I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like (31 page)

—
I’m not really that into archery, Park said.

—
So? Come with me.

Park started to walk back to the station. He checked his watch: classes started in another twenty minutes.

—
Are you working tonight? Tomo asked.

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Yeah.

Before they reached the edge of the Hanazono grounds he saw a number of other students wearing the uniform. There were a few he recognized from his junior high school classes, but he tried not to make eye contact. He remembered the grounds from a visit last year, especially the central building’s large arched entrance. Hanazono had been a prestigious girls’ high school in the middle of the century, but years of cutbacks had dampened its reputation. It had opened to male students ten years earlier due to falling enrollment rates.

—
All right I’ll see you later I guess, Park said.

Tomo looked at him.

—
What do you mean?

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Our homerooms are different, I checked.

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Oh. Alright, later.

Park took a letter from the school from his pocket and unfolded it. His homeroom was on the second floor. Already a line of students had crowded the stairway.

When he looked up again Kikuko was still standing in front of him.

—
So are you going to come with me later or not?

He folded the letter again and put it away.

—
All right, send me a message when you’re ready.

He walked to the second floor and found the room, but the door was closed. He checked his watch and saw that he still had another ten minutes.

Three girls stood outside the room talking. He nodded at them but they ignored him, so he sat on the floor and took a notebook from his bag, pretending to read it while he caught sections of their conversation. Only one of them interested him. Her lips were darker on the outside than on the inside, so that a smaller, pinker smile appeared when she pursed them. Her skin was the color of wild honey, her hair rusted gold. When asked a question she paused and scrunched her mouth to the side and a little hollow appeared in her cheek.

An electronic beep sounded and all three girls took out their mobile phones. Finding nothing, they looked over at him briefly before returning to their conversation.

Park took out his phone. There was a message from Tomo, which he deleted without reading.

•

At lunch he found a table by the far window and sat by himself, taking out the lunchbox his mother had prepared for him. As he raised a prawn to his mouth, he noticed two third-year girls standing by the window. When they saw him looking they came over.

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Can we sit here? one of them said, and sat down.

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Sure.

He looked at her. She was wearing too much makeup.

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Are you a first-year..? she asked.

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Yeah.

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Oh.

He picked up another prawn with his chopsticks. He could feel them staring at him, watching him eat. He shifted his legs under the table.

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What’s your name? the other girl said.

He told them.

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I’m Mutsumi, the first girl said.

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Saya, said the other.

Mutsumi reached over and took a piece of chicken from Park’s lunchbox.

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You know, you’re really lucky we’re letting you sit with us, she said.

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Yeah, Saya said. I mean we usually don’t hang out with first-years.

He looked at Mutsumi’s face as she stared directly into his eyes. Her lips parted slightly. He wondered how many times she’d been fucked.

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How come you’re sitting by yourself, don’t you have any friends? Saya asked.

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My friend’s coming in a little bit.

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Oh, really? Mutsumi said.

He took out his phone and looked over his old messages.

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That phone’s really light, is that Docomo? Mutsumi asked.

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Softbank.

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Can I see it?

He handed it to her and felt her nails brush his hand. They were painted light pink, overlaid with tiny pastel hearts.

Mutsumi typed something on the keypad and handed the phone back to him.

—
I put my number in.

She smiled.

—
So you have to send me a message.

Eventually he saw Tomo coming through the door. Park caught his eye and he came over and sat down. Mutsumi glanced at him, then began talking to Saya rapidly about a girl who’d broken her ankle by tripping in high heels.

—
She’s really disgusting, he heard Saya say.

Whenever a girl they disliked came through the door, they remarked on the sloppiness of her uniform, the cheapness of her haircut, or the awkward manner of her walk. Park caught only fragments of the conversation; Tomo was telling him about the clubs he’d investigated. He wanted to know whether Park was interested in attending the Photography Circle meeting with him. When Park ignored him, he said:

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Well, I mean I guess I won’t go either then.

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You should go if you’re interested, Park said.

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No, I’m not that interested either, but. I just thought it might be worth checking out. Anyway, yeah, are you going to the archery thing with Kikuko?

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No.

Park closed his lunchbox.

—
Why were you with her anyway?

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She just met me at the station. She was telling me about how she went to this group meeting about whales becoming extinct, whales being overhunted.

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Don’t encourage her, don’t reply to her messages.

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I wasn’t encouraging her, she just showed up.

Park stood. As he made for the door, Saya said:

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Are you guys leaving?

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Yeah.

Mutsumi’s eyes widened in comic sorrow.

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Why, do you have class now?

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Yeah, Park said.

His next class wasn’t for half an hour.

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Which one?

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English History with Fukaya.

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Oh, I had that. He’s really boring. You should stay here and hang out with us.

—
I will next time.

They waved at him as he left. In the corridor he agreed to meet Tomo the next night, then walked to a study hall on the second floor, anxious to be alone. After a few minutes he sent a message to Kikuko, telling her he had to work and couldn’t meet her. Then he rested his head on the table and stared out the window, rolling a pen across the table with his palm. He replayed the last half hour in his head, imagining Saya and Mutsumi chewing on Tomo’s flesh, undressing him with knives, tearing off his penis with their teeth, sitting on either side of him so that the table rocked like a seesaw, each movement bringing one of their mouths to his neck, his chest, his groin; their makeup running with spit and come, a lacework of blood in their hair—

From the desk he could see the tops of the trees that surrounded Hanazono, their branches now in flower.

•

He walked to the station alone and pushed his way through the queue: his mother expected him at the florist by five. Soon the express train arrived and emptied, and the crowd pushed forward. Park held onto the overhead bar and looked at the seated passengers, preparing to move every time the train stopped. Finally a woman by the door stood up as they approached Shibuya. Park edged into her seat and took a book from his bag: a thick paperback, its title obscured by the heavy tape holding the cover in place. Flipping to one of the bookmarks, he opened to the Gospel of John.

Ragged from its years of use, Park’s Bible had become unreadable to anyone but him. Its margins were crowded with annotations and cross-references, his favorite passages circled in pen. Elsewhere, entire pages had been crossed off or torn out, discarded as irrelevant. Park had carried it with him for five years, reading nothing else. He regarded fiction as tepid and protracted, and nonfiction as a transparent lie, since a word and its object could never meet, not even in a dream. Only the Bible gave him any comfort. In particular, it seemed pointless to him to draw any morality from the pages of that tattered catalogue of murders. All that mattered were the passions of ancient women steeped in blood and idols: Delilah and eyeless Samson, Judith slaying the Assyrian in his bed, Salome who danced for the Baptist’s head. Then there was the death of Judas — recounted in Matthew as a hanging and again in Acts as a fall. This lonely, ambiguous death had a special dignity and beauty; it seemed to encompass a kind of infinity for which he couldn’t find words. Again he imagined Judas hanging himself in the Potter’s Field, and in another part of his mind, the fall and its broken flesh. The juxtaposition of the two — Judas’s snapped neck and ruptured organs — seemed far in excess of Christ’s miserable death.

He looked up as a group of Hanazono students entered from the adjacent car. As they huddled together by the door, he recognized one of them as the girl from his homeroom. He looked down and pretended to keep reading, examining her from the side whenever she wasn’t looking. From his seat, he could see her long, thin fingers and the smooth curves of her wrists. He overheard her name as Shiho.

One of the other girls noticed him and he stared past her out the window, reconstructing her features in his mind, drawing the lines of her face to their conclusions. He imagined the weight of ten, twenty, then thirty years piled on her: flesh sagging, hair thinning, weariness dulling her eyes. Time taut against her flesh like an invisible insulation. Tiny fragments of her shearing away even as the seconds advanced on his watch, slices of her youth and beauty discarded like pared nails.

He heard Shiho laugh: a loud, careless sound, her voice naturally deep and clear. He studied her face, his mind rushing to dismantle it, but as he let himself relax — tracing her movements, the way she carried her shoulders, the corners of her lips, her small, gently curving nose — he saw only a perfect unity and symmetry. Unlike the others, there was no entrance to her, nothing to suggest a weakness: her beauty was unassailable. Looking at her he felt stilled and suspended, emptied of hope. He wanted to see what absolute contempt would look like carved on her features — the detachment of it, all empathy gone. How could he get her to hate him?

The next stop was approaching... he shoved the Bible into his bag and leaned over the edge of the seat. When one of the girls turned her head in his direction, he raised his arm and gestured to her. The girl assumed he was motioning to someone else; when Shiho noticed him he caught her attention and waved her over. She stood hesitating, but he repeated the gesture until she exchanged a look with her friends and walked over by herself. As she approached he looked up and fixed his eyes on hers.

—
Hey, he said. You’re in my homeroom, right.

She looked at him.

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Do you want to go out somewhere, if you’re free.

He waited for her face to harden against him, for her eyes to freeze in hate like the sun.

Instead she said:

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Who are you?

There was no tension in her voice, no resistance. She looked bored, slightly worried.

—
I’m Park Seok-Hwan, he said. I’m in your homeroom... we go to Hanazono together.

Before he could say anything else one of her friends called her name as their stop came and she backed away to the door. He watched her join the crowd on the platform, remembering his glimpse of her fingernails. In the light of the train they had seemed almost transparent. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the rails until the voice called his station.

When he reached the store he found that his mother had already left. As he entered, Mrs. Matsukawa came out from behind the counter.

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Good, you’re here. I have to pick up my daughter, can you manage until seven?

Park nodded as she left and began to adjust one of the flower arrangements in the window. When Park’s father had died, his mother had used the insurance money to open the florist with Mrs. Matsukawa. The venture had paid off, almost entirely because of Sujung’s diligence. She managed her account book scrupulously and promoted the business herself, often taking out ads in the paper. Park filled in for her every week night, tending the counter until she returned at ten to do the day’s balance.

He looked up as he heard the door again. A woman in white boots and a royal blue scarf had just entered, carrying a small black handbag. He recognized Junko immediately, although it was the first time he could recall that she’d come to the store.

—
I thought I might find you here, she said, and smiled.

Park smiled back. Because of his frequent presence at her house, Junko’s attitude towards him had softened since their first meeting. She liked him more now — or pretended to for Tomo’s sake. But since they were alone, he took her smile as genuine.

—
Anything I can help you with?

She walked to the counter and picked up one of the brochures.

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My niece is getting married and I can’t make it to the wedding, but I’d like to send them something anyway.

Park handed her a different brochure.