Run Me to Earth

by Paul Yoon

  I was there when he showed up. Auntie didn’t push me away or tell me to shut my eyes, and for that I am always grateful to her. We dug a small grave behind the hut I was staying in. We only had one trowel, so we took turns and then we used our hands. We stayed very close together, kneeling and knowing what was inside as she untied the blanket one knot at a time. She looked down, but I didn’t, I was looking at her. I was looking at her crying. I had never seen her cry. It was the only time. She was so still, but her eyes trembled. Shook. It was like the world had entered her eyes and she didn’t know how to contain it. To hold it. We had a bucket of water and some soap, and as she cried, she washed her hands. She made me wash my hands. And then she cleaned Prany as best as she could, wiping the dirt around his eyes, washing his hair. And then we wrapped him in a new cloth and buried him. We never knew what happened to Vang’s body…

  I remember trying to say something to Auntie that day. To have the courage to say something, anything. That I was sorry. That I knew it was Prany who was supposed to come across and not me. That I wanted her forgiveness. That it should have been him here, beside her. But I said nothing that day. Nothing at all. Auntie told me to go dump the water, and I did. And when I came back she was gone, back down to help someone else, and I went to the class I was supposed to be in and learned some more math, ignoring the chemical smell on my hands… I’m curious, have you ever used powdered soap?… ]

  * * *

  In the morning, Khit returned up the hill. Marta was already outside, wearing an apron and a bandanna over her head. She had brought out a can of paint and was repainting the old bench. She wiped her brow with the back of her wrist as Khit approached.

  A wind came and the tree above them swayed loudly. Below them, down the slope, a group of hikers was at the head of the trail that would lead them around the town of Vernet-les-Bains and up the mountain.

  “Sa Tuna,” Marta said.

  “What?”

  “Where Alisak might be.”

  Marta reached inside the apron pocket and gave Khit a faded envelope. On it was written the address of a coastal town in Catalonia, only ninety minutes south. Then she told Khit it was the last known address she had for him. A room in a guesthouse in the Costa Brava. The Wild Coast, she called it. She didn’t know if he had always been there or if he ended up there after other places. She didn’t know if he was still there. But years after he had left, he sent her that photograph Marta had shown her yesterday. She thought Alisak must have heard Yves had died. It was his way of acknowledging it.

  In Spain!

  After all that time, he was only ninety minutes away. She pinned the envelope to the kitchen wall and looked at it every day. Every day, she imagined what his days were like there, living in a guesthouse. What he was doing for work. Whether he went swimming. Whether he had any friends or had met someone. And whether he had found the life he had gone searching for. Every day, she woke up thinking today would be the day she would step out and go visit him.

  But the truth, she said, was that she wasn’t sure he wanted her to come. And then, as the days went on, she grew convinced he didn’t. There was so much to do, to decide what to do, here. She was alone. She didn’t want that to be an excuse, she said, but Yves had always been here. Now there was just her. One week folded into another. Then the months. He slipped away. Alisak. The thought of him did.

  “Let’s go together,” Khit said.

  Marta leaned down, dipped the brush into the open can, and kept painting the bench. “Do you think it is still there? The farmhouse in the Plain of Jars.”

  “Yes,” Khit said. “I think it is. I think someone else lives there and it is something else.”

  She watched as the new green coat began to spread along the back.

  “One house,” Marta said. “One place. All that it holds over time. All the changes. Do you think this one will be here long after we’re gone? After I’m gone?”

  She didn’t wait for Khit to answer. She stood up again, facing Khit, and told her that she could use the bike if she wanted. That the keys were inside the shed.

  “I’ll expect you back, of course,” Marta said.

  “I’ll come back.”

  “We’ll have dinner together tonight. I’ll cook. We’ll sit down without your damn tape recorder and we’ll eat and we’ll talk some more. What do you think of that? And then you’ll go home to your family and you’ll tell your boy that you stole that thing from him.”

  “I will.”

  “We’ll be friends.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll visit again. With Philip. With Karawek. You’ll come back.”

  “I’ll come back.”

  “Good,” Marta said, and returned to the bench.

  The hikers had begun to climb. They were on a slope above the house. Khit went down to get the bike. The wind came again, stronger, and the dog barked. Before entering the shed, she turned to look at Marta one more time: she was kneeling on the ridge, now in the distance, barely visible under the swaying tree.

  Khit left that same morning, driving south and crossing the border into Spain.

  Not long after, as she made her way down the coast, she came upon ancient hill towns overlooking the water. In one, on a high bluff, there was a medieval castle. A dark wall that crawled over the cliffs. Someone was in a tower. Then she realized it was a stone head of some kind of animal, perhaps from a myth, perhaps a horse, forever confronting the water and the horizon.

  She thought of her centaur. What the roads were like four centuries ago. Old animals carrying supplies and wares across the hills. Stucco houses that had now become, some of them, hotels with balconies facing the bays.

  Khit was arriving one month before the start of the tourist season. It was colder here, and the hill town Marta had directed her to was empty. She twice drove through its maze of unmarked, sloping roads until she found a way to access the guesthouse. It stood near a bay and a rocky beach.

  She didn’t think the guesthouse was open—the sign was off, but the door was unlocked, so she walked in to find a narrow lobby and a chipped desk at the far end. Somewhere there was a television on with the news, and in the air was the smell of ashtrays and bread baking.

  The man who came out had half his shirt unbuttoned and was picking his teeth with a toothpick. He greeted her in English. She passed him the address Marta had given her. Chewing on his toothpick, he glanced at it and told her that Alisak didn’t live here anymore.

  Before Khit could say anything back, could ask this man a question, the man pointed out the window behind her, up the slope, and said, “He lives there.”

  And then he asked if she was a relative, and Khit shook her head, not yet certain if she imagined what he had just told her.

  “Are you having problems with your bike?” the man said, picking his teeth again.

  Khit didn’t understand until she was standing at the other address near the top of the hill. She had passed it on the drive down. It was a shop where tourists could rent bicycles and mopeds to go sightseeing around the Costa Brava. The shop wouldn’t open for another hour. She peered through a front window, but the lights were off, and there was no one inside. She spotted only a monthly calendar on the wall with handwriting under each date.

  One hour. It was forever. She headed back down. This time, Khit skirted the guesthouse and her parked motorbike, and she didn’t stop until she was on the rocky beach, close to the water. Behind her, an old man wearing sneakers was taking a stroll on the boardwalk with a newspaper curled up under his arm. Pretending not to be curious about her, he paused to study the menus of the restaurants not yet open for lunch. Otherwise, Khit was alone.

  She waited for the sun to come back again. She stared down at her own shoes as if for the first time, realizing the soles had worn away, probably a year ago. Slipping them off, Khit placed them side by side on the rocks, then changed her mind and dropped one haphazardly to make sure they were far apart from each other.

 
Then, without turning to see if anyone was watching, she stripped down to her underwear and waded into the bay. Her breath was taken out of her from the cold shock of water, but she kept wading farther in, following a line of yellow buoys until the water rose up to her chin and she could no longer feel the bottom. Shutting her eyes, Khit inhaled, dove under. She surfaced and pushed forward. She swam for as long as her body could stand it, and then swam back.

  Someone was standing by her pile of clothes. She thought it must be the old man, but as she hurried out, she saw it was a child, a girl around ten or eleven. The girl was holding a towel over her arm like a waiter and was carrying a cup of espresso. “You’re a crazy lady,” the girl said, in English, and handed over the towel first, which Khit wrapped around her body, and then gave her the coffee.

  The guesthouse manager was on the boardwalk, the toothpick still in his mouth, shaking his head and watching Khit shiver uncontrollably as she followed the girl up the beach, her feet unused to the hard stones that were like knives on her soles. As they passed him, the girl said something in Catalan, then called him “Papa,” and brought Khit inside to the bathroom of one of the restaurants that were not yet open. It was then that she introduced herself as Isabel and handed Khit her clothes under the stall, one piece at a time.

  When they came back, a table facing the bay had been set up for them: more coffee and a plate full of fruit and pastries. The girl named Isabel sat on one end, Khit on the other, and while the father helped a waiter set the other tables, she began to eat, luxuriating in the food and the hot drink, her body warming but her skin cold and coated in the salt of the bay. Out the window, a boat appeared and vanished behind a headland.

  “You’re here to visit Alisak?” Isabel said.

  Taking a bite of a pastry, she told Khit he used to work at a nearby canning factory. That her uncle worked there, too, and that was how they met, her uncle driving him into town one evening, Alisak asking for a room, speaking to them in French.

  “Uncle died,” Isabel said. “He had… how you say… a scar… on his neck. Like yours. You like fish?” She pinched her nose and said the two of them always stank of it. Then she rested her head on her hand and looked out the window to where the old man with the newspaper was high above them on a cliff.

  She went on: “It connects all the towns. The path, up and down. Alisak. He likes taking walks, too. In the afternoons. He always turns. When I call to him as he is walking up. I shout his name, and he always turns and slows. Right there.”

  The silhouette of the old man looked like a bird about to take off. Then he was gone, around the bend. Khit waited for her to say more, but she didn’t; she pulled out a deck of cards and taught Khit a game. They played. They focused on the game until Khit brought out the tape recorder and asked Isabel to say hello to her son. Which Isabel did many times, singing a pop song in English and saying a few words in Catalan and Spanish, phrases Khit didn’t understand, but ones that made the girl laugh, head back and mouth open, bits of the pastry stuck in between a gap in her front teeth.

  When it was time, Khit began to walk back up the hill. The guesthouse manager shouted from the street below, “Tell him to come down for lunch,” and waved with his chewed-up toothpick. It wasn’t until she was almost to the shop that she realized she had been walking barefoot. She caught the faint winding trail of her own damp footsteps, and she paused to scan the coast, the hint of that castle to the north, suddenly understanding that it wasn’t the water that was wild, but the coast itself—this unpredictable line of jagged rocks and bluffs as though its other half had broken off and floated away centuries ago.

  The Wild Coast.

  The shop was open. Connected to the office was a garage with its door lifted up, the space filled with bicycles and mopeds standing in rows. In the back, there was a service station where a man in his forties was on his knees, filling bicycle tires with air. He had yet to notice her, and she didn’t go in just yet. She stood outside near the entrance, lifted a hand for shade, and watched him. His quietness and the few lines of gray in his hair. The glasses he was wearing that were connected to a lanyard around his neck and the handkerchief in his back pocket.

  Taped to the wall above him was an old postcard of a young woman by a river.

  In Khit’s own pocket was a small seventeen-year-old piece of paper that no one knew about anymore. It had been taken from a doctor’s coat before that coat had been taken from her, and it had a circle drawn on one side. The paper was so crumpled and worn that it was barely there, but she had saved it this whole time and brought it with her, tucking it into her passport. She was clutching it now like a charm, like it was the only thing she had ever owned, as she listened to the garage radio and the faint hiss of the air pump. The drips of water from her hair as they hit the concrete.

  All around her was the daylight and the smell of the ancient ocean. She felt the salt on her skin, the pebbles stuck to the soles of her feet, and tried to imagine the distance from here to all the places she had left behind. Then to wherever she was going. Which one was farther. In this moment, she had no sense of the future. What the days ahead might hold, what happened next. What this man would do when she began to speak. And what, she hoped, they would learn about each other. It was as though a hand had appeared inside her chest, gripping her heart.

  She thought of her son. Always her son.

  And then a shadow flitted past. The radio went to static. And Khit, taking a step, reached up to ring the bell Alisak had hung on a wooden hook by the door.

  SA TUNA, SPAIN (2018)

  He sees today, to his own surprise, like sudden weather, that old hill of his childhood. The deep map of it. A certain path where they—himself, Prany, and Noi—slid down during one rainy season, frightening the animals. All those walls they knocked on in whatever code (what were those codes?) they made up. Or the painted tent where a man used to sell shoelaces and matchbooks, and the hilltop where they built their first-ever successful fire one late night, beyond pleased with themselves.

  He turns. From the shop, Alisak has heard a sound. A moment later, a ball appears within the frame of the open garage entrance, bouncing across until it hits the loose gutter of a neighbor’s house and stops. He takes off his glasses, expecting someone to come chasing after it. But no one does. There is no other sound, only the morning.

  It is as though the world is holding its breath.

  So Alisak, sixty-six years old, stands and leaves the garage, passing the rows of bicycles and mopeds, and heads across the street. He looks up in the direction of where the ball came, already self-conscious about the necktie he has been wearing since he had come down to the shop. Then he looks in the other direction.

  The street is empty. The distant water flat and calm, only a slow wind. He is standing in front of the homes of neighbors he has now known for decades, each of their doors a different color—blue, orange, yellow—all matching the color of the window shutters. He is aware that it takes ten steps to approach the blue door from his own. That he has never seen Josefa, who lives alone, without her apron that is so frayed it is hardly an apron at all. And that Josefa is the age Alisak’s own mother would have been.

  The rain gutter creaks as he picks up the ball, which is cold and a little larger than his fist, a child’s soccer ball. He tosses it up once as the dark arc of a cat hops down a windowsill farther up the ridge.

  “Gato,” he calls to it. “I suppose this isn’t yours?”

  The cat vanishes into an alley, and Alisak brings the ball back inside, where he places it on the table beside a gift-wrapped box and his notebook. The pages of the notebook are mostly filled with how the shop has done every season. The names of the customers who visit this town yearly and some detail about them: what kind of bike they liked, an anniversary they were celebrating, a birthmark on a wrist.

  He tears off a piece of paper from the back and writes, in Spanish, a quick reminder to himself to ask around later if anyone is looking for a soccer ball. I
sabel, whose birthday is today, will tease him for this when she arrives at her father’s place for a party. Tease him because Alisak still prefers the pencil and paper to his phone. News on an old-fashioned radio. He tells her it is the texture of paper, that it feels more permanent to him, but what he really wants to say, and has never said to her, is that for the first seventeen years of his life there were so few times he was given a chance to write anything. He hardly knew what writing was.

  His phone beeps. He ignores it. Whenever it makes a noise—whenever, in fact, he writes—he is reminded of Vang, who in another life would have taught Isabel how to play the piano. Would have somehow found a piano for her somewhere in this town, commandeered it, and made sure she practiced. Loose wrists, no tension.

  Isabel, who is thirty-five this year, has been living in Barcelona and working behind the desk at a fashionable hotel near Las Ramblas. He has never been to visit her, and he doesn’t know if she ever resents this. Oncle, she has affectionately called him since she was a teenager, using her first language.

  He has, over the years, become her ally. And although she has never said as much, he knows he is one of the last remaining links to her real uncle, whom she adored and whom Alisak used to work with at the cannery. The split-second kindness of a man who slowed his car as Alisak was walking down the road after his shift. Two days in, and Alisak had yet to speak to anyone other than the floor manager. And then this man who had worked beside him anonymously, both of them wearing goggles and masks, and pushing racks of sardine tins to the oven, had rolled down his window in that growing dark and asked if Alisak had a place to stay yet. Never once asking where he had been or where he was from.