Remember the Words

I figured the cabbie wasn’t pleased about us cutting our trip short, so after Hayley handed him 5,000 won and stumbled out onto the sidewalk I passed him another 1,000 won bill, did my best approximation of an honorific thanks and scurried out myself. When I looked up Hayley was leaning with one hand pressed against his thigh and the other against a tree, his head hanging over a couple of bulging garbage bags.

“Get it out, Hayley! We need to catch another cab.”

Hayley exhaled audibly. “It’s not coming up.”

“What did we stop for, then?”

“Sorry,” Hayley squawked. Eventually he pushed off the tree to stand mostly upright again. “Shouldn’t you be happy for me?”

Two months before, at the end of a similar night of cathartic bacchanalia, Hayley had opened the taxi door but deposited a bit of what he’d consumed that day on the door panel before he could get all the way out. So although I was relieved on this night to not be frantically wiping away what Hayley chucked up while also trying to guess if I’d have enough cash on hand to placate the driver, who was lambasting me with what I could only understand as bile, I couldn’t really say I was happy for him.

Hayley budged one of the bags with his foot while turning toward me. A clear plastic coffee cup tumbled from the top and thudded against the cobblestones. Diluted coffee dripped through the lid as it rolled back and forth, leaving a darkened crescent on the brown stones. We were still a ten-minute cab ride from our neighborhood and I had no idea what time it was, other than a suspicion that the sun couldn’t be more than a couple hours from reappearing. It felt like the long night was about gone, and I was feeling frantic for sleep.

“Get yourself straightened out. I’ll grab another taxi,” I told him as I leaned out over the curb and scanned up and down the road. Our previous cab was picking up a couple of men from the corner of the block. A couple more stood smoking until after it had pulled away, then dropped and stomped out their cigarettes before walking around the corner and out of sight. There were no cars in either direction. It may have been later than I thought. It may just have been a quiet street.

“No, wait!” I heard Hayley clomping toward me as he shouted this. “No taxi. I’m not ready!”

“Get ready. There’ll be one soon.”

“No, I don’t want to go home.” Hayley was huffing. He got himself to me as quickly as he could.

“I’m exhausted. It’s almost day again. Time to rest.”

“Let’s find a noraebang.” His hand was on my left shoulder. “You don’t have to sing. You can just sit. I just want to sing.”

He lost his balance again, his one hand pushing against my deltoid. I widened my stance and put my weight on my right foot to keep us upright, mostly.

“We need to sleep this off.”

“I can’t. I need to sing.” I grabbed his hand and we turned to scan the wall of signs behind us.

Around the corner we spotted a sign for a singing room on the second floor. The entrance was next to a convenience store. The men leftover from the quartet we’d seen before sat on plastic stools on either side of a table strewn with empty bottles and crumpled chip bags, their mouths open to little trails of crumbs. One of the men watched us approach. His eyes stayed uncomfortably locked on me, but he shifted in his seat and pursed his lips as though he wanted to talk to us. Perhaps earlier in the night he would have given it a shot, but English would have taken too much effort by that point. He lifted a small dark glass bottle of vitamin drink to his lips in relieved resignation and we walked silently through the door, past the stairs to the elevator in the middle of the hall.

In the flat white lighting of the elevator we caught each other’s eyes in the mirrored surfaces of the door panels as they slid shut. I knew I didn’t want to see myself that far into the night, so I looked at Hayley and hoped I was in better shape than he was. The brew inside him was showing itself in his sickly pale face. His eyes were half-shut, and when he saw me looking he dropped his gaze down to the floor.

“Your shoe’s untied,” he whispered.

I groaned, knowing I didn’t have the energy or the command of my motor skills necessary to kneel down, tie them, and get back to my feet without plenty of help. And I couldn’t count on enough from this companion. I looked down anyway.

He laughed. “Hah! Those shoes don’t even have strings.”

I looked down at my mauve flats and grunted in a way I hoped sounded good-natured. Hayley chuckled with all the strength he could muster, and I guessed he’d last another hour and a half before winding down enough to sleep. We’d had enough of these nights together since we met last year that I could recognize them.

The first time was at the end of his first month in the country, after we’d met a few times at dinners with some other teachers from our schools. We all went out late after work on a Friday night, and Hayley and I had our first chance for a one-on-one conversation. I’d picked up his hometown, age, alma mater, and major during previous meetings, so when we were sitting alone at the bar I asked him why he’d come to Korea.

First he snickered. “I’m sorry, I’m sick of that question. Everyone asks that. I’ve tried answering it so many different ways. Let’s talk about something else.”

So I asked why he’d left Ohio. To his credit, he chuckled and told me. Just like he requested, we haven’t discussed her since then, even when I could tell he was thinking about her.

It occurred to me when we walked into the dimly lit entrance of the noraebang that I’d never gone to one without a Korean speaker, so I wasn’t sure what to attempt to say to the middle-aged woman who rose from a little sofa in a corner of the room behind a folding screen and came over to the desk. I thought it should have been obvious what I wanted, but she looked at me, waiting for something. I held up two fingers for two people, mumbled “Two,” and rolled my eyes toward Hayley.

The woman said something to us in Korean which sounded as though it would be the obvious response, that she’d show us to a room and turn on the karaoke machine, so I nodded. “Yeah.”

With a blank gaze she looked me over and then Hayley, trying not to imagine the debauchery we would not be getting up to in her establishment. Then she led us to the first door down the hall and set us up inside.

Hayley collapsed on the couch once she closed the door. “Alright, let’s go!” His eyes were closed and buried in the crook of his elbow. I picked up the controller. The power button dimmed the lights and turned on a disco ball next to the television screen. I claimed my corner of the couch.

“Give me a number,” I told Hayley. He didn’t move, so I opened up the binder myself. English songs are usually in the back, and within about thirty seconds I’d found them. I felt like some Queen, but entered the wrong number. A Korean song started playing, a chipper-sounding woman wailing against a video of summer scenes on the monitor.

“Your Song!” Hayley called. I sat on the far side of the couch and flipped a few pages, to the Ys.

“They don’t have it,” I lied. He played it each time we went to a singing room, and the whole group usually joined in. I know it must have been their song, so it was the last thing he needed to hear.

Hayley pushed himself up to the table. “I need to hear it. To remember the words.” He propped his head up on his arms and I reclined on the couch, watching the faded scenes of children feeding ducks in a pond. The edge of the table blocked the left side of the screen from my view, so I watched the right half. As my mind surrendered to sleep it seemed the ducks were nibbling off large chunks of hangeul.