He's in Seoul now, standing on the eighth storey of a building located on a major rotary, staring partly at his reflection in a wide window, partly at the cars and people below. He's in a jazz club. It's around 9:00 PM.
The club is dimly lit, mostly by dark crimson Chinese lanterns that hung listlessly from the ceiling. The fluorescent Johnny Walker sign at the bar gave the place a feeling of clean-cut modernity. There's a lit stream flowing down the middle of the floor, decorated with exotic-looking pebbles, small Oriental paper dragons, and off-white rose petals. The Tosca Tango Orchestra's Mi Otra Mitad de Naranja was playing faintly in the background, dwindling from its discordant fortissimo. The few patrons in the club were drinking quietly, much like him, alone.
The joint was called Purgatorio. People came here to wait before going somewhere else, unwind after work or school, or simply to be alone with one's thoughts. The owner was also the bartender who ran the place with his wife, a Japanese-born Korean who came back. She prepared the dishes in a separate room, coming out only to receive compliments as a culinary artisan.
He started coming here, to Purgatorio, his second year of high school. The owner never asked questions about his age. He came in alone, sat by the window and drank without disturbing anyone--much like he was at that moment.
His reflection in the window acted like an overlay for the city behind it. The city moved; every second of its existence it breathed faster, throbbed, and pulsated with so much activity that it was impossible to comprehend. He watched, perched in that height, like a gargoyle, office workers speeding home, taxi cabs rushing to squeeze in a few more customers, and trucks traveling unhurriedly, expecting a long journey. He watched people standing in line to wait for the bus to pick them up. He watched all the people entering and exiting stores and buildings. He watched people sitting around, smoking, chatting, or idling. He watched the faces in the restaurants; a few of them were staring, like him, while others were engaged in conversation.
The song changed to a Brubeck number he couldn't put his finger on. He always came here on the wrong days, he thought. This place had a live band on Monday and Friday, but he always came on Wednesdays and Sundays.
He never had to step outside to come here: the building was connected to the subway system, so he could get here always underneath the ground. He'd get on a train and it would snake him around the city, quickly and efficiently.
He wasn't thinking about anything in particular that day, at that time, in that place. He usually went there to think something through, something that required more than his undivided attention. He would sit there, settle into his favorite spot, let his fingers absorb the cool touch of the leather couch, and suck up the atmosphere through a ravenous osmosis. His mind would slowly calm, like a thin layer of dust settling on the surface of still objects. At the slightest disturbance during this stage, his concentration would shatter incorrigibly. His breathing would normalize and the world would slip off of him, regardless of how it tried to latch on. Then he broke down every one of his thoughts and memories, organizing them carefully into glass jars, and then placing them in various locations in his mind.
After this cautious exercise, he would examine each thought, each memory, without refrain. He would remit no detail in this examination. He colored-coded them with words, details--language.
That day, however, he had nothing to think about. The day had passed like any other. He was on vacation, so he had more free time than he would've liked. His life became inflated like an enormous balloon, while he, something separate, held on from a string that was tied superfluously from the bottom. The weight of his body and then of his life balanced each other out, so he would gain no elevation but never touch the ground. He would hover through space, setting in the direction of the wind.
Suspended in that space, he wondered if it was the weightlessness of the balloon that permitted the wind to blow it about, or if it was the strength of the wind that caused the balloon to move.
No, that's not it.
He remembered a line from a film: it wasn't a question about the wind, or an object, but his mind that perceived this interaction.
