City of Ash and Red

by Hye-young Pyun

  The sewer was dirtier than any other place he had ever been. The concrete walls and floor. The tangle of pipes overhead. The pillars. The metal ladders leading up to the ground. Everything was filthy. The air they breathed was filthy, and the breaths they exhaled were filthy, and most of all, they were filthy. Like vermin marking territory, some made living spaces for themselves out of discarded items they had found. Though it was dark and the ceiling too low for comfort, they managed something resembling bedrooms. They laid down mattresses scavenged from garbage dumps, dragged in discarded wardrobes and filled them with clothes they’d found in the trash. They placed large, warped washbasins wherever the rain leaked in and used the water to bathe, and they combed their hair while gazing into shards of broken mirrors fitted into the gaps between the pipes.

  Meanwhile the man witnessed the others belching and pissing and shitting wherever they pleased. Most urinated into the black water or defecated next to where they sat. Some even went so far as to relieve themselves right where they lay, and simply rolled over to avoid the steaming puddle. He heard men masturbating, day or night, not caring at all that others watched. In fact, they were so blatant about watching that they even made fun of each other by timing how long it took them to climax. Fights broke out, but never lasted long since they all knew the tables could turn at any moment and the teaser would become the teased.

  The old man sometimes muttered comments to him under his breath, but he seemed less to be hoping for a response than assuming he would not get one. At least, the man figured as much from the simple, pointless things he talked about: “That old guy, him, over there, the old guy with the red blanket, he’s been here eight years, give or take, but I’ve never—look at that rotten bread he’s got! It’s blue with mold!—never once seen him get diarrhea, not even after he eats bread like that.”

  Though he knew the man never spoke, the old man asked him one day, “What should I call you? I might need a name for you at some point.”

  He stared back at the old man, as if incapable of speech. The old man’s voice took on a nagging tone.

  “I need to know your name if I’m going to share any of my food with you. What if I have a piece of bread I want to give you? How am I supposed to do that if I can’t even call you over by name? Come on already, tell me your name. What’re you, mute or something?”

  At last the man spoke: “Please call me whatever you like.”

  “Figures, soon as I mention food, you speak up. Sorry, but I don’t have any bread. I see you’re not from here. Your accent gives you away. Now I understand why you weren’t talking. A lot of people hate foreigners for no reason. Rumor has it the virus was brought here by foreigners. Anything bad always gets blamed on others. You sick?”

  He shook his head.

  “Of course you are. Who wouldn’t be after floating down the sewer like that? Diarrhea is a sickness too, and I’ve seen with my own eyes that you’ve had the runs since you got here. Not that I care. You can’t help but get sick down here. But anyway, what would you like me to call you? I can never remember foreign names, so it’d be better if you pick something common. Those are easy to remember.”

  He considered telling the old man his real name, which had long since lost all meaning, but he abandoned the idea. It would be too difficult for the old man to pronounce anyway.

  “Hey, how about the name Mol?” the old man asked. “It’s stitched on your shirt. Well, okay, I’m wearing it now, so you could also call me Mol, if you like. I change my name all the time. Do you like that name? I like it. Common names are useful.”

  The man nodded. As a matter of fact, he did like the name. Mol was the name he had to find, and it was the only name he knew in that country.

  The old man gave him a name and tolerated his presence because he mistook himself as having something worth taking. He seemed to think the man would help if looters came along. Whenever he heard footsteps, the old man would look around wildly until the steps had faded, and when he slept, he used the knapsack that held all of his belongings as a pillow. While up on the surface, he never set his bag down for even a second. And yet for all of that fear, the old man’s knapsack held nothing more than a picnic mat, a blanket that reeked of piss, a filthy toothbrush that looked like it had been used to polish boots, and a dented camping pot that he used as a bowl.

  The old man gingerly pushed himself up, tiptoed to the end of the sheet of plywood he had placed on the ground to mitigate the chill, and urinated into the water. Then he sat back down again, took some food that had clearly come from the garbage out of a plastic bag he kept stashed at his side, and in defiance of his own sluggish movements just a moment before, began to wolf it down. The food was gone in a flash, but the man had grown used to seeing people eat this way. Naturally the old man shared none of it with him. It would have been no different if they were good friends who shared heart-to-heart conversations. Likewise, he had no intention of begging for food from the old man. What the old man had really meant was that if the other man came across anything to eat, he had to be the one to share it. But when it came to scavenging through trash, age or fitness made no difference: the old man’s chances of procuring food were much higher.

  Besides, watching the way the old man ate made it difficult to even breathe the same air. The old man ate all of his food from the camping pot, which he kept with him always, then dipped the pot in the sewer to clean it. The sewer with its tarry black, nauseatingly foul-smelling water. The water was so acidic that not even bacteria could live in it.

  One day, in the middle of eating, the old man let out a stifled scream and hurled the pot at him. He knew the old man wasn’t aiming at him on purpose. He was cold but not ill-tempered. The pot bounced off of the man’s chest and fell to the ground. A chunk of cold rice rolled out. The fallen food glimmered whitely against the dirty ground. The man felt drawn to that strange white light and was debating whether to pick it up and eat it—after all, the old man had basically thrown it away, and he was the one who got hit by it—but before he could decide, the overturned pot rattled and started to move. Something wriggled out from under it. A rat. He quickly grabbed the pot and brought the back of it down on the rat before it could scramble away. The rat tried again to escape. He tightened his grip and pressed down hard. He was damned if he was going to lose his food to a rat. The sensation of something bursting traveled up through his arm. The ground he stood on felt suddenly hollow. All at once he remembered the decision he had once made never to kill another rat. Back then, he had told himself that he would sooner be a rat than kill another.

  “You’re fast, kid,” the old man said, sounding genuinely impressed, as he snatched up the food he had thrown.

  It was unexpected, coming from someone who had surely resorted to eating things worse than rats to survive. But the man soon learned that, despite their tolerance of dirt, none of the sewer people, including the old man, could tolerate rats. No one yet knew the source of the virus, and rumors were rife that rats were carriers.

  He picked up the camping pot smeared with the rat’s burst entrails, blood, and brain matter, and tossed it over to the old man, who dipped it in the tarry black sewer water as usual to clean it. He didn’t put his hand in the water but simply held the pot against the current (though it was dubious whether that water was actually moving) until it had cleaned itself. It took several tries of dipping the pot and holding it up to check whether the smears of blood and chunks of intestines and gray fur had washed off, but once it was clean, the old man gave it a quick wipe against the shirt he was wearing and refilled it with food.

  After that, the man passed the time by killing rats—first, at the old man’s request whenever one came sniffing around, and later voluntarily, whenever one caught his eye. It was boring to have to sit or lie around all the time waiting for his leg to heal. Since he had to eat, he took brief trips up to the surface during the day to rummage through the trash, but his leg dragged and made it difficult to find enough to sustain hims
elf. He gradually spent less and less time aboveground. He ate as little as possible and urinated into the sewer like the other men. At that rate, it would not be long before he willingly participated in that which he had not yet once brought himself to do, in that which was the absolute inverse of all of his long-cherished beliefs regarding personal hygiene and the maintaining of cleanliness, which he believed were absolutely mandatory if you were to call yourself a human being, in other words, in the laying bare of his most private acts of excretion.

  Being prone to frequent earthquakes, Country C distributed information to its citizens on what to do in the event of one via television and printed notices. These information alerts listed camping toilets as one of the very first things that had to be secured following a major earthquake. While it would only take a couple of days to get food and water to people, even with the roads damaged and unusable, the task of finding a place to relieve their other physiological needs fell to each individual. For those who did not own camping toilets, they were advised to use manholes instead. That is, they were asked to urinate and defecate into the city’s manholes, right into the place where the man now resided.

  While sitting still, waiting for a rat to appear, staring down a dark and narrow passage where a rat was sure to come along eventually, he felt that he himself was one big, oversized, useless rat. And yet his reason for crouching there, ready to pounce, was that only when he caught a rat did he feel he was not totally worthless, not trash, not a rodent of a man.

  The first step to killing rats was to figure out where they traveled. That was easier than he thought. Rats stuck to the same paths, so you only had to watch and wait. Once a rat’s path to its scavenging ground was set, it did not vary or swerve from that course. When you saw a rat more than once on the same path, it was likely that it was the same rat. As a rule, they did not stray farther than twenty yards from their nests.

  Sometimes he caught a rat, but usually he failed. Rats came and went whenever they pleased, with no regard for the man crouching as still as a stone near the places they were sure to appear. When he did manage to kill one of the rats glancing around warily at its surroundings, he was filled with an unfamiliar surge of pleasure. He would stare long and hard at the bright red innards bursting out of the filthy gray hide, like an overripe pomegranate split and spread open to the sun, and then watch as others walked past, treading on the little corpse until it was just a smeared clot of blood and fur.

  The rats meant he no longer got caught up in the petty arguments that broke out all the time in the sewer. No one picked a fight with him as he hunched in corners all day waiting for rodents to appear. They seemed to think that rats weren’t the only thing he was capable of killing, having witnessed him grabbing whatever was at hand and smashing it down on top of a rat, or catching and killing one with his bare hands when nothing else was available. But he didn’t care what they thought. He was happy to be free of other people’s pointless meddling.

  He left the dead rats aboveground in a pile at the base of one of the bridges. There was nowhere else to discard them. They were dead anyway, and it didn’t matter what he did with them. He could have left them right where he killed them. But what he wanted was to get them as far away from himself as possible. The things he had to discard were not dead, dried-up flowers, or scraps of paper covered in cute doodles, or tissues used to blow his nose, they were rats with dangling entrails.

  On occasion, he left the dead rats down in the sewer instead of taking them aboveground. The others didn’t seem to care. They might pull a face when they noticed, but that was all. Human bodies floated past sometimes (even the old man had mistaken him for a corpse when he fished him out), and they would pull them in, look for anything they could take, and strip them of their clothes. They all knew that the dead were merely dirty, unsanitary breeding grounds for bacteria; what caused real harm were the living. And so they were lenient when it came to leaving dead things lying around. Regardless of what it was, even a disemboweled rat, the dead caused no harm.

  Everything was the same as before. The streets were still filled with trash. Burst garbage bags with their contents exposed left dirty smears and smells on the asphalt. The roads were tangled and noisy with cars, and few pedestrians were in sight.

  And yet something felt off. He soon discovered the source. As he stood lost in thought in the middle of the trash-strewn pavement, he was nudged out of the way by the sound of a garbage truck blaring its horn at him. Two men in protective suits jumped down and tossed the long-neglected garbage into the truck’s gaping mouth. He wondered if this meant the garbage collectors had won their strike. Dozens of trucks were taking the trash away to be burned or buried. The roar and clatter of the giant vehicles was the sound of torn seams being sutured, of gaping cracks being filled.

  Some shops were still shuttered, of course, but most were open for business. And though there weren’t many shoppers, aside from the peculiarities of piled-up trash, pedestrians in hazmat suits, and black swarms of flies, he could have been standing on any other lively shopping street in any other city. Unchanging displays of products for sale filled the windows, and shop owners leisurely glanced out at the street until the occasional customer came by and could be ceremoniously ushered in.

  The man figured the lack of people out and about was because they were all at work or school, in the places where daily life was maintained. He realized this after seeing a swarm of men in suits pour out the front entrance of a building just as he passed by. The men tiptoed carefully around the trash in the street as they went into nearby restaurants or looked at their watches and rushed off to appointments. It was noon, lunchtime for office workers. They had reported to work in the morning, socialized with their coworkers, taken care of the morning’s business, chatted about what they wanted for lunch, and then left the building to eat, just as they did every day. Judging from the blithe way they carried themselves, he could tell that they had done this not only that very day but also the day before, and the day before that, and the days that he had spent killing rats in the tunnels below the city while waiting for his leg to heal, the day he was thrown into the sewer by vagrants, the day he leapt into garbage, and all of the days he’d spent quarantined in his apartment while the virus killed people and the number of the infected exploded.

  Despite the high rate of infection, the increasingly high death rate, and the continuing lack of a vaccine, everyday life itself remained immune. People kept reporting to work and going to school and selling products. They may have been living in an age of contagion, but there were still clients to be met to ensure the continuation of business. There were things to learn and schools to get accepted to, and other schools and after-school classes that had to be attended in order for that to happen. There were products that had to be exported, and imports that had to be sold at a reasonable markup. As the infected increased exponentially, some schools were closed, but the students, who had not a second of study time to waste, crowded into private after-school classes, causing the number of infected to increase all the more. Thousands of parents descended upon college fairs, and so many young job seekers showed up at a job fair held by a major corporation, against the advice of the authorities, that they ran out of applications. Some places of business experienced mass contagion and were ordered to shut down, but since following government orders would put them at risk of bankruptcy, they fired the sick employees instead and disinfected the office equipment with powerful chemicals.

  Chances of infection were high, and the ranks of the dead continued to swell, but no one knew whether they would fall ill or not, nor whether if they did fall ill they would die or not. While the truth of the virus remained clouded, everyday life revealed its own true form: in fissures that opened and cracks that widened the moment it was neglected. Everyday life was like a newborn baby still too weak to lift its own head. It may look peaceful, sleeping there on its stomach, but the threat of sudden, unexpected death looms. You leave the baby resting there, and t
he next thing you know its neck has snapped, or it has rolled off the bed and injured itself, or buried its face in the blanket and suffocated. And yet you cannot watch over it every second.

  Of course, the epidemic did bring changes to some of the more minute corners of daily life. People went to great lengths to avoid setting any dates or appointments, and when they were unavoidably forced to meet, they did not shake hands or exchange business cards. Meetings were conducted from behind surgical masks, and condolences were offered along with their first how-do-you-dos. All was forgivable. They did not touch other people’s belongings, and when obliged to use public facilities, they wore disposable plastic gloves. They refrained from using public transportation, as they dared not touch the handles and straps in the buses and subway trains, which might have been touched by the infected. Stair railings and elevator buttons were avoided. People kept their dust masks on, and when they went to a place where many people would be gathered, they took out their hazmat suits and put them on, just as they would a business suit. They avoided the trash-strewn streets and did not disturb the trash piled in front of their homes. The biggest impact the epidemic had on people was not infection and death but rather suspicion of others for fear of exactly that. Every person except for themselves was a potential pathogen, and every place outside of their own homes was dirty beyond belief and had viruses floating in the air.

  Official announcements that the epidemic had become a pandemic were posted all over the city. Public loudspeakers blared out entreaties at regular intervals like the chimes of a clock, urging citizens not to take any chances with their personal hygiene as the authorities were likewise beefing up preventative measures to fight the disease.