City of Ash and Red

by Hye-young Pyun

  She pointed at a chair behind the counter. He had trouble understanding what she’d said but he recognized the items under the chair from their labels.

  “That’s obviously not for colds,” she added. “If you need it, you can have it. But I doubt you need it.”

  “My cough is severe. Is there nothing for it?”

  “Drink lots of warm water. That’s the best you can do.”

  The man started to leave, then stopped and asked, “May I take those?”

  He had no particular plans in mind for the bug spray and rat poison. The rat poison could be useful for analyzing existing products on the market when he started working at the head office, but someone had probably already done that. As for bug spray, there was always a use. His apartment was probably crawling with insects from all of the neglected trash outside.

  The pharmacist eyed him suspiciously. “That stuff won’t help your cold. You understand? As long as you understand that, you can take it.” She placed the bug spray and rat poison in a black plastic bag. “You said you’re not a thief, so are you going to pay me?”

  Flustered, he fumbled in his pockets for money.

  “See, now you’re a thief,” she said jokingly.

  The man drew his bruised hand across his throat like a knife and laughed.

  As he left the pharmacy with the bug spray and rat poison, he figured that most of the stores had closed because they were worried that what happened to the pharmacy would also happen to them. He had unwittingly found himself in a place where you could not get medicine without resorting to robbery and where, for all he knew, everything else would have to be obtained the same way as well.

  He wanted to rush back to his apartment, but he could not. The spray from the constantly circling trucks obscured the buildings and shops and kept the ground coated in a layer of powdery chemicals, making everything look alike. Even the piles of black garbage bags and homeless men picking through them looked identical. The more he wandered, the more the air filled with vapor, and the taller the piles of trash seemed to grow.

  When he had exhausted himself with trying to find his way back, he flopped down onto one of the garbage bags. He knew it was trash, but it was the only thing there for him to rest against. As he breathed evenly, trying to adjust to the stench, he glimpsed a pair of legs coming toward him through a cloud of disinfectant left by a retreating truck. The legs drew closer. He stood up. He brushed the dirt off the back of his pants, but there was nothing he could do about the smell.

  The legs belonged to a tall, thin man. His shirt and pants were neat and unwrinkled, as if they had been recently laundered and ironed. He stopped the tall stranger and asked for his help finding his address, but he could barely make out what the other man was mumbling from behind the dust mask he wore. He managed to catch a few directional words, like left, right, and across. He turned his back on the stranger, staring worriedly down the street he was being told to take, the street that was indistinguishable from all of the other streets behind their veil of litter and disinfectant, when something hit him on the head.

  It wasn’t enough to knock him out, but he lost his balance and fell into the pile of garbage. His head felt like it was on fire. He gingerly touched the back of his skull: the flesh there felt swollen and strange from the impact, as though a helmet had been slipped over him. His fingers were sticky, but he had no idea if it was blood or from something wet seeping out of the trash. Lying in the pile of garbage, he watched as the stranger who had struck him looked inside the black plastic bag he had been carrying. The items couldn’t possibly be of use to the stranger. If it had been food or much-needed medicine, the man would have fought back, bleeding head or not. The stranger examined the bug spray and rat poison and tossed them away. As he hurriedly retreated, the stranger glanced back once at the man, not with a look of guilt but rather worry that the man might regain his strength, right himself, and come after him.

  The man lay still among the garbage bags until the stranger’s long, thin legs had vanished back into the chemical fog. If he could have stood up, he would have hit the stranger on the back of the head just to get even, but the pain kept him from rising.

  After a while, he checked again to see if the bleeding had stopped, then picked himself up. Pain flared up his spine, and his body ached like an old woman’s. The smell was worse than before. The foul garbage stench had mixed with the acrid disinfectant and was wafting off his battered and bruised body. While lying there, enduring the pain, he had become a part of the smell. He was no longer a newcomer to a foul-smelling world but was now of that world himself. He swallowed his nausea, as if to side with this part of him that assimilated so quickly to smells, and slowly walked away. There was no reason to rush; he had nothing to lose. The blow to the back of the head had told him that, here, problems were solved in a manner unlike anything he had experienced before; this was not a world where morals, order, education, and kindness were the norm, but rather one where plunder, pillage, violence, and garbage ruled. To survive in this world, he would have to be like that tall stranger. And if plundering and pillaging were a means of livelihood, then the only true asset was to own nothing.

  The drone of the dial tone trailed from the receiver. The next time Mol called, he would have to get the phone number, but it would be another week to ten days before that would happen. He was idly listening to the dial tone buzzing in his ear when it finally hit him that all he had to do was call his office back home to get Mol’s number. He couldn’t believe it had only now occurred to him. It wasn’t as if he were some mere tourist, he’d been sent there to work.

  As he dialed the number of the company, he wondered if it was rude of him to try to call Mol. All he had were questions and favors to ask. He wanted to know if he could get health insurance benefits so he could see a doctor about his cold, and whether he could stay somewhere besides this garbage-strewn island. He had other questions too, like why on earth there was so much rotting garbage in the first place, why the pharmacy was robbed in the middle of the night, what the cause of death was for those bodies he saw on the news, whether he was correct in assuming the virus had killed them, why everyone insisted on driving alone and blocking up the streets, why he never saw anyone out walking, and why everyone he did see wore those ridiculous and uncomfortable hazmat suits, whether the epidemic really had gotten so bad that they had to wear them. But most of all, what he wanted to know was why he had been told, with no warning whatsoever, not to come into work for ten long days.

  Just as the thought of all those questions began to be replaced by the worry that he would come off sounding like a big baby, someone answered the phone. It hadn’t rung more than twice. The branch manager usually let two rings go by in order to warn whoever was calling that they were imposing on his time.

  Trout answered. The man wished it were anyone else. When Trout asked who was calling, he blurted out, “It’s me.” It sounded like a confession.

  “Well? Are you loving it over there at headquarters?” Trout asked as soon as he recognized the man’s voice. He didn’t bother to hide his sarcasm.

  “Things aren’t going well.”

  “Yeah, I figured as much. That’s how things are all over the world lately, whether there’s a recession or a boom. I mean, it’s the same in this country too. Things aren’t going well. But you already know that, don’t you? Our idiot manager may be picky, neurotic, and stupid, but he’s also a workaholic who loves to create more work for us. He let us have it again at the morning meeting today. Went on and on about virus this and personal hygiene that. What, are we seven-year-olds? My kid’s already in the third grade, but I have to listen to the boss, who isn’t that much older than me, lecture us every morning about washing our hands all the time and covering our mouths when we cough so our spit doesn’t go all over the place. You know how he is. Oh . . . or maybe you don’t. He always treated you special.” Trout lowered his voice. “Hey, did you know? Yesterday, I went to get some papers signed by the mana
ger, and I heard the funniest thing from his secretary. You know that email that came for you, the one with the start date of your transfer? Do you remember who sent it?”

  He remembered clearly. It was Mol. The email contained a few formal remarks, briefly stated the conditions of the job, and noted that his start date would commence one week from the date it was sent. Trout didn’t wait for him to respond.

  “According to what I heard yesterday, they can’t figure out who sent that email. I heard the branch manager talking on the phone with the supervisor at the head office and, what’s that person’s name again? It’s something real common, but now I can’t remember. Anyway, the supervisor said he never sent that email. They seem to think there was a computer problem at the main office. They said that all of the emails in the drafts folder got sent out at once. I have no idea if it’s true, but it sounds like they’ve been busting a nut trying to undo the damage. The supervisor and branch manager are really upset about it. They’ve been making calls all over the place to find out if it was a mistake or not. I didn’t get to hear the rest because someone came in just then, but it got me worried that maybe something had gone wrong with your transfer. So I called a few other people over at the head office, and what I gather is that no one there seems to know anything about your transfer. And they’re the people you’re supposed to be working with! So, anyway, I hear you got a ten-day leave of absence? That’s what the branch manager said at the morning meeting. Figures you would get vacation over there when you did nothing here to deserve it.”

  “Some vacation. Everyone is in a state of panic over here.”

  “Panic? Ha! So are we. A state of panic. Everyone keeps asking why the hell you were picked. They keep grumbling about how you have no talent or experience. When you consider our disappointment, you could say we’re pretty panicked, too.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but it seems like everyone is panicking over the virus.” His voice was strained from trying to suppress his anger.

  “You mean that thing that’s been going around? Don’t worry. You know you’re lucky. Nothing bad will ever happen to you, no matter what it is. Anyway, they say the fatality rate is low, so what are you so scared—”

  He hung up on him. Trout probably had more sly jabs to make, but he didn’t want to hear them. If the situation over here had not yet made the international news, and frankly even if it had, Trout could not possibly understand how desperate the man was feeling. Knowing Trout, even if he had seen the news, he probably laughed at the situation the man was in and reveled in it. He pictured Trout delighting in his failure and realized that he had no choice but to endure the situation.

  He opened the balcony door. He had always been in the habit of standing in front of windows when he felt down. But the view of the city from his balcony did little to comfort him. The people passing by on the street were mostly dressed in protective suits and wearing dust masks. From time to time, he noticed people who were not wearing the suits, but the tattered condition of their clothing suggested they were homeless. In fact, there were several vagrants sprawled out like insects on the benches in the park.

  Each time a sprayer truck made its periodic rounds, he burst into violent, consumptive coughing fits. The stronger the fog, the more often he coughed, but he had no idea whether this was the fault of the disinfectant, or whether it was because his cold had not gotten better, or whether he was perhaps now infected with the virus. At that thought, he took a deep breath of the disinfectant as it issued from a truck. He had to breathe in the stink of garbage at the same time, but it was better than being exposed to the virus. No one yet knew how it was spreading, and whether it had originally come from a dog or a pig or a cow or a rhesus monkey or a goat, and if so how it had then made its way into a human body. The only thing they did know was that there was no cure. The chemicals made his whole body itch. Though they weren’t sprayed directly into his room, the walls and curtains were already beginning to stain. At this rate, even if he never became infected, he would probably die of chemical overdose. His bruises paled in comparison to the bright red sores that had opened up on his forearms.

  As he stood there looking out, a line of legs moving at matching angles appeared through the cloud of disinfectant. Gradually, the cloud dispersed to reveal an army of police officers with hazmat suits over their uniforms. The officers broke off into smaller groups, each of which headed to a different building. One of the squads formed a line in front of his apartment building, each officer standing as straight and even as eggs in a carton. At the sound of a loud siren, they broke formation and swarmed inside.

  The man cowered for no reason, and his heart began to race at some unknowable fear. The police must have been hunting down the suspect of a violent crime, and it must have been something pretty bad for them to mobilize so many men. After a moment, an announcement came over the loudspeakers installed inside the building. As the announcement repeated itself, he copied down the sounds of the words that he couldn’t understand and looked them up in his electronic dictionary: contagion, inspection, and quarantine. Assuming he had pieced the words together correctly, the announcement meant that someone in this building or neighborhood was infected, and until all of the occupants had been inspected and found healthy, they were being quarantined in their apartments for fear of spreading the contagion.

  FOUR

  Meals were distributed at set times. It was not what he had pictured: people standing in long lines, waiting to receive rations from someone in uniform. Doing it that way would have meant bringing residents into contact with each other and defeating the purpose of the quarantine. Instead, police officers set plastic bags of food in front of each door, and those inside collected them after the officers had left. Each bag contained a boxed meal or a sandwich, plain water or a beverage. He did not care for the fact that the food was always the same, but at least it tasted better than expected.

  After the food was set in place, the fire alarm was rung. The first time, they had not used the alarm, and a few people had opened their doors too late; their rations had been stolen. But the police couldn’t search every apartment in search of a food thief when they did not yet know who was infected. They’d come up with the idea of using the fire alarm in a last-ditch attempt to remedy the problem. At the sound of the bell, everyone opened their door and retrieved their food in unison. There were no more complaints about stolen food.

  Each time the bell rang, the man felt an uncontrollable urge to run. He thought he smelled something burning. But even if he hadn’t imagined the smell of smoke, the alarm was still a constant reminder that he was locked in an apartment in a foreign country, that the building was teeming with the infected, and that he was, literally, in a state of emergency.

  The eighteen doors on the fourth floor all cracked open in unison, the occupants already crouching down low like dogs or cats to grab the food from the ground as fast as they could. The man watched unhappily as his neighbors’ hands reached out to snatch the bags, the doors slamming shut behind them, as if to keep any bad air out. They were not neighbors. They were thieves who had stolen his suitcase, and before long they would be looters who would not hesitate to steal his bread.

  He was opening his door to retrieve his breakfast when he heard a dog bark from behind one of the other open doors. The sound jogged his memory loose. Flustered, he dropped the bag. He had left his dog behind. He remembered now. But what worried him was not the thought of his poor dog locked inside his apartment, whining with hunger for the last few days, nor was it the thought of what the woman next door might say (she couldn’t bear the sound of barking and complained every time they crossed paths in the elevator that it woke her newborn baby and insisted he get the dog’s vocal cords removed); rather, it was the realization that by leaving his dog alone in an empty apartment, he had failed in his responsibility to the dog, and he despaired at the thought that failure, for him, was only a matter of time. He told himself that he dese
rved to be living this way now, surviving on handouts like a dog. Indeed, the fact that he had not even thought about his dog for several days showed that he was lower than a dog.

  In truth, he was not fond of dogs. To be precise, what he felt was closer to hatred. He had been taking care of the dog ever since he and his ex-wife split up, but he hated the way the dog would suddenly start barking for no discernible reason. Each time that happened, he thought of the saying that dogs could see ghosts, and a shiver ran through him. He hated the dog hair that clung to his suit jackets, even ones fresh from the cleaners, and he hated it when the dog rubbed against his legs and whined. He hated having to rush every morning to fill the dog’s bowl with enough food for the day when he was already pressed for time, or how the dog would follow him to the front door and rub against his legs again, getting hair on his trousers, and he hated having to spend more time removing that hair. When he returned home from work, he hated having to pick up the dog’s feces from the bathroom floor, and he hated it when he had to use the toilet himself before he had a chance to clean up after the dog. More than once, he had wanted to get rid of the dog, but each time, the thought of his ex-wife made him put up with it a little longer. Given all of that, he felt bewildered by his own excess of guilt.

  The dog was as stupid as a dog can be, and yet it looked at him sometimes as if it knew everything, and when there was nothing to be afraid of, it barked ferociously and strutted around, but when faced with a threat, it tucked its tail between its legs and cowered and lowered its head. It whined to be taken out, and when he did take it on the occasional walk, it wore him out with its excitement, dragging him around as if he were the one leashed. In other words, it was a typical dog.