The Korea Society, “Exploring Korea’s Creation Myth/” accessed February 19, 2016, http://www.koreasociety.org/index2.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=144.

I feel myself from a young age to be all bear, no god.

*

Some beginnings. Seoul, South Korea. Spring 1975.

The baby has stridor. Notes are made in thin black script on charts. Nurses bow, bend, take the bus home.

The baby exhibits abnormal breathing with a high-pitched sound, the neck and face swollen, blue lips, blue nail beds, bluish skin.

The medical records look like a musical score of the body: its excretions, its color, the temperature of the interior.

We have inside us a series of red rooms, lesser and slighter, minor and more secret.

Paper soaked in milk.

Made itself sick.

The stethoscope, its metal methodical ear cupped to the hot and hollow places of the body—sounding the depths.

Long poem as prescription. The doctor is memory. Thick as a rib.

Skin-paper.

Blood is water and iron. A million motes of oxygen. Bind, bound.

Slippery remembrance. Punishment and sentence.

Penance.

Absolute apology.

Absolute forgiveness.

2. The Korea Society, “Exploring Korea’s Creation Myth/’ accessed February 19, 2016, http://www.koreasociety.org/index2.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=144.

The Other Asterion, or, The Minotaur’s Sacrifice (A Story)

The Other Asterion, or, The Minotaur’s Sacrifice (A Story)

The English word disaster is a combination of dis (bad) and astron (star). Bad star. An event caused by an unfavorable alignment of the sky-bodies. A calamity.

But of all the games, I prefer the one about the other Asterion. I pretend that he comes to visit me and that I show him my house. With great obeisance I say to him “Now we shall return to the first intersection” or “Now we shall come out into another courtyard” or “I knew you would like the drain” or “Now you will see a pool that was filled with sand” or “You will soon see how the cellar branches out.” Sometimes I make a mistake and the two of us laugh heartily.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The House of Asterion”

“It’s a remarkable piece of apparatus,” said the officer to the explorer and surveyed with a certain air of admiration the apparatus which was after all quite familiar to him.

—Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”

Prologue: The Cosmos Births the Prisoner

An empty symphony of velocity. In the beginning of the world there was nothing. If you listened very closely, with your ear tilted toward the void, you could hear it breathing like a great silent bellows, and all you could hear was the sound of nothing expanding and nothing contracting. The invisible lungs of the universe. No color and nothing to see or taste with. Within the breath coiled something like a tensed muscle, something readying itself to spring. Patient as a trophied hunter or a benevolent mother.