Writings

Planaria

by Jeon Sang-guk, translated by C. La Shure

Perhaps it was a drunken nightmare. When I opened my eyes in the morning I struggled for breath and my head was heavy. Did I really kill her, just like Sa said? Why didn’t I want to go to that valley in Mt. Yeonyeop? Had I not gone back to that valley even once after she disappeared? Twitter twitter, twitter scree.... It was that blasted bird’s song again. It was no longer within my power to find the source of the song. Fortunately, Sa had confirmed for me last night that the bird’s song was not coming from my mouth. But I was in a bad mood. I felt the same even after showering. Someone was watching me. It felt like I was watching me. No, someone else who was not me was watching me. Might she really have returned? I went out onto the veranda. A sign of something frighteningly strange—something was clearly alive and moving. My blood chilled. It was a slug. Glistening with mucus, a slug was stuck to the wall next to the orchid I had moved last night.

I don’t know why, but the moment I saw the slug I thought of her. Slugs generally come out at night to nibble on plant shoots. Of the two feelers that stuck out like horns on its head, one had an eye attached to it, and the other, shorter one was an olfactory organ. Perhaps because of the olfactory feeler, slugs were sensitive to smell. She was sensitive. When the bird’s song came from her body she was extremely sensitive. She knew which apartment in our building had opened a crock of soy sauce, or which apartment was fermenting soybean paste. Her every sense was so attuned that she heard the sound of a thief opening the door to the apartment two floors below us and called the police. Sometimes the humming of the refrigerator or the sound of the fan, not to mention the sound of the television, would set her nerves on edge. During rainstorms she would wrap herself up in her blanket. She would jump at the sound of the doorbell, and be startled by announcements from the apartment management over the loudspeaker. “That girl you brought home from the mountains,” said my stepmother, who had raised me since I was six, “there is something unearthly about her. She might even be a hundred year-old fox that has transformed herself into a human.”

Although it only happened rarely, there were days when she would become lustful. On those days she laughed a lot and drank liquor freely. When she was drunk she would act like a little child. She even took her clothes off first. Those unusually warm lips. I would close my eyes. I would take her in my arms. But it was not her lips that were touching mine. They were the lips of a thirteen year-old girl, twenty years ago. The girl seduced me. “Teacher, let’s stop studying and just play.” The house was empty and the floor of the girl’s room was warm. The girl draped her arms around my neck. She sucked at my lips. I was in ecstasy. The girl took my hand and held it to her breast. She took my other hand and put it beneath her skirt. The girl stopped moving. She stopped breathing as well. The door to the room opened and I saw her mother’s face. “Mom, I kissed my tutor. He said he would give me a baby seed, too.” Startled, I pulled out. My habit of coitus interruptus saved me often.

“Sex is the mixing of genes.” Before she vanished, I had tried to persuade her. I was certain that she now had nothing like a winged robe. “The meeting of the ovum and the sperm, and fertilization, that is the birth of new life, and so sex is life.”

She resisted stubbornly. “Those are all merely by-products of the instinct for pleasure.”

“But the important thing is that that instinct is the core of human history.”

“No, human history is the will of humanity.”

“The will not to have children?”

“No, the eradication of bad genes. That is precisely the reason that death is inevitably born along with life.”

“Do you still want to die?” I yelled, unable to stand it any longer.

Her mouth twisted into a smile. “No, I want everyone to die together.”

“Teacher, what happened to those planaria that disappeared?”

The pieces of the planaria that had disappeared into the sunshine along with the civil defense drill siren were still in the children’s minds. Just as that thirteen year-old girl lived in my body, so those planaria were still alive. They died, within the house of my soul, and within my memory! The confusion of appearance and substance was perplexing. There are no miracles in science. The vanishing of the planaria that day could only be called death.

The environment is life. I once talked with her about the evolution of living things. “Yes, unlike the diploid, sexually reproducing organisms, whose lifespan is limited, the haploid, asexually reproducing organisms never die. What that means is that the lifespan of plants is not limited. If a plant dies, it is not because it has reached the end of its lifespan, but because of the environment. Plants can die from a shortage of water, any number of natural calamities, or even a single bug. The reason all life forms could reproduce asexually for billions of years was that the environment was good enough to allow that. Not only parent and offspring, but also all organisms that multiply through asexual reproduction look the same. There can be no good ones or bad ones. But as the environment changes, two organisms unite to produce offspring different from the parents in a new procreation method that allows them to adapt to that environment, and the changes in the environment have finally ushered in the era of sexual reproduction. It was the activation of the organisms’ instinct for preservation of the species. Sexual reproduction is an historic reproduction method that allows the production of offspring than can adapt to the environment.”

She laughed. “So what you’re saying is that sex, which was developed due to the need for sexual reproduction, ultimately accelerated evolution.”

“That’s exactly it. Our relationship needs to develop too.”

“Evolution means a deviation or retrogression from tradition.”

“No, real evolution is going from the margins into the mainstream.”

“No thank you! That’s not for me.”

“OK, next you are going to write down the results of your observations of your planaria. Which of the following is not an observational fact? One, the body is brown. Two, it is creepy. Three, if you touch the body with a matchstick it shrinks back. Four, it has two eyes and a triangular head.”

Creepiness is a notion. A universal, sensual notion. Like other males, I loved her. She had the harmony of a sexually attractive appearance and lucid reasoning. I chose her at first glance. The idea that two people must love each other the same is nothing but wishful thinking—the law of love between male and female is that one gives while the other takes. After my unceasing male temptation, we finally started to live together.

“If you weren’t there then there would be no reason for me to tremble like this.” I never gave up expressing my love. “It was fate—I’ve waited my whole life to meet you.” What had been my weakness until that point was now displayed like the brilliant tail feathers of a peacock. “When I was seven my father left my mother. The only way my mother could take her revenge on my father was to end her own life. In response to my mother’s suicide my father passed on his genes to seven offspring through three different females. And my father, having forgotten all of this, is now locked away in a church retreat. There, I think you’ll understand now why I agreed with your desire not to have children.” Of course, what she wanted to know was the truth. What was that truth? The DNA within my sperm that swam toward the ovum of a thirteen year old? Perhaps she saw the lice hiding within my splendid feathers. Yes, she could have left because she was afraid of the lice in my feathers.