NK3

by Michael Tolkin

  Also by Michael Tolkin

  Novels

  The Return of the Player

  Under Radar

  Among the Dead

  The Player

  Screenplays

  The Player, The Rapture, The New Age: Three Screenplays

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2017 by Michael Tolkin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: February 2017

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2543-9

  eISBN 978-0-8021-8984-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For Wendy Mogel

  It really was as if the so-called “human” qualities had been characteristic features of a period of human history long past and were now only to be found on tombstones, as inscriptions for the dead.

  Joseph Roth, The Silent Prophet

  Colonel Lee, Sergeant Jun

  It was a warm night in the bunker and Colonel Myung Lee was worried about money. “Boarding school is expensive, Sergeant Jun,” said the Colonel, but Sergeant Jun knew it really wasn’t the money. The Colonel’s son had been accepted at Daewon Foreign Language High School near his home in Seoul and expected to go there, but a space had just opened up for him at Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, the boarding school a half-day’s drive from the city. His best friend was going to Minjok and the boy wanted to go there with him. The Colonel rattled with indignation. “Daewon costs five thousand dollars a year and Minjok costs fifteen thousand. Ten thousand more for food and a bed? Does that make sense, Sergeant Jun?” Jun agreed it seemed excessive.

  The Colonel had been in charge of this outpost since before Jun had enlisted. Due for a transfer to the capital, he wanted nothing more than to stay at home and see his son every day. But if the boy went away to Minjok, the Colonel would never again have the time to be close to him since most of the graduates of both schools went to university in America. Before he departed for such an exciting world of opportunity, Colonel Lee wanted to leave his son solid memories of good days together and was scared that this would never happen if the boy went to Minjok Leadership Academy.

  “I told my wife, if he’s going to get into an American university, I don’t want him going to one of the schools on the Atlantic side of the country. I want him in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Berkeley and Stanford are there. Those are very good schools. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, these are all in California. My wife says, ‘But what if he gets into Cornell? What if he gets into MIT? You want to hold him back from a great university because the flight is five hours longer?’ Then I say, and Jun, I know this is wrong, I say, ‘America doesn’t matter so much anymore. A Korean education is in many ways superior, especially in technology. Remember, the Americans buy the TV sets we make here. We don’t buy theirs.’ And she says, ‘Just admit to yourself that you’re going to miss him. I’m going to miss him too. And if he didn’t score so well on tests, if he wasn’t such a strong tennis player, then he wouldn’t be accepted by Minjok, and then he wouldn’t be on his way to a great American university.’”

  It was Sergeant Jun’s burden that the Colonel confided in him. He worried the Colonel might one day regret this late-night fraternization and find some excuse to punish his subordinate for having answers to questions about the Colonel’s private life that the Sergeant had never asked. But he had no choice about the assignment. On the nights when the Colonel was senior duty officer, he made sure that Jun was beside him watching the monitors for activity on the north side of the DMZ. Jun understood what the Colonel’s wife meant about the Colonel’s need to admit things to himself. It was Jun’s experience of the Colonel that he exaggerated to the point of impersonation the stubborn skepticism of a career soldier for whom all problems are merely logistic as a way to pretend he wasn’t in fact a complicated man. Jun had the passing thought more than once that the Colonel was infatuated with him for reasons the Colonel could not express without stirring up the cistern of his own emotions and that the Colonel found excitement, too much excitement, in the exercise of his restraint.

  After a moment of quiet, the Colonel confessed, “She’s right. I’ll miss him. She’s right. It doesn’t matter if it’s Boston or San Francisco. Why should I be cross with him for leaving home? You and I left our homes, right, Jun? We traded the warmth of family life for the glory of war. Look at how we traded family life for the dreadful machinery of war!” He pointed at the electric kettle, with its setting for herb tea, green tea, and black tea.

  Jun laughed quietly at this. The Colonel used his rank to exercise irony, but it was risky for Jun to make humor out of their situation, not for fear of political reprisal. It was their opposites in uniform on the north side of the fence—along the mined strip of negative space that stretched from one coast of Korea to the other—who couldn’t openly discuss the truth of their absurd situation for fear of dreadful punishment. No, the danger of levity in this bunker was that it would open these defenders of the free world to the pointlessness of their mission. And if their job was pointless, why weren’t they home in Seoul adjusting, perhaps slowly, to the forfeit of rank, bored by mundane reality, but at least watching their children grow up? The North would never invade with its army because China, dreading chaos and refugees, would let the United States defend the South and the North would lose. Everyone knew this. No one could say it.

  The command phone rang. Jun answered. Seismic detectors were picking up an increase in normal activity directly across from them, possibly from previously unknown North Korean tunnels. About this kind of alarm, the Colonel was never casual. And for all that Jun worried that their familiarity would provoke trouble in some form, Colonel Lee’s response to an alert instantly turned every false alarm into an adventure.

  Jun drove the Colonel the three kilometers to the scene. It wasn’t a surprise to see a platoon of North Korean soldiers approaching the fence on their side of the empty zone; both armies played the same game of posturing. But there was something different about the shape of the North Korean soldiers.

  Jun told the Colonel: “They’re wearing hazardous materials suits, Colonel, enclosed circulation.”

  “Are any of them not wearing those suits?” asked the Colonel.

  “None that I can see, sir.”

  “Weapons?”

  “None visible, sir.”

  “No sidearms?”

  “None visible, sir.”

  Lee asked for the field phone and woke up the General, who, like Jun, didn’t for a moment think Lee’s call was out of unnecessary cauti
on. “Fifty men in hazmat suits across from Outpost Twenty-Three, sir. Consistent vibration suggesting tanks in a tunnel.”

  The opposing outposts shared a ridge. A fire truck drove up to the North’s outpost and stopped, leaving the motor running. The driver of the fire truck was also wearing a hazmat suit.

  Lee narrated: “They’re raising the ladder.” It had a stainless steel water cannon at the end next to a long orange windsock that filled as the ladder lifted it into the breeze that came from the North.

  The ladder extended five lengths.

  “Jun, what is the angle of that ladder and is it crossing over the line of their fence?” asked the Colonel.

  “At least seventy degrees, and . . . no . . . it’s completely on their side. It might be a fire drill.”

  “Why wear hazmat suits for a fire drill?”

  Two men in the suits carried a hose to the top of the ladder and twisted the fitting onto the cannon. Immediately they turned on the water, which came out in a wide spray, not a long tight stream.

  Colonel Lee told the General: “They’re spraying something into the air directly above them, and the wind is carrying the mist across the DMZ. I can feel it on my skin. It’s an attack. It has to be an attack, but what’s our response?”

  Hopper, Hopper’s Silent Voice

  Hopper was asleep in an underpass when the sound of the first bus entered his dream, and then the dream melted into one of those invisible mental tapestries he called Thought Pictures. His Silent Voice didn’t talk about them. He saw a big yellow dog and a smiling woman in the Thought Picture. He didn’t have many Thought Pictures like this. The dog, a group of boys playing basketball, Hopper shooting and scoring.

  Another bus followed the first. He grabbed the binoculars from his bicycle’s saddlebag, crawled up the embankment, and watched as the buses drove down the freeway off-ramp a hundred yards away. The buses then continued a mile down the road that led to the mountain. Furrows of rippled sand covered the blacktop.

  Hopper read the words stenciled on the buses. THANK YOU founders FOR THIS GIFT—THERE IS NO EQUAL VALUE—LEAVE NO TRACE—INCLUDE THEM—yes YOU’RE HERE!—PARTICIPATE!—no branding—sustainability now

  The buses stopped and the doors opened. Two women left each bus and then stood by the door as the passengers walked out: more men than women, all of them quiet except for the times when they hummed in unison, one setting a random pitch and the others finding it. The women made the passengers form two straight lines, facing away from the buses.

  The women then returned to the buses, the doors closed, and the buses returned to the freeway, driving west.

  The two lines stayed where they’d been placed. Hopper asked his Silent Voice if it was safe to move closer.

  “Leave them alone. You can’t help them and they can’t help you.”

  Ignoring his Silent Voice, Hopper rode his bike nearer to them, pushing hard to move through the sand.

  A few of the Drifters looked at him, smiling with a blank familiarity.

  Another four buses came down the road. His Silent Voice told him to get away.

  The lead bus stopped and someone inside it pointed a rifle at Hopper and started shooting.

  Hopper’s Silent Voice said, “I told you it wasn’t safe to stop here. Ride toward the mountain.”

  There was no straight line to follow between the rocks and the clusters of brush. Hopper didn’t look back until he dropped down the side of a dry riverbed and disappeared from the view of the men who were shooting at him.

  The Drifters scattered during the shooting. Their lines were broken and they spread out in all directions panicked, except for the Shamblers—the more degraded among them—who shuffled in small circles or stood in one place with no reaction to the noise. The shooter stood on top of the bus, scanning the gullies with his own set of binoculars. He took a few shots at what he thought was there. He climbed down from the roof and consulted with the others.

  The sun was setting. They turned on their headlights and drove away.

  Hopper had done everything the Teacher had warned him against doing.

  “I trust you to do what’s right and your Silent Voice will help you. Listen to him when he speaks.”

  He waited for the deep part of night and walked the bicycle back to the freeway, past Shamblers stumbling in the dark looking for something to eat.

  There was sand on his chain and his gears slipped when he shifted. He wasted two hours walking through an outlet shopping mall, looking for a sporting-goods store and a new bicycle. The next town was five miles away. He would stay out of sight on a road parallel to the freeway. If he found a bike, in two days he’d be in Los Angeles, where he would look for his wife. If he found her and she didn’t have a bicycle he would get one for her and they would ride back to Palm Springs and he could introduce her to his Teacher.

  The Teacher had said it many times: “Your wife is in Los Angeles. If you want to find her, you have to go there. It won’t be easy but I can help you. How long have we known each other, Hopper?” asked the Teacher. It was a question he asked often, and Hopper always had the same answer.

  “Forever.”

  Erin, Stripers, Seth, Seth’s Silent Voice

  When you are nineteen years old and pretty, every day in Center Camp is an adventure in advanced perfection. So how wrong was it for Erin to wake up angry because some rude person was banging on her door? She shouted a yawp of annoyance and then the door was open and Brin, Jobe, Helary, and Toffe—who never spoke—looked in at her. With Erin, they were Center Camp’s first fivesome, and called themselves the Stripers for the white-and-red-striped stockings they took from Inventory whenever a convoy returned with them. Only last week, the sharp scouts from Inventory returned with a carton of striped socks from an overlooked Target distribution depot in San Bernardino. And while most of the socks were blue and white, instead of the preferred red and white, no one but Erin’s squad was going to get any of them. Brin, always the first among equals below Erin, threw a Red Vine at Erin and said, “We’re leaving for the DMV in fifteen minutes. Inventory found another eleven Drifters around Long Beach, and Chief wants them all processed today.”

  This would be Erin’s third trip this week to the DMV—the Department of Mandatory Verification. This was sometimes called the Department of Mental Verification, or Manual Verification. Until four years ago it had been the Department of Motor Vehicles, Hollywood branch. June Moulton from the Mythology Committee, the committee’s only member, said it was always a good sign when something that used to mean one thing could now mean something entirely new. She had no other examples. The heads of committee each had their own mansions in Center Camp, except for June, who shared this house with Erin, though claiming the master bedroom. Brin and Helary thought the room should be Erin’s because the house had always been Erin’s, not just in the new or recent now. It was where she lived with her father and mother, when she still had them.

  Erin was nineteen by the old calendar, but by the only calendar that mattered she was four. In the known world, by the new calendar, four was ancient. The new calendar four-year-olds had been rehabilitated four years ago by the best doctors in the city. They had been given the kind of attention and thorough cortical stimulation—three weeks in a controlled coma—that was no longer possible since the best doctors themselves were gone and the replacements they had trained didn’t understand the subtleties of the machines and drugs, or were forced to abbreviate the cure because the drugs had run out. The scale of the disaster obliged them to focus on the minimal rehab needed for the Systems Committee to continue without falling apart. Systems, the largest committee, meant Toby Tyler and her crew, the master civil engineers. They were granted the privilege of rehab even before medical specialists. There was no Medical Committee. Plus, and this isn’t a small thing, no one can run a smashed rehab machine.

  The daughter of privilege, born
lucky, Erin’s good fortune continued even when she was one of the first three hundred people in Los Angeles to be diagnosed with what was then called Seoul Syndrome Release 3.0. The first puzzling and awful symptom hit her thirty-two hours after a long night at a karaoke bar in Koreatown. There she was, walking in a corridor at her high school, when she felt the unfamiliar awakening of her soul’s recognition of God’s love, and with that, galaxies of old resentments rolled out of her—memories of insults and bad grades and rejection and envy—like a movie reel unspooling into a fire, and in the empty space left by all that crap, she fell into an infinity of peace. She tried to explain this feeling to everyone around her in the school corridor, where no one ever talked about the love of God. In the school nurse’s office, the first assumption was that she was high on ecstasy. But then she kept saying good-bye to memories, as she watched them take to the air like a flock of swallows leaving a disappearing barn and disappearing into a disappearing sky. She failed the basic mental status exam: time, place, count backward, who’s the president. The evil of the syndrome was that the victims felt relief as NK3 swept through their brains, before wiping them out. When the area’s emergency rooms compared notes after the first hundred cases, the Centers for Disease Control broadcast the description of the disease, which matched the epidemic marching through Asia. When Erin’s father, the president of Warner Bros., understood what had invaded his baby girl he called UCLA hospital’s chief of surgery and asked for the kind of favor typically and not covertly granted the charitable president of a studio, to put Erin at the head of the line for the first available bed in the SRC, the Syndrome Rehabilitation Center.

  June Moulton was in the next bed, and after rehab, June—age not certain but probably in her midforties—kept close to the young Erin, who neither welcomed her nor pushed her away. It was possible June was her father’s mistress.