Study of Pink

I decided to go there after hearing the rumor that it had no sign. The rumor that it had no sign had long been rife. I generally try to avoid places rife with rumors, but I thought I should visit this one. For it was, quite literally, a place of nothing but rumors. Of all the rumors rife about it, the most rife was that it had no sign. Yet no one had actually seen it without a sign. No one had ever been there. So I had come to want to visit a signless place no one had ever visited, which was no different, say, from going to meet a nameless person no one had ever met. Since no one has met him, even if you meet him you will not recognize his face, and in the end you will not know that you have met. Since he has no name to begin with, even if you meet him you cannot call his name, and in the end you will not know it. That is how we meet and part. With that much resolve, I decided to go there.

For some reason, the place I had yet to visit felt familiar, and perhaps that was why I thought it would not be difficult to reach. Everyone hangs up signs large and small; by avoiding them, I would naturally arrive at the place with none. I imagine the signs I would avoid. Large signs are easy enough to get around. Signs so excessively splendid or shabby that they raise some suspicion. Signs that must, after all, be taken as declarations. And signs that look like nothing but codes. Signs untroubled by typos. Perfectly upside-down signs. Badly crooked signs. Signs that suddenly changed one day. Somehow unconvincing signs. Signs with no distinguishing feature at all. Still, everyone has something hanging up that could somehow be called a sign. Something to put forward.

Suddenly I missed him, in whom I could find nothing to put forward—or thought I could not.

Fatigue, which takes as many forms as boredom, is aggressive. The fatigue inflicted by all the words that begin lunging into view the moment one steps into the street is proof. Words gather in every gap. The gathered words combine at will, the combinations mingle, the mingled words scatter everywhere. They fill every gap completely. They increase the density of the street. And so they tighten around the throat of whoever has stepped outside. That was the logic of a man who had not gone out for years.

Sound into letters. As if putting life’s irony into practice, instead of facing the words in the street he spent each allotted day listening to recorded audio files and typing them into documents. To keep up with the files, he had to type quickly, and therefore had no choice but to take shorthand. He might be called a kind of stenographer. But he had never met anyone who practiced stenography professionally, and so had never compared their skill with his.

An excellent ear. The first essential for those who spend their days taking shorthand. He was good at listening. If he could hear it, he could write it down. He heard all manner of words and wrote down all manner of words. At first glance, of course, this might seem something quite a few people could manage without much difficulty. But he had one rule. He never looked back at what he had transcribed. He wrote as he heard—or rather, as it was written. Perhaps he heard and transcribed words that could not be heard, though that was difficult to judge. His writing was generally hard to understand. Sometimes it seemed it would never be understood; sometimes there seemed no need to understand it—or, to put it another way, no particular desire to. Mutant signs, for instance. A spiral period. A disheveled letter. An intaglio brick. Fragment vases. Pastime jewels. The shuddering of trumpets. Green bones. Urgent crutches. Rickety training wheels. Ragged dusk. The convulsive footplay of young flickering abducted remains. A lamplit grave. Lamgrave. A round lump of spirit. Roulump. Mott. Mottled mirage. Flag, bell, flagbell, pebble, bellble. Wasted sleep-talk. Formal questions and typical answers. Inattention in full bloom at every corner. A kick called impatience. Anxiety in planar form. Amplifying saliva. The memorandum of a tail seen through. The corners and edges of bright vanity. Skullskeletonshoulderbladelabyrinth. A ghost’s cast-off skin. Caterpillar pulp. Candle mire. Dragging chatter. A soft laugh sleeps. I burn a frightening white. He accelerated the conversion of sound into letters. Intoxicated by speed, his fingers often mixed letters and combined words. The tangled words piled up, enough for one person to hide behind their mound. He was the shadow of words.

Always wanting to listen closely to speech, to spoken sounds, to voices, to vocal sound, he did not go out. We therefore had to cook most of our meals, choosing foods good for the ears whenever possible. We could have chosen foods good for the hands, but somehow we valued the ears. We thought one had to hear in order to write, and that was true. The main dish was grilled pork neck with garlic sauce. That pork could calm the nerves seemed both welcome and natural. The cut could change. So could the sauce, of course, in which case we served roasted garlic alongside. Other sides included stir-fried walnuts and broccoli or seasoned blanched spinach, dressed however our hands led us. We sometimes made roasted asparagus scattered with pine nuts. Fruit that was both tart and sweet often served as dessert. Candied chestnuts were just right for a snack. Far from eating much, he ate little, but he tried at least a little of every food recommended for his ears. That was how much he treasured them.

I once looked closely at his ears. More precisely, I once felt them closely. He readily offered an ear. Or perhaps resignedly. The sensation of the ear I touched that day still clings to my fingers. The outer ear. Large overall. The auricle is distinctly thin and quite intricate, not easy to trace with a fingertip. The lobe barely holds its shape. Past the helix to the antihelix. I rest my index finger briefly in the concha. Then toward the external auditory canal. I switch fingers and insert the little one. The passage is wide enough for half of it, smooth and free of dust or sebum—at least to the touch. It gradually grows harder. That is as far as permission extends. The tilted eardrum conceals the middle and inner ears. So I understand. I am curious about the tympanic cavity of the middle ear, said to take the shape of a rectangular box because of the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, but some things must remain objects of curiosity. I can only imagine the stickiness of the mucous membrane said to fill that room. And the bony labyrinth, its vestibule, a room behind a room. The membranous labyrinth, containing a spherical saccule and an egg-shaped utricle, a room within a room. His room.

I could enter his room only with my voice.

I do not know how to listen to music. That was his answer when I played music one day. Thus he cut off the kind of sound conventionally called music. He went into his room and soon began typing. Considerably faster than before. Little by little, he kept accelerating. A sound that scraped the nerves, that one could not help listening to, flowed from the room. The sound of twisted speed. I thought of recording it, but did not. I only listened. To him, who seemed as though he would never emerge. To the sound, which seemed as though it would flow forever. I fell asleep listening. Without knowing when he slept.

Generally capable of deep concentration, he devoted intense concentration to washing his body, and naturally washed for a very long time. Twice a day, before bed and after waking: a ritual surrounding sleep. While waiting for him to finish, I inevitably grew bored, and then his dog would come beside me. I wanted to go beside the dog, too, but it always came to me first. This seems unavoidable for dogs, and I cannot help feeling sorry toward them. Always.

His dog feared water. Naturally, it hated being washed, so we did not wash it often, and something would build up inside its ears. Only after quite some time did we discover that the large amounts of reddish-brown material coming from them were fungus. The dog specialist at the specialist dog institution the dog and I visited said its ears were deeper than other dogs’ ears. His dog was now a dog with certified deep ears, and I returned with the deep-eared dog to its deep-eared owner.

Avoiding the outdoors, he lived, to an outside observer, as though dead, and perhaps that was why he remained bound to death. Each night, lying down and waiting for sleep that would scarcely come, he thought about death. His own death, which had yet to approach, and the premature deaths of unknown children. Premature death generally has a clear cause. It is also clear that he is already old, so he cannot die as a child. Having imprisoned himself in words, he feels life touching death. Yet he, grown old, is not dead, while children who never grew old are already dead. Sometimes he thinks of other impossibilities, too. It has been a long time since he dreamed. Was I sleeping and woke, or did I think I was awake and fall asleep, or did I sleep at all? I do not know. I think I am thirsty. My body will not rise. I would like to get up. Nothing to grasp. Why I wanted to go there—a reason I cannot now recall, a reason that hardly matters. I think I would like to wander. Only the faint obligation to go there remains. Whether I sleep or wake, things that might happen do not happen, nor do things that would not be very strange if they did. Things that would cause no great problem if they happened, things that ought to happen, do not happen. Even the thing that seems as though it really should happen does not. Nothing happens. Only what I wish would happen remains. The thing I wish would occur. Waiting for death. I want to cross a black sea. Crossing the Black Sea from Istanbul, one can reach Tbilisi in Georgia. I want to wait for death in a strange place reached across a black sea. I want to wait for myself, already dead. I want to encounter in advance the form of my death, which I alone will never know. For the death that will approach me, I sing myself a requiem and soothe my own soul. I commemorate and mourn my dead self as myself. I savor my death as myself. In search of a new form of funeral. Those now dead who walked alive to a nursing home had already done so. Those who, after a lifetime of barely defending themselves against the assaults of daily life, obtained death as their spoils. When the time comes, will I be able to head there? Will I know the time? A yawn escapes. Will I dream this time? Can I stop thinking of death? The death I do not know. The death I want to know. But life endlessly lives off death, and thoughts of impossible things continue with life. Dreaming of asylum in death.

Tossing and turning, he turns his body away.

Although he had not gone out for years, he did go out once several years ago. Years afterward, he told me about it in detail. He said he could picture that day with his eyes closed, and indeed told the story with his eyes closed.

That day, a summer night, he met deer. Choosing a time when he was least likely to encounter anyone, he had come out and was waiting for the pedestrian light in the lane outside his home to change. That day, too, he had waited for sleep, but it had stubbornly refused to come, and, unable to bear it, he had gone out to accumulate physical fatigue. The light seemed to take a very long time. Soon restless, he looked around. And met those deer. At the entrance to a low hill, in a dark place like a garden, he caught sight of what looked like someone peeking their head out. Looking again into the darkness, there was something. Deer. Two looked large and two looked small, but overall they all looked small. Small deer. He recalled hearing that visitors to Nara, the city of deer, could be surprised by their rather rough nature, but these deer did not look that way, and so did not greatly damage the vague impression he had always held of deer. Only, they were smaller than he had imagined, and seemed cute rather than elegant. Like his dog.

A dog is barking. Because cats are crying. It is not his dog. He does not keep cats. The cats in the yard came from somewhere and multiplied. Someone across the way spends a minimum of time caring for them, while his role is occasionally to fling open a window and startle the family rolling about the not particularly clean yard, enjoying the sun. Another night in the same summer, a night when a fine rain made the ground a little dirtier, he finally realized that his neighborhood resembled the Istanbul he had heard so much about. A place moderately dirty, moderately noisy, with inexplicable smells drifting about, many dogs, and very many cats. Very many cats fight often. Sometimes they fight all night, and their fighting can be heard even in dreams. On days when the cats fight, dreams become confused. If one is lucky enough to remember them, of course. That day, however, his head was already dizzy before sleep, or before dreaming. He was typing rapidly as usual when he suddenly heard something strangely cruel about the relationship between a dog and a bench. The remark could have been omitted without affecting the context, and was therefore truly cruelty itself, so purely cruel that it bewildered its listener. Yet the most bewildering and cruel event of that night was that, having heard it, he inadvertently pictured it in concrete detail.

He thought that if he had approached the deer, perhaps he could have heard the sounds they exchanged. But he missed the chance to approach them and took the chance to cross the road instead. Now, having crossed, he keeps wondering about their sounds. He imagines himself speaking to them. His back would resemble the back he has never seen when he speaks to his dog. And his back, which he has never seen when speaking to his dog, may resemble a dog he has never seen. Its head and tail cut off.

I have heard that animals try to hide their bodies when it is time to die. I do not know whether that is why—and I have also heard that those who live outside the world inevitably seek their fellows—but I can no longer reach him. Once I decided to send him a brief message and wrote a few words, but never put the paper in an envelope. In any case, I would not have received a reply. Or I would have received an indecipherable one. I came here after passing all the time in which I could have returned to him. His face remains as little more than an outline. Only his sound is clear. The sound he makes. Typing. Quickly. Steadily. I willingly gave time to the sounds he produced and lived with a measure of enjoyment. He lived off sound, and I lived off him. Without wanting for anything. It was that kind of time.

A story he told me about a certain stenographer. The stenographer kept to the traditional method of writing directly in a notebook with a writing instrument rather than typing. Because he had to write the letters by hand, and to avoid falling behind those using keyboards, he wrote what he heard in his own code. Later he might decode it, but he had never shown anyone the original code. I never managed to tell him that the deer he had met that summer night at the entrance to the low hill, in the dark place like a garden, were actually crude models resembling deer. Somehow that seemed to resemble the lucid cruelty of a figure I had read about in a book, who babbled a mixture of mysterious-looking but utterly vague and incomprehensible words to a friend whose ears and mouth were blocked.

I decided to go there after hearing the rumor, the most rife for the longest time, that it had no sign; I heard that no one had seen it without a sign, but that hardly mattered, and I wanted to undertake this thing no different, say, from going to meet a nameless person no one had ever met, precisely because it was no different, and I am maintaining that much resolve to that degree. Writing tends to multiply as it spreads, they say, like disease. Those words he once told me were borne out by his writing, endlessly studded with words that could scarcely be deciphered. Now I have left him, and have not yet gone there. But if one day I reach that dark place at the entrance to the low hill, I will already know that I have been there for a long time. (Kim Nuyoun)