bone breaking.
Fan, for the first time since arriving in Korea, felt anxiety welling up into her stomach. She cast her eyes around for an exit. But that was impossible; she had no clothes on, only a dim idea of how to find the locker that held her clothes, and the masseuse leveled her vexed gaze at her every few seconds. The woman had cropped hair and a physique that offered the bikini little contour.
The masseuses, most between fifty and sixty years old, had the same look, stern and unbending, as if they couldn’t stop totting up the vast capacity for error found in human flesh. Yoon was right. Fan had come to the jjimjilbang, the bathhouse, only after Yoon warned her it would not be like an American spa.
The women are not “friendly like your American massage people,” Yoon said, but “very professional, very trained.” Fan understood this to mean they didn’t flatter you, or introduce themselves, or offer you cups of cucumber water. Or rhapsodize about your fingers. Yoon had visited the U.S., and she knew.
“In your country they want to make you feel special,” she said, “here it is just the body.”
The jjimjilbang was indeed like no spa in the United States—cheap, utilitarian, full of families with little kids and grandmas, and with several sex-segregated floors where nude women strolled from tub to tub or dropped to stretch or do calisthenics. Fan had spent two weeks reveling in her silence and solitude before she started doing things, but even then was choosy. She joined a Korean class that met twice a week at the university, and she visited this spa. Called Dragon Hill, the place was enormous—floor after floor including pools for swimming, enormous tubs for soaking, a video arcade, places to eat, and lord knows what else.
With Fan’s arm in the right place the ddemiri began working on her body. She leaned into her, using the towel and the salt and rubbing the dead skin off her in shreds and long grey rolls, curled and insubstantial as spider webbing. What was dead on Fan stripped away, literally. The ddemiri put Fan on her side and scissored her legs, she pushed her on her back, on her stomach. She scrubbed down Fan’s breasts and her butt and in front stopped only at her pubic hair. Every inch of Fan gave up its dead cells, grey, thin, scattering around her as if she burned in an impossible slow burn and threw off ash. The word dde kept rolling through Fan’s mind: dde, ded, dead. How strange, Fan thought, that words keep circling to the same thing, like water swirling in a drain. She imagined ddemiri somehow meant death watcher, a possible reading of the roots of the word in English, though of course it wasn’t English.
At some points—at Fan’s breasts, at her feet—the ddemiri’s scrubbing hurt so much Fan cried out, but the masseuse did not slow down, or even appear to notice.
Every few moments the ddemiri took a bowl of warm water and poured it all over Fan’s body. Now and then she poured it carefully over Fan’s forehead. The ash spilled away with the water and then the woman worked the towel once more and the flecks re-accumulated.
As the ddemiri worked—leaning all her strength, her self, into the deadness at Fan’s surface—she reached up to Fan’s face, every minute or so, and smoothed the hair back from her temple. Like the gesture she used to form the bun, this one was quick and sure. She placed her palm on Fan’s hair, sleeked it back. Fan’s hair sat tight in her bun with no stray strands; her hair got wet regardless, warm water from the bowls sloshing across the table.
The gesture felt like a mother’s, a pointless and absent-minded keeping neat. The ddemiri kept up the smoothing as she finished the scrub and began to massage, cupping her hands and beating Fan’s ass with the bone-crunching sound she’d heard earlier. It hurt a little but not as much as the sound had promised, then made her feel alive. The ddemiri worked on Fan’s feet, her back, her neck. The woman’s hand, all muscle, felt light only as it smoothed down her forehead.
Fan began crying to herself, on and off, the water still draining from her face concealing the tears. At the end of the massage the ddemiri pulled the band out with one hand, grasped Fan’s hair and washed it, massaging her scalp. There had been no purpose, then, to keeping her hair slicked down and wet, out of the way of the oils, the salts, the skin.
Fan cried a little more. It felt pure, to get all this woman’s attention and also its complete absence. To be so wholly cared for by someone who didn’t love her.
Finally, the masseuse slapped her butt with an air of finality and stepped back. Fan stood up, naked and spilling water, muscles separately jumping to life. The ddemiri punched her services into Fan’s bracelet, given to her on check-in. All payment at the jjimjilbang happened on departure.
“Can I have your name?” Fan asked her.
“Uh?” The ddemiri looked startled, then waved her hand. “No, no.”
Fan wasn’t sure if the ddemiri had understood her and somehow rejected the idea of sharing her name, or if she had not understood. But you couldn’t choose your ddemiri by name anyway. If Fan came back at the same time, she reasoned, the woman would be here. Came back when? Tomorrow?
Tomorrow might seem desperate. Fan would come back once a week, she decided. And she’d sit stubbornly in her mugwort pool until this particular ddemiri was free. Once a week—one day in seven. One was a decorous number.
Fan got back to her apartment, by cab, at around five o’clock. Paul was not there yet, but she expected him soon. He had been coming home much earlier than he would have in the States, throwing himself down on the couch with an unhappy look. He did this tonight. He had a habit when things bothered him of staring down at his thumbs, jerking them up and down, as if thinking through their opposability.
He had begun using a gel in his straight dark hair, slicking it back as Korean professional men did. Fan had always found his looks a bit generic, a little bit like the actor Seth Rogen, maybe, but cleaned up. He trimmed his beard close here and with the gelled hair looked more individual, a heavy-cheeked man with a nose that flared, and brows that never really ended, but ran across the top of his face in swards and strands.
“I don’t know how to contribute,” Paul said. “I don’t know what they’re doing. I never hear from In-Su.”
“Can’t you just stop into the lab? Talk to them?”
Paul shrugged and looked at his thumbs. “In-Su won’t tell me the schedule. I stop in but there’re just the grad students and I have to ask them what they’re doing. It’s embarrassing.”
She wondered if he wanted her to say, We can go home.
She said instead: “Let’s get dumplings.”
Fan suggested they go to a North Korean dumpling restaurant they knew of in Insadong, a pedestrian neighborhood, then take a walk. Paul found a lot of Korean food too spicy, though Fan loved it. North Korean food was mild. Today had been a cool, sunny day. Her body, suffused with new blood and scrubbed bare, felt alive beneath her, and she wanted to walk, to move.
“Three objects can be entangled,” she told Paul. “They’ve proven it.” This news had just been reported in Physics World. Fan had lately become obsessed with entanglement, how human it felt in some way—particles causing one another to change but stay opposite, like a particle with up spin creating down spin in the other. Three particles entangled would also keep changing one another’s states. It was bizarre and Einstein dismissed entanglement as spooky action at a distance, but it kept proving true. In the past, only two particles were found to be entangled.
“Huh,” said Paul, idly looking at three fingers. “I wouldn’t have expected that. Two makes a weird sort of sense. Symmetry or something.”
