Jong-Ki Lim
The Sleepless State
I met the mosquito who I had killed last year
Can I not overtake you?
Are you one too many for me,
Winged Victory?
- D.H. Lawrence, “The Mosquito”
“Tomorrow's temperature is forecast to be very hot,” I, who looks exactly like my sister, said on television. Mosquito bites were visible on my calf.
“Turn off the TV,” I said to him in an irritated tone of voice.
“I want to be reborn as an animal, or rather as a mythical therianthrope.”
My sister’s last words, which she had said to me on the day her serenity was shattered would suddenly come to my mind whenever I felt very lonely. And every time her words came to me, it occurred to me that ordinary persons, like me, who don’t want to swim against the tide of the times would survive until slow extinction anyway. This depresses me and eats away at us. Today I spent the whole day alone, especially being haunted by that thought and her face which had gotten wet.
Then when I lay down to sleep, a mosquito buzzed around my head. Its voice was as loud as a helicopter. After several failed aim attempts at aiming, I swatted the mosquito sitting on my left cheek with my hand exactly. When I turned on the light and looked in the mirror, there were remains of the tiny creature with some blood stuck on my left cheek. The death of a female. It was a female just like me.
As I looked at her red death, “Mosquito,” a song by the rock band, "Yeah Yeah Yeahs" that I had heard on YouTube that morning began to hover in my head like an LP. At the same time, the song’s music video came to mind.
In the music video, you can see a mosquito that settles on the back of a little kid's hand, sticks its sharp needle into his skin and sucks out his blood frantically. In short course, the mosquito’s belly swells rapidly and enormously like a balloon as if it would burst and turn red.
You, mosquito, as Gustave Flaubert said, that is more dangerous than any savage beast, don't look down on him just because he is a kid! If you are only interested in sucking out blood like that, you can depart this life with just a blow all of a sudden. Sure enough, before it can howl, it is squashed by the kid's hand flying toward it unwittingly. But the mosquito does not lament or mourn over its fate which is as light as smoke. That’s because it usually doesn't care whether it dies or not, as if it were Buddha. It may be saying, “Even if I die, I am immortal like a phantom. So, I shall suck out your blood any time. Because I am not alone, because I am us, an uncountable multitude! We're beyond space-time. We sucked out dinosaurs’ blood, we sucked out Jesus’s blood and we sucked out your father and mother. We'll suck everyone’s blood forever. I or we are always blood-sucking females!”
Seeing that I was constantly engulfed in useless thoughts, I didn't think I would be able to sleep comfortably tonight. It was a sticky night. I felt as if I, my room, and tonight were wrapped in some kind of mucous membrane. And another one was buzzing as if she had just resurrected.
After that day, I didn't hear a buzz for a while. I still couldn't sleep easily in the sticky darkness, but came to feel a little more comfortable at night without a mosquito. But in late July when midsummer heat reared its ugly head, I visited a secondhand bookstore in my neighborhood and encountered the mosquito while I was examining a book in a dim corner. Mosquitoes always use their numeral for their victory. They all seem to be connected by their invisible nerves. Not only to the living ones but also to the dead ancestors and future descendants. Like the human collective unconsciousness. So, the little flying vampires always all look alike. The bastards sucking out my blood are always the same. The mosquito, that had died on the back of my hand last year, was squashed in my palm, vomiting bright red blood this time. It was my blood. The grotesque bloody pattern seems like its own unique fingerprint or personality. The remains of a female’s body and the blood of a female together created unique spots of Rorschach. For some reason they seemed like the grotesque tragic fate of females: Ophelia, Rosa Luxemburg, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Sophie Podolski…. A myriad of women including my sister who jumped into the sea like Alfonsina Storni went through my mind. I felt the growing bitterness that they would have felt once. And lines from a poem by D. H. Lawrence came to my mind.
“Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes
Besides the infinitesimal faint smear of you!
Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!”
I felt kind of sad.
The owner of the bookstore, who was arranging the books, giving off the moldy odor of book papers, and who looked like Jorge from The Name Of The Rose, looked at me with a strange expression as if he had noticed my state of mind. The problem is that I can't hide my feelings very well.
“What’s wrong?” the old man asked me.
“Mosquito?”
“What's wrong with mosquito?” He slapped his palms together in the air, as if trying to catch a mosquito.
As a weather forecaster, I was once asked by a newspaper to write about summer. “What does a weather forecaster have to do with summer? Because of the miniskirt?” At that time, I happened to come across Lawrence's “The Mosquito,” decided to write about mosquitoes in the newspaper, and immediately read several books on mosquito ecology. So I learned a lot about mosquitoes. Mosquitos seem all much of a muchness to human eyes, but they will also have their own personalities just like humans. Males and females will be different from each other, and the weights of their lives will be different depending on their time experiences and life experiences in the processes that they change from eggs into larvas and pupas, and break out of the pupas to transform themselves into full-grown adults with wings, and live their short lives and die nameless. Moreover, given the fact that about 3,500 species of mosquitos live on Earth and fifty species live only in my country, rather they are more diverse than humans. Further, they may have their own unique personality and character like fingerprints according to their individual differences even if they are the same species. Just like humans, you and me.
Since I first thought this, just as Lawrence did, I have beheld mosquitoes to “stand/ For a second enspasmed in oblivion,/ Obscenely ecstasied/ Sucking live blood,/ My blood … Blood, red blood/ Super-magical/ Forbidden liquor.” When I saw her like that, I felt sorry and melancholy for some reason. Of course, the blood-sucking mosquito is female. Just like me. After mating with a male, the female sucks out the blood of warm-blooded animals to get the protein and iron it needs to breed its eggs. It is known to breed eggs three to seven times while it usually lives for a week or two. In this sense, the mosquito that was dying in my palm might be the bastard that had just broken out of the chrysalis to transform itself into a full-grown adult or the bastard that had lived for two weeks and was on the verge of natural death. Maybe the bastard was sucking blood for the first time in its life, or maybe it was frantically sucking blood one last time to reproduce descendants as much as possible in the presence of death. I was absorbed in this thought for a while, and suddenly the palm of my hand tingled as if it had been stung by a bee. At that moment, the spots of Rorschach seemed to penetrate my flesh.
Suddenly I thought that if the bastard had tasted blood for the first time in its life after its first mating, I had better have gladly donated my blood to it. It made me feel sorry for its death to think that it might have met with its violent death on the first day it had gained its wings and gone out into the world. I even felt like I had killed a noble life like Buddha. Now, her traces disappeared completely into my flesh.
Looking at the palm of my hand where her traces had disappeared, I did not move in front of the bookstore owner for several moments. After all, when it died, it began to take a little bloody vengeance on me. The affected part of my palm bitten by it soon swelled up and formed a yellowish pus in the next morning. The affected part hurt me, but was wonderful. It had some profound beautiful colors like the light and shade of an ink-and-wash painting. I tried to welcome the mark of the minikin’s fateful tragedy that it left on me. It seems that if the affected area containing pus is burst by my fingernail, a young mosquito might spread its pellucid wings and soar into the air from the pool of the pus. If so, all of these things will be due to divine providence.
That night, I made love to Arthur, my lover who always hated mosquitoes. We got mildly drunk on a few bottles of beer. Suddenly he slapped my breast with his palm.
“Ouch! you perv.” I shouted, pushing him away.
“Look at your breast.”
“What is this? blood?”
There were the remains of a crushed mosquito and some blood on my left breast. The death of a female. It is a female like me.
All of a sudden, like a mosquito, he sucked the blood, my blood. I pushed him away again. At that moment, for some reason, I wanted to leave the remains of the mosquito on my body. I wanted to build its grave on my breast.
At the dawn of the next morning, I saw a mosquito, or maybe her soul, flying high from her grave on my breast. She looked like an angel. The pool of pus on the palm of my hand began to heal up and at the same time, the lifelike three-dimensional tattoo of a small wonderful creature with pellucid wings was being engraved over there. It wriggled and in time it seemed to be like The Sorcerer painted on the wall of the Les Trois Freres cave, or rather the face of my sister who had gotten wet.
“You used to say, ‘You must get home before the 10 o’clock curfew’, just like mum. I used to get sick of hearing it, but now I miss it so much.” I said to myself, looking at my sister's face, which the mosquito had transplanted in my palm. “She's not dead, she's just gone, somewhere.”
Jong-Ki Lim is writer and translator from South Korea. He has published various translated books of literature, humanities, social science, natural science, and articles on literature in South Korea. His book, The New Literary Revolution Of SF Tribes: The Birth And Soaring Of Science Fiction (original title: SF부족들의 새로운 문학 혁명, SF의 탄생과 비상)' is SF literary criticism. He has poetry published in Strange Horizons, Shot Glass Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal and Wingless Dreamer, and is currently writing and translating in Seoul.