The café in the basement of the four-story building had a high ceiling, and was open and spacious except for the hall’s four supporting pillars. The black-finished walls and the alcove radiated a soft yellow light that reminded me a little of Mama Pig’s hostess bar. My gaze naturally strayed to the center. A bold ray of light beamed from the ceiling, and the air was smoky from cigarettes and clammy dry ice. The trancelike electronic music was thick in the air, dividing one person from another like a curtain. Though the space was crowded with customers, I felt like a solitary alien who had landed on a lonely planet. This made me think that the rays looked like columns of light from a UFO, and the people at the tables, earthlings waiting to greet the aliens.
A hexagonal acrylic cube, about two-by-two meters in size, rested at the base of the columns of light. Inside the cube I saw a mannequin in skinny jeans and a low-cut white chiffon blouse, lying at an angle.
I ordered a Coke from the approaching waitress.
Just then, the mannequin began squirming then stood upright. She gazed coolly around her and yawned. The off-white beam of light moved slowly from her bare feet up to her face. She was clearly a human being. But because of the lights and the setting, she looked like a cyborg. I found myself gaping. We ordinary people emerge into the world as wet, bloody babies from our mother’s womb, but the being inside the cube was far removed from human impurities and our disgusting, frantic lifestyles. It was nearly perfect.
Her work was simple. All she had to do was stay inside the cube and act natural, as if everything outside was a vacuum—a kind of outer space. She had earbuds in and read comic books, surfed the Internet on her netbook, and seemed to chat online with friends. When she was tired, she pulled a Hello Kitty blanket over herself and napped. She drank Welch’s juice and ate bites of cheesecake. The entire setup looked like experimental theater, or a popular reality TV show in America, or even a sacrificial offering. It was a space free of anything dirty or messy, a space where you could eat but where excreting was beyond imagination.
I asked the waitress, “Excuse me, but Yeom Mokran—does she work here?”
“If you call what she does work. I don’t think she’s off yet.” The waitress pouted as she pointed at the cube. Though sporadic gusts of dry ice blocked my view, the cube was definitely there.
Once when I was young, my family went to the beach. It was probably somewhere by the East Sea. At night my father took us to a sashimi restaurant. A lone halibut was still alive on the fresh plate that the chef had skillfully prepared for us. I still vividly remember how desperate the halibut looked, with its gaping mouth and bleary eyes. My father said a man needs to know how to eat these kinds of things, and shoved a piece into my mouth.
What I’d felt then came back vividly to me. Mokran’s experience in the cube clearly wasn’t cruel, but the café owner and the sashimi chef both exposed me to what I didn’t care to see—what I’d regret seeing—but was supposed to accept and enjoy.
Mokran had called me the day before. I’d saved her number under Jae’s name in my address book, so I assumed it was him, and answered, “Jae, is that you?”
“I’m not Jae,” a woman’s voice said.
“Then who is this?”
“You’re his friend, right?”
“Yes, and?”
“Sounds like you haven’t been in touch with him either. You asked right away if it was him.”
She wanted to know where Jae was hiding. I wanted to know the same.
“It’s weird, I keep wondering about him,” she said. “You know, he’s the first to get a hold of my number and not call me.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say so I waited for whatever was next.
She asked, “Which school do you go to?”
When I told her, she said that my school was near where she worked part-time, and that I should drop by when I was free.
“Is it somewhere students can be?” I asked, cautiously using informal language back to her for the first time.
“Yeah, it’s just a café,” she said. “What, you thought I was some wild chick?”
And now Mokran was locked inside a clear cage, a cube, yawning. I was drinking my Coke with a straw when I recalled the woman trapped in the water tank. The helpless magician and the woman. The air bubbles frothing from her lips. Her swaying body. Thinking about the scene made me feel queasy. I wanted to scream, to run and shatter the cube. It was a stupid thought but I couldn’t stop myself.
I shot up from my seat, but dry ice blasted out and the spotlights above dimmed. Like a UFO that had completed its mission, the ray of light aimed at the center of the floor; Mokran became fuzzy, then promptly disappeared. Like an alien temporarily come down to earth: mission completed as time warped.
I went outside but didn’t see Mokran, so I leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. After two smokes I felt calmer, until I heard the rev of an engine. When I turned, I saw a girl on a Kawasaki, wearing goggles but no helmet. I wasn’t sure it was Mokran, so I approached cautiously.
“I’m Donggyu, Jae’s . . .”
The girl pushed the goggles up to her forehead and squinted at me. “I saw you come into the café. Good to see you.”
I was relieved it was Mokran.
“Your motorcycle’s . . . cool,” I stuttered out as casually as I could.
Mokran looked different in sunlight. Without the lights dramatizing her three-dimensionality in the cube, she didn’t feel as mysterious, but she was as pretty as ever.
“It looks like . . . you’re going somewhere?”
“Yeah, I’ve got another part-time job.”
As she leaned over the bike saddle, I couldn’t take my eyes off her profile.
I asked, “Are you going to be inside something again, like here?”
“No, this time I’ve got to dance with a bunch of girls for a new store opening. I just have to get on a table and move around.”
“Oh.”
I saw the hem of her plaid school uniform through the gap of her backpack. So she would change into the uniform and dance.
Mokran asked, “But Jae—so you really haven’t been in touch with him?”
“I’ve been wondering about him. The last time was on your phone, a year ago, I think.”
“I thought you guys were besties. He was a strange kid. If he was hanging around this area, I’d have run into him at least once. If you see him, can you tell him I’ve been looking for him?”
“He might have caught the devil by now.”
Mokran turned back to me. “What are you talking about?”
I told her about how Jae had set two mirrors facing each other in the redevelopment district—and how he had tried to use black magic. She giggled but looked intrigued.
I quickly added, “If he really caught the devil and is ordering him around right now, he might not be in the area.”
“You saying that to make me laugh? I get it, you two are a little weird. I’m taking off now.”
“Um, if you end up seeing Jae first, tell him to call me.”
“Okay,” she said.
Mokran roared away on her Kawasaki. From that day onward, I began dreaming about her. In my dreams she’s always inside the cube. She’s masturbating with a long-haired Jae beside her, looking out of the cube at me. Jae gestures at me to come in, but I can’t find the entrance and keep circling. The more he insists, the more stressed I get. Finally Mokran stops touching herself and glares at me. Then she hurls the glass in her hand and screams, “This isn’t juice! It’s semen!”