City of Ash and Red

by Hye-young Pyun

  Even before he put the phone to his ear, he heard his mother tongue. It was Yujin. Not the Mol he was hoping to hear from, but it made him happy nonetheless.

  “Yujin!” He pitched his voice exaggeratedly high as he remembered how impulsively he’d asked Yujin to take care of his dog despite how strained things were between them and the fact that they’d never been close to begin with. “Thanks, man. You saved me.”

  “I saved you? Then I guess you killed me.”

  “What are you talking about? And hey, how did you get this number? What is the number anyway?”

  “You called me, remember? The number showed up on my cell phone. I couldn’t tell where it was from. You have no idea how long I’ve been trying to call. It took me forever to remember that you were in Country C. I guess that proves we’re not friends. But you knew that, right?”

  “I know, and thank you, seriously. I’m grateful to you for wasting all that time on my behalf. You really did me a favor, so thank you.” He got embarrassed at how he kept gushing at Yujin, who still had no idea of the situation he was in, and asked in a more even voice, “How did it go with the dog?”

  “I was going to just abandon it somewhere, like you told me to do. I had zero intention of taking care of your dog. I don’t know what you thought, but we’re not close enough for you to be asking me for a favor like that. Frankly, I was pissed off that you would leave such a rude message.”

  “I know,” he said weakly. He had not wanted to put Yujin in a bad mood.

  “And yet you left that message, like you were giving me an order . . .”

  “I was so sure you would ignore it.”

  “I went to your house because, if I couldn’t kick your ass, then I could at least kick your dog. Calm myself down that way.”

  “I hope you kicked it and kept kicking it until you felt better.”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  “Why? Did it bite you?”

  He pictured Yujin getting bit by the dog and grinned to himself.

  “I bet you wished it bit me, but that wasn’t it.”

  “Then it ran away? I shut the door pretty tight.”

  “No, it didn’t run away.”

  “Then what?”

  “You seriously don’t know? I’ve given you more than enough time to explain yourself.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I thought you knew. I didn’t understand why you’d left me that message until I got to your house and saw for myself.”

  “Look, Yujin. I had no intention of asking you to take care of the dog. I was only planning to ask for my ex-wife’s phone number. I don’t have anyone’s contact information with me right now, so I had to call you in order to get her number. But then—”

  “Enough excuses. I saw what you wanted me to see.”

  “All I asked you to do was take one whiny mutt out of an empty house and get rid of it. It wasn’t as big a favor to ask as you’re making it sound. It’s not like I asked you for a kidney or some—”

  “It was dead.”

  “What?”

  “It was dead.”

  “Dead? The dog?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t just sleeping?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Did you mistake it for me and throw it out the window?”

  “That is the worst joke I have ever heard,” Yujin said, his voice sounding strangely flat.

  “You know, it probably ate everything in sight after I left. That dog never could stand to go hungry. It must have made itself sick.”

  “Maybe so, but that’s not how it died.”

  “The dog’s really dead?”

  “It was stabbed. Cut to shreds.”

  Yujin’s voice shook. It was the voice of someone seized with fear. If Yujin had said that while sounding cold and distant, like everything else he had said up until that point, the man would have burst out laughing. He might have even mimicked Yujin and told him it was the cruelest joke he had ever heard. But Yujin wasn’t the joking type. He was more inclined to mistake his friends’ jokes to mean they were making fun of him and get angry instead.

  “There was something else, besides the dog.”

  “What?”

  “Are you seriously telling me you don’t know?”

  “The only things in my house that had lives to lose were the dog and the cockroaches. Oh, and ants. In the winter, I get these long lines of little red ants, they look just like threads, right near the boiler.”

  “Better get a good grip on the phone then, you might drop it in shock.”

  Yujin pretended to be warning him, but he paused dramatically, as if hoping the man really would be shocked. Or maybe Yujin was catching his breath and trying to calm his own fear. After giving the man plenty of time to feel scared while trying to figure out what else was dead in his apartment besides the dog, the cockroaches, and the ants, Yujin slowly sounded out the words:

  “Our ex-wife.”

  The man couldn’t help but laugh. It was a rotten joke, to bring his ex-wife into it.

  “Now that’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard, Yujin. I don’t know if you realize, but I am in no shape right now to listen to dumb jokes. If you keep messing around like this, you’re just asking to get chewed out.”

  “I’m telling the truth.”

  “I—”

  “She was stabbed. A lot. Her face was mashed up, like she’d been stabbed in the face over and over. If it weren’t for the clothes she was wearing, I would have had no idea who she was. It was that bad . . .”

  He thought Yujin was done, but after a moment, he heard muffled sobs. The sound was faint, frail. Like the weeping of some injured animal. Yujin was crying. The man felt like his stomach and other organs had fallen right out of his body. Yujin was not joking. Nobody could joke that way and then cry like that.

  “She’s dead?”

  Yujin continued to cry quietly as he tried to speak.

  “I was sure you knew.”

  Why would Yujin think that? He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he suddenly understood, and this time he felt like his arms and legs had fallen off. He had never, not even once, wished his ex-wife were dead, so of course he had never so much as dreamed of killing her. Yes, there were many times when he had hated her or wished she would vanish right before his eyes, but that was only a desire for physical distance, not her biological extinction.

  “I had to go to the police station again today.”

  “Did you say the police?” Now he was the one with the shaking voice.

  “I couldn’t not report what I saw! I was scared.”

  “I’m more afraid of what you’re thinking right now.” He spoke quietly just in case the trembling in his voice would sound like proof that Yujin’s suspicions of him were correct. But it only made it worse. He sounded like he was crying.

  “I played your voice message for the police. So they would understand what I was doing in your apartment in the first place. They’re investigating different leads now for why our ex-wife would be found dead in your apartment.”

  “I have absolutely no idea how she got there.”

  “I thought you’d be able to tell me something.” In an instant, the tears vanished from Yujin’s voice, and it turned as dry and stiff as a bolt of cotton. “But you aren’t saying anything. You just keep repeating what I say.”

  “There’s nothing for me to say. I have no idea what happened.”

  “Whether you know what happened or not, I couldn’t just leave her body there. If I did, there would have been trouble later for sure. Because I’m the one who reported it, they kept me in for questioning and they’re going to continue investigating me.”

  The man thought about the space between the words “couldn’t just leave her body there” and “trouble later for sure.”

  “Who in the world would do such a thing?”

  “I can’t answer that. But I do have one thing to say to
you: I hope that you’ll try to do what is legal, and moral.”

  “Everything I do is legal and moral,” the man said and sighed. He didn’t enjoy being lectured by Yujin when they weren’t even close, and in the kind of voice you would expect only the strictest of parents to use.

  Yujin sighed as well and said, “If that’s true, then good luck convincing the police.”

  Yujin slammed down the receiver before the man could respond. After a moment, he heard the dial tone that signaled the phone call had ended.

  She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead.

  He mumbled the words over and over, but the more he repeated them, the less real it felt. Yujin’s phone call was just a mean joke. Clearly, Yujin suspected that the man had slept with his ex-wife while she was married to Yujin, and had spent the last few days trying to think of how best to hurt him.

  He opened the balcony door. As the smell of trash and fumigant slowly spread into the room, a stunned sorrow spread out from the center of his body. It was not the sorrow of realizing that she was dead. It was something similar to what he had felt as a child, when he stood before the dark funeral portrait of his deceased mother. He had not seen his mother’s body. No one in his family wanted him, just a boy at the time, to see what she looked like when she died, her body mangled from the traffic accident. Though he was still a child, he knew what death was, but he did not yet understand what it meant to lose a mother.

  He’d felt sad because of his father. Dressed in a black suit that was too heavy for the season, his father dripped with sweat in the funeral home. The boy couldn’t stop glancing at his father in that suit. It had been made for his parents’ wedding nine years earlier. A furniture wholesaler, his father normally wore jeans and a windbreaker. Other than attending other people’s weddings, he never had any reason to wear a suit. The jacket sleeves were too tight on his father, who had gained a potbelly after marriage, and the pants were wrinkled from kneeling to bow each time people stood before his mother’s funeral portrait to pay their condolences, and from sitting back like a stone with his back slumped when they left. The sleeves tightened like sausages each time he leaned forward and looked like they were going to burst; by the afternoon of the second day, the seam in the armpit gave way and the white shirt underneath bulged out like a white-coated tongue. Everyone was too sad to care or to laugh. The sorrow of mourning the dead helped them to overlook the absurd. The boy kept glancing at the white fabric. It looked like his mother sticking her tongue out at him to keep him from crying.

  Later that night, after the boy had fallen asleep in the reception hall where several guests were still quietly tilting back glasses of alcohol, he was awakened by the sound of stifled sobs. His father sat alone in front of his mother’s portrait, crying. The boy burst into tears at the sight. He cried because of the quiet funeral hall, because of the peppery smell of the beef soup that had thickened and condensed from boiling too long, because of the dark faces of the tired people, because of his father crying until his eyes turned red. He cried, not out of mourning for a deceased mother, but from the sorrow of witnessing his father’s humble face now contorted and clownish, his bald head beaded with sweat, his one good suit torn.

  About a month after the funeral, his father called a cleaning lady to help straighten up their neglected house. As she was cleaning the refrigerator, she made a face and took out the containers of side dishes one by one and set them on the table. They were the last dishes the boy’s mother had made. They had turned moldy and sour with rot. The boy jumped out from where he’d been hiding in his room, watching as she cleaned, and grabbed one of the containers before she could dump it out. It was stir-fried dried shrimp, his least favorite of the side dishes. He couldn’t stand the way the shells always got stuck between his teeth when he ate it. He stood there, glowering at the hateful cleaning lady and stuffing his mouth full of moldy shrimp.

  For several days, he had a raging stomachache. With no one to take care of him, he had to suffer through it alone, the diarrhea wearing away at his bottom, while he realized at last that his mother was gone. Pain spread through his body and his heart, rising up and down his esophagus with each nauseating whiff of the moldy, mushy shrimp. He lay sick in bed alone late into the night and accepted the fact that he would have to nurse himself back from illness without his mother.

  His ex-wife’s death would sink in the same way. Only after his entire body ached because of her, only after all of the words that he wanted to say and needed to say had backed up inside of him and turned his stomach while his tongue stiffened with pain from not being able to speak even a single word since she was not there to hear them, would it finally become real. So he was not sad because his ex-wife had died. What he felt was nothing more than the dismay of being informed unilaterally by someone who was more stranger than friend, in a voice laced with suspicion, and while he was stranded in a foreign country, that the person he was closest to in this world had died.

  He longed to talk to his ex-wife, more than he ever had before. He had to keep repeating the words “she’s dead” to himself, if only to shake off that thought. Even if he couldn’t get it through his head, she was obviously not there with him so he couldn’t have talked to her anyway.

  He had strayed once, before the divorce. The girl was friendly and laughed easily, and she liked him. For a while, he was secretly tormented, wondering whether he loved the girl, while also trying to figure out whether the girl loved him back. He would think he was madly in love one day, but then the next day think to himself that if this flimsy emotion was called love, then he may as well say he loved a dog on the street. Unable to make up his mind, he slept with the girl several more times.

  What bothered him was not guilt or the moral failing of sleeping with someone else while legally married. Nor did he feel any remorse toward his wife, or the girl he kept sleeping with despite not knowing whether he loved her or not. What weighed on him was the loneliness of not being able to talk about the affair with his wife. It was the loneliness of one who harbors a secret he would prefer not to carry. When it came to the waves of feeling that washed over him, the thrill he felt each time he saw the girl, the insecurity of not knowing if she was going to leave him, the anxiety of wanting to be loved by her, the loneliness of having to guess what she was feeling through a single trivial word as she never opened up to him completely, and the fact that he wanted to get away from her despite all of that, the only person he wanted to confide in was his wife. After listening to the whole story, his wife, more than anyone else, would have been able to tell him whether or not the girl loved him, whether or not he loved the girl, and just how hard that love would make things for him in the end. But he also knew it was precisely for that reason that the one person he could never tell was his wife.

  He felt as lonely now as he had then. He longed to talk to his ex-wife about her death and about how hurt he was that she had fled to a world so disconnected from his own. But the one who would have been even more eager to talk about her death was his ex-wife herself. She would have wanted to tell him how terrified she was the moment she sensed her end was coming, how exquisite the pain was when the knife entered her flesh (he started to cry for the first time as he pictured it), how horrifying to realize she was still alive after being stabbed repeatedly, and how frightening to release her final breath as she used the last of her strength to open her eyes and gaze up at her killer. As lonely as he felt at being unable to tell her about his loneliness, she must have felt just as lonely at being unable to tell anyone about her death.

  His tears fell, but her death still felt unreal to him. It would have been no different if her corpse were spread out right before his eyes. But because he was no longer a boy, he accepted her death as a fact separate from feeling, and ached as he pictured her suffering. He could never see his ex-wife again, could never share a conversation with her again. The chance to talk to her about the loneliness of keeping secret
s from each other, the profound loneliness that came from only sharing what seemed appropriate, that chance was lost to him forever.

  The man took out his laptop. He had been using it sparingly. The battery had just over an hour left on it. The charger was, of course, in his stolen suitcase. In an hour, the laptop would be useless. Internet access was so unstable that it took a long time to get online, and even then, the connection was bad and kept cutting out. He struggled to find out what was happening in Country C. Other than reports that the virus was spreading quickly, there was little news. The problem of neglected garbage, looting, and quarantining appeared to be confined to District 4. There were sixteen major cities in Country C, including City Y, which was further divided into twenty-four different districts. No wonder the national news made no mention of District 4, when it was such a tiny part of Country C.

  Meanwhile, news of his ex-wife’s murder was splashed all over the headlines back home. It pained him to see her name followed by her age (far too young an age to die), statements that she had been found with multiple stab wounds, which suggested that she’d been murdered out of spite, and speculation over what she might have done at such a young age to have such enemies. He felt his heart was going to burst. And just as Yujin had said, the man was pegged as the prime suspect. The fact that her body was found in his apartment, the fact that right after the incident (it was estimated that the crime had been committed the day he left) he had fled to another country (though it was absurd to call what he did fleeing), and the fact that the knife found in the compost bin outside his apartment building was the same kind he used at home and had traces of blood that appeared to be his ex-wife’s along the blade were all evidence that pointed to him. Not a single fingerprint had been found on the knife handle, so it was presumed that he had tried to carefully remove any evidence before disposing of it.

  No one in their right mind would toss a murder weapon so close to home, and yet the police had fingered him anyway. They liked to wrap up investigations as quickly as possible and would brand their first suspect as guilty. They would be so thirsty for his blood that they wouldn’t even consider other possibilities. Some officers would stop at nothing to lock up a suspect.