Work Text:
And no marvel; for the devil himself is transformed into an angel of light.
2 Corinthians 11:14
There first thing that you notice about the hospital room is that it is too small.
You suppose it's not too different from any other hospital room you've ever been in. Nine years old, when your brother has his first seizure. Fourteen years old, when you break your left arm after falling from a tree. Seventeen years old, when your mother has appendicitis. But now these four surrounding walls painted in a shade of color that's probably supposed to be relaxing, make you feel sick to your stomach.
The ceiling is no better. You stare up at it at night when your back is too stiff for you to sleep. In your mind's eye, the ceiling collapses right on top of you, alongside the four walls that are supposed to bring you peace, burying you underneath a mountain of rubble. It is surprisingly quiet, like snow or the hollowed insides of a coffin. You think to yourself, I will never see the sky again, and then the room returns to its original state. Four walls. Your breakfast from that morning churning uncomfortably in your stomach, leaving a sour taste in your mouth. The ceiling. The quiet hum of the hospital, the rituals of life and death left on repeat. An ache in the small of your back. And of course, the terrible feeling of there being eyes trained on you. Always, always this feeling.
::
You spend as much time as you possibly can outside when the nurses let you, which is to say that you're waiting for the moment when the sun finally stops feeling cold against your skin. You've never known a coldness quite like this, and yet the summer drags on, easy and languid. Sometimes you sit on a bench and stare up at the trees, marveling at how green they are, at how they seem to drip with the kind of life you forgot existed at one point. Sometimes the sky is blue, and sometimes it is grey, but you never once consider the possibility of it ever toppling down. Here, there is room to breathe. Here, it is steady. Here, you are steady.
Instead, you think about taking a pair of scissors and using them to cut a hole in the sky and walking right through it like you used to imagine doing when you were bored as a little kid. Now, instead of the shape of a little kid from Busan with bruised knees and a bird's nest for a heart, the shape of that hole will be more ragged, more cruel along the edges but it will still be a hole, nonetheless, for you to walk through.
::
One day, when the sky is neither blue nor grey, you decide that you will never live in a home without proper windows ever again. That even if you have nothing left, you can at least have that for yourself.
::
The police officer with the heart-shaped face eventually comes to visit you. She asks you questions you don't remember if you answered or not. She looks at you like something terrible happened, and you can't remember that part, either.
She brings you a book that she says she found on the fourth floor, says that it belongs to you. You don't ask her what it was doing up on the fourth floor, nor does she volunteer any information. You think about the pair of eyes that must've scanned through the pages of that book and suddenly you feel very tired.
::
The girl you swore that you were in love with never comes to visit you. That's okay; you are steady, but not that steady.
::
Your mother calls you a lot from Busan. You tell her not to worry; everything is fine. This is a lie, of course, but you think about the warning she gave you before you moved to Seoul, about how hell is other people, and even you, in the depths of your blown-glass delusion, realize you never want her to think that that warning could ever be about her own son.
::
It is only after you've managed to crawl away from the back-lit outskirts of hell that you realize you can't trust good people any more than you can trust bad people. You're not sure what to do with this information, this question of what's a few more devils added to the shoulders of men, or where it leaves you. There are no longer any shades of grey for you to walk through; the only drop of color you have to your name is a memory of red.
You don't want to think about that anymore. Being stuck in the hospital means you're also stuck with a lot of time on your hands, and you decide to use this time to think about a house.
Not just any house, though. A house that you will one day live in. You don't expect to have many visitors, except for maybe your mother and your brother. The house itself will have lots of windows, you think. Tiffany windows, depicting scenes of beauty that glitter like jewels. French windows, little slices of heaven. One above the kitchen sink. One in your bedroom so you can watch the sunrise every morning, covering you in hues of heady orange and delicate pink. One that overlooks a small backyard, because you are determined to take back a portion of that beautiful shade of green that once vanished from your memory. All the mirrors will be covered. No eggs. In university, you used to play around with the idea of getting a cat as a pet. Not anymore, though, perhaps.
There will be no room for heaven or hell in that home; they will simply become words. Just enough for you, and only you.
::
(More than anything, you wish to forget that small square of light above your bed in the other place that told you to pick up the knife.)
::
You have this recurring dream in which you see god, or maybe it is a man who is trying to be god.
I thought I killed you, you say the first time he appears to you in the hospital room while you are sleeping.
He only smiles and sits on the edge of the bed you lie in. Sometimes this is all that happens in your dreams. He sits, staring at you in the same way the walls and the ceiling stare at you, and you imagine that you stare back at him in the same way that the police officer with the heart-shaped face looked at you. Like something terrible has happened.
Sometimes in the dream, he'll read aloud to you, from that book of yours that was found on the fourth floor, his voice as steady as a finger tapping on glass. The door could not be heard closing; they must have left it open as is usual in houses visited by great misfortune. Sometimes in the dream, he'll be hovering over you, his face only a few inches away from your own, and your first instinct is to either stick your fingers in his mouth or to choke him. God smells like cigarettes and rain. This makes him terrible to you. This makes him lovely.
In one particular dream, you meet god where the bones meet the red of the earth. God gives you a knife. You take it and make a mental note to stick it in-between his ribs the next chance you get. He then gives you his hands, and you take these, too. These hands that promise you death, and yet you eat from them, drink from them like a ghost drawn to blood at an altar. Those hands that crafted and destroyed you. Took those tiny pieces of you that now belong more to him than you. Built a home, ruinous and ravaged, where the pipes creak and groan, where the paint peels and the floorboards sigh. There are ghosts in this home, too.
I think I have to kill you again, you whisper to him because it's the only thing you can think to say.
He smiles again, and it's poison. Promise?
Promise.
::
The warm heat permeating from your laptop provides a small comfort for you in your tiny hospital room. You write of death. You write of men with knives for teeth and women who keep Biblically-accurate angels on leather leashes. You write of Persephone, choking on pomegranate seeds as she creeps through the shadows of Hades. You write about a scene at the end of the hallway, in the showers, at the bottom of the stairwell. You write of desire, wrapped in the sheath of a knife, in the barrel of a gun. You decide what doors remain opened and closed. You decide what is real, and what isn't. I killed you and you and you, for you and only you. Small details like that, perched in the corners of your vision.
::
The next time you see god or maybe the man who is trying to be god, it is not in a dream or in the story you have written. You know this because you are outside and the sun is cold and the sky is neither blue nor grey. You're sitting at your usual bench when you see him, caught between the green of the trees, and suddenly you understand why the police officer with the heart-shaped face looked at you like something terrible happened because something terrible did happen, and he's standing only a few yards away from you. A white scar on the landscape.
- the wooden bench I'm sitting on is real the cold light I feel on my skin is real the sound of birds chirping I hear is real -
He's gone as quickly as he appeared. There is a scream caught in the back of your throat. It is ugly. Frustrated. You feel like breaking something because now you are not sure if you ever killed him or any of the other people from Eden, or if he truly is only a man pretending to be god as you have written in your story. Maybe he is god. Maybe you are god. Maybe none of this is real, and you should probably just go back inside to your hospital room with the four walls before your own thoughts crumple in on themselves like aluminum cans.
::
If he is real, I will kill him, you think. Promise, promise, promise.
::
The day you get discharged from the hospital, you make your way back towards Eden.
This is most likely a mistake, like every other single thing you've done since moving to this city, but once you catch sight of the residential building at the top of the hill you dreaded walking up every day on your way home from work, all your worries about the detectives who are now suspicious of you vanish.
You don't go inside - you're not that insane - but you can't help thinking of when you first arrived here. You'd told yourself that you'd only stay here for six months before moving out. In the end, you only lasted a week but even that was too much time spent there.
You think of the tiny room you slept in that only grew smaller and smaller as the days went by. You think of the loneliness that threatened to kill you in low whispers as much as your deranged hallmates. You think of the kitchen, where you cooked ramyeon and drank cold beer. You think of the pervert, that bastard, and the twins, and the landlady. You think of the boy with the smile you could wrap around the sun. You think of him. God. Your neighbor. Angel of death. Standing on the roof with him as the world started to come to an end. The city lights, painting over the apocalypse in pretty colors.
You think of the novel you had wanted to write about the serial murderer. How you watched the events you wrote about bleed over into your reality. Now, you have met that serial murderer who wraps his fingers around the necks of his victims, who never breaks eye contact as the life fades from their eyes, not even once. Who taught you about the kind of heat he seeks, that collapsing star that implodes from within the people he kills with his bare hands.
He gave you those hands. You took them, and somehow the blood on them is still warm.
::
This is the story you will write as you turn your back on Eden and the figure who stands on the rooftop, watching you:
This man will die in the basement, like an animal. This woman while die on the third floor, with her head smashed through glass. This man will die on the rooftop, in the pouring rain. This boy will die at a very young age.
And god? Surely god will one day die, too, in your story of grief and white-hot anger. Maybe with you alongside with him. Man or no man. Angel or no angel. Beloved or hated. Creator or creation. Eden in the way you have remembered it, in the way it should be preserved forevermore, and it is only up to the reader on whether or not they'll choose to believe you.
Interviewer: And that is what I felt when reading your book: that solitude.
Clarice Lispector: Imagine the solitude of the person who wrote it.