Once the Shore

by Paul Yoon

  The boy opened the ladder and placed it against a tree, wiggling it to test its support. Ahrim asked if he wanted to climb but he shook his head. “My legs are sore,” he said, and they left it at that. So Ahrim stepped up onto the ladder and the boy held the bottom rung, directing her on which tangerines to pick. He pointed and she chose them and slipped them into the pocket she had formed with her apron. She was surrounded by their scent, both sharp and light, the smell, she used to imagine, of the sun.

  Solid earth. The boy’s feet rooted there. He no longer swam and he no longer climbed trees. As though vulnerability lay only above or below the ground.

  In her years in the sea, thirty women had perished. Some vanished, the currents taking them over the horizon. Others bobbed up to the surface, their backs like miniature bridges. Very few were victims of sharks, as many assumed was the greatest fear in the water. It was, for the most part, the ones who overestimated how long they could hold their breaths, reckless and determined. She had known each of them. Just as she did the women who accompanied her now, all her age, save for one. Interest was fading, the girls heading to the cities.

  Her occupation, over time, would cease to exist. She would be relegated to history, that old word she carried with her always, that feeling that there was a time from which she had departed and was now wishing to return to. She existed in the middle, always. But it was different, she thought, in water. For there, time was not linear. It was, in her mind, a globe, spherical. Death perhaps was less important in that space because it remained inseparable from the living. Within the world of the sea, all was enclosed, all was present. The ritual of burial and mourning seemed nonexistent.

  “That one,” Sinaru called from below, pointing at a tangerine some distance away. She held on to a branch and leaned forward. She stretched her fingers. She grazed it and the tangerine spun. She felt her calf muscles tighten. The boy urged her to try again. She did so and succeeded and she blushed because she was proud. “Happy?” she called, showing it to him. Its skin was smooth and she weighed it in her hand.

  “You have a big bum,” the boy shouted.

  Narrowing her eyes at him, she dropped the tangerine onto his head. She waited for him to say something but he didn’t and she saw him fall. He lay on the grass with his mouth slightly open, and Ahrim quickly descended the ladder, jumping the last two rungs, spilling her pickings. She kneeled before him. “Sinaru,” she said, shaking him, patting his head. “Sinaru.”

  The boy, under the sun, opened a single eye and grinned and slipped his tongue through the gap in his teeth. Laughter erupted from within his chest and he squirmed under her grip as she attempted to spank him. He freed himself and, still laughing, ran past the trees, farther into the grove like some infant spirit, his empty sleeve billowing with his speed.

  Ahrim did not follow him. He would return. She sat there on the grass and looked up at the looming fruit in the shapes of dozens of faces, tilting in the winds, about to snap their necks and drop. She felt an old sadness, the smell of snow and horses, and then her strange fantasy faded. But the feeling stayed. And she did not know where the years had gone.

  The next afternoon, as Ahrim returned to the village, she found Sinaru’s father pacing in front of his house. Every so often he slammed his fists against the shut door and shouted something in Japanese that Ahrim could not discern. He had a fine jawline, dark eyebrows, and strong, thick arms. Although autumn was soon approaching, he was sweating through his T-shirt, leaving a trail between his shoulders. Sinaru’s mother could be seen behind one of the windows. She held a broomstick, the bristles of which she tapped on the windowpane, as though her husband were a fly she were trying to swat.

  There were women who found him attractive, she knew. She had heard one speak of him to a friend at the market, pointing at the different sizes of fish, in mischief.

  Ahrim shut off the engine of her truck. He turned and stared at her blankly, his eyes large and white against his tan skin. They were Sinaru’s eyes.

  He approached her, grinning. “Sea woman,” he called. “Have you seen my son?” He looked at her as if he knew something about her and wouldn’t tell—he always looked this way. He leaned on the passenger-side door and tucked his head through the open window. “I want to see my boy,” he said. “My son.”

  “I haven’t seen him,” she said.

  He smelled of cellophane, the plastic of the factories. He chewed on his fingernails. “Aren’t you his play buddy?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been at the market all day.”

  He lifted his hands. “Sure,” he said. “But if you do see him, tell him he should come find me, yes?”

  “All right.”

  “And tell him to bring her along.” Sinaru’s father pointed his thumb to where his wife stood behind the window.

  Ahrim left her truck and walked up the pathway to her house. She still kept her door unlocked, like the old days, and so she entered thinking perhaps the boy was inside. He would never, not when she wasn’t there, but she thought it all the same and sighed when she saw that he wasn’t. She went outside again and headed to the backyard and the grove where the scent of citrus lingered and the bark of the trees was bright under the sun, which split and shadowed along the leaves. He wasn’t there either. She called for him, in a low voice, afraid that his father might hear. “Sinaru,” she said. “Sinaru. Where are you hiding?”

  When she returned to the front of the house the street was empty, save for a group of children kicking a ball in the neighboring playground, dust rising to their shins. The father was gone. Had Sinaru’s mother acquiesced and allowed him entry? Had he left? There was his car in their gravel driveway. He could have walked, she considered, to the nearby noodle shop for a drink. He could be spending the night elsewhere. The woman had kept the door closed. It was what she would have done, Ahrim concluded.

  There was dinner to cook, although she no longer felt like cooking it. She was tired. It had been the diving, yes. She remained in front of her door and looked out across the street at the varying roofs of the village, some of them still made of strips of reed. The light of day was paling toward the blue of evening. The weather cooled. She listened to the soft thud of sneakers scuffling along the playground.

  She hardly knew her neighbors. There were younger couples now. It was likely, she thought, that they spoke of her inside their homes. Same as always, they would comment over dinner. Their spouses would shake their heads. They would look at their children, with assurance, in their silence perhaps a concern. She keeps time with the young boy, a woman her age, her solitude.

  A few days passed. There had been an incident at Sinaru’s school and today she waited for him.

  She boiled seaweed. When they were softened she marinated them with sesame oil, rice vinegar, a drop of sugar, and some spices. She ate them in a glass bowl, cupping it with her hand, bringing the rim close to her lips, using her chopsticks. She sat on the floor, her legs crossed, beside the folding screen behind which she used to undress. Jinsu used to turn away even though the screen covered her nakedness. She would step lightly around the screen and surprise him, covering him with her hair, and he would look back at her curious and shy, taking in her body.

  Not long after Hiroshima and Nagasaki there had been propositions. But Ahrim remained steadfast, convinced Jinsu would return.

  There he was. She saw the boy through her window, crossing the street, and she thought that what seemed inherent in some was caution. She herself took it from her life in the sea, which moved and pressed against its environment in a perpetual act of provocation. She opened the door before the boy could knock and so upon first sight she saw his hand in a fist, raised, his knuckles pointing at her. He wore a different shirt, cleaner, fresh. Cinched at the waist this time was a long thread of twine. A stick was tucked inside it, the end of which he had sharpened to a point. His bruises were healing. The skin of the young did so, much faster than the old.

  Two d
ays ago, three boys had wanted to see his stump.

  The first punch was to the side of Sinaru’s head. When his body bent, they kicked his shins and hit him on the shoulders, and then ripped the sleeves of his shirt. “The Jap has a second dick,” they said. They stole his belt, taking turns whipping him, then twirling it in front of their crotches, telling Sinaru to pull on it.

  She had gone looking for the boys. But he refused to tell her who they were, and so, yesterday afternoon, she remained in front of the school building and searched the crowd for who had hurt him. She stayed until she saw Sinaru and then walked him home.

  She knelt beside her door and examined his legs. The bruises there were the color of a mussel’s shell, the color of the outer rim of stars.

  “I made this,” Sinaru said, tapping his sword. He looked down at her. He was filled with pride.

  “Let’s have a look.”

  She stood and he presented the sword to her. It was a branch of a forsythia, its golden flowers gone. At the sharp end its flesh was revealed, nearly white against the bark. He would have used a kitchen knife, perhaps, something a bit dull. She could tell from the unevenness of his cuts.

  “I would like something for this,” the boy said, raising the stump where his arm once existed. “I’d place it there and then I would be a knight and I could cut paths anywhere.” He made swooshing noises.

  “You’d rescue the princess,” Ahrim said.

  “Yes, I would.”

  “And would you rescue me?”

  The boy considered her question. “You’re too old to be a princess.”

  “True.”

  “But maybe I would.”

  “Here,” Ahrim said, lowering the bowl. “Eat.”

  With her chopsticks she picked a few strips of the seaweed salad, twisted them, and fed the boy while they were standing at her door. She asked whether anyone had bothered him at school today. He shrugged while chewing.

  When they first came to the island she noticed Sinaru’s mother avoided looking at her son, the way she called for him by the door and then turned away. Ahrim remembered this, remembered the fear in the woman’s eyes, or something akin to it, which, in the years that followed, turned into an indifference. His father was like this as well, because the boy would grow to find his opportunities limited. She heard him say this once and she heard him say he wanted another child and Sinaru’s mother didn’t.

  She fed the boy the rest of the salad. When he was finished, he wiped his mouth with his wrist and said, “Did you find one?”

  The boy had missed a few spots and she wiped his mouth again with the tail of her shirt. She smelled his hair and felt the softness of his face. From her pocket she revealed a thin shell in the shape of a fan, the size of her palm. It was striped the colors of cinnamon and granite and ivory. She had found it at the beach this morning.

  “Almost,” she said, handing it to him, her gift. “I almost did.”

  The boy’s eyes grew dim. She reached for his shoulders, to see the bruises there, but he stepped away. “You didn’t find one?”

  “No, child,” she said. “Not today.”

  His reaction was unexpected.

  “Then you’re no good,” he said, and crossed the street and threw her gift into the dirt. She gripped the door and in silence watched as he raised his leg high and cracked the shell and ground it into the dirt, twisting his hips, until the shell was powder.

  Ahrim knew of only a few incidents involving sharks on Solla Island. The first occurred when she was in her adolescence, when on the weekends entire villages would flock to the sea, as though they had never entered it in their lives. Some were bold, swimming farther and farther, and although she didn’t remember the man, what returned of him was a foot trailed by a cloak of deep red like some lackadaisical comet gone astray.

  Ahrim was nearby when it washed up to shore and she remembered the tattoo around the ankle—which was how they identified him—an image of a swordfish, wrapped around the skin so that it faced its tailfin, the ink lines iridescent from the water and the sun and the blood.

  Another was a diver. A sea woman in her forties. She survived it. Once, she showed Ahrim the scar that ran up along the side of her body, curved, like an albino root, where the shark had gnawed. “A pound of flesh,” she joked with the tourists.

  All sea women seek death, was a common expression heard among the island. It was a state of being almost there and returning from that place.

  Her mother used to speak of the divers from fifteen hundred years ago. In those days there were thousands, the women providing food for their families. They swam without fins, their eyes naked against the cold water, and each time they dove, a bit of the ocean entered them through their open eyes and they took it back to their homes. For what? Ahrim asked. For their children, her mother answered. They carried the seawater within them and it surrounded the children that grew in their bellies. And the children were born and they were not afraid and they sought the sea.

  After her parents’ death, after Jinsu, too, was long gone, she would take walks alone to the coast. Hours before dawn she followed a trail through tall grass then climbed the walls of a bluff, and when she arrived at the high meadow she began to run, her eyes focused on the distant sea, stopping just short of the cliff’s edge. She ran back and did it once more. All through the morning she kept running, over and over again across the headland until she collapsed in exhaustion, crying, blinded by the reflections against the far water.

  Where she lay seemed to be the world in its entirety and neither the sea nor the sky existed. It felt as though she were being pulled into the white, and there was the desire, yes, in those days. Though it wasn’t for death, specifically. It was the fall. To jump the cliff, to meet the water with such force that perhaps the world would shudder and flip and when she surfaced she would be where Jinsu was—that ash-eyed boy whom she met in the sea when she was sixteen years old, his fishing hook caught in her hair, reeling her in unawares as she struggled underwater to open her pocketknife. When she surfaced she grabbed his ankle and said, “You have my hair,” and together they looked up at the clumps on his fishing hook, aloft, dark as kelp and dripping.

  Years after the Second World War ceased, she would be notified that his body was discovered in the mountains of a Pacific island. In his chest pocket was an address, the one-room house on the eastern coast of Solla. The body hung within the canopy of a tree. They found him with his shoulders sagging forward and his Japanese uniform brittle, his face long ago erased of identity. It was assumed he had been propelled into the air by an explosion, though what killed him was the pointed arm of a tree that sliced through his forearm and then pierced his heart, growing within him, sprouting leaves.

  On his wrist was a bracelet, which she buried in the grove they had planted, her own hair returned to her, a decade later, woven.

  Ahrim was in the midst of a dream when she heard a heavy, echoing boom. She blinked and it faded in its density, like a contrail, muted and controlled. Waking, she experienced the familiar sensation of being lifted up from wherever it was she had been. Her eyes, focusing, revealed her kitchen. Her hair was still wet. So was her skin and she looked down and there was her body, naked, seated on her couch, her knees thin and wrinkled, her belly neatly folded.

  She remembered now. She had intended to shower after coming in from the diving. Her chest throbbed. It had been a slow dive and she had gone deeper than she intended. She drove home with the pressure still pulsing against her skull, the sun sharp against her eyes. She had wanted to sit down for a short while and had instead fallen asleep.

  Under her closed door she saw the pale edge of the afternoon light and two small silhouettes, shifting and unsettled: feet.

  Someone had been knocking, she realized, and she rubbed her face, smelling the octopus she had caught. Her hands were numb and cut from the abalone she had attempted to pry off a stone. She pulled on a pair of shorts and a shirt from a pile of clothes she had neglected t
o launder.

  When Ahrim opened the door she saw Sinaru and managed a smile before noticing the wound.

  The boy stood shirtless. He had tightened his brows, as though in concentration, and his lips were pressed firmly together. His arm, across his chest, gripped his left shoulder. Below that was a stain. It seemed to expand as she stared at it, dumbstruck in her waking, as though the limb he once had was regenerating. Sinaru, with all his effort, returned her smile.

  “Ahrim,” he said. “I am leaking.”

  And then the edges of his eyes flooded and he leaned forward, still clenching his shoulder, and she lifted him and rushed to the couch and lay him there. “You’re doing well,” she kept repeating. “Just like that. Grip it tight.” She ran outside to her truck where she kept her first-aid kit and returned and wiped as much of the blood as she could with a wet cloth before applying ointment along the end of the stump, feeling where the doctor had severed his bone. She felt the fresh puncture there, at the tip. She bandaged the wound as tightly as she could, wrapping the gauze up to his shoulders, asking if it hurt. “A little,” he told her, and she wiped his forehead and asked him who had done this, although she knew already.

  He didn’t respond at first. He shrugged. And although it was warm she drew a blanket over his chest and tucked it under his chin, kneeling on the floor beside him.

  “Was it the boys?” Ahrim asked. She brushed his hair with her fingers. “Was it the boys? Tell me, Sinaru. Was it them?”

  His bruises had not entirely healed. And now this. He was alone, she thought. And they knew it and they taunted him and he did nothing because he was kind. He let them. He allowed it. Because he was afraid. Because his life was governed by an incident that occurred at sea, as though his days were a preparation for when it would happen again, embodied in a multitude of shapes and forms and places.