About Crows

The Beverly Hills of Korea

25 T h e B e v er ly Hi l l s o f Ko r e a (i) Although the apple travels a greater distance, we know the earth rises ever so slightly to meet it. And though the green tea with honey the waitress has placed on the table at the psychic café will cool as the fortune-teller flips through onionskin pages to find my girlfriend’s Chinese sign, birth date, and time, the room, too, will warm, and humidify infinitesimally. (ii) If Whitman left New York on a train heading west, and didn’t circle around at the Rockies but hopped a Pacific freighter straight; and if Cendrars left Montmartre on a train heading east—say he picked up an assistantship with a pocket watch salesman and befriended a ditzy prostitute along the way— who do you think would arrive first in the Beverly Hills of Korea? (iii) The knife-sharpener? Or the cobbler? We know they are oneand -the-same when we see the old man pedaling his upside-down bicycle frame, turning the stone wheel and sharpening the sushi chef’s blades. Sparks lob across the busy sidewalk in front of our officetel twice a month, lengthening the line of housewives: their heelless pumps and dull cleavers in hand. (iv) Sometimes the same elements that make up our bodies collapse into an area smaller than the region can hold and gravity draws everything, hopelessly, toward it. Not even light escapes. We know the Beverly Hills of Korea acts the same way. 26 Our error was assuming Whitman and Cendrars had a choice, their vessels barreling toward us. (v) Although the traveling cobbler/knife-sharpener set up shop on our sidewalk twice a month, the sushi chef’s wife asked me to the Hills to fix a strap on her taupe sandals. And though I knew my girlfriend would be in the same neighborhood, getting her fortune read with friends, I crowded under one umbrella with my neighbor and let her hand snake around my bicep like we had no choice. (vi) Because circumstance made us aficionados of love motels—of rooms with swings, Edward VII chairs, Jacuzzis, and mechanical sex beds. Because we’d learned which back muscles to tighten and to loosen hips as moans marked the automated mattress like a metronome. Because on tiptoes we unscrewed red light bulbs, as the BBC reached out from the next room—something about a subway attack in London. (vii) If Blaise refuses to leave Little Jeanne behind at an unnamed station, would Walt then find an excuse to drag along Peter Doyle? (But O! I can only see Whitman traveling alone.) Perhaps making eyes at the youth across the aisle, but finally deciding to take his newly sharpened paring knife from his coat pocket to nimbly skin and split a Macintosh apple and offer him half. (viii) When you enter the tunnel, the flicker of light behind your eyelids tricks you into thinking the whole car is up in flames. Because fire in dream is both fear and desire, it forces you from home then burns as the light that leads you back again. The shoe slips from the foot of your neighbor now slouched against you and the steel wheels rise slightly off the tracks to meet it. 27 (iv) It is fractal in nature: these two women’s lives intersecting at a larger point of crossing, a transfer stop where I might have disappeared in any direction. But too far from home, I stayed, if only to listen to the chorus of disbelief rising. Music that draws one in, like the old man in a felt hat toward the younger— with his suitcase full of counterfeit watches. ...