Jung Young Moon - Vaseline Buddha

Reflecting thus, I laughed bitterly. And laughter, though weak, found me again before long, but it seemed like the laughter of an idiot I met on the street, a stranger, directed at me.

I continued to be in a poor condition in many ways, but I hadn’t yet reached a state in which the poor condition had continued for so long that I didn’t care, but I wasn’t in a state in which I could do something in a new, bad mood, either.

Anyway, what kept my poor condition from growing worse, no, kept me, to an extent, from completely crumbling, was my son. Or I should say that the thought crossed my mind. But I wasn’t sure if that was really the case. I kind of thought that my son wasn’t able to keep me from growing worse by thinking worse thoughts. I didn’t have the kind of relationship that most fathers have with their children with my son.

My son didn’t live with me, and when vacation started, I brought him home and we spent several days together. I tried to spend as much time with him as possible, but it wasn’t easy for me to spend time with him.

My son, who, as most children do, let me down, by being born as a boy even though I wanted a girl, and let me down again by looking like a girl at first but growing more and more into a boy, seemed bright but somewhat slow in a way, and as for myself, I tried not to be someone he didn’t need, at least, or was better off without.

Once I taught him how to catch rabbits using a wire snare, not because I thought it was something that all the fathers in the world should teach their sons in all ages, but because we didn’t really have anything to do together when we actually met, and I happened to think of snares. We lay a snare on a path that no one used, on a mountain at the back of my house where no rabbits lived, and when we returned later, there was nothing in the snare, of course, let alone a rabbit.

And once I bought him a slingshot. It seems incredible now, but as a boy, I made slingshots out of branches and rubber bands and caught birds with them, and I thought about making him a slingshot myself, but didn’t want to bother. (I don’t know about anything else, but I just can’t bring myself to do bothersome things, and although I did unpleasant things even while thinking I didn’t want to, I couldn’t do the same with bothersome things. So when there’s something that I must do, I do it thinking, if possible, that it’s something unpleasant rather than bothersome.)

With the slingshot we went to the mountain to catch a magpie, since there were only magpies there. I demonstrated how to use the slingshot, but that didn’t go so well, either. (It seemed that there was an eccentric old man in me, as old as could be and willing to lose all his judgment, as well as a boy around ten years of age wanting to remain in the peace of childhood, and the two appeared alternately, and the problem arose when the old man and the boy, who usually got along pretty well, looked down on each other, and a bigger problem arose when the old man and the boy faded away, and an awkward adult who found everything bothersome appeared, and that was the case when I was dealing with my boy.) Nevertheless, he practiced how to use the slingshot as I taught him, but he wasn’t very good at it, just as expected. And yet, after we climbed a steep hill, both gasping for breath because my liver was damaged from smoking, which I couldn’t quit, and his wasn’t fully developed yet, something amazing happened, and a stone he threw casually at a magpie sitting on a branch, which missed the target, hit the wing of a magpie that was flying up into the air, which wobbled for a moment, then steadied itself and flew away, and seeing that, he got excited and jumped up and down for joy. Seeing his great delight, I thought that it wasn’t something to get so excited about that you had to jump up and down for joy. Still, I told him something that wasn’t far off, that with a slingshot, you could make something like a roe deer, which lives in bigger mountains, black out for a moment although you couldn’t kill it, and my son, who already has a problem believing most of what I say even though he’s only nine, said with a twinkle in his eyes that we should go to a bigger mountain right away and catch something bigger, and I told him that I knew how he felt, but he should wait a little longer, until he was a little bigger.

Nevertheless, I instructed him to practice more so that he could shoot a flying magpie for real, and feeling triumphant, he practiced till the sun went down, not to do as I instructed but, it seemed, to shoot a flying magpie for real. But he didn’t practice for that long, because the sun soon went down. He could have kept practicing after dark, but he gave up. He took after me and lacked perseverance.

I thought that I wasn’t sure what I could do for him, but that I wasn’t sure, either, if I could do anything and everything if it were for him, and regardless of that thought, I thought of things I should teach him as a father, and taught him how to swim. For some reason, I thought that I had to make sure to teach him how to float on water, how not sink when you fell in water. But he gave up soon after swallowing a few gulps of water, and was reluctant to do anything that involved the possibility of having to swallow water. So I taught him how to jump ropes and do sit-ups, which didn’t involve drinking water, and although he couldn’t jump the rope even once, he could do sit-ups quite well, as if he’d been doing it for a long time, ever since he was born, even though it was his first time, and did thirty sit-ups at once the night I taught him, possessed with a strange enthusiasm, as if he took great pleasure in it, and didn’t listen to me when I told him to stop, and did thirty more, and in the end, reached a hundred, sounding out of breath — he made me kneel down and hold his ankles, and count to a hundred, and I thought about stopping him but I stopped myself from stopping him and watched as he, too, counted the numbers, folding his body in half and unfolding it, and gasping for breath, and as I did I felt something like the sorrow of a father who has a son, not too severely, but mildly, no, severely and mildly at the same time — and at last fell asleep, utterly exhausted, which seems appropriate only for a child, but is somewhat strange even for a child.

And once I taught him how to spin a top, but he didn’t have an easy time learning it, and we were both beset with great difficulty until he could spin a top properly. But once he learned how to spin a top he became hooked, and buried himself in spinning a top both at home and outside. As a result, I had to feel a dizziness that was different from my usual dizziness, watching the top he was spinning, which spun around in a circle that was a vivid black and red and blue, so I tried, much too hard, to focus on the red at the center so that the other two colors next to it would disappear and no longer be seen, which made the dizziness grow worse.

There really was quite a strange side to him, which I confirmed one day when I finally woke up around four in the afternoon because I’d drunk too much the night before to find him sitting quietly on the edge of the bed with his back to me. He sat by himself without waking me up till that hour, only drinking water like someone fasting, and at that moment he seemed not just strange, but a little scary as well. Next to me, on the bed, there was some kind of a castle he’d built with Lego blocks. He never told me if he hadn’t completed it or if he’d torn it down after completing it because I never asked him about it. That day, I had the ridiculous idea that perhaps I could take him, or make him take me on a journey, and start a true life of wandering as Molloy did, not just go on a trip.

I asked him what he was thinking, and he, with a look of severe reproof on his face, told me that he couldn’t tell me that, and so I was able to conclude that he was once again thinking negative thoughts about me. It seemed to me that he was thinking about ordering me around and making me do something when I woke up, condemning me in his young heart.