“Tonight we will sleep together.”
The man sitting naked across from me smiled and sweat poured from his face into his teeth. His arms stretched the width of the bath and through its violent bubbles I saw his toes extend toward me. Of course I said yes.
There’s a ritual to Korean bathhouses. I would start in the charcoal room, set my head on a wooden pillow in the darkness, wait for sweat to rise out of me like all my concerns, and listen in on the harshly whispered conversations of the middle-aged women surrounding, imagining their confessions. Then I would sit in a Finnish sauna lined with fragrant cedar, then a steam room laced with menthol and then nude in the segregated baths on the men’s side: warm then cool then hot then cold then scalding. Pulling a rope that tipped a bucket of ice water over my head, I would scrub every part of me ruthlessly in the full heat of a shower with a pink abrasive towel. My skin tingled with joy. For $7 you could overnight.
Aazhang and I fell into rhythm that night in Andong, making the rounds together before finally speaking. He had traveled from the Kingdom of Bhutan to perform in the International Mask Dance Festival as a cultural representative of his government, a dancer. He announced that as his friend, when I visited Bhutan they would waive my tourist tax of $300 per day. He was grateful to find someone who spoke English.
We toweled off dripping, put back on our baggy uniforms and found a space to share on the heated marble floor of the communal sleeping room. Its warmth rose into my back, intensifying the euphoria of my blood vessels having expanded and constricted in the alternating baths, and I fell deeply asleep. In the middle of the night I found a woman perpendicular at my feet. I scooched back until my head touched someone else in the dark. The collective snoring lulled me back to sleep.
I woke before Aazhang and left the jjimjilbang without a goodbye, sure I will meet him in Bhutan. And the morning air of Korea’s “most spiritual city” kissed my skin.
