here in the Pacific Northwest, I guess I always understood that I was different from other people. We had everything; they had nothing. We could never be poor or have needs, others would have to mold themselves into institutions in order to get by; they would have to play by the rules. Tusk was more pure poise, pure energy balanced but never releasing itself.”
"SEATTLE is fascinating because she can be anything; she chooses not to be. The economics householders can’t choose art; the arts person can choose to be a business manager.”
"TUSK thinks of me as a certain type; I am the perfection of ‘beautiful sad-eyed dark-haired girl.’ It is a form of categorization to be perceived outside as such type; if we are ‘Asian artists,’ that itself is a value judgment, and that itself is a category that cannot in kind include the tenor of the artistic choice, the path selection that is the predominant motif of events until now. I couldn’t be the groundbreaking artist myself—this was TUSK’s goal, but then in turn he became silent; he withdrew into himself, he disappointed arguably more than I did, that unofficial non-sellout pack of his nineteenth year (I was twenty-one). Image, sound, memory, impression: these themselves would defy long-winded description. To drown yourself in a Nam June Park video. To lose yourself in regional studies. Even in the ride up, out to eastern Washington, there was coffee, there was a diner, there was those dark mysterious woods spinning past the windshield, an ache for experience or memory or loss, a source of dark creativity, of fears in the night, of the stories that would unfold wherever so they would, an answer to identity art.”
"What we did was drive out for long distances, until the odometer ticking over was some kind of event in itself. 19,999 miles, then 20. I think she left, that last time, to get into her car, without looking back, a swerving, a capture in sunlight that would later constitute a memory. It was an episode; an interruption. I showed her the calluses on my palm from intensely gripping the steering wheel in bridge input tunnels in the city; then I showed the map, the distances crossed; that territory.”
"You cannot capture the real things in narration. The play of moonlight on a field, that impression of the night drive’s back from some favored destination: it was there; those people interacted; that thing was felt.”
"Shopping mall, woman questioned, staff at McDonalds wondering at cash changing hands, people at dinner tables not wanting to be talked about openly. Lack of affect; narcissicism.”
She was an ‘older sister type.’ That much was the crux of things, underlay why the relationship would go so far and then proceed no further. If she felt this overwhelming urge to protect TUSK, to keep him from all possible harm, he in turn felt that there was no other girl who could quite pull off things as well as her. And there were fake imitations. The Wellesley girl who thought Paris was the most exotic and appropriate destination for an heiress (please). The actually mentally unstable girl who thought newspaper articles were in reference to her; who criticized random other people at a reunion dinner table (uh, hi, they don’t know you). Nobody else could just be pure artistic sentiment combined with an absolute black hole of lack of desire. There was one last swan song, one last flotation, a drifting away into a sea of stars, this game of love that ended just so. Taos would be like that; New York’s art scene would be like this; but here, white paper, black ink words, you didn’t need a penny more or a penny less, to be transported, transformed.
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SEATTLE was beautiful beautiful beautiful. In Tokyo there had been drunken nights. In Kyoto they had both looked with awe at that huge train station with the stairs all the way to the top. And then TUSK had lost his wallet, and shared SEATTLE’s sandwich. They argued in such a way that was unforgivable, and then they were all right to each other, and then she walked off at the airport. He had never had a chance; he was deluding himself. But she loved him, too; in an older-sister way.
"Those East Coast boys, so whipped by society, so unable to just be who they are. It’s not even the real America really. The woods extend five thousand miles north from Seattle up to the very arctic circle, where they disappear into white snow conifers. The identity politicker, the accumulators; the dingy brown hand extended forward for hand-outs. What do they know of these depths; those silent frozen tundras and dark as night forests where the owls call and the wolves prowl? This is Pacific northwest temperate rain forests.”
She graduated; she returned home; she tried to be an artist, but didn’t produce anything that was stunningly good. She was all right; she was decent. She was respected. But she herself was beautiful; she herself was so untouchable, so ethereal. “We had one class together, taught by a thin Christian. We came together around the book ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ and I saw some things TUSK worked on, I thought he was clearly the recessive character. He only understood this by the very end.” The road goes on and on. The two drive out to unknown destinations. Neither makes a play for the other.
That was the end of SEATTLE, to be remembered, most intensely, years later, at a program with one hundred eighty SEATTLE copies, but nobody quite comparing, the “” girl with no desires, no future, and no intent to stick around. The lump in one’s throat, sticking, was a form of false nostalgia—and something hasn’t been captured, either, the Japanese restaurant, the past stories, the one previous relationship that affected everything and made everything impossible. Cell phones, calculators, data pads, consumer electronics streaming in at highest possible velocity into everyone’s lives and tearing us all apart.
Farhome tapped on her iPhone. Sunday.
Several years after separating ways with Seattle, Tusk found himself at a Japanese language program located at some time-space-culture nexus directly apposite the experience, and this is a narration or account of those six weeks, two different years of three weeks, taking as it does the institution of the novel, narration, plot, and language as its main theme. In this first and last final accounting of things, things would have to begin with the understanding that like last year and like other programs unfolding, the main play of action was over, and Week 6 could only be about accounting, tying up things, letting go others. Within the fourth floor kitchen, a drama unfolded between three Japanese girls, IOTA, GOAT, and TUSK, and here is a natural segue into that third and interesting personality, IOTA, who found and located her coalition of cute, and then led it at the orientation walkabout; what kind of girl looks for other cute girls and self-identifies with this value as a sort of aesthetic identification, to be little miss oblong-eyes at a program of one hundred girls?
IOTA, and this is what we are getting at, loved the ‘kawaii’ (cute). What she would do is deliberately buy some little small plate rather than a practical medium or large sized one, so that inconveniently for the next three years she would have to serve herself little tiny mountains of rice or little tiny portions of whatever else was served, while her family rolled their eyes and found their own daughter tiresome, that dinner would be turned into some kind of production, and she would then draw little girly eyes on her pencil sharpener and name inanimate objects; that she would live in a self-created bubble of cute, such that foreign girls especially would depise her, and the only tragedy being, of course, that it would be impossible to inhabit this value-system indefinitely, whereas one could be ‘understated,’ ‘chic,’ or even ‘archetypical’ almost indefinitely. The three Japanese girls stalked about, trying to call out the other. GOAT broke first, dissolving into Japanese, semi-hysterical. TUSK tried to convert this to full psychological dominance, but it was timing; that made everything impossible. IOTA had to return right at that moment, for a beautiful split second TUSK wondered he could convert things into a threesome, but no, that was delusional; that wasn’t going to happen in a million years.
"I have a boyfriend!” screamed IOTA.
"Oh God, thanks a lot,” muttered TUSK. He walked off, hands in pockets, returned with Rophynol and drugged up the little girl. Somehow magically without committing any improprieties...
But then that didn’t happen, either. So
many bloody occurrences and separate walkabouts that Seoul itself suggested itself as the next and next-to-last character. ICEPRINCESS was thoughtful. Her Korean boyfriend had finally--finally--made that leap into higher cognition that if he wanted to bring PRINCESS over, he would have to cough out for a private apartment. It didn't have to be big, nor did it have to be central, but something finally clicked that he and she were graduating; they would need some sort of game plan for the future. It only helped matters that ICEPRINCESS was graduating eight months before her boyfriend; he would have time to cook things together while she wrapped up things in Japan. She cooked dinner for him that Tuesday and thought deeply about events.
BARBIEDOLL and Farhome were off shopping in Gangnam. Rockstar walked, alone, by the Han River.
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Seoul, the Nagoyaesque city lacking any sort of romantic possibility whatsoever, glittered in the night without comment. It was incapable of direct action, for it was just an abstract entity. Yet in metaphysical terms, it acted. What is to say is that it was particularly the geography of that city of hills and rivers that made up matters. Precisely due to