Anna was her English nickname.  She was a fortuneteller who always finished with the words believe it or not, but they all believed.  She craved new vocabulary and reveled in the dissection of American idioms.  The ajummas pitied Anna because she was 34 and unmarried.  On my first day as a teacher, my first day in Korea, Iris peered over her translator and asked, “I say to Anna, speak his destiny?”  Tell him his destiny, I said.

Iris told me to write the numbers one through ten three times on a blank piece of notebook paper.  From that came this:

“Your childhood had great love.  You are smart.”  Ooos and aahs from the ajjumas.  “You will be rich.”  Her face strained then as though a door swung open between one of my 3’s and my 5’s.  This I remember most.  “Your wife will be beautiful.  She will not love you.”  The ajjumas turned in unison for a reaction.  I was red.  They began speaking Korean to Anna, harshly.  Anna continued.  “You are too busy for your wife.  Busy working.”

Jayne felt the need to comfort.  “Anna is very good.  Everyone has not perfect.”  Iris rephrased for my clarification, “Anna is always right.  Fate is true.”  And Lily.  “You are too busy for your wife.” 

I spent many nights stoned on soju wondering where Anna lived and if she had friends.  Her indifference intrigued me.  She was a puzzle.  An idiom.  By the time she first approached me after class, my thoughts of her were mesmerizing and the cause of terrible anxiety.  I had quit being a comedian and became a professor.  Even I could notice the difference in my handwriting on the chalkboard.  The ajummas would ask me if I’d made a girlfriend yet.  Making Anna my girlfriend was bending an oak and expecting it to stay bent when I let off.  It was only when I let off, when I trained my eyes to look through her, that she leaned, ever so slightly.  She asked me to help her with a poetry translation.

 “My sister had a dream about living in a castle in Gyeongju.  In this dream she urinated for three days until there was a deep river that flowed in a circle around the castle.  When she woke her bed was soaked.  She asked if I wanted to buy this dream from her.” 

“I like the urine river.  Good image.”

“In the Shilla Dynasty, a woman bought her sister’s dream and later became Queen.  This is a famous story.  Their fates were switched.  I bought my sister’s dream for one hundred thousand won.  She bought new sheets.”

The storm came soon after we set out for the library.  The streets were empty.  The wind did enough damage in Japan to convince the Korean street vendors to take the day off.  The air was stale without the aroma of fish and rice cakes wafting across our faces, carried on the shoulders of steam and smoke.  The feelings of the day were defined by a lack of presence.  Anna seemed more comfortable in this void.  Her furtive glances and fast tugs at my sleeve when she made an abrupt turn down a deeper, darker path revealed a playful side I desperately wanted to engage.  In these alleys, canvases hung between the roofs of buildings to allow market trade to continue during bad weather.  In the drinking dens low watt bulbs shone red light on old beer and soju posters.  I began to wonder if the red lights signified a sordid facet of Anna’s fortune telling duties.  I mostly discarded it as a notion brought on by strange winds.

I followed Anna into a noodle restaurant.  The owner didn’t seem to notice Anna at all but bowed to me.  She sought approval for her leopard-patterned pants and I obliged by sharpening my gaze.  Anna ignored both of us and crawled up the steps that if they were a few degrees more vertical would be a ladder.

I waited for the tea downstairs, watching astounding TV images of the typhoon reeking havoc on rice paddies and parking garages alike. The owner watched with me for a minute, making condemnatory clicking noises with her tongue before putting a kettle on the stove.  This typhoon was the fifteenth of the year and by noon had poured more rain on the country than all the others combined.  He was willful, steadfast, anxious, and by no means difficult to analyze.  Typhoon Rusa was his name.  

In Kohung, he moved the Kim family and their yard from one street to another, giving their house a surfing lesson and playing some other games he’d picked up around the East China Sea.  Then a floodwall somewhere broke and made the streets so indistinguishable Mrs. Kim felt they were in an entirely new district.  The house surfed well for about a minute, Mr. Kim counting the seconds aloud, then wiped out and scraped bottom.  Only the dishes remained afloat. 

In Busan, the kettle water reached a boil and the owner poured one cup of tea.  When I asked for another cup, she smiled and bowed as though I’d paid her a compliment.  When I pointed to the loft, to Anna, she took the tray from me, climbed the stairs and placed the tray on a table opposite Anna’s.  She laid a cushion on the floor and bowed again before descending.  She walked past Anna, not so much snubbing her as suffering from some sort of acute tunnel vision.  I moved the tray to Anna’s table.

Anna began.  “I was going to see my sister in Kangsang but the road was blocked.”  I had decided to skip a wedding in Kangsang in order to meet Anna.  Anna picked up her Korean poetry book and started reading aloud.  I transferred my teabag to a napkin and decided I’d rather see my home burnt than flooded.

“You’re a good woman.”  I said.

“You flirt like an old man.”  She read the title, “The bark of old dog.  Are you interested?”  I was. 

“Is old dog a proper name, or is it generic?” 

“What is generic?”

“I’ll go buy some generic soju and when I get back we’ll translate this whole book.” 

“What is proper?”

“Drinking soju while you’re reading poetry with a beautiful woman during a typhoon.” 

“I’m not beautiful.  I’m smart and pretty.”

“I don’t care what you think.  I need to drink if we intend to have any sort of normal conversation.  Please start with the titles and we can go from there.  I’m very interested in this Old Dog fellow.  I certainly hope his name is not generic, but we’ll soon find out.  I’m going to call you Min-kyung from now on.”  She nodded and waved me away. 

When I returned, the poem about the Old Dog was folded neatly into an origami elephant.  I didn’t know why she didn’t make it into an old dog.  I didn’t ask.  Instead I clapped the two bottles of soju together and let them ring.

“I bought you some flowers.”

“I don’t see any.”

“I said I bought some.  Some drunk prick was yelling at the flower lady, buying time so he could stay dry under her tent.  But he fell into her flowers and couldn’t get up until he rolled over three rows of bouquets.  The flower lady stared at me as if there were something I could do get the petals back on the stems.  Then this drunk prick grabbed your bouquet from me and stumbled off mumbling some profanities I didn’t understand.”

“That’s because you don’t speak Korean and besides, you don’t listen regardless of the language.”

“I didn’t need to speak.  And don’t tell me I don’t speak Korean.  I told him I’d give him a bloody nose if I saw him anywhere near the flower shop again.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“I’m helping you.  I’m.  What do you mean?”

“He could be back at the flower shop right now.  Pillaging the place.  Raping that poor old ajjuma and eating her flowers.” 

“Why do you have to be so strange all the time?”

“I’m not strange.  I just know things about you that make it uncomfortable for me to talk to you.  I can’t talk about the weather.”

“Today you can talk about the weather.  There’re umbrellas like skeletons all over the sidewalks.” 

Min-kyung didn’t care about the storm or the skeletons.  “You shouldn’t go back to America.  You want Los Angeles but you can’t have it.  You want to make me your lover.  Don’t go back to America and don’t be clever.”

I poured for her and then she poured for me.  We drank.  A bodybuilding poster blew off a wall on the other side of the street and attached itself to our window for a few seconds.  An empty bus passed.  A butcher pulled the metal door down over his shop.  I could see a black pig staring out into the rain, more afraid of it than the butcher.  A turtle in a small fountain by the window pocked its head out of the water, praising the chaos.  I decided not to go back to America.  

“That’s the first step.”  She told me.  “It feels true, right?”

I nodded.  I loved her and she surely knew that.  We finished the soju and finished the conversation in Korean and she lead me to a motel.  She wouldn’t have brought me if it wasn’t going to be satisfying.  The next day I woke up alone with more bottles of soju on the windowsill.  Many trees were down and windows boarded and the sidewalks were swamped with debris and students.  A faint whistling bounced off the buildings of the serpentine path through the market.  It was a song and a voice I’d heard before, echoed in the depths of the subway.

It was a long filthy walk to school but I was early. The ajummas brought rice cakes and boiled potatoes.  No Min-kyung.  I stood at the window watching street vendors push vending carts through brown pools until their Korean whispers gave way to a singular English voice.   Lily said Anna had gone to Kansang to see her sister.  Jayne said she went yesterday.  I ate noodles with her yesterday.  Iris said it was not possible.  She’d driven to Kangsang yesterday morning.  In the afternoon, Typhoon Rusa picked her up and threw her into a glass house. 

But what about the wind that threw us into the motel room and onto the floor that became our bed?  I rushed from the wooden building to the market in search of the noodle restaurant and the motel.  Smashed signage and shredded canvas allowed hard sunlight to reached into corners.  The entire market was painted with a white generic veil that deleted the references of red lights and dark dens.  I sought the woman in the leopard pants.  The broken umbrellas, sick and silent, pointed in all directions.  I wandered for hours circuitously, hung over in the maze.  I stared into sun.  It offered trite illusions; a fearful black pig and a turtle.  Somewhere in the middle I found Lily.  She asked if Min-kyung had shared a dream.  I said yes.  Through sweaty eyes and fatigue, “She took your fate.” 

That subway whistle came back and banged around inside my chest until it became exhausted.  Then it lay like a spoon.

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