City of Ash and Red

by Hye-young Pyun

  * * *

  He burst out laughing when he saw the street sign. Sixth Street, District 4. The park was a mere three blocks from his old apartment. The place he had thought of as far away wasn’t far at all. How pathetic he was, calmly picking through the garbage, not knowing he had barely escaped. He had felt so at ease in the park because he believed he had put many miles between him and the apartment, and because he assumed the homeless were excluded from quarantining and therefore no cop or detective would bother searching the park.

  He had clung to the top of the truck until his limbs hurt too much, certain that he’d held on long enough to at least reach another district. He couldn’t believe that he’d only made it this far, and felt stupid for not figuring it out sooner. Each truck was assigned to one district, so naturally the one he had ridden had not left the neighborhood.

  He headed toward his old building. It didn’t take long to find, though he got lost along the way, crossing a few wrong streets and heading down a different alley. The building was as he remembered: it appeared to be floating on a cloud of disinfectant. But the riot police were gone. Either the quarantine had been lifted or the illness had spread out of control, leaving them with no reason to continue imposing the quarantine.

  He peered through the glass doors that he could not enter. The superintendent, still dressed in a puffy hazmat suit, looked back at him with suspicion. The mask covering the superintendent’s face made it impossible to tell if it was the same person as before.

  The small park adjacent to the apartment, the one he used to look down at from his balcony, was not that different from the one he’d taken up residence in. Similarly unbathed vagrants were lying on benches, and the ground was also littered with garbage dragged over from the nearby garbage fire, making the whole place look like an upended trashcan.

  And yet, the moment he entered the park, he felt that he had reached a peaceful and longed-for place. He thought maybe it was because of the phone booth, which was as brightly illuminated as a street lamp. Just the sight of it made him think of several people he missed, but the booth was packed with trash and the telephone itself was gone. He wished he could call someone that instant. Yujin, who had informed him of his ex-wife’s death. Soyo, who hated him as much as Yujin did. His dead ex-wife. The more he longed to talk to someone, the more he realized that he had no one whom he could tell about his new surroundings, this world of garbage and germs. Then it hit him. Without a moment’s hesitation, he headed off to find that person.

  The sky was so dark that the office building had most of its lights ablaze even at midday. From a distance, he could see people on the other side of the large picture windows moving back and forth, sitting at their desks, busily engaged in meetings. He knew from this that everything was business as usual at company headquarters.

  This attempt to meet Mol could very well end badly. Mol might have been the one who tipped off the men he had assumed were detectives. But he wanted to know whether or not he had ruined an otherwise serene future with a momentary lapse. He’d been thinking that maybe his leap into the garbage was a mistake born of a fleeting delusion. The thought began as a simple hope but had gradually turned into the conviction that it was all just a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding meant an opportunity to get his life back; he could still correct the life that had fallen into garbage.

  Despite the high ceiling and bright fluorescents, the lobby was so deserted that it reminded him of an abandoned, underground city. The immaculate building made him feel like one of the public ashtrays sitting out on the sidewalk. Though, strictly speaking, they were cleaner than he was. A security guard stopped him the moment he stepped into the lobby. He felt indescribably filthy compared to the guard in his pristine hazmat suit. The guard had an electronic thermometer sticking out of his pocket: it seemed that permission to enter the building was based on body temperature, but the guard didn’t bother with it; he took one look at the man and spread both arms out to stop him from entering. The man hurriedly said he was there to see Mol and recited Mol’s job title and department to the guard, who was clearly intent on throwing him out on the street like a panhandler.

  “You’re asking to talk to one of our employees face to face?” The guard scowled, but then led him to a counter on the right side of the lobby and half-heartedly retrieved a blank form from a shelf labeled MEETING REQUEST FORMS. The man hadn’t realized he would have to fill out a form just to be able to see Mol. It would not have stopped him from coming, of course, but he was stupefied by all the boxes he had to fill out.

  “What happens if I don’t fill this out?” he asked.

  “You’re a foreigner?” The guard sounded incredulous. The man slowly nodded. “Do you know how to write? We don’t accept verbal requests for meetings.”

  Without waiting for an answer, the guard strode away, as if to say he was done helping him, and escorted out a group of people in black suits with masks over their noses and mouths who had just stepped off the elevator. The man stared hard at them. Some headed straight out the front door, while others hung back to wait for someone. He thought one of them might be Mol, whom he had yet to meet in person, and he scanned the ID cards hanging in plain sight on their chests. To his surprise, one of the cards did say Mol, but it was a woman. He didn’t let that get him down. He had heard that Mol was a common name in that country.

  He filled out each item on the form in his clumsy handwriting. When he got to “purpose of visit,” he hesitated and looked over at the guard. He was taken aback to see the guard staring back at him. Since he already felt like a child waiting for a teacher to help show him the way, he wrote down “career guidance.” He knew it wasn’t quite right, but nothing better came to mind, and even if something had, he was not confident he would know how to say it in the local language anyway.

  The guard pored over his application before finally saying, “Career guidance—that’s a new one.”

  “Do you think I’ll be granted a meeting?”

  “I have no idea.” The guard shrugged. “Sounds like something a high school student would write.”

  The man suspected the guard was making fun of him, and this made him feel like he’d made yet another mistake, but he summoned up his courage and asked, “When will I know?”

  “I’m only responsible for sending these up to the office. Whoever is in charge there reviews the applications. If they okay it, then they pass it on to the person you wish to see. Do you understand? If they say no, your application is automatically thrown out. That’s all I know. As with anything else, it takes a while for them to process these, so I cannot give you an exact time frame. Not everything is so precise. Do you understand?”

  The guard gave him an indifferent look that said, yes, he had asked that question but, no, he did not actually care whether the man understood or not, and with a slow, dramatic flourish, he pulled open a drawer and set the man’s application on top of a stack of dozens of other such submitted meeting request forms. Then he turned to face the door, as if to say his work here was done, and stood with his feet exactly hip-width apart and his hands behind his back. His posture, so like a soldier standing at ease, combined with the puffy suit reminded the man of the mascot of a foreign tire manufacturer, but there was nothing comical about it. Or maybe he just wasn’t in a laughing mood. His determination to find Mol had left him feeling tragic.

  He started to leave but paused to ask the guard another question.

  “Can anyone fill out a form to see someone who works here?”

  “Yes, anyone,” the guard muttered, barely moving his lips.

  “Including a cop or a detective?”

  “Well, they only have to show their badge or a warrant. But they’re not allowed inside if they’re sick—they have to pass physical inspection, just like everyone else. Do you understand?”

  “Do you think my application will be approved?”

  The guard looked him over slowly, never once breaking his rigid stance even while turning hi
s head.

  “Like I said before, it’s not up to me. So I don’t know what to tell you. You shouldn’t be swayed by my opinion. I don’t want to get your hopes up too high or worry you over nothing. I’m just one man employed by the state. Do you understand?”

  As the man turned again to leave, a group of people entered the lobby and lined up in front of the guard. The guard took the electronic thermometer from his pocket and checked each person’s temperature and ID card in turn before letting them pass. The man watched until the lobby had emptied, and then he left. He would probably have his own temperature taken when he went back to check on the results of his application, so he knew he had better wash up and clean his clothes, but his steps grew heavy at the realization that getting dirtier by the day was so easy while getting clean was all but impossible. He would have to come back and see the same guard, and each time he did, he would have to give the same explanation over and over. The guard would tell him his application was still under review, and he would ask the same litany of questions to try to find out how much closer they were to deciding.

  A few blocks away from the office, he came across a pile of trash bags lined up like a row of barracks between two buildings. He headed over to it happily. The wall of garbage had collapsed in places, but it didn’t look like the sanitation workers had touched it yet. Several vagrants, a dog, and some stray cats were digging through the trash. He joined them, using one of the bags as a seat while he randomly opened up more bags and rummaged through the trash that had been strewn carelessly about or had burst out of other bags.

  If it weren’t for the other homeless men lying in the street like litter or passing the time by foraging through the trash, or for the giant banner overhead proclaiming how they could prevent the spread of infectious diseases, he would have felt like a tourist. The air was relatively fresh from the rain that had fallen the day before, and the fumigant had turned everything misty and made him feel like he was sitting on the bank of a fog-covered lake. The sprayer trucks had been coming by less frequently than usual. One should have passed by several times already, but the road was quiet. The clouds were lifting. For once, the air was clear. It felt like the first sunny day after the long summer rains. Though it would not last, it was the perfect weather for hoping that maybe the need for all of this control and prevention had finally come to an end.

  As he was pulling a damp scrap of fabric from the trash, he spotted a familiar-looking suitcase. He couldn’t tell it was a suitcase at first. With its wheels broken off, the suitcase itself was little more than a trash can giving off all sorts of smells. He slowly emptied the case. Out came a dried-up piece of meat infested with maggots—it looked like the corpse of some long-dead animal. The maggots crawled off of the meat and onto his hand, their bodies accordioning in little regular movements. He wasn’t taken aback but simply brushed them off like they were so much dirt. A plastic bag filled with festering fruits and vegetables emerged next. With no time to adjust to the sudden blast of rot, he gagged. He moved to toss it to one side, and a stream of black discharge spilled onto the suitcase. Instantly, a swarm of flies descended as if they had been lying in wait. He reached back into the suitcase and pulled out part of a broken bowl, its original use now unknowable, and long-unwashed clothes that smelled like dishrags. He dumped it all on the ground and examined the case.

  It was an ordinary black suitcase, so common that it would be easily confused with another person’s suitcase at baggage claim. But the handle would prove whether or not it was his bag. The original plastic handle of his suitcase had broken off while it was still under warranty, and the company had replaced it with a new, imitation-leather handle, attached on each side with white stitching. He lifted up the bag and took a long, careful look at the handle. One end had come undone and the rest was barely hanging on, but the handle was indeed sewn to the case—the thread was too dirty to make out the original color, but he was sure it had once been white.

  Maggots from the long-dead animal were crawling along the suitcase, looking like stray bits of white thread. He unzipped the front pocket. It was stuffed with objects he didn’t recognize. A smaller pocket inside the suitcase refused to open. The zipper was rusted shut. It stayed shut no matter how hard he tugged. Once, on the way back from a business trip, he had packed a can of local beer inside his suitcase: the can exploded from the change in pressure, and the zipper had rusted. Since he had never gotten the zipper open again, whatever he had packed inside that pocket would still be there.

  He took out his knife. He rested the dull blade against the fabric and scraped it back and forth across the same spot. His heart raced as he pictured what might be inside. Finding his lost suitcase after all that time was no small matter. This trash can of a suitcase might still hold something that he had brought with him from his mother country. Whatever was inside that pocket might even cast some much-needed light on his situation. It could restore his memories, which felt like mere dreams to him now, or prove vital to clearing himself of these false charges, or even play a role in identifying the real criminal. He took his time, running the knife back and forth, back and forth, over the same spot until the fabric began to split. He inserted the tip of the knife into the tiny slit he’d created and ran the blade along the grain, tearing a long hole down the side of the pocket. Just as he’d hoped, there was something inside. All he had to do now was pull it out. He hesitated for the briefest of moments and slowly slipped his fingers in.

  He felt something hard and rough. It felt exactly like the wiry fur of a monkey’s tail that he had touched once long ago. When he saw what he pulled out, he fell back. It was a rat, long dead and as hard as a fossil. The suitcase pocket that he’d thought might harbor a secret had already been ransacked, and the rat that had mistakenly crawled in had been trapped there by someone, and left to stiffen like plaster.

  The park was as silent as a dead mouse. So quiet that he could hear the other vagrants’ exhalations. But the stillness was mixed with a rustling and a quiet stirring. He listened closer. Someone was struggling to inhale through congested sinuses and exhale through a clogged windpipe. It was clearly more labored than anyone else’s breathing. As he turned his head left and right, trying to catch where the sound was coming from, someone tapped him on the shoulder. He had been so engrossed in the strange breathing that he’d failed to notice the sound of footsteps drawing near. He turned to look, thinking as he did so that if there was one thing more frightening then infectious disease, it was an unexpected visit, like this one. There was nothing to be done about disease other than wait for death, but surprise visitors rarely brought anything good. He couldn’t accept the thought of possibly losing his bench. All that work just to find somewhere he could stretch out and rest, and now to have it taken from him, this splintery old wooden bench that he would guard as fiercely as if it were a home he had lived in his whole life, no, he would fight for it, would bleed and break bones for it, and probably, in the end, lose it.

  Chin quivering, he turned, barely able to meet the eyes of the man standing behind him. The man’s face was hidden behind a scraggly beard, and his hair had grown down to his shoulders and was matted like straw. His clothes gave off an odd smell, mixed with the stench of urine. They were dirtied and stained from being soaked with rain and drying, then soaked with sweat and drying, over and over. Steam rose from the other man’s body like a heat shimmer. Judging from the acrid smell, the man had pissed his pants, either moments before or while walking over to him.

  Number Eight had come to the park after him. That was back when the man was able to find a bench without having to fight for it. Eight had arrived dressed in a dark suit and white button-down shirt. He had stood for a long time, gazing up at the sky and around at the park, hazy as usual with disinfectant, before taking his messenger bag off of his shoulder, removing a book from it, and sitting down on the eighth bench to read. At first, he looked like he was only there to pass the time before his next appointment, but when night fell, h
e lay down in the same spot and fell asleep, and the next morning he awoke early and resumed reading. The man assumed Eight was the victim of an untimely “honorary retirement” and had left his house that morning as if going to work as usual only to find himself with nowhere to go. Eight remained in the park as his white shirt turned less and less white and his beard grew with abandon and slowly hid his face. The vagrants in the park rarely poked their noses into each other’s business, but someone finally let his curiosity get the better of him—probably Three or Six, who were prone to chattiness—and asked how he had ended up there. Eight hesitated and then said he’d been kicked out of his company. When the other person pried a little more, he admitted that he had been fired because his employers thought he was infected. At that, his inquisitor jumped back in alarm.

  “I’m still alive,” Eight said with a laugh. “That’s proof enough that I’m not infected.”

  But no one went near him again after that.

  While the others were busy digging through the trash for food that was hardly better than trash, cramming their mouths no matter how rotten the food was just to ensure it wasn’t stolen from them first, Eight sat calmly and sipped only enough water to keep his throat from drying out and closing up, as if to prove to them all that he was not sick. Of course, as the days passed, Eight gradually spent less time reading his book and more time rummaging through garbage, but even then he moved slowly, picking through items deliberately like he was shopping in a supermarket, as if only interested in finding whatever was absolutely necessary, rather than lunging at others like a starving ghost to keep their hands off of his things. He was able to take his time like this, because no one else would go near him.