Six Hundred Twenty-Nine Thousand Eight Hundred Ninety-Eight by Youna Kwak

I was born in the year of Roe vs. Wade. Watergate and Wounded Knee, Skylab, Secretariat, Billie Jean King, the last US troops out of Vietnam, and I was born. Roe and I turned twenty-one in 1994, the year the Magellan disappeared, of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, of Whitewater and the Kremlin accords. That summer Brazil won the World Cup, Nixon died, Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered, and members of a religious cult used sarin gas to attack Japanese commuters, an inexplicable event later narrativized in Haruki Murakami’s Underground, a book I would read while riding the subway in New York City, having moved there three years later, now graduated from college, almost a grown-up, after the abortion.

The summer of the abortion I was waitressing at a suburban family pub alongside sardonic women in their twenties and thirties who gossiped indiscriminately about our white-haired boss and his bejeweled, gum- cracking wife, and traded guesses about who’d been spotted giving head to whom in the cab of a truck after closing. I kept quiet and demonstrated solidarity by chain-smoking in a nook on the way to the back station where the bread baskets were kept, where half a dozen cigarettes were perpetually burning in a mammoth glass ashtray, so that on your way to and from the floor you could grab your cigarette, take a quick draw, then drop it back into one of a dozen curved grooves without breaking your stride. Coffin nails gonna kill me someone cackled, seeming to relish the thought. Everyone despised the boss and his wife, who had shown me, the sole college kid, mostly parental benevolence. My kid is sick, what the fuck complained someone else, after being denied the night off. When I left my job at the end of the summer, my boss slipped me a fifty inside a card scrawled good luck, stay in school.

Being lower class, I learned as a child, was not strictly tied to economics, because some lower class kids had parents whose income equaled or exceeded my parents’ income, but their values were different, as evidenced by certain ideas about the purpose and necessity of education that were to be viewed with distrust and alarm (it was said, for example, of a pretty blonde cheerleader at my high school, that when her equally pretty blonde mother was asked whether she would be going to college, she snorted why the fuck would I waste my money).

Lower class like the kids I met at church who, instead of participating in extra-curricular activities to better their characters and résumés, spent their free time hanging out the open windows of their moms’ Honda Civics, in the parking lots of cinderblock apartment complexes identical to the one we’d lived in after immigrating to the US, and that our collective familial mission had been to leave as far behind as possible. Sitting sultry shotgun in a car driving nowhere, drinking afternoon cans of Coors and smoking the extra fat Camels that were the trend, I entered a space where certain desires had to be disavowed, in exchange for the indulgence of loosening the reins of longing for upward class mobility, respectability and ceaseless self-improvement—a space where I could imagine a life beyond these narrow imperatives.

I sought the same ease in the company of the women with whom I worked in the summer of the abortion, who never asked me what classes I was taking or what books I was reading, omissions that occasioned both loneliness and relief. Instead they encircled me into their sisterhood of dark jokes and judgments, metered out on bosses, co-workers, customers, boyfriends, exes, children, or anyone whose aim that day was to cause them trouble or grief. I hoarded my cash tips in a large glass kimchi jar of the kind that were always readily available around the house with the habitual sense of dread with which I have always dealt with wages and paychecks, because I have never not been afraid that I will someday run out of money. If I could avoid keeping careful track of how much was in the jar, I could imagine the sum to be almost infinite, let the steadily mounting level of thin green paper fill me with a sense of security and well-being. When I had to draw $300 out of the jar to pay for the abortion, the visual effect of the diminished level of bills was in itself distressing.

This was the point my ex-boyfriend kept harping on when I called to let him know I was getting an abortion and asked him to help me pay for it. The fact that he felt the responsibility—financial or otherwise—was not, or should not be, shared, was an offense he brought up over and over, to the exclusion of any other subject: you want to make it disappear like you want me to disappear and: you only care about the money.

Not all I cared about, no. But I did care about it, I cared about the money a lot. I didn’t count how much was left in the jar, but once I’d taken out three hundred dollars in mostly ones, the stash was noticeably reduced. For a while I took a second job house-painting to supplement my income and to make the level of bills rise higher, but I couldn’t stomach the provocation of being bossed by a crew of white guys all my age or younger, whose chief activity was to take as many smoke breaks as possible, in between pouring paint into huge trays and slapping it carelessly all over the siding, while delegating the most tedious tasks, such as carefully taping off the many-paned windows before painting their tiny, narrow frames, to the only girl: me.

Next I tried giving English lessons to an expatriated creative professional, a man in his thirties who had been introduced to me by one of my college professors and paid me handsomely in cash, before sexually assaulting me, although we named these things differently in ’94.

After the abortion, I waited in the clinic for the required hour, got into my car, and drove myself home. I went to work as usual for my next shift, but a few days later, rising from bed, I was suddenly in so much pain that I could not walk, and had instead to crawl to the kitchen where the telephone was inconveniently installed high up on the wall, to do what I had never done before—call in sick. My boss did not take this last-minute cancellation well, and it was not lost on me that it was an abortion that had finally joined me to the fate of the women whose unjust treatment never quite penetrated the collegiate bubble of my life. But I only missed one shift. Back at work the next day I was awash with relief at how little damage had been done to the twinned strongholds of my body, and my jar of money.

Another childhood lesson in economics: a paycheck represents the scarcity and finitude of money that everyone needs in order to live and that you would die or be destitute for lack of, in the absence of any reserve. To hold a paycheck in your hand is to know that you are secure in the now, but in the after there are no guarantees. And the enemy of the paycheck are the bills and payment books that fill the top drawer of a small lacquered cabinet that also contains stamps and a pen, so full it has to be jammed shut, against which a constant reckoning is necessary. Mortgage, electric, gas, phone, insurance, but also, an upright piano bought on layaway, whose monthly payments are printed on thin sheets of vellum gummed together. See? says Mother grimly each time a page is torn from this negative checkbook—it’s a very big check. How could you disagree?

Still, our deprivations are always of a second order—not without clothes, food, or shelter—not hunger, cold, or disease, but rather the shame that adheres to precarious belonging, your belonging to a reliably safe world so fragile that you are condemned to never actually possess but only to desire a way of life that remains contingent, impossible to maintain. Living dangerously beyond your means, which is to say, your capacities, unwilling to settle for a class position that you could simply inhabit without effort, unable to clamber into a higher class position with anything resembling grace.

From the body, nothing disappears. Everything that exits must break down some door. Somehow, I knew exactly what to do. I looked in the phone book under “A,” called a number, found the small, neat office, in a complex of anodyne townhouses each blandly identical to the next, as if their purposes could be interchanged. First only a urine test, no more than what I could have done using a home kit I felt more nervous about purchasing in a drugstore than showing up at this much more compromising place—and when I stepped into the examining room, the nurse following me with her clipboard, I already knew what I knew. But even as I knew what I knew, when the nurse said: what do you want the results to be? I was pierced with a sudden and eclipsing joy. Was it possible after all to disappear? What do I want, meaning: I could choose? My wants could direct the future? Meaning: desire was all it took? Wishes become prognostic? Negative.

But she had nothing new to tell me and I knew what I knew. I knew it coming down the stairs of the bartender’s house—I had a crush on the bartender I could tell no one about, including myself—she was small, but tough, with a blond buzz cut and blue eyes rimmed with black kohl, a small, blonde angry raccoon. Men came to the pub solely to sit at the bar and leer, but she was not to be trifled with, she was fierce and could handle anything, her volatile family, her unreliable mom whose car was always breaking down that’s the last fucking time I get it fixed I swear to god.

We were at the bartender’s house after work, drinking beer, passing a joint, watching a movie—I can’t recall what movie—on TV, when people still had TVs and still watched movies on them. At some point I lost track—how many joints, how many beers, how many cigarettes—I fished myself out of the armchair in which I’d been slouched and started up the stairs to go to the bathroom but at the top of the stairs I collapsed, blacked out, and when I came to, I felt utterly changed and I knew.

Pregnant with: synonym for predicative, fatidical, premonitory, prophetic

(Roget’s Thesaurus).

You’re making it disappear like you want me to disappear but no disappearance occurred, rather: a matter of body, tissue, skin, flesh, muscles, blood, contractions, cold, metal, gauze, rubber, plastic, and paper. I took the pile of money from the kimchi jar, the bills smelled terrible, dank and fermented. After the abortion, I am surprised to find myself crying but the nurse is not—she reaches for the box of tissues on the counter with a practiced gesture, and hands it to me matter-of-factly and without a word, a discretion I appreciate. Had she asked, would I have told her the truth? That my tears were not provoked by the fact of terminating a pregnancy I was absolutely, unequivocally certain I wanted to end; nor was I crying for the ex-boyfriend who, in his present self-absorption and callousness concerning the situation I now found myself in alone, had finally projected himself out of the sphere of my sympathy or love. Instead, I was crying because it had been so simple, so easy to survive—because I was free and young, with a car and a job. Because I had money in a jar on the dresser in my bedroom, money that belonged to no one else, and that no one could stop me from using to deliver myself to a beige townhouse, don a clean gown, recline on a clean gurney, open my legs trustingly to a stranger, and be saved. I cried because I disassociated from my present safety, as if I could smell the soil of unlit rooms, the hostile look on the man wielding metal, the ugly scrum on the blade destined not to help, but to harm. As if my bright vision might be extinguished by the apparition of countless faces, women and girls who seemed more real to me than the unknown ancestors whose features I have never been able to conjure—the women seemed more real, I felt their veracity, their presence, the lightning sear of their rage and shitty luck—I sensed their fear, their ferocity, their grief—and I thanked them, apologized to them in my mind, I thanked them and apologized at the same time, not knowing whether their suffering was a gift of which I was the recipient, or a fate for which I was partly responsible.

The last time we had sex on the carpeted floor of his childhood bedroom in a city I had consented to travel 32 hours on a bus to visit for the purposes of “closure” after a tumultuous break-up, when my ex-boyfriend asked me, as he was about to come inside me with no protection, is this ok? I said: yes.

Mentally fumbling to do the math, I figured I was in the ballpark of yes. Not thinking or thinking too briefly to let the thought deliver me to safety, or perhaps I merely completed the sentence in my mind—is this ok? yes, for you, it’s ok. I don’t claim to have had, in that moment, any idea what would come next. But even without knowing, I must have accepted my lot—for you, it will be ok, I could have sworn it. As for me, what would become of me—who, even I, could possibly imagine.

Listen. I have no desire to persuade. If I had to do it again, I would get the abortion. If I could do it over, I would get the abortion, ten more times, I would get the abortion, a hundred times, a thousand times I would get the abortion, ten thousand times, a hundred thousand, six hundred twenty-nine thousand, eight hundred and ninety-eight times, I would get the abortion, again and again, since the beginning of time, we will never stop, nothing you do or say will stop us, we are past persuasion, our lives are proof, look around you, we are everywhere, we are as air, we belong to ourselves, we deliver your dead, we will never disappear.

Youna Kwak is a poet, literary translator and teacher, born in Korea and based in Southern California. She is the author of the poetry collection sur vie (Fathom Books, 2022), and two books in translation, Gardeners (Véronique Bizot) and Daewoo: a novel (François Bon) (Diálogos Press, 2017, 2020).

19 October 2023