Once the Shore

by Paul Yoon

  They were to have a service for him. Without a body. A photograph instead. Jim received the call from his mother the day before. He would go; he had decided. His brother wouldn’t forever be fishing, although he could always think of him in that way. Regardless of a service, a formality. It made no difference. He knew that now. So he would go. In two days he would fly to the mainland and return home. How long he would stay he was unsure. But there was one thing he was now sure of. He would stand there, in that room, beside the photograph of his brother, in front of a small group of the city’s citizens, neighbors, family friends, anyone—he didn’t care—and recount the story of finding the middle of the ocean. He would share that. And in doing so, he would regain his brother, pull him back down from the static of the sea and air. From the mouths of strangers.

  And when the widow asked him, “Will you take me?” he said yes. He would do that as well.

  He recruited two other waiters. Three was enough. They agreed in amusement, slapping him on his back and shaking their heads and describing it as the farewell party.

  So at four in the morning they stole the keys of a resort truck and loaded it with the necessary products and, with the American widow, they sped away down the dirt road and through the forest and around the hills toward the southeastern coast. Their headlights spotted the foliage in a luminous lime color, the stars still clear and distinguishable against a paling sky. The woman remained silent throughout the journey, her hands against her lap, squished between Jim and another waiter. She was wearing one of her linen outfits, a light blue, with a white scarf draped over her arms. They all bumped shoulders whenever the truck skimmed over rocks.

  It took less than an hour, as Jim predicted, and by the time they arrived at the beach, the sun was lifting above the horizon. Jim, with a hand on the woman’s elbow, took her to an old log at the edge of the forest and told her to wait. From his pocket he took out a handkerchief and reached over toward the woman’s head. When she hesitated, he assured her, “Just for a short time. I promise. A surprise.”

  The woman nodded, staring up at him. Behind him the sea was red and the sky thinned toward morning. She felt her heart. And the last thing she saw before her vision was covered in darkness was the boy’s T-shirt with the image of a sailboat printed on his chest.

  When her eyes were covered, he took her hand and squeezed once quickly and then ran to the truck where the three waiters carried the table and a chair down to the middle of the beach. They covered the table with a white cloth. Jim set down a plate, flanked by a napkin, forks, knives, and a teaspoon. He placed a saucer and a coffee cup to the left and two glasses on the right. The chair faced the sea. From the back of the truck they ignited Bunsen burners to heat the small silver trays that contained scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, and sausages. They opened the icebox to reveal a bottle of water, cream, pineapple, melons, and strawberries. The thermos of coffee was still warm. They changed into their outfits, black jackets instead of their usual white.

  It was all set. They stood beside the truck barefoot. Jim began to roll up his pants. “One more thing,” he said, and treaded down to shore. The waiters lingered by the truck, uncertain. The tide rose up to his shins. He looked back at the distant canopy of the forest, the flat peak of Tamra Mountain. It was possible, he considered, that this island lay at the center of the ocean, the place he and his brother never found. And thinking this, he began to cry, covering his mouth, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. He waited for it to cease. He breathed, deeply, then slipped his hand into his breast-pocket and produced what resembled a harmonica against the light of the sun. It shone amber. Leaning forward, he dipped the object he was holding into the sea, like the beak of a bird, and then lifted it in a slow arc toward the length of his hair.

  She had heard of fishermen in the ancient days, lost at sea, delirious and racing toward the horizon and the half-sphere of the sun in pursuit of illusions: some vision of land or of anything attributed to a country and its soil and the possibility of their feet touching a surface without sinking. She imagined that for the men who fell into the sea over a week ago now, perhaps one of them, if only for the briefest of moments, considered this as the water parted and the skin of what could very well have been a continent rose beneath them. That perhaps, before they keeled, there was this sense of a waking dream and, through it, a descending of peace akin to slipping into sleep. She hoped that it happened too quickly for them to feel otherwise—that by the time they knew this was the last of their days, they had already entered the sea and shut their eyes and given themselves to its depths.

  This was what she thought of in the covered darkness of the handkerchief. And how, every night, she sent them a prayer. Not to a god but to their ghosts, whom she envisioned forever on a boat, riding the cusps of the Pacific, in search of images that existed only in the mind.

  Like the one she saw at dawn as she smelled potatoes and heard footsteps and Jim uncovered her eyes, forcing her to squint, her vision blurred. There in the distance: penguins. Tall and slim, rising out of the ocean. Then they evolved into black-suited men walking up the beach, their clothes dry but their hair wet and combed and before them a table and a chair. She gasped, placing her hands on her chest. One of the men carried a thermos of coffee. Another a water bottle. Jim helped her to the chair and then leaned over to tell her about the menu. He then picked up her plate and carried it to the back of the truck and proceeded to arrange her requested breakfast. When he returned she picked up her fork but changed her mind and took his hand and tapped him lightly before she began to eat, the sun warming her skin and the tide closing in on the table legs.

  Later, Jim introduced the American widow to a man who had appeared beside the truck, picking at the leftovers. They shook hands. With a nod Luis led them around the coast to a cave by the shore. He gestured to it with his walking stick, his arms spread, indicating that it was, in his opinion, the best. Then he bowed and said that he would wait for them on the beach, with the others. “Careful,” he told them. And they were.

  Jim held her by her elbow as they waded in through its tall entrance, the ends of the woman’s skirt forming a circle in the water. Their voices echoed the farther they entered.

  There was a myth, he told her, that the island contained a network of underground passageways, used as meeting points for those who were persecuted for their religious and political beliefs. In the middle of the night, by candlelight, they would travel from all parts of the island and speed through the tunnels to a room somewhere. It was there they discussed the future of the island and its people, writing speeches and preparing pamphlets for distribution. No one knew where the room was located. But perhaps this was one of the passageways, he said.

  They hadn’t gone far. To each other they were still visible. They could hear the approach of the ocean. And Jim, his hair dry now, presented his hand to the woman. In his palm lay a small flat stone that she reached for and rubbed with the tips of her old fingers. He stepped away, stood behind her. Water cool and dark around his toes. He watched her. Her thin shoulders. Her shedding gray hair. The hem of her skirt afloat and her arm rising. With that stone she speared the wall of the cave and began what could have been a sketching, calligraphy, some form of design—Jim was not yet sure—or the words of a language long forgotten.

  AMONG THE WRECKAGE

  EARLY ONE MORNING IN THE SPRING of 1947, a dark blue trawler, once used for fishing, moved slowly across the flat of the Pacific. It had been abandoned by the Japanese on the banks of a river in Solla Island, and the old farmer named Bey had claimed it as his own. He now stood at the helm, above the deck. He was shirtless, his skin dark and speckled with moles. His pale beard hung past his neck, cinched at the bottom with a piece of twine. Below him, his wife, Soni, lay near the bow. She was asleep. Her right arm covered her eyes to shield the sun. Her hair, like a thin cloud, curved over her shoulder and across her chest. The sea was calm. Above them, in the shape of teardrops, flew albatross. The birds headed e
ast, toward Japan. Bey was following them.

  Two days had passed since they heard thunder and the trees shook as a cluster of long-winged planes stormed over their village. When they rushed to the coast they saw what resembled a vaporous tsunami rise up in the east, whitening the midday sky. And then the waves sped away, followed by a long echoing shudder. They recalled the bombs of two years before and remained silent. The noise faded. The waves calmed, the air stilled. Their world returned to as it was before.

  They did not learn of what happened until the following morning, when the salt peddler arrived from the mainland.

  The Americans, they were told, had been testing. This had become common. They targeted uninhabited islands. It had been this way since the end of the Japanese occupation. What the pilots were unaware of, however, was that the coasts of this particular island, east of Solla, were used by fishermen to collect seaweed and shellfish. And so the belly of these planes opened, releasing over seventy red-fisted bombs, and out of the hundred men who were missing was Karo, Bey and Soni’s forty-year-old son.

  They waited a full day for his return. And when he didn’t come they set out to find him.

  This was at dawn. Now they had been at sea for an hour. Already they felt the heat of the sun. Soni, for the first time in two days, slept. Though as soon as she was settled into it, the engine of a plane woke her. She rose, startled, her hair slipping off her chest. Bey descended the helm, gripping the rails. “It’s nothing,” he assured her, as the engine noise faded. He wasn’t certain; it was something to say. He listened to their breathing and they kept in rhythm with each other. In the sky contrails were dissipating.

  She believed him. He could tell by the way her face calmed, as though she were returning to sleep. She yawned and the sun hit what remained of her teeth. But then something caught her attention and she stood and pointed down at the waters. “Look,” she said.

  Bey attempted to follow the path of Soni’s finger. He searched the vague shadows, the empty distance. She leaned closer to him. Her hair had become brittle, her eyes dim, her back arced like the blade of a scythe from her years in the fields. He used to cup his hand under her soft chin and bring her to him.

  “Over there,” she said, her voice gone quiet. “Do you see them?”

  “What is it?”

  “Dolphins,” she said. “Look. They’re leaving.”

  She was so certain. She kept pointing. Bey scanned the surface of the sea. Nothing. And so he shut his eyes and recalled their image, silver-backed and quick as spirits. He thought of his son and could not remember when he had last embraced him. He saw the boy in a field. He saw him wrapped in sails, running. He turned away from his wife, who did not know his thoughts, and he said, “Yes, they are leaving.”

  Bey and Soni had known each other as children. In those early years, as their parents spent the days in the fields, they would do their chores together. The houses there were raised on stilts and the ground beneath was used as a pen for pigs. They fed off the family’s waste which Bey and Soni threw down through a hole in the kitchen. They washed clothes and bathed in the river, scraping each other’s back with rough cotton rags, their bodies bent and shivering from the dawn water. They braided each other’s hair. They wove wide-brimmed hats and moccasins out of straw. Every year, when the Japanese inspectors visited, they filled sacks of barley as offering for the Emperor.

  Bey was thirteen when he asked the officials whether they took the grains for themselves. He was struck on the side of his face with the butt of a rifle. They were standing in front of Bey’s house. He fell and Soni kneeled to cover his head, and when she looked up at the men they hit her mouth. When Bey regained consciousness, he saw her lying there, beside him, covering her face. What resembled the juices of berries leaked out between her fingers.

  She lost her front teeth. They found one on the ground. The other, she told Bey, she had swallowed. Like a seed, she said. It was growing already. She opened her mouth for him to pour drops of water down her throat.

  When he first kissed her he slipped his tongue into that space where her teeth had been. She pressed her other teeth together and surrounded his tongue. In this way he filled a space.

  Their marriage took place when Bey turned sixteen. It was dusk and the winds from the sea cut through the trees and blew against the bonfire. They celebrated through the night and at sunrise the newlyweds went on a treasure hunt in the forest. The wedding presents—candies wrapped in wax paper, chopsticks, bean curd, pouches filled with small cakes—had been hidden throughout the village by the women and children.

  Bey and Soni looked inside trees, on branches, under rocks, and moss. They searched without bothering to change out of their wedding clothes. Soni wore a silk gown with a ballooned skirt and wide sleeves, the top folding over her breasts and tied around her waist by a ribbon. Bey was dressed in clean linen pants that fell to his shins and a new pair of straw moccasins that Soni had made him. They stopped several times to face each other. In the early morning, sleepy and drunk with wine, they rested under a tree and she braided his hair and twisted it into a bun above his head the way all the married men did. They fell asleep there with their pockets stuffed with gifts.

  With the treasure hunt, the amount of presents you were unable to find was the amount of children the wife would bear, the undiscovered gifts returning through a life. They found all but one. What that lost gift was no one ever identified.

  Soni gave birth to their son a year later, on the floor of their house. Bey, along with his father, remained outside, facing the forest. They heard her and the frightened pigs brushing up against the pen. And then they heard the child. The infant was given to Bey to hold. He brought him close to his face. From his skin rose the copper smell of Soni’s insides. Bey licked his thumb and wiped away the stains across the infant’s head. He had his mother’s nose, his father’s thick eyebrows.

  During the monsoon season, when the thatch of the roof whistled from the leaking winds and the floors shook, Karo learned to walk across the house, with care, as an old man would. First he touched Soni, who was attempting to boil rice, and then he returned and touched Bey on the top of his head. Back and forth he went like this. After the winds calmed and the house settled the child ventured to the window and looked outside in awe, as if they were somewhere else.

  In the winters Bey carried him on his back to watch the sea at dusk. When it darkened they witnessed the constellations appear, one by one, and the child held on to his father’s ears and leaned back as far as he could, swinging his braided hair. His breath puffed above them. He asked his father what kind of fish swam among the stars.

  They were happiest then.

  Karo grew to love the sea. And distances. When he was old enough, he joined a fishing crew. Soni wanted him to stay. To help with the fields. He would be at sea for weeks, months. Bey wished the same though he did not voice his concerns.

  He left at the age of fifteen on a ship with mud-colored sails. Bey and Soni stood on the riverbank to watch him depart. Their son waved until the ship disappeared around a bend. They stayed there, standing, long after the ship’s wake faded and the lanterns began to glow through the trees.

  From that moment on, they would see him when time allowed it. And all the days that had gone so quickly, slowed and lengthened. Both Bey and Soni’s parents passed away. It was the two of them now; and in each other’s company grew the overwhelming reminder of absence.

  Bey began to remain in the fields long after sunset, unwilling to return home. On some evenings Soni ate alone. While she slept, he took walks through the forest. Beside the river he imagined the limbs of trees as the masts of ships. He smelled the night water, light and cool. As the years progressed he walked farther. To the coast. There he undressed and swam into the sea, to the spot where the moon lay reflected.

  Afloat, he recalled the treasure hunt and the single gift they had not discovered. He wondered what it was and where it now lay. He wondered whether an animal had
taken the gift for its own purposes or whether it was still there, buried, or high up in a tree.

  There were now days when it seemed that all his life he had been looking. As though he could not account for all the years gone, as though he could not yet claim those years as his own.

  In the Pacific, a war had begun. And his son lived within it.

  And Bey bathed in the luminous dark of the coast, scrubbing his back and soaking his hair and his beard. He stood upright to clean his chest. In his sadness he opened his mouth up toward the metallic stars and waited for one to fall.

  The trawler lacked navigation equipment so he used a compass and a map Karo had given him on his fiftieth birthday. He had never seen a map so intricate before. The ones he had grown accustomed to were approximations, errors corrected over them again and again, revised by fishermen, a palimpsest created on rice paper, the islands unnamed. The one he held now had been drawn by a Dutch mapmaker, bought at a port on the mainland. It was well-proportioned and colored, the outlines of all the Pacific islands in bright green, each one named, though that mattered less. Unable to read, he guessed at their identities through their shapes. Here was Solla, one of the largest. And north, there, a portion of the mainland. In the east lay Japan; it was how he imagined the crescent moon might appear if one were to ever see it up close: flawed and ravaged.