Once the Shore

by Paul Yoon

  “We’re going to find the middle of this ocean,” his brother said.

  They were pushing hard, perpendicular to the waves, and Jim sat near the bow, tightening his legs against the constant pressure of the water as it split beside the hull. He sat facing his brother, the shoreline receding behind the level of the older boy’s shoulders. They sped onward. Twenty minutes perhaps. Maybe longer. And then all of a sudden his brother cut the engine and elbowed the rudder and Jim reached for the gunwale as they spun, fast, the boat rocking, and then slowing, slower, in their sight a single straight line that divided sky and sea, a line that traced their movements like the unraveling of a ball of string until, gradually, they were still.

  Above them hung a quiet—save for water lapping against the hull, there existed no sound, not even of a bird or of a distant horn. And all around them lay the ocean, a great wide ring of it with just that thin line of the color gray with the boat its very center, and his brother then stood and raised a hand to his brows in the manner of a salute and said, “There. We’ve done it,” and Jim followed his brother’s gaze and where there was once the shore there was now water and where west once lay was now north, east, south, any one of them. How many rotations the boat had spun Jim couldn’t recall.

  The panic came in the form of an arc: slowly rising until the boy felt his chest clench and the joints of his legs loosen, and when his brother began to laugh in triumph, hopping and whooping, he knew then what it was to be afraid. It was the feeling of diminishment. And he didn’t know what to do so he sat there gripping the sides of the boat as his brother, in his underwear, dove into the water and surfaced and shouted for him to come on down, he said, come on down, and Jim would not, shaking his head, his jaw set and his gaze fixed at that gray line. He heard his brother’s breathing and then he saw, in his periphery, what resembled a fish jump up into the air and bite down on his wrist and all at once that line tilted and he felt the cold and the warmth and he shut his eyes and opened them to see that the sky was now a glowing haze of thick water.

  This was when he screamed. Opened his mouth as the sea entered the passage of his throat and he heard the dull vibration of it against his ears and then he felt a rising, a lifting as water gave way to the heat of the sun, and all he saw then was a pair of thick, dark arms that enveloped his chest and he leaned back and listened to a soft laughter and felt a palm press against his soaked hair and heard the words, I was just playing, I was just playing, it’s all right now, everything is fine. And then a hand appeared in front of him and within the thumb and index finger there was a compass, suspended just above the horizon.

  “Here’s our sun,” the older boy said.

  Jim reached up and took hold of it and, as the sound of the engine returned and they headed west, slowly this time, he fell asleep in the arms of his brother.

  They reached shore at sundown.

  “You’re not going tell anyone?” his brother said, waking him. “Promise? You won’t tell anyone?”

  He remembered walking up the beach, his clothes still wet, and the look on his brother’s face which, to his surprise, seemed so young then, so much younger than himself, his eyes as wide as a child’s, his shoulders not so confident anymore, and he couldn’t help but smile.

  He promised. And then they held each other’s hands for a moment, the way a shy couple would do, and by the time they returned home to their mother shouting about their whereabouts and ordering them to their room until their father came back to give them a proper punishment, the afternoon was already far in their memory, where it took the shape of not only a grinning secret, not only the conspiracy of two brothers, but of a campaign against the sea.

  The Spaniard lived in a cave. That was the rumor she had heard from the boy Jim. For how long no one was certain. But lately he had been coming to the resort property to receive leftover food in exchange for God knows what. She saw him once, against the slope of a distant hill, with a walking stick, and she pointed at his figure and that was how the boy responded—that he lived in a cave. The American widow drew a mental picture of this man, outfitted in bearskin and smelling of lard, perhaps, or week-old fish. Hairy. She quickly dismissed this fantasy. It was, after all, the cave she was interested in.

  “There are many,” Jim said.

  “I’m speaking of ones close to shore,” the woman said.

  “Many there as well.”

  It was evening, the candles lit. Her hand covered the folded newspaper on the table. A single body had been recovered, a man in his forties. The search continued.

  She wondered if, among the missing, there were husbands. And she thought of the wives and whether they caught themselves in the late afternoons unable to remember what they had been doing or were going to do. She thought of the waiting. Of images of the sea that, years ago, dominated her dreams, all the more terrifying in its emptiness, vast and quiet and gray. Of how she prayed for her husband’s safety, for his return, and how, in his absence, her love for him grew through memory, in constant repetition, images circling so that the effect was that time paused. And yet, time did not because a single day turned into another. She slept, woke. It was a feeling of both immobility and motion. This was waiting. She knew it well. And it was how the wives of the fishermen spent their days, she was certain, with the conviction that they were alone, regardless of the publicity, the news, the interviews, condolences.

  A couple from Boston had shortened their stay on the island lest the incident provoke anti-American sentiment, which was developing on the mainland. A group of college students had formed a rally in front of the walls of a U.S. Army base outside of Seoul. There had been a skirmish at a bar involving a G.I. and a teenager. Jeeps had been vandalized with words painted on the windshields: Go Home.

  But she would not. Now that Jim had mentioned the caves. Afterward, perhaps. Or maybe she would stay. It felt very possible to do so.

  During a furlough, her husband and a friend joined a fishing crew and sailed to this island. They spent the day swimming and walking along the beach. In the distance their ship, a sentinel in the shape of a fingertip. There were no other reminders of what they would soon return to. Not even the distant roar of fighter jets. On that morning it was as if the war had paused for a day and while the fishermen rounded the island her husband collected coral and urchin shells, took photographs of the hills and the forests inland, and chased crabs.

  There, on that coast, he found a cave. A wide mouth that drank shallow seawater at low tide, its walls as tall as the entrance to a fortress within the earth. He waded in. Not too far for it was dark. Far enough so that he could still see his own hands, sunlight concentrated into the shape of an egg behind him. He picked up a stone. And against the right wall, he inscribed his initials and hers and drew a heart around it.

  There it would remain for the rest of their days, he told her. On an island at the opposite end of the world he knew was waiting after all this. Four letters and the shape of a heart etched in stone.

  The first few times he told this story she believed him. And loved him for it, pressing her cheek down against his chest without speaking. They were in their thirties then and life seemed as they imagined, living in a town in upstate New York with enough fields to walk across in the evenings. Her letters to him during the war had gone unanswered. He had never received them, he said. But it didn’t matter anymore. Because he had written against the wall of a cave. To her. Somehow, though she couldn’t explain why, that was worth more than a lifetime of correspondences.

  But when she asked him one day to see the photographs of the island, he hesitated. He lost the camera, he said. Stolen by a little Korean boy. And as the years progressed his story began to change. Not dramatically, but enough to make her pause, repeat the story in her mind. It wasn’t a fishing boat. It was a small motorboat. Three friends instead of one. They were AWOL. It wasn’t a stone but a shard of coral. And the more the story changed the more she wasn’t sure herself what she heard on that first night
.

  He was getting older. Age transformed memory. That was what she told herself. And why say such a thing if it never happened? It was her inability to answer this that allowed her to forgive him. She wasn’t angry. No. Just puzzled.

  Later, she would find in a drawer a stack of photographs. Men beside a fighter jet spray-painted with the words: Eat This MiG. A group of young girls smiling shyly. Another girl bending over as her husband pointed a pistol at her rear. And one of the sea, flat and emerald, and set against the horizon a wide island with a mountain at its center.

  She rushed outside to where he was changing a tire, her duster in one hand with feathers the colors of a rainbow, saying, “Is this it? Is this it?” until he snatched the photograph and told her to never go through his possessions again.

  It was only in the evening, in bed, that he nodded, said, “Yes, yes, that was the island. That was it, baby. That was where I wrote to you.” He pulled her shoulders to him and she felt a quickening and shut her eyes and imagined herself folding, refolding, growing smaller, and then she turned away from him, pretended to sleep, and felt as though she were sinking.

  So when Jim answered that there were many caves she wasn’t surprised. In any case, she told him her husband’s story. About the initials.

  “You would like to find them,” he said.

  In his voice lay a trace of skepticism. Or perhaps it was her own sentiment that she heard behind his words. Strips of the sea shone silver from the stars. A busboy blew out the votive candles around them.

  “I would like to find him,” she said.

  Silence. She heard him sigh, shift his feet behind her.

  She went on: “To wait. It is a fever. And I waited for him. But the man whom I knew, he never came. So I want to remember him. Not the one who returned. But the one who never left.”

  A breeze came in from the ocean and she watched the shadow of the candle flame swing across the tablecloth. It was late. She noticed the busboy lingering, waiting for her to leave.

  “I would like to see a cave,” she said. “Close to shore. A tall one. Before I leave. That’s all.”

  It was then she managed to ask Jim the question that had been on her mind since her first day on the island. Why she waited so long—she had been here for almost two weeks now—she wasn’t sure. Perhaps she didn’t want to go at all, she thought. Perhaps the question was waiting for the right person. And so she asked him and no one else. And he, after a short pause, leaned over so that his face hung beside her hair like a moon and quietly responded.

  “I will take you,” he said.

  It wasn’t a secret that Jim had grown an affinity toward the American widow. The Madame, the other waiters joked, a woman who, they were sure, came from royalty. No one in their right minds would spend more than two weeks at the Chosun Resort. Not with these prices.

  “But someone who has nothing?” one waiter conjectured. “What does it matter to her?”

  “What do you think, Jim?” another said. “Has she told you yet about her fortune?”

  “Will you marry her, Jim?”

  “All she’ll do in bed is tell you about her husband!”

  They had gathered outside the back entrance to the kitchen, on the dimly lit gravel lot where shipments of food were delivered every morning by way of a narrow dirt road that cut through a forest and around the resort property. Jim remained silent, smiling on occasion at their well-intentioned humor. For that was what it was. Their teasing wasn’t out of spite. Perhaps a little envy. That was possible. Jim had found some other form of amusement in addition to watching movies late at night in the conference room or smoking hashish.

  They also knew of his brother. Word had, of course, spread among the staff. They offered to take his tables so that he could leave but Jim thanked them politely and refused, which at once confused them and brought upon a certain respect for the boy’s dedication to his work. In short, they weren’t at all sure how to proceed. In the end, they chose distance. They joked with him, as they always did, and never mentioned the news updates or their opinions on the matter—which ranged from rage to a shrug of a shoulder—although they saw him every morning in the bar watching television, skimming the reports in the paper, and speaking on a telephone to whom they presumed to be his mother.

  And whether or not they knew it, Jim was grateful. Glad, he admitted, for the company and the harmless words and the patterns of these days, including the nightly gathering of the waiters, which always began at the back entrance of the kitchen.

  They heard the footsteps first and then from the road a figure appeared with a walking stick. He was tall with short bright hair and wore shorts and hiking boots, his wool socks stretched up to his shins. He stopped a few feet away from them and leaned against his walking stick in the manner of one who had traveled from afar. From his pocket he handed over a small paper bag and Jim, who was carrying a plastic container filled with leftover food, walked over and asked if he could have a word.

  “Gracias, Luis!” the waiters called.

  The two stopped some distance away from the kitchen entrance, right where the road began.

  “You know about the caves,” Jim said. “Along the coast.”

  “Yes. Many of them.”

  “There’s one that’s very tall and wide,” Jim said.

  “Many,” Luis said again.

  “But you know the best?”

  “The best?”

  “Yes, the best. The biggest.”

  “The most magnificent,” Luis said, extending his arms.

  Jim nodded. He told the man that he had promised to show a woman a cave. “A family relation,” Jim added. He hadn’t planned on saying that but it came out naturally and so he repeated it. She was a friend of his mother’s. An American. She wanted to see a cave by the sea.

  Luis stood in contemplation. After some time, he agreed to meet them at a beach on the southeastern coast, and from there he would lead them to the cave.

  “Sunrise,” Luis said. “That will be best. Tomorrow.”

  With the container of food in his possession, he was about to walk away but then paused and tapped his fingers against his walking stick. He looked at Jim in a way that was indecipherable to the boy’s eyes. He shook his container in front of him and said, “There is nothing more beautiful than eating with a full view of the sun at the very edge of this world. On the days I come here. To pick up this. That is what I miss.”

  And then he left and Jim watched him for some time, under the glow of a tall lamp, and wondered whether he really did live in a cave. And if he did, it was no different, he supposed, than living in a house. Perhaps his brother had found a cave, he thought, as Luis’s figure faded. He could imagine it. With a front entrance that was always open.

  “It is all set,” the boy said when he called her room. They would leave before sunrise. She woke early anyway. At four o’clock. Starving long before the dining room opened. She had asked him up for tea. She would stay up a little later if he wanted to chat. “I have to prepare for our expedition,” was how he replied, then told her she wouldn’t have time to eat. Then he gave a short laugh and said good night. It was to be a surprise. How old his voice sounded on the telephone. “Good night,” she said, perplexed.

  And now she lay on a king-sized bed in the dark, unable to sleep. He was so kind, the boy. A kindness she imagined he had brought with him from infancy. She wondered about his family. His answers were always so nondescriptive. What she knew was that he was born in a place called Pusan and now his family lived in Seoul. He grew up on the coast. And siblings? She had forgotten to ask about that. She grew angry at herself for not asking such a simple question, but then the feeling subsided. There would be many more opportunities to speak with Jim. A lovely name. One that she always admired. James. For its strength. For its sensitivity.

  Before sleeping, she thought of a great flat field. This was when her husband returned. They had yet to marry. In the dark they wandered, careful with their steps,
for it had rained the day before. He led with a small flashlight and for every dry spot he placed his foot she imitated with such exactness that all they heard on that night was a single body in the midst of cicadas and the distant rumble of a truck on the freeway, its headlights filtered through the nearby forest, shredded and fading like frosted breath.

  It was her blanket he carried. Light blue, pulled from her bed and folded and folded until it was a square, a pillow, a sack filled with a mysterious treasure, one that he revealed in the middle of that dark field. He dropped the flashlight and as it lit a fallen dome of white beside their feet, he lifted his arms and the cloth unfurled and hung for a brief instant in midair then fell like a parachute onto the grass. There, in the middle, lay their shape, their shadows already congregating. It resembled a tortoise. Their arms around each other. Their two heads meeting.

  “There we are,” he said, and pointed down at their silhouettes.

  In that dark under a night spread with unknown constellations and the warmth that gathered at the very bottom of her stomach—there she made her promise. Because he had come home and this time wouldn’t ever go away. Afterward, lying there, she twirled the beam of the flashlight across his pale body.

  They had known each other since high school. Three lives they led. The first she would always think of as the evenings when he appeared at her house with his hair wet and groomed and they walked without touching, a good distance between them, discussing books or what they wanted to be. He always phrased it that way: what she wanted to be. The second was right after the war, when she thought of him as a swimming tortoise. And then that faded as the years passed and it was replaced by something she couldn’t, to this day, articulate. It was the longest of the three. Though in retrospect, it didn’t seem that way at all. In fact, the opposite: it was the first that lasted. For a good while. When his scent was of soap. When he would have done such an act as pick up a stone and write their initials in the mouth of a cave. Caged in the loose sketching of a heart.