“I hear your mother’s looking for you.”
William tried to explain. “Oh. Well. I was just—”
“Bad boy,” she teased. “Call your mother.”
Did she wink at him? Yes. He tried to laugh, as if it had been a joke, but something in her tone seemed off. She’d been so shy the last time they’d gone out. She’d worn flats. She hadn’t kissed his cheek unprompted or said anything along the lines of “bad boy.” He wondered if she was already drunk. The last time they’d gotten together, she’d had half a glass of wine and almost fallen asleep. Nothing like this.
“So they’re searching, like, the whole tristate area to find the guy who hit Chongso. Once they do, I hope they run him over.” Then she rolled her shoulders. “Anyways, how’s life?”
“Life’s . . . life,” he said. “How’s yours?”
“Really great,” she said. “I’m having a lot of fun.”
“Fun. I think I had that once,” he joked.
She laughed. A lot. And grabbed his hand and said, “I’ll remind you. Come on.”
She led him down the street like a puppy dog to the Cutty Sark. A jaunty little ironwork clipper ship dangled from the sign at the entrance. Windows were festooned with ropes as thick as his wrists and aged canvas sails. A chandelier made from a ship’s wheel hung from a rusty block and tackle in the center of the room. At the many wooden tables along the decking sat men and women drinking beer and eating fish and chips. William and Sung-Lee took a seat at a table beside a man in a red wool cap, who was splitting a bowl of chowder with a man with sideburns and a porkpie hat.
She flagged down a passing waitress and ordered two Manhattans, one with five brandied cherries. “They rinse the glass with absinthe,” she explained. “Really makes the flavors pop.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t it eat holes in your brain?” William asked.
“Buzzzzzzzzz,” she lifted a pointer finger to the side of William’s skull. Then she ran a hand over the lump on his head.
“So, what, did you get into a fight?”
William smiled. “Actually, yes.”
She seemed—surprised? No. Impressed. He kept looking around, as if someone might see him with her. Not like he was cheating, even if that was how it felt.
“I can’t be out too late,” she announced, withdrawing her hand. “I’ve got a six a.m. flight to Istanbul for a conference.”
Some very loud song thumped its beat on the speakers across the way. She was sort of singing along and shifting her hips. At the chorus she sang along, “‘O . . . oh . . . oh. Dreams weave the rose . . .’ Have you seen this music video? It’s so awful. But I love the song.” She shrugged as if this were one more of life’s unresolvable little mysteries.
“What kind of conference?” William asked. The drinks arrived, and he wondered how fast he could finish his and get the hell out of there. She fished one of her five cherries out and began to nibble on it. “Mifamurtide. It’s this new drug that just finished a phase three trial. They’re approving it soon in Europe. It’s got to go well because we really fucking blew it last month in Copenhagen. It wasn’t my fault, of course. It was this idiot, Parker, who screwed up the goddamn time zones or hit his snooze button or something and didn’t show up, and of course we left all the materials with him. I had to get up there with nothing and do the presentation from memory. I mean, it was the worst thing ever to happen to anyone. You don’t even know.”
William nodded agreeably. He couldn’t decide if he was being polite or pathetic, but either way he sensed he’d regret it.
“I just hate it when people waste my time, you know?”
He couldn’t decide if this was a veiled dig at him, or if she was just too obtuse to realize how it could come across.
“Thank god it all worked out. And my boss was so impressed, he took me on his jet to stay at his villa in Panama. It’s, like, on the top of a private mountain that used to be a volcano. The only way to get there is to, like, take a helicopter? And the whole thing is, like, fucking glass walls so we’d be just, like, sitting in the kitchen, and you can see whales out in the ocean, like, blowing water a hundred feet in the air. Out of those blowholes?”
William tried his hardest to seem impressed and jealous, which he assumed was the point.
“‘Atlantis ROSE,’” she burst out, singing along to the same song. “‘Drums wreathe . . .’”
“Sounds like things are great then,” William said.
“So great,” she replied, again doing a little dance in her seat to the song as it ended.
“Are things . . . serious between you and your boss?”
Sung-Lee burst out laughing. “Him? No. He’s, like, married or whatever. It’s not even a thing. And—” Then as if it were a big secret, she leaned in to say, “He’s got the grossest back hair? I had to just tell him at some point—keep your shirt on, you know?”
Last time they’d gone out, she’d been insufferably demure. Now she was like her own evil twin sister, and it was no improvement, except that, he supposed, she did seem much happier. He couldn’t stop watching her fingers fiddling with the edge of her navy lapel.
“You seem different,” he said at last. “I mean, in a good way. I mean, I guess, I’m impressed when people can do that. Just take on a whole new attitude.”
Sung-Lee again leaned in. “I started doing Entrance. Have you heard of it?”
“No. Is it some kind of drug?”
She shook her head and then stared up at the ceiling as if searching there for the words to explain it. “It’s like—so incredible. It’s all about the radical reinvention of your brain’s whole structure through hypnosis. Well, it’s not hypnosis. It’s a semiconscious state induced by rhythmic motion and chanting. At first it’s sort of like yoga almost, but then you go into this full-on trance state. That’s why they call it that. En-Trance. Right? And while you’re in the trance state, you can just unlock all these things. It’s all about realizing what you’re doing to hold yourself back, like through hatred or fear or nihilism or eating gluten. You identify the things you want, and you finally allow yourself to take them—”
William lost the end of her diatribe as a garbage truck rolled by outside, thudding and crashing and beeping and flashing its lights as men in neon vests hopped off to collect black bags of trash that gleamed in the streetlights. He looked back up at Sung-Lee, coaxing the last of the cherries between her lips. Was he a thing that she had decided to allow herself to take? Or was he something to unlock? Some kind of shackle; the gluten of her love life. He watched the men outside throwing bags of trash as if they were nothing but black air. He could see Sung-Lee following his gaze to the door. What did he want?
“Let’s go up onto the bridge,” William said.
• • •
On the very edge he stood with Sung-Lee under a wash of golden light, watching boats cutting through the darkness hundreds of feet below their feet. Her hair blew up into his face, and her arm pressed against his as she pointed excitedly at a pair of helicopters going wing and wing, only feet from each other. Surely it was no accident that she was crushing her butt into his thigh. His hands seemed to remember, as he pressed one against the small of her back. This was what a real body felt like. When he turned to kiss her, she didn’t disappear. Her lips opened, even greedily, at his touch. Tongue behind savage little teeth. Her chest heaving up, and her hands weaving, rising, up his spine. A powerful wind enveloped them, pushing downriver. She smelled like poppies and Earl Grey—had she just bitten his tongue? Yes. He tasted pennies. His hands whipped around her waist and down the back of her skirt. Her hips swayed, danced a little, as she had in the bar. O . . . oh . . . oh. Dreams weave the rose.
Her cheekbones were glowing. He stopped, not sure of himself now. Her dark, heavy lashes lifted, and the soft brown pupils beneath studied him, twitching. He’d forgotten, almost, what it was li
ke to really see a person. And to see someone seeing you. She traced a finger along the horn of his nose and the line of his lips.
She shouted over a passing UPS truck, “When the fuck did you learn to kiss like that?”
William watched the corners of her lips rise up into the folds of her cheeks. A smile like a perfect parabola. The tips of her fingers ranging . . .
“Did she teach you? The girl you left me for. Last time.”
“I’m so sorry about that,” William yelled back. “I know I should have called.”
But she grabbed him and kissed him even harder. There was a lull in the traffic as she whispered now, right into his ear, “Don’t hold grudges. That’s fear and hate, William. And besides I definitely don’t stand in the way of true fucking love.”
“I mean, I don’t know if I’d—” Except he would. It was. Or had been. True fucking love.
She looked in his eyes. “You’re still in love with her.”
“She—died,” William said. He knew she knew this; their mothers talked.
“Like that matters,” she said. Then very seriously, she asked him, “Have you kissed anyone else since she died?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. Then he added, “No.”
This seemed to be the right answer. She began kissing his neck, and he could feel her hands on him again. He turned away and looked at the other people on the walkway. Families. Couples. Faces, waists, feet. Hair on shoulders. But none were the ones he wanted.
“Let’s go back to your apartment,” she said.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
He paused, pretty sure he didn’t want to tell her he’d moved back home with his mother a year ago. He was surprised, actually, that she didn’t already know, which meant that his mother hadn’t been telling people about it.
“They’re spraying it actually. Pill flies.”
She kissed him again, almost angrily, “Then let’s go to my place.”
William whispered okay, and she melted against him, and he gripped her tightly, knuckles white. They didn’t speak again about Irene as they walked back to Manhattan and caught a cab to the Upper East Side. Instead she talked to him about her annoying coworkers, her ex-boyfriend Jeremy. William felt himself sweating. He wondered why he was doing this. Because he was scared of her? Yes, but there was something else. The more she touched him and the more he touched her back, the more he felt something else. Someone else.
Inside her apartment, Sung-Lee was tearing William’s coat off before the door had shut behind them. He liked the way her hands felt against his sore jaw. The way her teeth nipped at his ear. His tongue throbbed a little where she’d bitten it, but this pain, along with the familiar ache above his eye, was lost in the whole ache of his body now. It was dark in the room, and he couldn’t see her very well, only shadows and the warm feel of her skin against his. She pulled her dress up and off, and beneath there was only cinnamon flesh and pink underwear, no bra, the silver sharks’ teeth falling down between her breasts. He buried his head there and filled his lungs. Poppies and Earl Grey. Her hands were tussling with his belt buckle, fingers hooking through the loops, steering him into the room.
Her black hair whipped around her head like something self-possessed, and she demanded, “On the couch.” William looked longingly over toward the other side of the room, at her bed, but there was no reaching it. She almost hurled him onto the couch. Increasingly it was all William could do to simply hang on and do as he was being told—loudly and repeatedly—not sparing on the fucks and the shits and other things. She was purposefully screaming. There was no way he was that good. Not that it wasn’t kind of incredible, though. Even if it felt a bit like he was being used. Even if it was a relief on several levels when it was over. “That was nice,” she said, though little about it had been anything like nice at all.
He woke up a few hours later to the sound of her in the bathroom, and watched through slit eyelids as she came out, fully dressed, and quietly left the room. Six a.m. flight to Istanbul. Business class, nonstop. William walked over to the bed, finally, and pressed his face into the cool pillows. Just as he began to slip back to sleep, he felt a warm hand on his back, and the tip of a nose on his neck. Had she come back? Changed her mind or gotten a later flight?
How was that? came a whisper in his ear. What was that like?
William started up and began to roll over, but just as before, he felt a hand press against his cheek as if to stop him. He felt a flood of guilt, of stomach sick. As if she’d seen the whole thing.
Oh please, she said. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just sex. And if I thought you’d fall in love with Sung-Lee and forget all about me, I’d say go for it.
William felt his face go hot. He wouldn’t cry in front of her, whether or not she was really there.
She was quiet a moment, and he thought maybe she’d gone. I have to say, I really miss sex.
Ghosts can’t have sex?
No bodies, no nerve endings.
No fair.
You don’t know the half of it.
William felt her hand lift from his back, and he reached around to grab it but found only air and his own warm skin. I’ll find you, he promised.
As he fell asleep, he thought he heard her saying, I’m not lost.
9
Twelve Spruce was a prewar building made of clean white brick. William located the dusty buzzer near the door and tentatively pressed 4R. He knew it was crazy, but he wanted to try. If no one was home, then fine. But to his surprise, the door shook and unlocked. Across a dark lobby, he climbed into a creaking old elevator that took him slowly to the fourth floor. There he soon found 4R, with a mat out front that said WELCOME.
William knocked at the door and waited. A few moments later someone answered. An old Hispanic woman with wide wrinkled circles around her eyes. For a brief moment, though he knew she was long dead, William imagined it was Grandma Fiona. Behind her the sound of rapid gunfire and shouting in Arabic came from the television, followed by a trumpeting of transition music and the opinions of an unseen news anchor.
He took off his hat. “Hi. I’m sorry. You don’t know me, but a friend of mine used to live here in your apartment. And I was wondering. Could I come in for just a minute?”
There was, he knew, no earthly reason this woman should allow him, a total stranger in a slightly disturbing French punk rock T-shirt, to enter her home, but to his surprise she moved away from the door without a word.
“My name is William. Um . . . Mi nombre es William?”
She nodded and walked back over to the big white couch in front of her TV. The floor was covered in scattered trucks and balls and other children’s toys. There were religious paintings on the wall, a Madonna and Child and a few Christs on crosses. Everything seemed to have been recently remodeled. The floorboards were new and fitted together. The walls were white and bumpy, in the way of all New York apartment walls, painted over with each new tenant. If only he could peel it back and see underneath. Would there be smudges and tea stains and fingerprints and stray flecks of oil paint that had once been Irene’s? William moved lightly into the apartment, wondering which of the rooms had been her bedroom. He passed a sideboard table that was being used as an altar. There were photographs of children and grandchildren to be prayed for, and in front of those an arrangement of candles and little statues. A bowl for holy water, and a smaller one with something grainy inside like salt. There was a very nice set of rosary beads carved from a red wood, just next to a little incense burner covered in ash marks.
William stood there and thought about his mother, who would be back at home by now, putting away the tools of her ancient trade: apples and rice cakes and money and tiny paper figures. Iron chains and small boats that she’d waved in the air. Drums and pieces of paper drawn now with letters and symbols. Science and medic
ine were good things, his mother had told him, growing up. To heal diseases, to mend bones, to tend to the sick, the elderly, and the newly born. To do research on AIDS, as Charles did, and to peddle pills and vaccines like Sung-Lee—these were noble things. And lucrative, not to forget that.
But a mudang treated something else. Something that couldn’t be reached with chemicals or seen on X-rays. The thing that causes illness, the thing that comes before viruses and bacteria, even DNA. Uhwan. What she called “misfortune” and others might think of as simple “bad luck,” though it was far worse than that when uhwan began to creep into your life. Just a few things would go wrong at first, but well within the realm of expectations. A setback here, a letdown there, but you keep up, mostly. Bad things happen, but don’t they happen to everyone sometimes? Only like in an undertow at the beach, you are being pulled gradually in the wrong direction. You correct, but you overcorrect. You flail, but this makes it worse. Things fall apart, and you hurriedly glue the pieces back together and cannot ignore the resulting cracks. There isn’t time to do more because other, larger things are going wrong already. Medicine cannot cure the problem. Psychology cannot resolve it. One day you wake up to discover that where once there was one thing wrong, there are now hundreds. Far more is wrong than right. Because misfortune is a plague that begets plagues. What starts as a tiny imbalance creates a ripple effect that can take down empires.
What string of ever-worsening misfortunes preceded Chongso’s accident? What had made Mrs. Kim decide to punish him that morning? What had led him to dare to sneak out on his own to buy the comic book? What had the driver been doing instead of watching the road? No disaster is a singular incident. It is the tsunami that follows the swelling tide. It is the nuclear meltdown that begins when a dozen fail-safes have failed. Before the chemo, before the cancer, before the cell mutation, there is the misfortune. Uhwan.
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