Promises, Last Post

Tentative title number 4: Luck Turns the Corner

Tentative title number 5: No Worry for the Wounded

That night, we buy Wii Fit and invite her students to sleep over, which I am assured is a one time thing. They stomp around and scare the animals. The cat tries to scare them back, hissing and pawing the older one, who kept playing with the dogs. I think about losing weight and Cathreen can't sleep--worrying, maybe--and misses her lesson. The children have a fine time.

Children and babies and animals are Cathreen's favorites.

When we got the cat, Boise, I thought of it as an agreement: we were going to last. We went to the pet store with a former friend of ours who later stabbed Cathreen in the back. She bought a dog; we coveted Boise. She returned the dog the next day, but Cathreen and I kept our promise. It makes her happy just to see Boise clean himself or wait outside the bathroom as if we might disappear inside. We worry about how he will fare on the plane to Boston.

With the cat, the job, and a new apartment, I settled into life here. Life was pretty steady in 2006. I made money; I saved some of it; I spent it on who-knows-what.

Now it's three years later and luck smashes into our car. After the missed lessons we drive over to her sister's house and as we enter the apartment complex, a delivery truck driver opens his door into our right side mirror. I can't see behind us on one side. I struggle with the symbolism. When we were hit, Cathreen was talking about how when the lunar new year comes, she will get back the luck she lost.

"Call the police," I tell her five or six times until she does.

I don't expect them to bring us into the office with the guy who is clearly at fault. Finally, after two hours, the insurance men come and straighten everything out. Some outside force.

We sleep it off, and the next day we bring the car into the shop. The hospital staff is out to lunch, no worry for the wounded. "Unbelievable," I say, though I know this is regular in Korea.

At 6:20, forty minutes before the hospital closes, I tell Cathreen we'd better go immediately.

She continues to work out some banking issues online.

"We have to go right now," I say. "You promised you would go."

"Don't pushing me," she says.

"You promised."

"It's too late," she says. "There's no time."

But if I think this is the end of the promises, it's not. Later, she says she will write me a contract. I won't repeat its contents here, but I am content.

Promises, Post 6

Tentative title number 3: Shut Up and Take It

Except I didn't. I quit.

I moved closer to the ocean. Cathreen came with me to my temporary housing. The night before I moved, I slept in a motel, and she said the words I'd been afraid of, and then anticipated, and then grown anxious to hear.

I have kept the promises, all except the one about the dogs.

Back at the hospital again, Cathreen suggests I continue the treatment on my neck. My spine, the doctor says, is without a crucial cuve. I have been living without this for how long now--and not even known it.

I figure my body knows me better than it knows itself.

Yet I lie down on the hospital bed and let the doctor do doctor things. I can smell the sweat of other people on the equipment he places beneath my neck and shoulders. I complain, and Cathreen complains, and I shut up and take it.

He is going to shoot electricity through my body the way he shoots it through Cathreen's hand. "Now you will seeing what it's like," she says. The doctor turns a dial but I feel nothing. "More?" Cathreen asks. "More," I say. Soon I feel a pulsing. "Does it hurt?" she asks.

I sweat in the same spot, sweat that will be passed on to someone else. "Doesn't hurt," I say.

The new apartment belonged to a parent of one of the students at the school--they were on sabbatical. Two bedrooms, open spaces. The beach nearby. I loved this borrowed life.

Before we went to the beef restaurant the other day, Cathreen asked for restaurant suggestions. I didn't want to choose the place. Neither did her sister. "You never decide anything," Cathreen accused. "I don't want the responsibility," I said before I could stop herself. Then her sister said the same, so I was safe.

Promises, Post 5

Tentative title number 2: The Blood Is the Most Delicious

It's still a lot about that. In America, our positions will change. I will be the one introducing our life, saying, there it is across the room, saying, appearances can be deceiving, or, it's really nice once you get to know it, or, it was prettier before.

Cathreen spent years in Australia, and I hope that is similar enough. She says she was sent there by her parents because her "freedom-life" didn't match the strict listen-and-repeat of Korean schools. I love her independent spirit but wish at least one of us was less stubborn.

Though I have no job, Cathreen still manages to buy me shoes, and we still go out to expensive restaurants. We take her sister and our nephew to a place in the next city over, where we eat beef that is supposedly safe from mad cow disease, a scare that last year convinced Koreans to distrust both America and their own government. The entire Korean cabinet resigned, but the protests were not enough to drive out the president, like they were in Thailand.

The butcher chops up the cow outside and brings it in to us, and we cook it ourselves and taste the blood in our mouths. I like it rare--the blood is the most delicious.

We take pictures in the temple nearby, sitting our nephew on sacred relics.

Later that afternoon, I have to convince Cathreen to continue seeing the doctor; we rush to get there before it closes. Hospitals scare her. They press on her hand until it hurts and as she winces I try to translate in my head what to say to ask them to stop, to be careful, to quit that shit, seriously.

The stress makes an old car-accident injury in her shoulder act up, restricting her movement. The doctor lies her down on the steel bed and whips her neck around and I watch in shock until her neck cracks and he looks pleased with himself. But it seems to have worked: she trusts him. I'm still a little in shock when she asks him to do the same to me, and soon after, I feel and hear my neck crack as well, and for a few hours, I have none of the stress in my neck I hadn't known until then that I'd had.

After the love motel, I moved into housing beneath the owner of the academy's house. Cathreen, being Korean, was paranoid about being seen there, cavorting with a co-worker. The shower fell on the toilet. There were mold stains on the ceiling. I almost missed the red lights.

Promises, Post 4

I lost almost twenty pounds eating nothing but cereal over the next couple weeks, but slowly, with her help, learned to ignore what they said in the guide books about the food causing diarrhea--though later my stomach would be permanently damaged by how spicy things could get.

I thought it quaint when she said people still asked each other out, as in, "Would you go out with me," to determine that they were officially dating.

The doctor says what is growing in her hand are ganglions. She memorizes the sound and waits until we get home to look it up. I search for it on google and discover its alternate name is "Bible bumps." This is because people used to hit the cysts with bibles until they popped under the skin and the built-up fluid ran out into the veins of the hand. This treatment, this blessed beating, they say is "discouraged."

I realize I haven't had a complete Bible since I lived with my parents, though I have an old and beautiful leather-bound copy of the new testament--in a storage unit in Boston. It's far too thin to break the wound stuck inside Cathreen's hand.

As we got to know each other, three years ago, it was a lot about figuring out our different cultures.

Promises, Post 3

I was only teasing her. I realized this when she eventually grew angry and I had to appease her--by then I knew already that I needed her.

At the hospital today, the doctor says she may have permanent damage to her hand. We thought she would heal and it would be like I hadn't slammed her hand in the door, but now it might be like my guilt is permanently visible on her body. From what I understand, her veins have twisted together and clung to each other out of trauma. Just like people.

They shine a hot light on her and shoot electricity through her palm. She looks at me in a way that I know I have to apologize again, though the accident was three weeks ago. A look that will always remind me to keep the second promise.

Two days after the club she was waiting for me as I walked home from the beach; she ran out of a kimbap restaurant and I thought, Oh, and felt something working inside me.

Promises, Post 2

Despite the unlucky things that have been happening to her--getting her hand slammed in the door, catching her hair on fire in the tub, losing the skin on her palm--she has been locking the door when she takes a bath, taking baths when she gets upset. I worry what might happen to her. What if her hair catches on fire again and her body lights up as well, and I can't get to her, I can't break down the door and rescue her from a burned and blistered life?

The reason I deleted the promises was because writing them seemed to break the first promise. I will try my best to keep the promises from here on out.

Cathreen and I got together on a night I thought I couldn't feel anything but my hangover. I'd gone out drinking the night before, my introduction to soju, and had passed out and gotten my wallet stolen (lost?). The next day I had agreed to go to a club with a few of my coworkers and their friends. I sat and refused to dance, or drink anything but water, but was somehow at the top of my game.

Except I wasn't.

Promises, Post 1

Promises (tentative title)

I've tried to start this twice. The first time I wrote promises. The second time I wrote that I wrote promises but they were private.

Cathreen seems to have a complicated relationship with these essays. I am doing my best to keep them friends.

When we met, Cathreen and I were teachers at a school in Dongnae-gu, and I was ready to leave Korea after being here less than a week. My boss had arranged my housing--a ten-by-ten room with red lights ringing the ceiling, a round bed in the middle, a tv that showed porn, and a single window that hardly let in light. I later learned to call this a love motel, and to identify the cards on the stairs as calling cards for hookers. The heat and isolation kept me inside this room all day. For meals, I ate Frosted Flakes from the box and washed them down with milk.

Cathreen was what made me stay. I have been back six times since. I am writing this essay not to explode our life here but to record how we beat the odds.