Jung Young Moon: Vaseline Buddha

And for some reason, I really liked the dark green sweater that she, a stage costume designer from the old East Germany who was almost out of work and who, as a result, was almost always free, and was, as a result, very poor, wore, which she knitted herself and was unraveling around the wrist — I thought I could even make love to the sweater — and thought I could keep seeing her as long as she wore the sweater when we met — and during the short time when we saw each other, she continued to wear the sweater when we met, as if she had nothing else to wear. I thought I liked her more because we were the same height and she wore an unraveling sweater, than because of the unique way in which she spoke English, or talked to another German person, such as a café employee, in her native German, or sat with her legs crossed, or twirled her hair as if she were having trouble recalling something. Looking at her sweater, I would sometimes think, with her sitting right there in front of me, I’m quite attracted to the owner of that sweater, what should I do? The sweater was something she made out of a piece of clothing she bought very cheap at a flea market, which she cut and sewed up so that the stitching showed on the outside, and I wandered around the streets with her, who was wearing the sweater, past midnight, and I was pleased to discover a ping-pong table in a park near her house where she took me, because the ping-pong table, which was standing in the middle of a silent park at two in the morning, looked somewhat out of place. I thought that two people playing ping-pong, listening to the quiet sound of a ping-pong ball while other people were asleep, would make a fine sight, but we didn’t play ping-pong or anything. When we sat down on a bench from which the ping-pong table could be seen, and she looked at me with her very big eyes and said, while talking about something, that there was a lake not far from the park in which people swam in the nude in summer, I felt an irresistible, fierce desire to pull the unraveling yarn of her sweater, even if it meant asking for permission, as if that were all that I wanted in the world at that moment — once, in a similar way, I was consumed with the desire to pull out at least two or three of the hairpins in the hair of a woman I met for the first time, for she was wearing too many hairpins in her hair, thereby ruining her own hair, and I wanted to help her by pouncing on her and pulling out her hairpins, in the same way I would want to help an old woman climbing up the stairs with difficulty (some desires came over me in such violent ways that I had to stand violently against them, or do something by cooperating with them) — and I thought that it might be nice to visit the city again in summer. And at one point her sweater as a whole seemed like a badly tangled skein, and feeling a very strange yet very natural desire to untangle a badly tangled skein, I couldn’t resist the desire to pull the unraveling yarn, and told her that, and she graciously said that I could pull it slightly, not too much. I pulled the yarn slightly with caution, and expressed the delight by stamping my feet, and as I did, I thought that there was a certain delight that could be expressed only by stamping your feet. We laughed together, and I felt as if we’d become friends.

When she told me that some time ago, when she was sharing a room with a friend, she was cleaning with the door open, and her friend’s robotic vacuum cleaner went out of the house and fell down the stairs, and somehow in the meantime, she found a large black dog standing in the living room, as if the robot cleaner had turned into a dog, I really felt as if we’d become friends. The robot cleaner was stupid and cunningly dodged, as she put it, spots that had to be cleaned, and mostly liked to stay under the bed. And the dog that had suddenly appeared didn’t look shabby, but smelled bad as if it had been roaming the streets and sleeping out in the open, so she had no choice but to turn it out of the house, but it wouldn’t leave willingly, and in the end, she was able to throw the dog out by turning on the robot cleaner, which she brought back inside, and was fortunately not broken. When she told me that she tried to put a cat she had at the time on the robot cleaner in operation and make it ride around on the cleaner, and finally succeeded after numerous attempts, I told her that she should make the cat ride around on the robot cleaner, wearing a little eye patch, and when she told me that she would, I felt an urge to kiss her. She said that the cat came to enjoy riding around on the robot cleaner very much after that.

And several days later, when we met again in the middle of the night and went to the park, and she suddenly jumped up on the trampoline that was there, and kept bouncing up and down on the trampoline as if overflowing with energy, as if she couldn’t control her overflowing energy, she farted unwittingly, without being able to help herself — for she wouldn’t have farted on purpose just to let me hear her fart — and when we heard the sound together, I felt an indescribable fondness for her.

The sound of the fart that had come from a woman who was jumping on a trampoline in a silent park in the middle of the night, a woman who was six feet tall, at that, wasn’t that loud, and so didn’t spread far, far away, cutting through the silence of the park in the middle of the night, but it sounded like the short but clear sound produced by an accidentally disturbed little bell, or the fleeting chirp of a bird, so the incident, which could have been quite embarrassing for both of us, was far from being quite embarrassing for both of us, and became something that made us feel quite merry, before we could even do anything about it. We broke out into merry laughter, and the reason why I felt merry, at least, was because the sound of the fart that had come from a very tall woman I didn’t know very well, and vanished into the air, made me think, as it vanished, that it was like a bubble that rose to the surface of a still pond, through a breath exhaled by a fish, or through some kind of an activity at the bottom of the pond. And watching her go up and down in the air on a trampoline in a silent park in the middle of the night, I felt as if she were the last survivor after the extinction of mankind, and jumping on a trampoline seemed just the thing to do for the last survivor after the extinction of mankind. And I thought that if mankind ended up going to a planet other than the moon, on which we have already set foot, the first thing we should do is set up a trampoline there and jump on it. In a way, what the astronaut who took the first step on the moon did was also jump, as if on a trampoline, on the moon whose gravity is much lower than that of the earth — the image seemed to be one of someone leaving his own world and landing on another. I felt an urge to sleep with her, the last survivor of the earth who was jumping on the trampoline by herself after mankind had disappeared. And the urge grew when I recalled that once, while having a meal at a restaurant in mist-shrouded St. Mark’s Square, I wondered if there was a trampoline in a park or a playground, with children jumping up and down on it in a thick mist, and thought it would be nice if there were such children.

Physical relations between us seemed a natural thing, only a matter of time, and we both knew that we wanted physical relations, but our relations did not advance into such. For reasons I don’t understand, it seems that I anticipated in my heart a development into a physical relationship that could soon take place, but at the same time, wanted to prevent it in any way I could. And there was a practical reason, too, for I wasn’t well at the time and wasn’t sure if sex was indeed possible. It was almost certain that sex wasn’t possible, and I was sure, almost confident, in that respect, and it could be nice to fail in your attempt to have sex with someone for the first time, making that person fail as well, and to do something unforgettable as a man, thus becoming an unforgettable man to that person.