that he was expressing my own state of mind, but at the same time, I felt almost intimidated by the sharp noise and went somewhere else, and picked up a stone from the innermost part of the Versailles Palace, where there was almost no one, and threw it at some birds sitting on a nearby tree, and, having done that, I could finally leave the spot; throwing a ball absentmindedly, or aiming at something, was one of the things that made me feel strangely excited when I was a child, and is still one of my secret hobbies. How many stones had I thrown at rivers and trees as a child?

But the swans of Versailles reminded me of the fact that it wasn’t really true that I didn’t have anything against swans. I recalled the family of swans, consisting of a couple and two cygnets, that lived in a small pond in a little park in a small French town I once stayed in, where I took regular walks. But one day, the cob literally went crazy, and could no longer control its anger, and did not hide the fact. In the end, it bit both of the cygnets to death, after which it became even more vicious and attacked people, and even after people shut it up in a fence it escaped the fence and continued to attack people, and I was one of the victims.

At the time I chose to flee instead of getting into a ridiculous fight with the swan that suddenly came rushing at me, wounded me slightly by pecking at my buttocks, and again aimed at my weak spot with its huge wings spread out, because it instantly occurred to me that our weapons were much too different — a fight between a swan, which could use nothing but its beak, and me, who could use both my hands and my feet, would be as ludicrous as a fight between a sea lion and a camel — for our fight to be fair. And what I felt after the somewhat awkward incident with the swan, which disappeared from the park soon after — I don’t know if it was sent somewhere else or was executed — was a somewhat pleasant sensation, which was also the case when a puppy suddenly appeared from an open gate of someone’s house while I was walking in an alley in the town sometime before that, and disappeared back into the gate after lightly biting my leg. Curiously, the puppy had a string with a blue balloon attached to it tied around its neck, and it was possible that the puppy did what it did to me because it was excited or angry over the balloon that a child at that house had hung on it for fun.

And what made it possible for me to leave France, which had made me break up with my girlfriend, were the dragonflies flying in the air over the Versailles Palace. No, perhaps that wasn’t true, but I made an effort to think that it was. The dragonflies that flew around in confusion as if they owned the sky drained all my energy, and made me feel strangely uncomfortable, and, above all, dizzy. It seemed that my dizziness wouldn’t subside even if I distributed my dizziness all around to the countless dragonflies flying dizzily in the air. I wanted to leave Versailles, and France, in order to get away from the dragonflies, but I couldn’t do so right away, for I could get on a flight home only the day after.

And as a result, my ordeal in France continued for a little longer. I stayed in a cheap Arab hotel at the foot of the Montmartre Hill, the owner of which looked as if he had walked right out of The Arabian Nights into reality, being big, with a long beard, and wearing a turban on his head, and looked so indefinably Arab, even when you considered the fact that he was Arab, thus looking like a non-Arab who was disguised as an Arab, but anyway, the inside of the hotel was even shabbier than its shabby exterior.

When night came, I barely managed to fall asleep, being extremely tired and trying to put up with the still-loud noise that came from a nightclub nearby, but soon woke to find, to my surprise, that my body was literally tilted to a side, that the lower part of my body was on the floor, and what was even more surprising was that the bed, too, was tilted along with myself. It was clear that the bed had tilted when one of its legs, temporarily fixed and barely supporting the bed, fell out.

Lying askew on the bed, watching the glittering light of the neon sign of a bar reflected by the window, and listening to the music to which some might be dancing, I thought that I didn’t want to have any patience in a place that required great patience, and almost losing my patience, I had the vague thought that by making an issue of everything that could turn into an issue, you could stir up and raise an issue, and at the same time, either find or not find a solution to the issue. The various sounds that came in through the window didn’t please me at all, and I thought that I had a good reason for not being pleased. The sounds were actually noises that tormented me, for I had experienced the horrors of noise more than the horrors of anything else, and had never been able to shake off my fear of noise. Several times, I’d felt an intense urge to kill someone all because of noise. One day someone who lived right next door to me played, endlessly and desperately all afternoon, a hymn called “Faith, Hope, and Charity” on a brass wind instrument, either a trumpet or a saxophone, probably practicing for some kind of a church performance, which drove me nearly insane, and I had to, with great effort, keep myself from running over to strangle the person.

But when the noise from the nightclub subsided after a few hours and I tried to sleep again after temporarily fixing the bed leg, there was something else that kept me from falling asleep. Something seemed to be moving very quietly in the silence, and there was, in fact, something moving very quietly. At first, looking at the thing, hovering over the boundary between the circle of the faint light and the shadow created by the bedside lamp, I thought I was dreaming. But the thing, which appeared in the form of a shadow in the beginning, but soon cast off the shadow and revealed itself, gradually came toward me like some kind of a fluid movement being made on the floor, and the thing, which looked like a mouse in every respect, was none other than a mouse, and it was as real as the mirror hanging on a wall and the reflection of a mouse in the mirror. So there was no mouse that appeared before me, and I had not imagined a mouse, listening to the distinct sound made by mice running around busily or cautiously above the ceiling. (I already feel that I’ve forgotten how and why I’ve come to tell this story, but that won’t really be a problem.)