Super Sad True Love Story

hear him out, too hungry even to complete Reverend Suk’s quick sermon quiz (“Only for fun, not graded!”), which the young people in sashes were passing down the rows.

We bowed our way out of Madison Square Garden and adjourned nearby to a new restaurant on 35th Street that specialized in nakji bokum, an octopus-tentacle dish inflamed with pepper paste and chili powder, among many other forms of debilitating heat. “Maybe too spicy for you?” Eunice’s mother said, the usual question asked of the white.

“I’ve eaten this many times before,” I said. “It’s yummy.” Mrs. Park looked at me with great suspicion.

We were taken to an empty little room where we were to remove our shoes and cluster, cross-legged, around a table. I realized, with toilet-inducing horror, that one of my socks featured a giant bull’s-eye of a hole, through which my pale, milky flesh could be scrutinized by all. I turned to Eunice with a why-didn’t-you-tell-me look, but she was too scared by the collision of her two worlds to notice my urgent stare. She threw off her pointy church shoes and made herself uncomfortable by the table. The grown-ups were clustered around one side of the table; Eunice and Sally faced us meekly from the other. Mrs. Park began to order, but her husband stopped her, unleashing a series of grunts at a pimply young waiter with a slick parabola of hair. A bottle of soju, the Korean alcohol, was immediately presented to Eunice’s father. I tried to reach over and pour it for him, as the young are supposed to serve the old in this culture (as if the old are really any better than the rest of us, not merely closer to extinction), but he forcefully moved my hand away and did it himself. He picked up my glass, put it in front of him, and, with a precise, calibrated spill, topped me off. Then, with one index finger, he moved the glass in my direction. “Oh, thank you,” I said. I waved the bottle toward Eunice and Sally. “Anybody want some of this good stuff?” They averted their eyes. Dr. Park swallowed his medicine without a word.

“Well, then,” I said. “I’ve got to say, having Eunice as a roommate has been really great this past week, with all that’s been going-”

“Hee-young!” Dr. Park ejaculated at Sally. “How are your studies?”

Sally blushed. A cube of cool, white radish slipped out from between her chopsticks. “I,” she said. “I-”

“I, I,” Dr. Park mimicked. He turned to me briefly as if I were his co-conspirator. I smiled at him, finding it impossible to ignore any gestures from this man, even if it meant siding with him against the innocent women at the table. That’s what tyrants can do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy. “All that money for Elderbird, for Barnard, and for what?” the doctor said. “They have nothing to say. This one protests, this one spends my money.” He spoke with the hint of a British accent, acquired during a residency in Manchester. The quality of his speech scared me all the more. He was a perfect little man, towering above us in his own special way.

“Actually,” I said, “this is not a good time for speaking and writing. Younger people express themselves in different ways.”

“Yes, yes.” Mrs. Park nodded at me, one tiny hand held up before her equally minuscule face, blushing like her daughters, the other hovering nervously over her rice. “It is time we live in,” she said. “These are final times.” And then to her daughters: “Daddy only want best. You listen to him.”

I ignored the scary biblical reference and continued to praise the woman I loved. “It may surprise you to know that Eunice is actually a great speaker of sentences. Recently we discussed-”

Dr. Park began to speak lowly, and in Korean, at Sally and Eunice. He spoke for twenty minutes from behind his dark glasses, stopping only to refill his glass and to knock it back within the space of a second. They sat there and blushed, looking at each other occasionally, each seeing how the other was taking her punishment. No one ate anything, except for me. I was hungry in a way I had never been, and felt myself growing faint, hypoglycemic. The waiters came, bearing immensities of smoking, steaming cuisine. A large pot of baby octopus came my way, hot and sweet, surrounded by ddok, a tubular rice cake that soaked up the spices like a sponge. I felt anxious with so much spice in my mouth, as words continued to spill out of Dr. Park’s. I reached for a plate of pickles and egg custard to cool me down; the flavors of the squid, the green onions, the chili peppers, the orange-streaked onions soaked in sesame oil built in intensity. I couldn’t stop eating. I tried to reach for the soju bottle, but Dr. Park swatted away my hand and poured my drink himself, while continuing to let loose at his tiny daughters across the wide wooden gulf of the table.

I thought I heard the word hananim, which I know means “God” in Korean, and the deeply insulting term michi-nneyun, which made Eunice exhale in such a sad, hurt, elongated, final way, it made me wonder if she would ever be capable of replacing that breath. Mrs. Park’s hand continued to hover over her metallic rice bowl, occasionally touching its rim. In my experience, it was very unusual for Koreans to sit before food and not partake. I closed my eyes and let the lining of my mouth turn into pure heat. I floated over the table and out into the dense midtown air. I wished I were stronger and could help Eunice, or at least take my place in front of her and absorb some of the pain. I wanted to bury my face in the warmth of her hair, the musk and the oils of it, because it was home to me. Because I knew she was too small in body and spirit, too worshipful of her family and the idea of her family, to accept this kind of hurt alone. Was this why she had run off to Rome, learned Italian, found someone pliable and kind, if unbeautiful, to be her companion, tried to become a different person? But one can never outrun the Dr. Parks of the world. Joshie had asked us to keep a diary because the mechanicals of our brains were constantly changing and over time we were transforming into entirely different people. But that’s what I wanted for Eunice, for the synapses dedicated to responding to her father to wither and be reborn, to be rededicated to someone who loved her unconditionally.

Something was drawing me back, a breath of coolness across my brow. When I opened my eyes, I saw Eunice looking at me, pleadingly, shyly, like the first time I saw her in Rome, talking to that ridiculous sculptor. How I loved her then, and how I loved her now. Rarely could affection be both so instant and so deep. We locked eyes for a millisecond, but it was enough time to download a million bits of sympathy, for me to tell her, Soon you will be home and in my arms and the world will reconfigure itself around you and there will be enough compassion for you to feel scared by how much I care for you. Meanwhile, Dr. Park was landing the plane of his soliloquy. The fight was leaving his body. He spat a few more things, then became quiet, so quiet that he appeared to have deflated before my eyes, leaving behind only the dense, poisoned marrow of those whose entire lives are reduced to the acts of hurting and being hurt. Who had done what to him, I wondered, or was it just the usual neurotransmitters run amok? Dr. Park inhaled another glass of soju and then leaned into the octopus and began to push large amounts of it into his mouth. The girls and Mrs. Park started to eat as well, and within five intense moments all the food was gone.

“So, Lenny,” Mrs. Park said, as if nothing had happened, “Eunice tell me you have good job science.”

Dr. Park snorted.

I wanted to build up my status with the Parks, but didn’t want to push my position at Post-Human Services too much, because I knew that devout Christians were not enamored of the concept of eternal life here on earth, which made their celestial dreams pitifully invalid.

“I work for a division of Staatling-Wapachung,” I said. “You might have seen some of our buildings going up in New York. That’s Staatling Property. And then there’s Wapachung Contingency, which is a huge security firm. Property and security and life extension I guess are the three things that we do. All very important in a time of crisis.”

I went on in that vein for a while, careful to be nonpolitical, hewing to my parents’ FoxLiberty-Prime conservatism. Sometimes when I spoke of Wapachung Contingency, Sally would look at me with ill-concealed annoyance, as if she was not overly enamored of my employer, but even in her displeasure she was graceful and mild, and I wanted to get rid of her parents and talk directly to her, debate her in a chummy, casual way. “Of course,” I was saying to her father, “I am not a doctor, a man of science, in the way that you are, sir. What I try to do is synthesize commerce and-”

Dr. Park pointed his index finger at my foot, the white flesh peeking out from within the hole of my sock like a shameful bit of burlesque. “I see,” he said, “that you have either a tissue or bone growth at the base of your metatarsophalangeal joint. Maybe the beginning of a bunion. You should buy different footwear, shoes that don’t crowd the toes. This is a real pathology that you should take care of, because over time your only option will be surgery.” He turned toward Eunice, who nodded.

“New shoes,” she said.

“Take care of each other in difficult time,” Mrs. Park said. “Good roommates, okay?”

“Thank you,” I said. I wanted to return to my career, to how I was going to help Eunice weather the uncertainty ahead, but the screen over the ticket window had just dropped shut. “Um.”