The door always jams in its frame so he shoves it open with his shoulder to get out and then shoves it back again to close it. It’s not something he thinks about anymore. It’s another part of an unconscious routine like finding his keys in his pocket with no memory of putting them there. He doesn’t ask himself why most doors in the city hang so poorly or why his shower was designed to spray onto his toilet paper roller. Many questions like these daunted him for a long time. Now they are old questions for younger men to chew on. He doesn’t question a lot of his life in Korea. More and more it resembled a static television screen. Most of the time, a perpetual unshakeable fuzziness pervaded his waking hours.

This is the beginning of a story of an English teacher going out for dinner. On his way down the stairs he looked back at his unlit window and imagined night inside his apartment as the same night that was breathing in the belly of an alley cat, saturating the bricks of his building, climbing over the hills into the clouds that blanketed the city. The night somehow erased the walls and flesh, the rock and bone. Everyone has the night in common, he thought.

Andrew was on his way to a local restaurant down the hill as many of his neighbours bent with exhaustion were returning home after a long day. The pressure of his first day at work crept out of some file folders he had left on his desk. The commitment of a new contract and its responsibility weighed heavily on his mind. He was wondering if he was up to it all. He stared at his shoes as he walked down the hill and through the market, tangled in his own thoughts, hoping no one would notice him on his way.

He was thinking how nice it was to be alone sometimes. There was some soul stuff to be found there. He had a truer sense of the elemental, the singular that persists through all the hell. Sometimes, especially in a good drunk, he sat happily alone and just let things take their course around him, through him, where they will. Always willing to participate in some way, true to his nature, but never forcing, imposing, craving, needing, begging… In these rare benevolent moments he felt as if he could just about pass his hand through the wall and let reality flow freely through his fingers.

However, the danger for Andrew was that being alone could easily become a habit. The dialogue in his mind, could find neither route nor reason to get from the inside to the outside. Most conversation would get lost around him and the sanctity of his solitude would be threatened by the cynical conviction that most things are futile, vain, self serving and pointless.

Inevitably, nonsense was what he usually thought about his own thinking.

His neighbourhood crawls up the mountain into a village crumbling with age into a secretive little valley that was meant to be protection from the Japanese in less peaceful times. It is a fairly typical older neighbourhood of clothes lines and clay pots on roof tops. Concrete blocks, dukbokie stands, chicken and barber shops. A patchwork of weathered awnings, tiles and brick form a functional parade of squat box apartments and store fronts. That night, there was a group of small women with moist eyes and broad crooked smiles clapping and hopping with heavy feet and light hearts under the influence of many sojus. They were chanting ahh e ahh e ah e ah e ohhhhhhh and yanking up their balloon pants while making their collective ways around the room. Most of the time these diminutive women in printed tops with rolled up sleeves and their pants hanging here and there out of plastic boots were squatting low behind tables filled with baskets, bins and boxes selling produce and wares. A bare light bulb hangs from a snaky cord above each of the tables casting a warm light mixing with the stumbling, belching chatter of life. Children chasing each other through a wild native dream between buildings and cars like rabbits in the woods.

Andrew was relieved to see no one in the restaurant. There was less chance for an encounter that he didn’t feel he needed right then. The husband and wife smiled at him as if welcoming him into their home, which of course they were. He knew what he wanted but he looked at the menu anyways. In case there was anything new or maybe it was just a ploy to further distract his mind from the simple truth that he had nothing to say. He decided again what he already knew and ordered a cutlet with rice. The husband chased the wife into the kitchen with a friendly bark and shuffled around in the doorway for a while. The dinner came with some inch and cabbage salad smothered in ketchup.

They forgot the mayonnaise, he thought, but chose not to pursue it.

He wolfed it down trading mouthfuls of rice and meat with some kimchi and washed the whole thing down with not so cold water in a metal cup. He went to the water machine and was surprised to see the wife, passed out on the kitchen floor, leaning half way up a kitchen cupboard. He said thank you and with two hands politely dropped some crumpled bills into the lady’s open palm. As Andrew was leaving the husband smiled unabashedly and held the door open wide obviously appreciative of the foreigners ability to devour a meal in less than three minutes.

It was a warm night in early September. Andrew remembered the videos he had carried with him to return at the shop around the corner. The girl behind the desk didn’t look up from her comic book when he placed the videos in front of her. When Andrew turned around to leave he caught a glimpse of something that could have been alive if it wasn’t so quiet. Maybe a mouse or something. He looked at the clerk but she wasn’t paying attention to anything except her comic so the teacher, a little anxiously, hit the glass door with the palm of his hand and trundled down the sidewalk past a crane game machine and some fish tanks.

Scared of my own shadow, admonished Andrew to himself with a smirk.

He stole a glance backwards and saw something move again. This time it was much closer and more brazen. Andrew thought he might know what it was. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and darted into the supermarket on the corner.

He hurried through the store and bolted out the other side. Hollow footsteps were following him and in seconds were right on top of him, tap dancing on his skull. Andrew kept walking and the women under the light bulbs started glaring, pointing and spitting in his path. He wanted to disappear. The footsteps seemed to pass by him and for a minute the English teacher thought it might be gone.

He looked around self- consciously and slowed down until he was barely moving. Suddenly the thing appeared again, this time directly in front of him, growing menacingly taller as if trying to scare him away. It inflated as well, bigger and bigger until it smothered the whole street.

A dog was barking over a wall somewhere. Andrew peered around to see what other people were thinking. A couple of old guys, hostile and smoking aggressively, looked on from inside a truck and a young kid was taking a piss on the mailbox as oblivious as the video store clerk.

What had appeared in front of Andrew just seconds ago was a silhouette, a mere shadow without substance but it was rapidly gathering dimensions. Rock and glass, cement and even chunks of wood from a nearby construction site flew to it amassing a hideous looking armored anthropoid. Its eyes turned from empty shades of eternal gray to blazing madness. It was screaming but no sound was coming out. Andrew could do nothing but keep going forward as if he was under its spell. The Armour kept growing inches at a time, becoming invincible by feeding on all that existed within the reach of its power. Andrew felt its power growing as he stood face to face with this debris- wearing monster in an ever growing void that was threatening to swallow all reality. It figured that a beast like this wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left but itself alone. Feeding on itself would implode the universe and erase history, everything would be for nothing!

Did this have anything to do with the movies being late? wondered Andrew has he formulated an impromptu plan. No, they don’t care about that here, he concluded. He knew what he had to do. He reached into the void searching for a watermelon gun but he couldn’t find it so he settled for a cantaloupe cannon. The monster, with telepathic precision mimicked Andrew’s every move and grabbed for his own weapon. It was a standoff, in the far east, on a lonely street, only a couple of geezers and a boy with piss dribbling down his pant leg watching. Andrew was light seconds faster and sprayed the beast right in the fire of its eyes with nutrition rays. Stunned by Andrew’s vicious onslaught the beast stumbled, wavering between this world and the non- world it was creating. Another splat with the old canon and the beast fell face first, eyes extinguished, and turned into a pile of junk at the side of the road.

As the void started filling in under the weight of the world and the natural darkness of the city night returned to the street, Andrew returned home with his cannon under his arm. He fell asleep in bed listening to some cats scrapping and hollering, a young woman crying on the phone outside her apartment and a guy telling his girl a story. Judging from the girl’s laughter Andrew imagined it must have been a pretty funny story despite the fact he didn’t understand a word of it.

Soon there was silence. The silence of people hoping, dreaming, willing, and searching all the same. It was a good silence, free for the moment of that soundless scream.