It was raining when I got off the bus from the airport so I took the underpass underneath the road, which was unexpectedly filled with dozens of soldiers in full camouflage and helmets watching, what appeared to be, an instructional film about tanks. They had unscrewed a light bulb from the ceiling and attached an adapter to the socket that the TV could plug into, so half of the underpass was pitch dark. What they were doing watching it there, and not at the nearby army base, or at least in room that wasn’t a tunnel underneath a road, was beyond me. This country was constantly coming up with new ways to confuse me.
My apartment building was small and cramped, basically a filing cabinet for a lot of old people and a couple of other foreigners. Inside my room there was a hundred-foot length of rope and a carabineer inside a box mounted to the wall, with instructions in English and Korean telling you how to repel down the side of the building in the event of a fire. There were also instructions—instructions I had deciphered word-for-word with the help of my Korean dictionary—to head to the 15th floor or higher in the event of a poison gas attack, and wait for rescue. There were only fourteen stories, but, it was home. Well, a place to sleep, really.
I walked in the door and the guard, the lonely old man who never seemed to stand up or leave his desk or be off duty, stood up and acknowledged me for the first time ever. He waved me over and I thought maybe he had missed me, that maybe he was wondering where I had been for the last month.
I went over to his desk and he gave me a key. Very slowly in English he told me “3-1-7,” while holding up the appropriate number of fingers.
I was a little bit confused. “My room is 617,” I told him in Korean.
“No, no, no,” he said. “New room.”
My school paid my rent and arranged my apartment so, I guess, they reserved the right to move me around without telling me while I was away on vacation. It was annoying but, in retrospect, not very surprising. School was constantly being cancelled for a random day each month, and I would show up in the morning only to be greeted by a locked door because nobody ever told me about it. I never knew what was going on.
Even though my new apartment was in the same building with an identical layout, it was noticeably shittier. I don’t know why, but cigarette butts clogged the shower, which I felt was even grosser than having to pry out somebody else’s hair, which is what I had to dig out of the sink when it didn’t drain as I was brushing my teeth. There were dirty dishes left on the kitchen counter that reeked of old Korean food, a smell I had worked so hard at in my old apartment to keep outside. I looked in the fridge and catalogued the food I would throw away before I went to sleep—an entire fish, a quart-sized container full of kimchi, half a dozen packages of tomato-flavored yogurt. There was a single beer inside too, a Cass, not my favorite of the Korean beers, but I opened it up and drank it anyway. I guess one should never complain about free beer.
A thin layer of black dust coated every surface, and I wasn’t really looking forward to scrubbing it all off. It was after midnight, I had classes starting in two days, and I just wanted to sleep. All of my belongings had been already been moved and were sitting or hanging in the same places I had left them in my old room, and I thought this was very creepy and disconcerting. It would have been better if everything had been dumped into an unorganized heap on the floor. I wanted to complain and get an explanation, but knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, so instead I just wet a rag and started mopping up the floor.
I made a note to talk to Fede on Monday morning, the Korean maintenance guy who had grown up in Argentina and was now working at my school. He said his parents had forced him to move back to Korea to solidify his citizenship, but since he suffered from paralyzing back spasms he wasn’t allowed to join the army like most Korean men, so instead he had to work at our school where he wasn’t even paid. He longed to be back in Buenos Aires where people knew how to dance properly and he could hit on girls. Fede was kind of weird, and I think I could understand why Korean girls didn’t like him hitting on them. He only wore oversized football jerseys, but he was nice and it was easier to talk to him in my broken Spanish than work through a conversation in Korean or English with the administration. Besides, he was probably the guy who had packed up all of my stuff and moved it.
When I was down washing the floor, I noticed a Korean penny on the floor. I tried to pick it up, and when it didn’t even budge, I guessed that it had been shellacked onto the floorboards the last time a fresh coat of varnish had been put on, whenever that was. I tried to force it up with my fingernail and, when that failed, a credit card and finally the claw of a hammer before giving up and telling myself that it didn’t really matter.
Fede wasn’t very helpful…65,034 out of 100,000.
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