‘Hold on, Maria,’ Jim told her. ‘I promise you, you’re going to be OK.’
Maria smiled. ‘You cannot save me, Mr Rook. The only way to change the future is not to go there.’
‘Maria, listen to me – that is absolutely not true. You can never tell what’s going to happen to you until it happens. From now on, your life is going to be different. I swear to God, that stepfather of yours is never going to hurt you again, because if he does I will personally beat five colors of crap out of him myself.’
‘Kim told me,’ said Maria.
‘Kim? Kim told you what? What does Kim have to do with it?’
‘I told Kim what I saw and he said I couldn’t change it, no matter what. He said the future has happened already.’ Maria coughed more blood, and then she said, ‘How can you change something that has happened already?’
‘You shouldn’t have taken any notice of Kim,’ Jim told her. ‘Kim talks a whole lot of Korean BS. This is where your new life begins, Maria, and you’re going to be happy and successful and you’re never going to let a scumbag like Barto ever hurt you again.’
The ambulance had reached them now, and jounced to a halt next to the tractor. Two paramedics climbed out, a man and a woman, and came hurrying across the grass.
‘How the hell did this happen?’ asked the woman, kneeling down beside Maria and opening up her first-aid bag. ‘How are you feeling, honey? Can you hear me?’
Jim stood up to give her some space. ‘Please help her. Her name’s Maria Lopez. She walked into the lawnmower on purpose.’
‘Any idea why?’
‘She’s been abused by her stepfather. That’s what she told me, anyhow. I guess she couldn’t take it any more. Did the groundskeeper tell you about the janitor? He’s down in the basement, in the boiler room. Some cat went crazy and took his eye out.’
The male paramedic nodded. ‘We’ve called for back-up already, and in the meantime your nurse has gone to take care of him. How about you, sir? Are you OK?’
Jim held up both hands and realized that they were criss-crossed with clawmarks and sticky with blood. His shirt and his pants were stained with blood, too.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just a few scratches, that’s all.’
The female paramedic looked up at him. She had red hair, green eyes, and freckles across her nose. ‘We need to contact Ms Lopez’s next-of-kin. Her mother, I guess, after what you’ve told us about her stepfather.’
‘Sure,’ said Jim. ‘I’ll do that now. Where are you going to be taking her?’
‘I’m not sure yet. I have to contact the coroner.’
‘The coroner? Why the coroner?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. Ms Lopez is dead.’
‘What?’
The paramedic turned Maria’s head sideways, and it was only then that Jim could see that the back of her skull had been chopped open by one of the grass-cutting blades and that her brain was exposed.
‘She wouldn’t have suffered,’ said the paramedic.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that death would have been pretty much instantaneous.’
Jim took two or three steps backward. How could Maria have died instantaneously, when she had been talking to him, and smiling? He felt giddy, and he saw stars in front of his eyes, as if he were going to faint. The male paramedic saw that he was losing his balance and took hold of his arm.
‘Why don’t you sit down, sir? Sit down right here on the grass and put your head between your knees.’
Jim stared at him. He was tempted to tell him that Maria had been conscious, and lucid, and that he never would have known about her stepfather’s abuse if she hadn’t been able to speak to him. But now that she was dead, there was really no point, and he only would have made himself look like a fool.
He realized what had happened. He had seen Maria’s spirit, before it had left her body, which had made it seem as if she were still alive. It had happened to him before, two or three times, when he had visited elderly people on their deathbeds. They had gone on talking to him long after they had died, especially when they had obviously felt that they had some important secret to tell him, which they had never told anybody else. They hadn’t yet grasped the fact that they were dead, and that there was no need for them to panic, because they would have the rest of eternity to tell him, if they wanted to.
As Jim walked down the slope toward the college, another ambulance arrived, and he saw Nurse Okeke come around the side of the building and beckon the paramedics toward the basement. Class must have finished now, because several students were trying to push their way out of the main doors, but two members of the college security staff were ushering them back inside.
Jim mounted the steps. Dr Ehrlichman was standing at the top, waiting for him.
‘Maria Lopez,’ Jim told him. ‘She’s dead.’
‘Oh, God, that’s terrible. Young Billman here said she walked right into his lawnmower. He didn’t see her until it was too late.’
Jim nodded. ‘That’s just about what happened.’
‘She didn’t do it deliberately, did she? Well, I suppose she must have done. But what a ghastly thing to do. Do you think she was high on something?’
‘No. I don’t know. I guess the medical examiner will tell us, eventually.’
‘You’re not hurt, are you?’ Dr Ehrlichman asked him. ‘You look like hell.’
Jim wiped sweat and blood from his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘I need to get myself cleaned up, that’s all.’
‘What about Dunstan? How did that happen? Something about some rabid cat scratching out one of his eyes.’
‘Let me get changed,’ said Jim. ‘Then I’ll tell you all about it.’
‘I’ve asked Ms Handy to call the police.’
‘Of course you have. I’ll talk to them, too, when they get here. But this isn’t something that the cops can help us with, believe me.’
Dr Ehrlichman frowned at him as if he expected Jim to explain what he meant, but he didn’t, because he couldn’t. Not yet, anyway. He needed to have a talk with Kim Dong Wook.
He made his way through hundreds of noisy milling students to the staff changing rooms. He took off his clothes and bundled them up. Even his pale tan loafers had bloodstains on them, like maps of Korea, and he would probably have to throw them away. He didn’t want to be reminded of the way that Maria had killed herself, every time he looked down at his feet.
He took a long hot shower. Afterward he sat for almost twenty minutes with one towel around his waist and another towel covering his head, trying to empty his mind of all the bloody, jumbled images that kept flickering across his consciousness like some endless horror movie.
He was still sitting there when a deep voice said, ‘I’m real sorry about this morning, Jim.’
‘Oh, Bob! What happened to you? I thought you were going to take over Special Class Two for me. I was here by twenty of twelve so it wouldn’t have been for long.’
‘Hey – I did take a look in for you.’
‘You took a look in? What good did that do? Special Class Two, they’re like an ongoing prison riot.’
‘Exactly. That’s why I didn’t take over for you. I value my life too much.’
‘Oh well,’ said Jim. ‘Forget it. Remind me never to rely on you again, that’s all.’
There was a long pause. With the towel over his head, Jim wasn’t sure if Bob Nussbaum was still there. But then Bob said, ‘Dan Kelly told me what happened to Maria Lopez. Pretty horrific.’
‘Yes,’ said Jim, picturing the way that Maria had looked at him and said how can you change something that has happened already? ‘Pretty horrific.’
‘And Dunstan, having his eye taken out by some stray moggy. That was pretty horrific, too.’
‘Yes,’ Jim agreed. ‘That was pretty horrific, too.’
An hour later, he sat down in Dr Ehrlichman’s office with Detective Wong and Detective Madison and explained how Maria had killed hersel
f and Dunstan the janitor had nearly been blinded.
‘Do you have any idea why Maria would have wanted to take her own life?’ asked Detective Wong. He kept twiddling an elastic band around and around his fingers, which Jim found highly irritating.
‘I think you need to talk to her stepfather,’ Jim told him. ‘Some bozo called Barto. Maria told me that he regularly abused her and beat up on her if she refused. She was covered in bruises. You only have to look at her body and you can see them for yourself. You’ll probably find evidence of sexual abuse, too.’
‘When exactly did she tell you about this abuse?’
‘Yesterday,’ Jim lied. ‘I saw bruises on her wrists and asked them how she had come by them. Today she came to class with a split lip.’
‘And she alleged that her stepfather was responsible?’
‘Like I say, you need to talk to him. And her mother. Maria said that this Barto hits her mother, too.’
‘OK, Mr Rook. We’ll look into that. Now, what about the janitor having his eye scratched out? What’s his name, Dunstan?’
‘My cat did it. I think Dunstan has told you that already.’
‘Your dead cat?’
‘I thought he was dead.’
‘You thought he was dead so you brought him to college to have him cremated?’
‘Yes. I couldn’t afford a proper funeral.’
‘But he wasn’t actually dead?’
‘I believed that he was, but apparently no, he wasn’t.’
‘What gave you the impression he was dead?’
‘He wasn’t breathing and he wasn’t moving and he had started to decompose.’
Dr Ehrlichman said, ‘This was strictly against college regulations, Jim. I hope you understand that.’
‘You mean there’s a specific West Grove regulation which says you can’t cremate cats in the college incinerator?’
‘You can’t cremate any animal in the college incinerator. Especially if it’s still alive.’
The college was closed for the rest of the day to show respect for Maria’s passing. After he had been questioned for nearly an hour by Detective Wong and Detective Madison, Jim went back to Special Class Two and stood for a while in front of Maria’s desk. He had been warned. They had all been warned, everybody in the class, but he was the only one who had been capable of remembering what they had seen – Maria, stumbling into the classroom covered in blood. He was determined that it wouldn’t happen again, and that no more of his students would feel such despair about their future that they would be tempted to kill themselves.
He would have to keep a close eye on Patsy-Jean, especially after she had written IF I HAD $1 MILLION I WOULD PAY SOMEONE TO KILL ME. He didn’t know much about her home life – not yet, anyway – but she was clearly embarrassed about her weight. She had been stuffing herself with Golightly candies, after all. Although they were very sweet, they contained no fat, no salt and no sugar, and a whole bag was only three hundred calories.
Jim walked to the back of the class and looked out of the window at the grassy slope where Maria had been killed. The tractor and the lawnmower were still there, surrounded by cops and photographers and CSI. He went across to Teddy’s desk. Unusually, Teddy had left his notebook on top of his desk. Up until now – however many days of this semester had or hadn’t gone by – he had put it into his rucksack and taken it home with him. The notebook had a dark red marbled cover and a sticker on the front with Verbal Death by Theodore Greenspan printed on it in black ink.
Jim opened it up and started to read. So far, Teddy had filled over a hundred pages in tiny, crowded handwriting. Although he was such a stickler for correct English, this narrative was written with almost no punctuation whatsoever, an endless stream of words that ran on page after page:
because i woke up in the middle of the night a few minutes after two pm and i thought of a story and it was a story about a man who gets lost in the woods and when he is lost in the woods he finds a house and so he knocks on the door and the door opens and theres an old woman in the house leastways she looks like an old woman she wears a black cone-shaped hat and a veil over her face but she smells strange quite funky like a dog or a fox.
she says to the man sit down and have some soup so he sits at the table and she serves him an earthenware bowl with a lid and when he lifts the lid he sees all kinds of disgusting things floating in the soup like clumps of human hair and rubbery fat and connective tissue and even a human penis all soft and shapeless.
and when the man turns around he sees that the woman has grown bigger and bigger and she isnt a woman at all but a huge hairy animal so he tries to escape but the huge hairy animal tears him wide open and sucks out his soul which is like a shadowy reflection of him.
i tried to write this story but i couldnt think of the words to tell it and I couldnt hold my pen without dropping it and I realized that something had gone wrong with my brain like maybe alzheimers and i couldnt string two words together I couldnt even think how to write one word getting all the letters in the right order.
it was like id lost everything i was and all i wanted to do was kill myself it was only when i woke up in the morning i found out it wasnt true but beside my bed was a piece of paper with OCNE MAD WOLST in big spidery writing on it and I knew that when i was struggling to write in the middle of the night i had tried to write once a man was lost but couldnt manage it.
Jim was still reading when he became aware that there was somebody else in the classroom with him, watching him. He looked up and saw that it was Kim, standing in the far corner, his arms folded, a smile on his face as if he felt very pleased with himself. He was wearing a very white shirt with the collar turned up, and pale-blue Levis with the cuffs rolled up. His black hair was gelled to stick up vertically from the top of his head.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Rook, sir. I see you have found another student who has looked into his future.’
Jim held up Teddy’s notebook. ‘It’s a story. It’s fiction. Nothing more than that.’
‘What Maria saw, was that a story, too?’
‘It wasn’t real, if that’s what you mean. The tragedy was that she believed it.’
‘What her stepfather was doing to her, Mr Rook – that was real.’
‘I’m sure that it was. But she could have found a way to change it.’
Kim walked down the aisle on the opposite side of the classroom, until he was standing next to Grant’s desk. ‘She did find a way to change it. Now she will never suffer again, ever.’
‘There has to be some other way for a person to change their future except by killing themselves.’
Kim grinned, showing very white teeth. ‘Once you are born, Mr Rook, your fate is already determined. The road to Anseong-ri goes only to Anseong-ri.’
‘Tell me something,’ said Jim. ‘Give me the truth. Are you behind all of these switches in time? Was it you who showed Maria what was going to happen to her? Are you responsible for what Teddy’s written in here? And how about me? I woke up in the night thinking that I was over eighty years old – hairless, toothless and wetting the bed. Did you do that? Who are you, Kim Don Wook? Maybe more to the point – what are you?’
‘I am only a student, Mr Rook. Nothing more. And, no. I did not do any of those things. This is the truth that you ask me for.’
‘You know about this fox-demon, though. What’s her name?’
‘Kwisin, Mr Rook. You have seen her, yes?’
‘You bet your ass I’ve seen her. She’s turned up in my apartment twice already, and I suspect that she had something to do with the woman downstairs setting fire to herself. Not only that, she bit the head off my neighbor’s Boston terrier.’
‘The dog is dead?’
‘The dog is still alive. But I’m beginning to understand what’s going on here. You can show us the future, and when we see how crappy it’s going to turn out, we commit suicide. And what happens to people who take their own lives, in almost every religion on the planet? They f
orfeit their place in whatever heaven they believe in.’
‘Yes, Mr Rook, that is so.’
Jim approached Kim and looked him directly in the eyes. He had never seen irises so black. He could have been wearing those totally black contact lenses they use in werewolf movies.
‘So,’ said Jim, ‘if their souls can’t go to their respective heavens, where do they go?’
‘There are always spirits who are prepared to welcome wandering souls, Mr Rook. The more souls that any spirit can gather in, the stronger that spirit becomes. You know that.’
‘Not only spirits, Kim. Demons.’
Kim’s black eyes glistened. ‘Some people call them spirits. Other people describe them as demons. It depends which side you are on.’
FOURTEEN
Late that evening Jim was cooking himself a chicken and garlic stir-fry when his doorbell buzzed. He turned down the gas under the wok and went to the front door, but he didn’t open it.
‘Who is it?’ he called out.
‘It’s only me, Jimmy! Not some demon! One of my customers gave me a bottle of champagne and I thought you might like to share it with me!’
Jim opened the door. It was Summer, in a very short scarlet dress. She held up a bottle and said, ‘See?’
‘That’s great,’ said Jim. ‘Why don’t you come on in?’
Summer came tripping into the kitchen in her high-heeled sandals and said, ‘Phew-eee! Garlic, or what? Lucky for me I’m not a vampire!’
Jim took the bottle and looked at the label. It was Cloudy Valley sparkling wine, which usually retailed around $4.99 a bottle, and it was warm. Some champagne. Some customer.
‘Let’s put it in the freezer for a while,’ he suggested. ‘How about a glass of red to keep us going?’
‘OK.’ Summer looked into the living room. ‘She hasn’t come back again, then? That Korean fox-demon-woman thing?’
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