by Axie Oh
I stare at him, the shock of his words making it hard to speak.
“Bastard,” I say finally, “why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because you’re my friend. And I knew that you’d never have left me if you knew I wanted to go with you but couldn’t. I couldn’t go. I threw you away, and it hurt, like nothing I’d ever felt before.” He has tears in his eyes, and his nose is red, and it has nothing to do with the cold.
I’m no better.
I can’t speak. I don’t know what to do, now that we’ve reached this point. There’s so much lost between us, I don’t know if our old friendship can be what it once was — when we’d been dependent on each other, when a day didn’t go by when we didn’t see each other.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way, maybe it can be another way, but I don’t know anything.
I sink to the ground. “Shit, I’m so drunk.”
“Yeah,” Young says, laughing — the sound strange but familiar. He holds his hand out to me. “Let’s get you to bed. You need to sleep it off.” He looks over to the stairs leading up to my apartment. “We’re almost there.”
I take his hand. I let him help me up from the ground, and I let him help me up the stairs, and I let him find the key to my apartment he knows is hidden in my mailbox. I let him shove a tonic down my throat to help with my inevitable hangover, and I let him throw me onto my bed at the back of the apartment.
That’s where I am when I finally fall into sleep, sinking into the warmth of the sheets — a little more whole than I’d been when I’d first woken.
30
Mugunghwa
I don’t surface until noon the next morning, greeted by the worst hangover headache of all time. It’s worth it.
I lost my phone during the crash, so I search my apartment for an old model, finding one behind a stack of manhwa in my bookshelf. I log onto my server. I have more than fifty messages, most of which are from Bora. They range from: Are you okay? I heard about the crash! to If you don’t answer this message, I’m going to assume you are dead and steal all your clothing from your locker. Minwoo’s one message is: Man, I’m so jealous you get to miss school.
I text Bora back: I’m fine. Lost my phone. How are you?
My phone pings with her immediate response. I miss you. Coming to school?
I text back, Not today.
This phone doesn’t have a floating option, so I throw it onto the bed, take a quick shower, and get dressed. By the time I return, I have a response from Bora. It’s a picture of her in class with her eyes closed as she pretends to sleep.
I send back a laughing sticker and head outside, checking the rest of my messages. The last one is from Young, one simple line: It’s time to put old ghosts to rest.
A picture of my father as a young man accompanies it with the date of his death, ten years ago today. A sharp pain stings my chest, and the old anger resurfaces. We only just made up, and Young’s already pushing me.
But that’s what friends are for. Young would always call me on my crap. And he’s right. It is time to let go of the ghosts that haunt me. If that means finally visiting the grave of my father, so be it.
I make a quick trip into the mart to purchase a hangover drink. I step outside and down it. It tastes sticky and medicinal, but I already feel the fogginess in my head receding. Another ping from my phone. I take it out, expecting to see another message from Young, but it’s from Alex.
Check the news, he says. I’ll meet you in the lobby of the hospital. Cryptic.
I open my browser and scroll through the recent headlines. They’re all the same. I click on one, and a short video begins to play, the bright lights of the Grid flashing behind the news anchor.
“During the transport of the United Korean League’s leader, Oh Kangto, from the Neo State of Korea’s Tower of Defense in Gangnam to an undisclosed prison facility for war criminals, a band of suspected United Korean League operatives opened fire on the Grid. In the ensuing crossfire, four NSK soldiers were injured. This video footage, taken from Grid surveillance, shows the successful transfer of Oh Kangto from the NSK prison car to a black off-Grid van, which shortly disappeared after these events, presumably to a location outside the Dome. The escape of Oh Kangto follows on the heels of an assassination attempt on the Director only three weeks prior to this event. The Tower has not issued a response to the perceived threat from the UKL.”
I scroll through several more articles while grabbing my coat.
Oh Kangto escaped. By now he’ll be recuperating in some safe unknown location.
My eyes catch on more headlines.
A Devastating Explosion in the NSK’s South China Weapon Manufacturing Facilities Leaves Hundreds Dead, A List of Casualties
Memorial Services for Fallen Soldiers Will Be Held at the Following Locations
Still, Alex’s message mentioned meeting outside the hospital. But which hospital, and why?
A sputtering of news articles appear across my screen in quick succession, ones newly posted.
C’est La Vie’s Sela Hospitalized for Gunshot Wounds
C’est La Vie’s Sela Suffers Severe Gunshot Wounds after UKL Abduction
C’est La Vie’s Sela Survives UKL Terrorist Attack, Hospitalized at City Hall’s Mercy Hospital
I pocket my phone and catch the first cab I can find heading across the bridge.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Alex waits outside the hospital, which is already teeming with reporters alerted to the fact of Sela’s hospitalization.
In the lobby, I buy a branch of flowers in a basket.
“Mugunghwa,” the store owner tells me as I take them, the five petals of the flowers colored a light pink. “They were cut this morning. They only live for a day.”
I nod, paying him, and catch up with Alex by the lifts.
Outside Sela’s door on the eighth floor stands an armed guard unaffiliated with the NSK, judging by his civilian clothes. “She’s not taking visitors,” he states after Alex and I stop outside Sela’s door.
“We need to get a report from her,” Alex counters.
“She’s not taking visitors,” he repeats.
Alex scowls. “We’re not visiting, we’re here to get her statement. She’s a witness to a crime.”
The guard steps forward, his face centimeters from Alex’s. “She’s not taking visitors.”
“Maybe it’s the only sentence he knows,” I say.
“Jaewon-ssi?” Sela’s voice drifts from behind the door. “Is that you? Won’t you come inside? Alex, stop bothering Isao.”
The guard turns to face me.
“I’m Jaewon-ssi,” I say, raising my hand.
“You should have said.” He clicks the button to release the doors.
Alex raises an eyebrow. “When did you get friendly with the pop star?”
“She’s a pop rocker.” I enter the room first. Sela sits propped up in the hospital bed. It’s like a garden in here. Or a toy store. She’s surrounded by flowers and gift baskets filled with toys, food, and stuffed animals.
I hold out the flowers I bought in the gift shop. “I got these for you, though it looks like — ”
“Mugunghwa!” she shouts happily, reaching for them. “These are my favorite,” she says, beaming at the flowers and then at me. “Thank you very much, Jaewon-ssi.”
She turns and pushes aside a vase of flowers to place the basket of mugunghwa by her bedside.
For a girl who’s been shot, she’s pretty upbeat. I check her for bandages, evidencing a gunshot wound, but half of her body is covered beneath a pile of blankets.
There’s one thing different about her, though.
“Your lenses are out,” Alex says. “You look better without them. Brown eyes suit you.”
She ignores him. “Jaewon-ssi, I apologize f
or letting your prisoner escape.”
“He wasn’t my prisoner,” I say. “If anything, I’m glad he escaped. I liked the old man.”
Alex scowls, scanning the corners of the room for cameras or hidden microphones.
“There aren’t any,” Sela says. “Isao already checked. I like my privacy in the moments when it’s mine.”
Alex nods, and then turns to me. “What the hell, Jaewon? Are you trying to get yourself killed?” He starts pacing. “Sela, what can you tell us about what happened yesterday? Did you see who the rebels were, any glimpses of faces?”
“No, I didn’t, and there isn’t much to tell. I was shot shortly after we were initially fired upon.” She points a finger at her leg, covered beneath the sheets. “After I was shot, I fell backward into Oh Kangto, and he caught me. He said, ‘You’ll be all right,’ and then he gently covered me with the body of another soldier who’d already fallen. Then I fainted.”
Alex scowls. “Well, we’ll leave out his heroics in the report. It won’t do to piss off Tsuko any more than he already is.” He moves to the window and notices a bouquet of yellow roses. “Can I take these?”
“Yes,” Sela says, cocking her head to the side.
Alex scoops up the flowers and marches through the door. It slides open at his approach.
I watch the door, scratching the back of my head. “Eh, I guess I’ll leave too.” I turn to Sela and bow. “I hope you feel better soon.”
Sela doesn’t blink as she stares at me. I turn to leave. “I wonder if Ama’s favorite flowers are roses,” she says.
My gaze flits to the door Alex just passed through.
“Jaewon-ah,” Sela whispers, “are you like Alex? Did you bring me mugunghwa because you thought they might make me happy? Because you cared enough to want to make me happy?”
“I thought they’d make you feel better.”
“Jaewon-ah. Are you like Alex?”
The fact that she’s dropped the honorifics, switching from jondaenmal to banmal, isn’t lost on me.
“No,” I say, turning back to meet her gaze. “I am not like Alex.”
“I want to ask you something, but once I do, it can’t be taken back. It’ll be up in the air, and I’ll be at your mercy. I’ve never been at another person’s mercy before. Not, at least, of my own free will.”
My heart beats painfully in my chest. “Then don’t ask.”
In the ensuing silence, I hold my breath, not wanting to hurt her feelings by leaving, yet wishing I were anywhere but here. I’ll hear her out if that’s what she needs. As a friend, I owe her that, at least.
“Okay,” she says.
I blink, not expecting her reaction. “What?”
“I won’t ask. Good-bye, Jaewon-ssi.” She smiles at me, a sad, lovely smile. “Maybe some other time.”
I nod, taking her dismissal for what it is.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The lobby of the hospital is jammed with reporters and Sela’s fans. Sela’s PR people team up with the hospital security to create a human barrier between the crowd and the lifts, but I can see some determined fans making a break for the less-guarded stairwells.
I opt out of navigating the crowd, doubling back toward the gift shop. Next to the shop is the opening of the hospital’s funeral services area — there’s bound to be an alternate exit off it.
I’ve always thought it morbid to attach a funeral parlor to a hospital, but I guess it’s convenient for the families of the deceased. Anything anyone would need for a service is provided by the hospital — clothing to dress the body, food to feed the mourning.
I round a corner, coming upon a dark hallway lined with mahogany sliding doors. It’s quiet here, especially after the loud tumult of voices in the lobby.
It smells like incense. Subtle wisps of fragrant smoke creep beneath the doorways, coating the floor in a pillow of smog.
A blue exit sign glows at the end of the hall, like a light at the end of a tunnel — an ironic thought. I walk to it, passing closed door after closed door. The door to the last room is open. I reach for the control to open the exit, inadvertently glancing into the room.
A woman around my mother’s age kneels before a small raised platform. A photograph sits atop the platform, a rare nondigital framed photograph. A young man smiles out of the photograph, and from the way she looks at him, I know he is her son. An array of uncovered dishes is spread out before the photograph — a fish painstakingly deboned; a teapot beside a cup, half full of barley tea; a tin bowl of rice; a stone pot of thick, clear soup. The woman lifts trembling hands to slowly push the cup closer to the photo, as if she believes that the reason her son can’t reach the cup is because it’s placed too far away.
I look closer at the picture and see that the boy wears a uniform.
“Lee Jaewon.”
I freeze, turning around slowly to find Tsuko standing behind me in the hall. A shiver runs up my spine. I hadn’t heard his approach. The light from the exit sign casts an eerie glow on his face. One white chrysanthemum dangles by the stem from his long fingers.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, his eyes narrowed in suspicion. I notice that for once, he isn’t wearing his uniform, but a black suit.
“Visiting Sela,” I say. “I was just leaving.”
The grim line of Tsuko’s lips seems to get even straighter. His brows furrow in contempt. “You shouldn’t be here.”
And what about you? What are you doing here?
The woman appears in the open doorway, her hair falling messily from her bun. “My son,” she whispers, coming toward Tsuko and falling against him. His hands go up quickly to steady her.
Surprised, I glance between them, seeing if there’s a resemblance, but then she continues, “What have you done with my son?”
Tsuko’s hands tighten on her shoulders, the stem of the chrysanthemum crushed between them. “Madame Siu . . .”
“You were supposed to protect him,” she shouts. “He wasn’t supposed to die!”
He releases her, and she stumbles backward into the room. She goes back to the altar, where she moves every one of the dishes closer to the photograph until they’re all crowded around the young soldier’s face, obscuring his soft smile.
Tsuko doesn’t look at me again. Gripping his damaged flower, he steps into the room after the mother. He shuts the door quietly behind him, leaving me in the dark. My eyes adjust enough to see the trail of chrysanthemums he’s left beside every door.
31
Memorial
I take a cab back across the river into Old Seoul and pick up my motorcycle from the food cart ajumma. Seeing Tsuko honor and grieve his fallen soldiers reminds me of my own resolution to visit the grave of my father. I can’t cut through Neo Seoul on my lowTech bike, so I take the western highway that curves around the Dome, the route Old Seoul workers take into the northwestern city of Incheon. Most of the metalworkers that stop by the bridge ajumma’s cart in the late evenings are men and women who work in the huge shipbuilding factories out in Incheon, massive platforms that produce ships meant for sea and sky travel.
As I move off the highway and head into Incheon, huge swaths of reclaimed land pass by in the distance — thousands of square kilometers of land that were created out of the ocean — where conglomerates have built God Machine factories. The machinists might develop prototypes in the Tower, but GMs are mass-produced in these factories, tested on the open space of the reclaimed, backfilled land and over the ocean. Moving lights on the fields against the twilit sky indicate that a test might be in process at this very moment.
It takes me another fifteen minutes to reach my destination. The ashen fields of Incheon’s old weapons base are several kilometers out from the main part of the city. I’m not surprised to find Young waiting for me when I arrive. Small dust devils flit across a field littere
d with broken debris. The site was never cleaned up after the initial fallout from the explosion. Crumbled buildings lay in ruins, as do old God Machines, stripped of their parts, the bones of giants.
I ride up to Young, who is standing beneath the shadow of one of the bigger ruins, then turn off the engine and drop the kickstand. Pulling down my antipollution mask, I take off my goggles. “How long have you been here?”
“Not long.” He glances at my face. “Rough night?”
I shake my head and look around. My stomach falls at the sight. All around the ruins are little shrines made of stacked stones, lovingly covered with wilted flowers. My father wasn’t the only person who died that day ten years ago, who was loved, who is missed and then remembered. None of the shrines look recent, which I’m thankful for. The idea of meeting someone whose loved one my father killed is enough to make me want to leave this place and never look back.
Young reaches into his coat and pulls out a bottle of rice wine. “I figured you wouldn’t have time to prepare anything.”
“Thanks,” I say, and take the bottle.
“Don’t drink it,” he warns with a grin. “Not until after you’ve bowed, at least.”
I haven’t conducted a memorial before, but I know what to do, I think.
There’s a soft noise to my left, a scuffing of feet against the ground. I look over to see Jinwoon and Daeho circling the ruins.
“You brought the kids?” I ask, jokingly referring to when Jinwoon and Daeho would call Young and me “mother” and “father.” We were a year older, and our dynamic was that they would do something idiotic, I would clean up their mess, and Young would scold them.
Young chuckles. “What can I say? They’re my ducklings.” He cracks his knuckles. “But jokes aside, we have business to take care of after this.”
“Gang business?”
Young shrugs. “Something like that.”
I raise a brow. It’s not like him to be close-lipped.
