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September 23, 2005

Suicide Eyes

Once when I was living in Seoul I saved a girl's life. That really may only be partially true--her act of sitting defiantly on the train tracks may just have been a dramatic gesture not intended to end fatally. I'll never know. I pulled her off a minute before the train WHOOSHED into the station.
WHOOSH!
Hemingway once wrote that exclamation marks should only be used every 30,000 words. Or I may have read someone attribute that to him. Or it may be apocryphal. Either way, it's sound advice, and the use of that little '!' should prove sufficient for the next six months. Ho-hum. Let's return to the aborted suicide...
All of what I will tell you happened in the above photo--Itaewon station, a tube station much like many others in the world, only its memories and Korean hangul signage are unique. Can you see me, and her, and her boyfriend in that shot? Can you see the torn jeans and the blue-blues and the echoed screams and the rotten meat? No? I can. It's in the walls, the memories. I should tell you, dear reader, just what it was that actually happened, eh?
But, before I do...

I had told this story many times before, in many ways and in many places, but almost always in my own head. I had also tried to write about it, to capture the... hue, and place it in a narrative. That's always the best place for wisdom--in a narrative, far away from hill-tops and podiums... I had written it placing the thrust of the story in the hands of the relationship between me and a close friend. I had tubed to his house after the aborted suicide--I was in some state. It was around 7 in the morning and so I woke him up, brushed past him, got a beer from the fridge, sat down and lit a cigarette. "What the fuck?" he said.
Indeed.
But I never finished that version. I don't know why. It's tough, this writing business. Bukowski said it was the worst. Ho-hum.
But we've moved very far from that photo, haven't we? Have another look at it. Go on. I'll place those people and that pain in it for you soon...

She was Canadian and very far from home. So far, in fact, that it seemed to all of us that she wanted to die. Damn it. This was kinda fun. Then I wrote that word--"die". Damn. It's not so much fun anymore, but that photo hasn't come to life yet for you, has it?

Ahh... there's always something keeping me from telling the story of that girl's eyes. Let's have no more of it. Let's tell it. Let's paint that photo with the colour of suicide eyes...

When I first saw her, she was standing at the top of the tube entrance, cold, but not as cold as I, who had lost his jacket, shirt and scarf in some forgotten drunken blunder. Shoot me.
She stood, trembling, talking earnestly to her male companion, who avoided eye contact. The gates rose, allowing us down, the few of us...

Very quickly she began screaming raped elegies of unrequited love. It was a rotten business.
He avoided eye contact.
She dropped to her knees. They bled. She screamed.
He avoided eye contact.
The very rational Koreans, the few of them there on that damned platform, moved to the other end. Good for them.
I approached the couple.
I said something, I really don't recall what, and she turned to me with those fucking eyes--"He won't love me!'' she said, not realising her exclamation mark.
Her eyes were the Queen of Hearts, turned righteous and ruinous with the collapse of her Empire.
Or something.
I kept talking to her, she kept screaming, holding my hand very tight and bleeding from the knees.
It was fucking cold.
I'm going to fast forward, get to the bit where she jumps onto those tracks. Have a look above. She was there, sitting, her bright blue backpack still on. She was singing some devillish thing, and her boyfriend stood limply, more dead than her. I looked at the clock. Dangerously close.
Damn.

Her friend wasn't gonna do anything. Nothing. Had his hands in his pockets. He looked beaten by some damn thing. My father once said that it's no disgrace not to be able to live in this world sometimes.

She was very heavy, and so are trains, but I pulled and she kicked, and I screamed, and she screamed, and I pulled her up. Phew. I was really shaking here, you understand, and I pulled a cigarette out, lit it. In Korea you can smoke in just near any damn place, except tube stations. The tube guard, who had done nothing in this devil's business, dutifully came over and gestured for me to put the fag out. He pointed to the "no-smoking" sign.
I swore at him, quite loudly, and threw the cigarette on the tracks. Damn Confucian fucks.

And so it goes, or so said Vonnegut, in a little book called Slaughterhouse 5. And so it goes.

What's your photo?

Posted by Martin McKenzie-Murray at September 23, 2005 4:51 PM

Comments

Posted by: clance at August 2, 2006 12:03 PM