Chapter 1
My name is Alex Kim and I want to get something out of the way before we go one sentence further. I am not Korean. Both my parents are, but not me.
I used to attend the University of Michigan studying aerospace engineering, but even then I was not an Asian whiz kid. My SAT scores were only slightly above average and my grades were equally below. I didn't spend every waking hour studying. I overslept regularly and preferred to play Midnight Frisbee Golf in the Arboretum rather than perform differential calculus. I've never even been to another country (Windsor, Ontario doesn't count). So whatever impressions you form from my description of my life and myself, remember: I was born in Grosse Pointe, not Seoul. I'm not Korean; I'm American.
A prideful declaration that I am American may seem like a paltry revelation. I can see why you'd think so since in all likelihood you are American and have never thought twice about it, yet I cling to it as the one certainty that came out of the last year of my life. Everything else seems like so much random chaos. I sense that I should be able to draw something of metaphysical significance from a frank evaluation of the events, but it all ends up a muddle after about two minutes of thoughtful analysis. Deep thinking on the topic, usually done cloistered in the dark recesses of some overly designed cafe under the influence of a couple of Ethiopian Hazel Nut blends, spins into a swirl of causal loops and deterministic paradoxes in short order. Thus, the book you have in hand. I figure if I can document the events, walk through them in roughly chronological order while maintaining a discrete authorly distance, a theme may arise, something of value that I can work with to better understand why what happened happened.
On the other hand (which I should have amputated), whatever there is to learn from this is only a matter of definition at this point. Such lessons are rarely clearly evident, instead insinuating themselves into your daily life as new instincts to be reacted to as one might thoughtlessly decline candy from a stranger without pausing to assess the philosophical underpinnings of the behavior. By definition, I already react as a man who has experienced what I have experienced. But that's not enough this time. There is simply no way I'm going to have my life turned inside out and not bother to try to figure out why it happened. Was it my fault that I fell for her? Or did my stultifying existence drive me into the arms of cataclysm? And how did I get myself into such an existence to begin with? Am I truly responsible for it all? The path of causality leads back to me, but causality is not control. Did free will lead me here or was my choice limited to the method of my execution? You see what I mean about getting swamped in the core questions of being.
But I digress.
I can, in fact, pinpoint the instant where it all began. As I said, about a year ago. It was a strange sort of snapshot moment, frozen in my subconscious only to periodically reappear in crystalline detail to tease me into pensive, meditative sulks. No, that's too strong--I'm confused and borderline obsessed, but not dour, mopey, or even unhappy as far as I can tell.
I wasn't unhappy back then either. Things seemed to be going pretty much according to plan; a plan I assumed to be mine. There were bumps and turbulence here and there, all negligible in the context of my limited awareness and provincial naivete. I was sharing an apartment with three roommates, the same apartment and roommates as the previous year, and the year before that, and the year before that. We never really fought; we were too superficial to take serious offense at each other. The problem was that I was beginning to realize what my roommates were, gradually, like how you realize that Saturday Night Live is not all that funny. They were dweebs. Not plain old dweebs in the sense of nerds in extremis, these were dweebs of such purity and totality they could rightly be called definitive. The Buddhas of dweebhood. Allow me to introduce you.
Peter, dweeb alpha, was a stocky--call it chubby--oaf with a superior attitude. I'm bound to say the guy did do well in school which made him superior in that most superfluous way. He took this circumstance as proof that he was much smarter than anyone who crossed his path, a belief he did not hesitate to express in a very forthright and pompous manner. Naturally, this exceptional intellect lent significance and irrefutability to all his opinions. He would hold forth on why Asimov was better than Bradbury or why Feynmann was smarter than Hawking or why Linux was the only real operating system, that last item being delivered in the form of a sermon. Once he even started in on how male-female relationships were no different among humans than any other species. Like he would know. I was able to put a stop to that by casually mentioning that there were new Pamela Anderson photos posted on the web.
Dweeb beta was a wan, high-waisted pencil neck who had an aversion to washing his hair when he took a shower, which in itself was an exceptional occurrence. His intellect was inconsequential and his social skills had not progressed since potty training. (On two separate occasions I heard him say, in total seriousness, "Shut up, you stupid head.") He had a tendency to snort in reaction to most external stimuli and he was apparently so proud that he had mastered that art of chewing his food that he showed off by keeping his mouth open while doing so. His name was Eustace, pronounced Useless, and as near as I could tell, his only intrinsic value was as an anthropological curiosity. He never got a grade lower than an A-.
Since my knowledge of Greek is spent, dweeb number three, Lenny, was the least offensive of the trio. He listened exclusively to 1970's progressive rock and played air guitar in between breaks from the Sony Playstation. He latched on to that annoying habit of adding hip suffixes to everybody's name, which for a time was a mainstay of bad TV comedy skits. He just never got over it. I disliked it especially because my name doesn't lend itself easily to that practice. Alex-meister and Alex-o-rama just don't cut it. But that was the worst of it; at least he was sanitary. I never saw him open a book, but even he got better grades than I did.
I met this threesome at freshmen orientation shortly after enrolling. We linked up as roommates because we all immediately realized that none of us were axe murderers or prone to any sort of violence nor were we comfortable in the sort of social situations that most people were. In other words, we saw and appreciated our common anxieties and knew that, because of that, we would not judge each other lest we be judged. Also, we were all too anal to be a day late with rent so there was no fear of eviction. It seemed to make sense to stick together rather than risk our fortunes to roommate roulette.
Since we were all majoring in aerospace engineering I had the distinct pleasure of not only living with them, but having them in most of my classes too. Over the years I had gone from accepting them as my clique to being mildly annoyed by their peculiarities to seeing them as a hindrance to a normal life. Let me be more specific, they had come to make my skin crawl with their infantile antics and maladaptive behavior. I can't count how many times I wanted to bellow and rail at their inanities, but bellowing and railing aren't my strong suits.
Besides, I got the impression that they still thought of our little foursome as a kind of fraternity of like-minded (or like-mindless) souls. They were comfortable in the knowledge that they would not be belittled for their social shortcomings and felt as though they were within a fortress of friendship. None of this was ever spoken outright, but it was understood. I was never up to their level of dweebosity, and as such I lent a certain legitimacy to the group. They weren't totally weird because Alex was their friend. If they needed badly for someone to think they were normal they could always arrange for me to be present to show they were really part of humanity. Thoughts like that turned my disgust to pity and I would bite my tongue instead of losing my temper.
Back to the point.
If this book were a screenplay, this would be the Fade In. It was late September; senior year having started a couple of weeks earlier. The Dweebs and I were sitting around our hand-me-down circular dining table, studying, as was our habit. We had studied for three hours on Monday and two on Wednesday and Thursday every week for the past three years. I had a reasonable, if uninspiring, social life for the other nights. The Dweebs spent those nights doing an assortment of, well, dweeby things that evolved only slightly over the years. Maybe once or twice a year they did something that required interaction with the outside world, except, of course, for browsing the web.
The idea of three nights a week devoted to study may sound laudable, but it was done as inefficiently as possible. Peter, Useless and I would sit around the table with our books open and converse in a mixture of insult and false insight, with little attention paid to actual schoolwork. Lenny would be wandering about, playing air guitar to Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd and occasionally chime in with an observation of no consequence. We never bothered to turn the TV off so it was droning on in the background subliminally suggesting we were amidst society.
It was an evening exactly like that when this snapshot kind of moment occurred. For about sixty seconds I could hear none of the bickering or dreadful music. Like a distant object coming into focus, I centered on the TV. On screen was a little Asian girl, possibly Korean, possibly not, no more than seven years old. She didn't smile and never gave more than a one-word answer to any of the condescending questions that were asked by the hostess of the show. Her parents (she was obviously adopted--they were Caucasian) were with her, stiff and nervous but beaming with sugary pride. She never once looked to them for help. She just stared right through the camera with a sort of mechanical vacancy to her face. Apparently, this little girl had caused a stir in the human-interest news community by being able to spell just about any word anyone could throw at her. To make the whole thing as trite as possible, the audience was allowed to do the throwing. She spelled Mississippi. She spelled astronaut. She spelled personnel. Not a particularly literate audience, but you get the picture. After each correct spelling the platinum-blond-bimbo-journalist-hostess looked the word up in a weighty, leather bound dictionary and said breathlessly, "That's right," and the audience gave a collective "Ooooh."
"Hey dummy!" said Peter. "What did you get for number four?"
I snapped out of my trance. "Uh, 3.785 x 106 kilograms."
"What? That's not even the right units! Are you crazy?"
"Yeah. That's not even the right units. Are you crazy?" Useless snorted in agreement.
Having gone approximately three minutes without touting his intellect, Peter changed the subject. "Hey, I got a ninety-two on that Thermodynamics test."
"Quick, get the phone! I want to call home and tell everyone you got a ninety-two." Lenny snapped, interrupting a complex air solo.
"Yeah. Get the phone--" Before Useless could finish, Peter had him in a headlock and administered a barrage of noogies.
"So what did you get, smart guy?" Peter asked Lenny.
"An eighty-seven."
"Hah! I got an eighty-eight," Useless said emerging from a post-noogie haze. "What'd you get, Alex?"
The above exchange may not be entirely accurate because I had zeroed in on the TV again. The little girl spelled tribulation. She never reacted to the crowd or the lights or the adults around her. She was totally emotionless, to the point of being hollow. She spelled interrogative. It was as if she was wholly and forever resigned to her existence as envisioned by the people around her. She spelled oleander. She was defined by their expectations. The universe was merely rote, a thing to be memorized.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mean to suggest she was oppressed or abused. And I don't mean to suggest I actually knew what she was really feeling. Like me, she probably wasn't even unhappy. I'm sure she was just overwhelmed with being on TV and that in real life she was just an average seven year old girl, playing with dollies and pretty bows and whatnot. She was obviously very intelligent and the word skills she was learning would serve her very well in the future (I say this as someone totally dependent on a spelling checker). She would probably be very successful, go on to a good college, and maybe even move in with a trio of dweebs. But there was something in that visual that struck me, a vision of helplessness. Completely acquiescent helplessness. Why not scream in terror and hide behind mommy? Why not ham it up ala Shirley Temple? Either reaction--any reaction--would have been an affirmation of self worth. But she just stood there...
"Alex!"
"What? What?" I snapped-to again.
"What'd you get on the Thermo test?"
"I got right around the mean." My standard answer. I had no idea if it was true.
"What's your problem, man?" Lenny asked. "Are you pinin' for your Korean homeland?" he added, looking at the girl on TV.
"I'm not Korean, stooge. I'm American. I was born in Grosse Pointe."
"OK. Don't get touchy."
"Yeah ya stooge. He's American," Useless parroted with a major snort.
"Hey! You blew a snot on me!" Peter accused.
"Shut up, Peter. I did not!" Useless retorted cleverly.
This witty banter was interrupted by the phone. I took it upon myself to get it since I suspected the others would soon be involved in another round of noogies.
"Hello?"
"I hereby issue you a challenge, for the world championship of Midnight Frisbee Golf. Tee time in fifteen minutes." It was K.J., my real friend.
"I've got this test coming and I really have to study."
"A test? A test? Where are your priorities? You've got some kind of screwed up values system, buddy. This is of monumental importance. Daa-Daa-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da..."
I grinned, picturing him marching around his apartment to the Olympic theme. I suppose I shouldn't have allowed myself to be manipulated like that. I probably could have resisted the temptation but I turned back and saw that the dweebs had begun to belch the alphabet in unison. Some sort of bonding ritual.
"Fifteen minutes," I said and hung up.
I filed the little girl away, put on my jacket and was outta there.