Tales of Two Americas

by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)

  He had no idea what he’d been. He’d certainly accumulated a great deal of money. Which was gone. Arthur was subsisting on the generosity of some do-gooder encampment in a beetle-compromised wood. His benefactors were a faintly perceived lot, last of a breed really, at odds with the more generally accepted belief that compassion was nothing more than self-cannibalization. The more an individual doesn’t care the freer he becomes. This was the current thinking.

  When he’d first arrived he’d had the companionship of rats, like Paul in prison, but the rats, never a playful lot, had long abandoned him. For a while there were the occasional mice, white ones trying to clamber out of the toilet, but they too vanished after the nearby research facility tightened up their disposal practices.

  His small cabin was comfortable enough though it seemed to be shrinking, the walls creaking closer, the glass of the single window moaning in its frame, which was riddled by the tireless efforts of those beetles. And the rain, pounding upon the roof, was relentless. He remembered when rain fell so prettily and the smell without exaggeration was divine. But that was a while ago—fourteen months ago—goodness, the Governor was still in the bin. Fourteen months ago rain had changed its nature.

  He mused on the number fourteen. Some philosopher—the name failed to present itself—maintained that it was impossible for fourteen minutes to pass. Something about it corresponding to infinity. This philosopher was greatly influenced by an earlier philosopher whom he had misunderstood completely, which is how all great discoveries are made, through misunderstanding.

  A bovid plastic duck with a nasty expression floated in the bathtub. It was one of the Governor’s effects that Arthur sometimes fancied. He tended to avoid taking baths in the daytime, not only because he considered it bad form but because it was then that the grout between the tiles looked unequivocally filthy. Still, he was spending long hours in the tub lately, thinking about this and that, sipping from a bottle of Hirsch Selection rye, reflecting on the fabled concept of a continually stocked honor bar, the rows of shining bottles that trusted you would do the right thing. He’d come across only two of these marvels in his life and he had advantaged himself of them shamelessly both times.

  He placed a fetid washcloth over his head.

  Arthur used to think that we all feel so strange and nothing is right because there are more people alive today than all the people who ever lived but then he learned that those who are alive today comprise less than 6 percent of all the people who ever lived. Or something like that. Which is an even better explanation as to why we all feel so strange and nothing is right.

  When he had arrived trolleying the last of the Governor’s footlockers it had harbored a full case of rye and though he thought he’d been provident, only one bottle remained. He promised himself that he would put off its retrieval as long as possible. For one reason it was the last and for another it was wedged between a bag of filthy pink candy imprinted with an unflattering image of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (worth something to someone, he was sure) and Darling Bea’s immense hand-tooled leather collar with the coral inlays. Arthur felt fortunate that he’d never made the acquaintance of old Bea. He was sure he would have been judged unfavorably as her master’s ancillary, maybe even devoured. He could visualize with unsettling vividity Bea in some freezing Franciscan kennel, mangy and enraged, eyes green as peridot, plotting night and day her return. He saw ice in her water bowl, on her muzzle, between the pads of her gigantic paws, ICE, the very subject of a massive book which was the only other occupant of that wretched trunk, Hans Horbiger’s 1913 Glazial-Kosmogonie. Another total nutcase, Horbiger had written a pseudoscience classic—lengthy, ponderous in style, and utterly without value—in which he argued that the most important material in the universe was ice. It was the cosmic answer. Arthur could understand the Governor’s interest in this theory for it suggested the irrelevance of Florida. Thus all the disastrous decisions the Governor thought he’d made on that unfortunate state’s behalf had been irrelevant as well.

  The rye was gone, the bottle empty. He had deceived himself in believing there was another, for holding his breath, closing his eyes, he had reached into the depths of that trunk several days ago, braving the touch of Bea’s frightfully disorienting and cold collar, and removed it. This had been that. Nothing more to take there was.

  In the asylum one of the Governor’s fellow travelers had remarked that all he wanted from life was a competent portion.

  A competent portion.

  Marvelous! I’m going to remember that! Arthur had exclaimed.

  Sweet old guy in a shiny soiled seersucker suit, always talking about eating companions. Arthur thought he’d meant an eating club, recalling the black tie dinners and dances at glorious Harvard where he claimed to have matriculated, until he was informed by the Governor that “eating companions” were well-known etheric world entities that invisibly attach themselves to one’s body and suck from it all vital force, and the pitiable wasting fellow in seersucker had them in spades.

  Arthur became aware that the plastic duck was listing near his groin. There was something wrong with it, it wasn’t balanced properly. Just kept circling his groin as though it were a drain. He swatted it away.

  He felt old. He was old. The last fourteen months had aged everything excessively. It had something to do with the rain, the rabid rain. Or was it the birdless dawns? He no longer had communion with the Governor. His dreams weren’t even the Governor’s anymore. Truck-sized butterflies, radiant women, sustained applause—repetitive but pleasant. He missed them.

  The Governor didn’t want to be in here, of that he was certain. But he didn’t want to be out there either. There was where people who couldn’t imagine the earth without them plundered on, unconcerned as to the probationary nature of their exertions. And even with the apocalyptically hammering rain that would drive anyone off the rails, there were billions and billions of them.

  Gee, he was tired.

  He thought sentimentally of his grandmother and sniffled a little. She used to say that a robin singing close to a window meant sorrow was on the way. She was Welsh and gloomy as they come. But his mother had been part of the Blessed Assurance crowd, the visualizing the world without you crowd. I left and the birds stayed singing. Down in the lovely valley, down by the glittering brook. It was supposed to put a joyful steel in your spine. I left and the birds stayed singing, his mother would say, her mouth trembling. And now it was his turn. But the birds no longer sang, there were no birds.

  Arthur gripped the slippery curved sides of the tub and began the process of hauling himself out. The image of a pale, struggling, and determined mouse came easily to mind.

  He carefully patted himself dry and put on a silk bathrobe of excellent quality from the Governor’s extravagant years.

  The rain screeched. He had seen one of the do-gooders try to catch it in a bucket and it had thickened like an eel and snaked away.

  He shivered.

  He was ready, but he was a little hungry. Just one more thing. One little bit of something. He went into the tiny kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There should be one more serving of integrity-raised beef in there. There were many who didn’t care about the integrity of their food overmuch but he was not one of them. He thought the Governor would approve even though the man had limited himself to rice balls and water in the weeks before the piano incident. But there was no last portion of integrity-raised beef in the refrigerator, no calf raised to prime by loving kindergartners, petted a hundred times a day by tiny hands, fed flowers and clover, surrendered in the final moments by the most loyal and trusted and affectionate of caregivers, the ones who had named it and taught it to know that name as its own. No Tunnel of Death, no blood-slick and reeking duckboards. No inept stickers or angry leggers, no prodders or stunners. No knocking gun going kachunk kachunk kachunk. Just a last embrace in a lush and sunny field, the little children’s piping v
oices. Not a whiff or inkling in the air for it.

  The last of Geryon, raised by Mrs. Ricky Hormel’s advanced kindergarten class of Hopewell, New Jersey, was not in the freezer. He must have finished it off sometime back and just forgotten.

  APARTMENT 1G

  Nami Mun

  THE OLD NURSE hovered above him, sniffing at the fresh wound at the top of his head, picking at it with her fingernails until he could feel the wet lesion writhing like an oyster. The nurse’s two front teeth were black and smelled of infection. Confirm your name for me, she said. First name? Last name? And what part of your body are we working on today? When he twitched with pain, she giggled, every note sounding like tiny, dry brakes. Hanju Lee wanted sleep. The kind that turned the world into a dark, muddy slime. But the old nurse’s lips, peppered with prickly hair, scratched against his earlobe as she whispered a list of his failures into him—the Laundromat that had kept his wife washing other people’s underwear twelve hours a day; the motel that lost money the second they took it over; past due rents, past due gas bills, past due water bills, electric bills, supply bills, medical bills, and Songmi’s college tuition, so on and so on, and of course the little girl—the one with the birthmark shaped like a whale—found only blocks away from their motel, her tiny body bloated by the morning dew. And then the Russian. The supposed answer to all of their problems. The answer that took a square piece of his scalp as collateral.

  The old nurse was now shoving something cold and metallic down his throat, making him scream. A furious white light screamed back, straight into his eyes. Lee squinted and hand-blocked the glare as the nurse chanted Count backward from a hundred as if on a loop, her head ballooning to the size of the sun and then shriveling back down, just as quickly, to a hard dried lemon. Count backward from a hundred, because honor can’t be bought and yet one pays highly, she said, wiggling her finger in admonishment. Soon, Lee fell headfirst into that slime, into a warm molasses where nothing lived, except maybe a burp of dialogue overheard in the orphanage where he grew up—No one will take him with that scar on his face—and then a sliver of thought about one of the monks who smelled of burned sugar, the sweet bitterness spiraling him down to a cup of coffee, his wife stirring it slowly, hypnotically, the spoon clinking against porcelain sounding robotic and medical, like the cold gray room where Songmi was born—how breakable she seemed, how his hands felt so dirty holding her.

  Then came the thread of a long silky dream: bells ringing, a flash of bright orange. The air rippling with the smell of diesel. People bustling by, their heads whipping toward a monk who has lit himself on fire.

  The monk is wearing an orange robe and sitting like Buddha in the middle of a busy street. High winds. High heat. Other monks encircle, ringing their bells. The hems of their orange robes flap like flags. Che yong, che yong, che yong, they chant. The flame waves wildly and black smoke rises. Everything is chaos. People are sobbing. Some scream. Some cover their ears, while others run for help.

  The only one not moving is the monk in flames.

  He is stone still. A gust of wind blows the flame to the right, and for a moment Lee can see the man’s unflinching face. The brows quickly vanish. The lids disintegrate and melt down his cheeks. Then he is simply eyes. Nose and lips meld into a lump on the chin, and the skin on his neck bubbles, then pops, the sound loud enough to make people wince. His shaved head blackens, then drips like grease. The skull is revealed. His bones fuse, and soon everything smells like hot sand.

  In the end his entire cross-legged frame tips over like cheap furniture. Only then do fellow monks put out the fire. The casket arrives but the monks cannot fit his scorched body into it. His bones do not bend. So, upon their shoulders the casket flows down the street, a charred knee sticking out from under the lid. Black flakes of flesh sprinkle the air.

  Lee couldn’t breathe. The scent of bones bit his nose. Che yong, che yong, che yong, for the roots and the branches make up the tree. Che yong, the nurse said, hovered over his face again, and as she spoke, her rotting teeth, all of them covered in fuzzy mold, fell from her mouth and plopped into his.

  He clamped his lips shut and jerked side to side but one nurse morphed into three, and their six hands and arms whipped like tails and conspired to pin him down, pinch his nose, vise-grip his jaws open. Each nurse took turns looming over his mouth and let their teeth pebble down his throat, one by one, choking him, until his eyes foamed, until his hands fisted. And all he could do was moan for his daughter, over and over, like a long, foggy siren.

  Songmi.

  Lee’s eyes snapped open. You ready to tell us what happened? The ceiling fan above him wobbled and whined. Who did this to you? The light flickered. The room still smelled of gasoline, and maybe fish. Who scalped you like this? Bedsheets stuck to his back. The mattress was a pond. Just above his forehead the bandage sat heavy. A cold wet sock. In three blinks he saw he was no longer at the hospital but in his own apartment. Two more blinks and his wife slept soundly to his left, snoring, even. Only the guilty can sleep so well, he thought.

  He lit up a cigarette so as to breathe and tracked the smoke up to the flickering bulb. At the age of fifty-one, Lee still slept with the light on, something his wife had found charming at first. What do you think you’re afraid of? she had asked once, as if it were that simple.

  When the phone rang, it startled him. He was about to answer but his wife placed a cold hand on his shoulder.

  “What if it’s Songmi?”

  “Then we really mustn’t answer,” she said, and rolled to her side.

  After six rings the answering machine clicked. “Yeah, this is Joe McGill from the New York . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence, seemed distracted. “Anyway, I’m sure you’re getting a lot of calls but if you have anything you wanna get off your chest, anything about the little girl, I’d make sure to do right by you.”

  The reporter went on but Lee stopped listening.

  “How long have you been awake?” his wife asked, still with her back to him.

  “Does it matter?”

  The ceiling fan took up the silence. “You’re not the only one suffering,” she said evenly, and then: “Go back to sleep.”

  Lee got out of bed. He wanted to show he wasn’t that easy. But then he stood at the desk in his underwear and socks, not knowing what to do. And wasn’t this the problem. He never knew what to do. For him, the time between inaction and action could be measured only in oceans. Oceans of doubt. Wasn’t this why he was now staring at his suit, cleaned and pressed, hanging over the back of his chair? The pants dragged along the carpet, as if someone had hammered the knees and snapped the legs into a backward L. And next to the legs, the two cans of gasoline.

  From his desk he picked up the picture of Songmi. A moment from her high school graduation. Her face a perfect diamond. Her smile soft, as if apologetic. The girl who grew up eating ramen and doing homework in the utility closet of their Laundromat was valedictorian. He was proud of her, not because of grades but because she’d remained humble. And kind. He tried to feel proud of himself—tried telling himself that he had made her, that he’d had a part in creating this goodness, but then he looked around and saw where he was—a one-room ground-floor studio apartment that contained one desk, one chair, one bed, two burners, and a coffee table where he and his wife ate rice porridge and kimchi nearly every night, and salted fish when lucky. There was no sofa, no dining table, no TV, no life, unless one counted the small family of mice squeaking under the kitchen sink.

  No, it was impossible for the proud to live here.

  “Don’t be frightened.” His wife had pulled back the covers, and through the sheer nightgown he could trace her long slender back as it dipped at the waist and rose at the hips to meet her red underwear. Even at rest, she was in control, which only made him want to revolt. He picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Calling her will only make things worse.�
��

  His hands trembled.

  “She’ll think she had a chance to stop us but couldn’t.”

  When the line rang on her end, his mouth dried. He could picture the pay phone just outside her dorm room, a triangle of light painting the hallway as Songmi opened her door and squinted at the ringing made conspicuous by the early hour. She’d be in her pajamas, the panda slippers he’d bought her, and she’d walk slowly to the phone because she was smart enough to know that at five in the morning it could only be bad news. Only bad news ever had the right.

  On the twelfth ring she answered. “Hello?”

  Lee opened his mouth. Nothing.

  “Hello?” she whispered this time, sounding frightened.

  Lee couldn’t believe how much he wanted to cry.

  “Who is this?” she asked, and he wanted to answer her—to say the things a father was supposed to say to a daughter. Advice on boys and love and how to change a tire or how not to trust people who say “Trust me.” Most of all he wanted to apologize. He was a failure—not because of losses financial, but because he had viewed life through glass so stained and dense, not one ray of truth could shine in or out. He failed, in the end, in seeing truth—the truth in others but mostly the truth about himself. And now it was too late. Even if he were to break the glass, all that lived on either side were molds of neglect. He wanted to say all of these things but something like cold gravel clogged his throat. “Dad, is that you?” she asked, and, as if his hand had been struck, he hung up.