City of Ash and Red

by Hye-young Pyun

  The vagrants’ day begins with garbage trucks lumbering through the chemical fog to dump their towering loads of refuse. According to the placard posted at the park entrance, this used to be where children played basketball or pick-up games of lacrosse, but as the illness spread and trash disposal became more urgent, it was turned into a temporary site for burning garbage.

  Rummaging through discarded things that spilled from the dump still glowing with embers and dark with ash made the man feel like he had become a rat. By the time he managed to pick out something useful, he would be gray with ash from head to toe, the same gray as a rat’s fur. And just like rats, he and the other park vagrants owed their survival to the trash.

  As the man picked through the rubbish, he was reminded again and again that he was not competing with the other homeless men for survival, he was competing with the rats. He was no match for them. The rats were always faster. They moved freely in the places his arms could not reach and were always first to the places he could reach. They found things he could not find, ate things he could not eat, and got to the things he could eat faster than him.

  There was no question that he was lower than a rat now. Like rats, he slept in the open air and foraged through filthy and unspeakable things in search of food, but he was inferior to rats in that they could eat anything whereas he ate whatever he found only to suffer repeated illness.

  Though he could not compete with the rats and the other homeless, he liked the dump. It had everything he needed: a change of clothes, shoes, a broken umbrella, paper or fabric bags to hold his personal effects (that is, the cracked bowl and comb he’d collected after his first few days of being homeless), and even a suitcase. The most important thing though was food. The dump provided him with long-expired bread turned moldy, overcooked noodles that had dried flat, wilted vegetables that had lost their color. Sometimes he got lucky and found perfectly good food that had been tossed out. The smell made it easy to find. Whenever he caught the foul stench of rot coming from somewhere in the trash, odds were good that he would find something there that had once been called food. The smell of spoil and rot was the smell of sustenance.

  For the first few days following his arrival in the park, the man had eaten almost nothing. He had been too busy feeling sorry for himself and wondering why he should be reduced to foraging for rotten crumbs. But he soon realized that feeling sorry for himself did nothing to curb his hunger. As a vagrant, he could not afford this inhibition toward food. The first time hunger drove him to forage through a garbage can, the terrible smell did not bother him because he was too busy holding back his tears. He ate rotten, sludgy noodles. Once he got the first bite down, the rest was easy. If there were bugs, he picked them off and ate. If it was spoiled, he plugged his nose and ate.

  When he discovered a knife etched with the logo of an airline company in a pile of ashes one day, he felt that he had finally gotten one over on the rats. Not that a rat would have any use for a knife. Fearful someone might take it from him, he checked his surroundings and slipped it into his pocket. The blade was dull and hardly distinguishable from the spine. All it was really good for was spreading butter on toast. But whenever he lay faceup on his park bench in the middle of the night and could not tell whether the haze that blurred his vision was caused by the constant fumigation or the sleep gumming up his eyes, or because he was crying, and whenever another homeless man snatched up a bit of trash that he had had his eye on, and whenever he went after that other homeless man only to be beaten and knocked back, he would slip his hand down into his pocket and stroke the knife. The cold vitality of the knife’s edge gave him courage.

  He wondered if he might luck into finding his lost suitcase, but that had not yet happened. Now and then he did come across black suitcases like his. They were useful for storing the things needed in the life of a vagrant, so fights were always breaking out over who would claim them. Time and again, he took a beating and had to weakly bow out, satisfying himself with merely checking whether it was his suitcase or not. He didn’t necessarily want his suitcase back. Even if it were his, there was no chance it still contained the items he had brought from his home country. It was hopeless. His suitcase was only so much garbage now. Just as it had taken only a few days for him to become no different from the city’s homeless.

  Each time the sharp smell of urine pricked his nose, he looked around in fear. The smell came from the garbage fire, from the bench he sat on, from the trees at the center of the park, from the beggars at his side, from the air he breathed, from the ground he walked on. The smell came from all of those things and from him. His bold leap into the garbage bags to escape the men he assumed were detectives had been a fitting prophecy of his future spent digging through garbage. He had sprained his lower back in the fall but had no time to attend to it as he dove into the only hiding space available: between and under the bags of garbage. Then he’d crawled along the ground of this new world, which was populated by bugs and maggots and flowing with a sticky discharge. He kept expecting the detectives to grab him by the scruff of the neck at any moment. The police surrounding the building would surely help the detectives in their search and drag him out of the trash. His heart had raced with fear, and its audible pounding made it difficult for him to make out any other sounds around him. If caught, he would be deported, arrested, tried, branded a criminal, and punished. To avoid being caught, he had shoved his way through garbage and curled up and hid like garbage among the garbage.

  If it had not been for the sprayer truck passing by, if the truck had not been spewing out a tremendous cloud of fumigant right at that moment, if the billowing cloud had not perfectly concealed him, he no doubt would have been caught. He snuck onto the roof of the truck as it slowed down to spray the garbage nearby. A second large cloud billowed out, and the truck slowly moved to its next spot, carrying him on its roof. He lifted his head to look back, but all he saw were black garbage bags wreathed in white vapor.

  He had planned to stay on top of the truck until he put a good distance between himself and the detectives. If he could, he would have liked to stay on that roof for the rest of his life, his body hidden in the clouds, but he couldn’t hold on. His arms and legs hurt too much, and so he’d jumped down and ducked into the park. His muscles were stiff from the effort to press flat against the curved top of the tank-like truck and cling to it with all four limbs. It vexed him to know that he’d been unable to bear a little pain, even in a life-or-death situation. It wasn’t as if he had been dying of pain either, it was more of a constant, nagging discomfort. He lay down on the first empty bench he saw and thought, if he were to die, it would not be from a virus or a knife to the heart. More likely he would grow careless and tread on a rusty nail and die of tetanus. A part of him preferred the idea. He deserved to die slowly and by something so stupid and trivial.

  When he wasn’t picking through garbage, he passed the time like the other homeless men: lying or sitting or slumped on his bench. He did not feel real. If he didn’t keep his back pressed to the bench, he became a puff of air. His cold lingered. Whenever he grew tired, the coughing fits returned, squeezing his chest. His head ached all the time from the fumigant, and he had an unbearable itch somewhere. His skin turned ashy and flaky, and scabs formed over the spots that he could not resist scratching. When he ran his nails over the scabs, they bled. The undersides of his overgrown fingernails turned black from the dead skin and dandruff that collected there each time he scratched his head.

  Seventeen vagrants lived in the park, one for each bench. The bench under the streetlight nearest the entrance was number one, and the rest followed clockwise. He had no idea who had numbered the benches, but he found this out when he overheard one of the others refer to him as Nine and the man across from him as Eleven.

  They had numbers, but they rarely addressed each other. He knew his number and that was all; no one called out and no one responded. Other than Three and Six, who were always mumbling something under their bre
ath, the sound a constant singsong hum, the rest of the homeless men were remarkable for their utter silence. Was the refusal to move from their seats due to the fear of becoming infected, or simply the vagrants’ way of claiming ownership? Either way, they only spoke to each other when they fought over a piece of garbage, and they spent as much time as possible rooted in one spot. And though such cause never arose, even if there had been reason to, they would not have helped each other or saved each other’s places or willingly relinquished a single scrap of food pulled from the trash.

  On second thought, the constant mumbling might not have come from Three and Six. It could have been Four and Twelve, or even One and Seventeen, who were a bit farther away. The thick fog that hung over the park made it difficult to track exactly where sounds were coming from. Each time the sprayer trucks passed by, the fog grew so dense that he could not see the bench right next to his.

  It was difficult, even without the fog, to tell the homeless men apart. All of them were filthy and dressed in rags, their faces hidden behind scruffy beards. Their hair was tangled, their skin blackened with dirt. Their dirtiness was not proportionate to how long they had been homeless. In fact, the shorter their vagrancy, the dirtier they were, whereas the longer they had been out there, the more skilled they were at finding a change of clothes and shoes in the trash, and the more places they knew they could go to wash up, including public bathrooms that were open all night, vacant homes for rent that were left unlocked, and apartment construction sites that they could enter after dark, which meant they could keep themselves relatively clean if they wanted to.

  Their numbers were not permanent. The numbers belonged not to their persons but to the benches. After the person who had sat on the second bench lost his spot, he kicked someone else off of the sixth bench and became Six.

  This losing and taking of benches was an everyday occurrence. Arguments over seats led to indiscriminate blows, but no one ever tried to intervene. Once a new vagrant had occupied a seat, a string of fights would follow: the loser would simply move to another bench and pick a fight with whoever looked weaker than him, and then that loser would do the same. All seventeen benches were always occupied, and it was difficult to tell the seventeen faces apart amid the clouds of fumigant and smoke from the garbage fire. There was no way to tell who was sitting where after each fight, and no one ever bothered to ask.

  As the fights grew more vicious, they resorted to randomly grabbing bags dumped by the garbage trucks, taking them back to their benches, and rummaging through them there. This reduced their odds of finding anything worthwhile, but it made it easier to protect their seats. Of course, this came to nothing if someone simply decided to attack them and take the seat by force. As the items they dug up proved more and more worthless, the trash strewn throughout the park steadily accumulated. It was soon barely distinguishable from the makeshift landfill nearby.

  The man’s hardest moments were when it rained at night. It was impossible to stay warm once he was drenched with rain. His only recourse was to squeeze into the space underneath the bench. Lying there on the wet ground, he remembered how happy he had been during his short time quarantined in the apartment. The hot water was shut off, but still he could bathe whenever he wanted, and though the tap water came out rusty, he could filter it and not have to go thirsty. Eating at the sound of a bell like some kind of trained animal was humiliating, but the food always arrived at the same time and tasted the same way, so he never had to worry about going hungry. He could stretch out on his bed and sleep, and if he closed the balcony door, he could block out most of the smell. He was not rained on, never worried about heavy wind, and did not have to slip a hand into his pocket to make sure it still held a knife.

  Of course, there had been far happier times in his life than when he was on lockdown. So many, in fact, that he’d had no idea how happy he was then. Now that he lay curled beneath a bench like an insect, the dampness of the earth radiating up at him and cold drops of rain seeping through the wooden slats above, he thought that every single moment in his life but this one had been happy. Even his most torturous moments—like the moment he saw the news and knew with objective certainty that his ex-wife was dead, and those other moments, just on the edge of waking, when he was not sure whether his nightly dream of murdering his ex-wife was only a dream or a lost memory—even those seemed happy in comparison.

  He dreamed that she whispered a secret to him in the same soft voice she’d used the first time she told him she loved him. He suffered more from hearing that secret than he had when he’d learned she was dead, and he was convinced the dream was real.

  In his dream, Yujin was the first to broach the subject, but she was the one who confessed, her face devoid of expression as she told him that she had been pregnant with his baby but got rid of it. Her voice was so flat, so lacking in any kind of emotion, that he wondered at first if she wasn’t talking about someone else. He had never wanted a child, not while they were married and not after. Their divorce left him feeling relieved that they hadn’t had one, but he also believed things would have turned out differently if they had. He didn’t want to know what she was thinking or why she’d made that decision. He assumed the only reason she did it without consulting him was so she could leave him for Yujin, and that made him unbearably angry. He hurled invectives at her. But he didn’t know if what really upset him was the fact that she’d had an abortion at all, or that she hadn’t consulted him first, or if he was sad that his child was gone, or if it was none of the above and he’d simply found an excuse to unleash his anger.

  Yujin looked back and forth between the two of them as if silently relishing the moment. In an attempt to rattle him, the man asked if Yujin knew that she had been cheating on Yujin with him. He hadn’t sleep with his ex-wife solely to satisfy a physical desire. Just as when they were married, the sex lacked passion. Touching her was like touching himself, but that easy familiarity was what he liked about it. They didn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of not knowing each other’s bodies, or exaggerate their pleasure to avoid hurting each other’s feelings. He never once assumed that his wife slept with him because she was unsatisfied in bed with Yujin. He just assumed that she too enjoyed lying beside him, staring up at the ceiling, glancing over at the side of his face from time to time, and talking.

  Yujin countered by saying he already knew. This angered the man and made him lash out at Yujin only to get punched first. When his ex-wife tried to break up their fight, he shoved her by accident. The look on her face, a resigned expression that said fighting was pointless, incensed him further, and he went into the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the counter, intending only to anger her right back. He pointed it at Yujin. He was angry at his wife, but angrier still at Yujin for revealing her secret. Yujin’s intentions were obvious: he wanted the man to suffer, just as the man wanted Yujin to suffer for breaking up his marriage. Amid the hazy unreality of it all, the feel of the knife in his hand, the glare he fixed on Yujin as he aimed the blade, and the regret when the knife clattered to the floor during their scuffle were so vivid that he would wake each time with a start.

  He woke in the dark, the bench as hard as ever, his body slick with sweat. He could never tell if he was sweating from the nightmare or because the temperature in the park had risen from the decomposing trash. He would wait until the sky lightened enough for him to just make out the shape of his hand in the dark, then he would clench and release his fist over and over. The hand that had held the knife tingled and throbbed, and the stark chill he’d felt when he looked down at the fallen knife remained.

  The sensation of holding a knife had seemed so concrete. He could picture every muscle and bone of that hand in detail. In fact, it was so overly vivid that it felt unreal. If he had indeed grabbed a knife while angry and confused, then his memories should have been distorted and jumbled, but he remembered it in perfect detail every time, as if it had been planted there in his mind. The sheer clarity of it made him convi
nce himself that it was just a dream, nothing more than fancy. A mere fantasy generated by the fear that he might have killed his ex-wife.

  The pain in his hand paled in comparison to remembering each time he awoke that his ex-wife was dead. He figured this was what dying of a broken heart would feel like. But the pain never lasted long. While he might freeze to death from lying on the ground in the rain, he knew he would never actually die of a broken heart. He kept living, no matter how badly his heart ached. He wished never to relive the past and yet, at least, back then, he was not being pelted with rain while lying on the bare earth, furrowing his brow as he tried to figure out whether that sensation creeping up his body and tickling his skin was from worms, the dampness, or the cold of the soil, or stifling a shriek each time he looked down to see fat drops of rain opening craters in the dirt and revealing the source to be worms after all.

  In fact, he had to admit that the effort to endure his physical discomfort was inuring him to the pain of his ex-wife’s death. Thinking about it still left him feeling beaten and raw, but even those pangs were growing shorter. The more often he grabbed the knife in his dreams, the less guilt he felt upon waking. Maybe the strange combination of the recurring nightmare with the vividness of the sensation was pushing his ex-wife’s death into the realm of the unreal, the field of the imaginary. But even if it were a reality he would eventually have to face, even as he suffered over the loss of his ex-wife, he still had to crush the bugs that mistook his filthy, reeking body for a tree and climbed him, still had to run his fingers through hair turned muddy with sweat and rain and dirt and scratch until the undersides of his nails came away bloody, still had to flock with the other homeless men in the park at the sound of a passing dump truck and forage through garbage bags. He gladly put his grief second.

  So much had happened in such a short time, but he did not know the truth of any of it. He gave up on understanding anything coming from himself. It could be that he did not want to understand, or that it was beyond his comprehension in the first place. But regardless of whether he understood, was resigned to, accepted, or misapprehended his ex-wife’s death, he sensed that the suffering he had experienced so far was still better than the unforeseeable future making its way toward him. What depressed him was this: his current agony was nothing compared to what awaited him. All he could do was stay alive until he had put this world behind him.