Mind Is the Key

28
Mind Is the Key, 1983~1985



The contrast became palpable. The Dano-Tschai couple, who had become man and wife with the union of two independent persons of counter sexes, turned out bizarre. That is, the consummated union, which had been considered as an inalienable one entity, had developed into two utterly different personalities. Whereas Dano still looked to be one personality with nothing but his own physical body which he could call his own, Tschai, who had originally been one person, her own woman, became a changed personality with assets, the offspring of three sons. That is, she bore three son children herself, who went to high school and middle school respectively, who she could call her own.

Tschai's accessory store was doing well so that she was able to support her family. She was also able to finance her three children with tuition fees, their seasonal clothing, and their pocket money. Dano had been idling away all along, doing nothing to stuff the house coffer. He had been thinking aloud that he had been working also hard but he had not been able to make his voice heard and himself known. And Tschai had not been in a position to police her husband's thoughts. In appearance, Dano had been goofing off to her annoyment. Voices were raised frequently; Yells were routinely shared; Fingers were pointed at each other from time to time; The mention of a taboo word, which could be defined and listed in the Civil Court, was made on and off.

After Dano's "goofing off" for the whole year of 1983 and failing in the first one exam of the two- time- chance Judicial Examination, Brother Illczhin wired 1,000,000 won to Dano, with a recommendation that Dano move to a quieter place other than his apartment room. Dano and Tschai decided to accept his kind proposal. Tschai called a taxi to their Dogok Apartment Complex the next day. It was drizzling. The early morning traffic on the drizzling Seoul-Busan Expressway was light.

Dano once thought big on a great national road of Seoul-Busan Highway, but at a certain point when the taxi swerved to a two-lane provincial road leading to Yongin, Gyeonggi-do, he had second thoughts on the challenge to a judicial post of court judge or something. The realm of language was regarded as supreme, real supreme. Make it or not, the exam would be final, he decided, looking out the car window from the passenger seat at the greenery of early spring passing by.

They were on hand out there to greet Dano and help him remove the package. His appearance made it more apparent that he turned out an "odd man out" case. That is, he was much too old for the scene to quit it. The landlady of the koshiwon, a boarding house built for the candidates who were preparing themselves for the exams for higher government posts, was an apparent divorcee in her early fifties who were thrown out of resources. desperate to survive. The monitor, or the captain of the boarders, guided Dano to their den of 20 tin-roofed compartments separated by a shallow side corridor. The monitor, who seemed to be in his late twenties, allotted Dano Room No. 16.

The previous host was just leaving the room as Dano stepped into the boarding house. A vague impression then was that he had been upset by something or offended by someone else. A more exact impression was that he got distracted by what the boarder himself could not pinpoint. Dano was wondering what drove him so nervous that he would have to leave the place in a hurry. Entering, he found the room so tightly spaced that a boarder would be able to lie down and set up a desk and a table on the rest of the room space.

Stepping out, after unpacking, arranging and setting done with the books and miscellaneous things, Dano found that a group of young boarders assembled around a wooden parallel bar outside the boarding house. Point of their talks was that they were having restless nights and that they couldn't concentrate on their study, with the sign of which vividly played on the bloodshot and blurry eyes while they didn't exactly say what had caused their insomnia or something. Room 16 boarder had just left with the other two colleague boarders.

One of the young boarders came up with a suggestion that he help Dano do the sights of the periphery. The Pyowoonsa Temple was a misnomer because the Buddhist shrine was not like a serious temple but rather like amja, a Buddhist hermitage cell. Walking steep uphill, Dano discovered that both sides of the hilly road leading to the cell were lined with rocks and decked in weird wild flowers. There was a pond below the cell yard in which there were various kinds of fish swimming. "Everything on the periphery has the monk's touch! He has a hand for beauty," he marveled.

A bell was tolled for lunch. The boarders got out of their den and came down the stairs for the dining hall which was a wooden house unit separated from the koshiwon in which a baap azumma, or a lady cook in her early fifties lived with a young daughter. The young aspiring diners entered the hall shuffling along in their slippers and seated themselves around a long wooden table on the ondol room floor with their legs folded Korean fashion. 'Special' food spread was laid out by the hostess who introduced Dano to the other guests. The azumma suggested offhandedly to the diners that Dano be seated at head table in one of the two opposite seats to which the folks in the room expressed consent with claps.

--------------

The night study went on swimmingly. Dano was glued to the desk for hours on end even with no break for a relief. He got the hard subjects of the Civil Law and Civil Procedure Law alloted for the morning hours whereas he got the piece of cake Criminal Law for the night. When he thought he was ahead of schedule, he memorized model answers which he had prepared, scribbling them on the answer sheet pads. When he once stepped out of the room to pee, he saw the host of Room Nine at the opposite lying on the room floor with the door open and reading a newspaper. He seemed to have heard the first crows of the roosters at the village when he fell asleep sitting on the desk.

At a coffee break after breakfast the next morning, the host of Room 18, a young man in his early thirties with southern accent, invited Dano to his room. Dano was surprised at the sophistication with which his room was furnished with a variety of coffee wares. But the point was that he did not invite him to give him a coffee treat but he did want to know about the neighbor's nocturnal wellbeing.

Dano halfheartedly admitted to having experienced some displeasures, but didn't mention any details. Host of the room Mr. Kang elatedly said, "Room 16 has since been devastated because all the previous hosts have given up on the room. Why don't you move to another place?" Dano didn't like the idea.

"If a ghost were really at work, what good the mere room movement of a few meters will do? He'll be after me wherever I go. So I'll stand the room there," Dano said. It's an issue of pride, Dano thought aloud. It'd be ashamed and pathetic of him if he admitted to having suffered all the gamut of humiliations.

He'd been dragged, pulled, run, crossed, up the steep hill over the rocky crevices through the thorn bushes. He didn't see whoever it was and didn't hear whatever it was, but he was controlled, manipulated, and raped. Yes, raped. In a person's dormancy, if the person couldn't be his or her own person, and if he or she were abused for the sake of unidentified pleasure, you could rightly say that the person was raped.

----------------------

In every mealtime gatherings, the seats of absentees were watched with sympathy and fear. Dano was astonished at the numbers with which the exodus was progressing. The progression was headed toward No. 16. Some interruptions were made, though, because new arrivals made replacements. In the midst of the chaotic fuss over the bizarre exodus, there were some leisurely moments. Dano was mobbed around by some younger boarders who were very curious to know what brought him there.

There had been a previous search, of course. He had gone to a koshiwon nestled under Mt. Bomun on the edge of Daejon City. The boarding house for the judicial exam aspirants had been patterned after cabin-type rooms. Entering a patio of the house, Dano had been received by the landlady of the facility. After a due greeting, she was about to serve Dano a cup of tea when he almost dropped it.

He was exaggerating, of course. But fact was she was so beautiful. She struck him as fascinating. She had been such a beauty of whom even her toes, which had been not covered in socks at the time, had been beautiful. He was wondering why such a shining beauty had been living in near 'hiding' with frail-looking husband rather than living in the broad world.

As he took a brief tour of the precinct, he ran into a roomer who tipped him off to what had been brewing among the roomers: "They argue among themselves which often develop into fist fights." With that, he got out of the place because he could not recommend the place to himself or anyone who was preparing the exams for higher government posts.

"Why?" one of the two woman boarders questioned him.
"Because it was preposterous of them." Dano answered.
"What do you mean by preposterous?" she wanted to know.
"It means that the boarders of the koshiwon in Daejon were not properly served by the cook but thrown into a position to serve the lady cook, instead, in a way that they'd be favored by the pretty cook," Dano said. All the boarders there nodded their consent.
"We're so lucky then," Mr. Kang said, smiling.
"Why?" Ms. Bahn asked.
"Because our azumma is so humble-faced that we're at liberty not to flatter her," Mr. Kang said, giggling, with the others laughing with him.

------------------

Dano couldn't have cared less. He braced for every invisible encounter whenever he entered and sat on the study desk. He even made "his soldiers" stand guard on the rampart. He posted a warning alert on the wall:"Ghosts, Off Limits!" Despite all that, nights tortured him to no end, and even on day time he had hair-raising chills. On nights, he was roughly hauled to the field, over the hill, across the rapid river, through the thorn bushes. He had scratches all over him. He stood the brutalities, nonetheless.

The sleuth in Dano started being active briskly. He thought for days on end what would be the motivating agent behind the conspirator or conspirators to drive out the temporary occupants of the place that the baap azumma had leased in order to accommodate those who were sitting for judicial exams.

The emotional factor of hatred was involved, Dano concluded for the time being. And the culprit, who had been engrossed in driving the exam students, was not a ghost or ghosts but the Buddhist monk himself and the proprietor of the shrine estate, Dano assuredly concluded.

Was there any lead? None but some circumstantial evidences or clues. First of all, Monk Stout didn't like the idea of leasing the modest housing estate for other lucrative purposes. He originally planned to run a nursing home for the aged who had gotten disabled or unsupported. But his initial purpose was frustrated by Mrs. Lim, a divorcee with a daughter, who had entreated him to lease the facility.

The monk couldn't decline her requests, which was his vulnerability. But he tried to get his frustrated wishes accomplished by other mean methods, that is, by evicting the occupants of the facility by his own supernatural powers. What a mean-spirited act of the meanest creature. Why didn't he say that he wanted the facility to be used as a nursing home for the aged so he couldn't lease it for the profitable purposes other than that? Why did he talk one thing and act the other? It was considered mean and double dealing.

Supernatural powers? Who in the world gave a particular person or persons such terrifying powers? How was he empowered with such horrendous powers? Was it not against nature? What the hell was meant by the supernatural powers anyway?

Legend has it that some highly trained Buddhist monks or gurus got so powerful that they could enter other persons' cerebral territory and govern their actions, during sleeping hours and through dreams. Dano conceded that there were such powerful men and he suspected that Monk Stout might be one of them.

Enter other persons' cerebral territory? In the real world, entering other persons' estate without the proprietors' permission constituted trespassing on private property which constitutes a crime, of course. Therefore, the behavior of trespassing on other persons' cerebral territory constituted a sheer violation of people's cerebral sanctity, Dano thought.

Problem was that he could not catch the criminal and keep him collared to the floor. Question was how and where he could materialize himself. Through the nostrils of the slumberer? Or, through the victim's navel as you had seen in the movie Matrix? Or, through the top of the head? Or, through the veins and nerve cells? Once in there, how could he arouse the consciousness of the slumberer and let it do his bidding?

There occurred a small accidental bang which shook the shrine borderline. It was a wordless protest or another demonstration of their powerlessness, wasn't it? The rest of the boarders, who had survived the ordeal of headaches and nightmares, made an onslaught of prankish looting on the kitchen of the temple, that is, the hermitage cell. They sneaked, under the influence of the darkness of night, into the kitchen and looted a big jar containing makkoli, home-brewed conventional liquor of rice. The looters then relished it, drank it with the others and got drunk. One of the revellers ran amok through the hill town all through the night, hollering, "Come on out whoever thinks he is smarter than me!" Monk Stout, with his ears opened to all that's running wild, got enraged to the top of his head, cut off all the utilities which had been connected to the boarding house.

Dano, chosen as a representative for apologies, with two other young men, walked up the steep slope to the ground of the shrine, where he called for Monk Stout, "Sunim, may we enter the room?" There was no response. Dano said then, "Sunim, we're entering now." The room was not locked from inside. There was seated a man in his middle 50s with stout build and the medium height. His eyes were warm rather than sharp.

The sleuth in Dano, while kneeling before him and presenting sincere apologies on behalf of the boarders for having stolen the makkoli container and for having made all the wild scenes, tried to detect any lead connecting to conclusive evidence that the monk had done all the bizarre attacks on the boarders who had had to leave the facility. The suspicion seemed to put into affirmation when the monk, hearing from Dano that the "candidates" had been suffering from insomnia because of the nightmares, solemnly declared that mind was the key, citing that the housing lot had not been constructed on the graveyards. He said, "Mind causes everything. All the worries and delusions come from the mind." Dano suppressed the urge to yell before him, "You violated their mind territory, didn't you, you coward monk?"

They switched on the light again and the water came out of the faucet again. Where did the light come from? Up from the Buddhist monk. Where did the water come from? Up from the Buddhist monk. He was the origin of things which enabled people to carry on with He empowered people and things down under. He was the power and originator itself.

Normalcy returned to routines but the population of "the down town" curtailed to a mere few including Dano so that the boarding house was about to shut down. Strange thing was that new arrivals came sitting at the dining table, which made Dano gawk up at the one at "the up town."

Hardly had two months and ten days passed when the second-stage subjective test of the judicial exam got seven days ahead, a last-pitch period. It was early morning. After packing the book box, he called on Monk Stout to his modest dairy farm where he was milking the cows. He wished Dano a good luck, adding "Do as usual." The jubang azumma had called a taxi for him.

Dano liked exams, whichever exam you name it. He liked the moment just like the angler liked it. He liked it in the same context that amorous partners liked the moment. Which could be had the moment immediately by consummation. Wires gotten taut to the extent that it would be broken any minute.

An inspector comes into the room with a scroll. Folks stop breathing. Heart throbs make thunderous thumps to every owner's ears. The inspector hangs high on a blackboard of a classroom a wrapped scroll attached with seals. Bells ring which could tear the air into pieces. He unfurls the scroll and reveals the two exam subjects for all to see.

Dano, who seated himself in Exam Room 16 of Dongguk University, whose vision began to deteriorate these days, and who rose and went forward to see what the problems were. Eyes were blurring. Veins were running and raw nerves were running wild.

Letters, which were needed to answer the exam problems, consisting of consonants and vowels, were about to burst out but his hands got stalled: His penmanship was so clumsy and so tardy: Briskly scribbling noises around him running on answer sheets sounded like those of a bullet train.