I reply with a look.
Come here, he says. Come on. I’ve been looking it over again, and will probably never allow it out of its case again. Not while I’m alive. He takes me into the library. A letter in two pages, under glass.
They were renovating an old building, and it sort of fell in, in the cellar, he says. They came across the spire of an ancient cathedral, buried shallowly and unfinished. The letter was found in the top of the spire. Here’s my translation.
1361. Edinburgh. I do not know the day, since they were abolished. A last letter. To whomever finds it, whenever they have heart enough to dig.
This was to be a cathedral built for Robert II, but now is mine.
I had fallen asleep. A fever had come over me and I had left my house, where I had been a boarder. I was the last one, I think, of those who hadn’t left and were not dead. In any case the house was empty and I sought the company of our Lord, even though I was soon to have it.
Our area had been set off, and no one was allowed to enter or to leave. The death rolls for this street of the township had increased so quickly and stayed so high that soon no one was coming in to bury the dead. They were being left, and sometimes a house would burn, to indicate that everyone in that family had passed. Being unable to partake of a regular service at the church, I came here instead. And I had been so unhappy, and so afraid, I tried, here in the unfinished cathedral, to make some peace in myself toward what my fate would be, when this fever ended.
I hadn’t expected this.
I do not know how it is they have succeeded, by what art they have buried us. But they have. No light fills the windows. When I look from the door, I see a narrow and dangerous tunnel, the roof timbered. Piles of dirt are there. Refuse. And I am sure the smell is not just from the dead left here, but from those brought over and thrown here. Since we are a street of graves anyway. And so the air is foul and close, and there is now a stink that I suspect to be myself. I am lucky, I think, that the boils on me arrive now, where no one will try to burn them with irons. I am given to remembering now, how a friend had said, of the Black Death, that the leprosariums are now closed. The lepers being dead. Soon, all will be dead.
I am Andrew Hunter. I am a Norman, my family recently given over charge of the forests of Arran. I had come here to study stoneworks. In particular, I had been interested in a Roman bridge, back in Normandy, where my family is from, made of coursed stones, and made so that the water passing could pass through the stones, even as the bridge stood. Many days I spent looking at the bridge, studying the construction. But I am not sore, for surely it is Gods work that I be here. Surely it is Heaven’s own intent that I be here, alive, to record what has been done. For no one will write of it otherwise, a record of what happened here. I do not doubt, the new death roll is simply the number of the souls buried here, and the name of the road. I do not doubt.
Mostly I fear the rats, gruesome and huge and black. They fear my candlelight, what I can draw from these tapers left here. Meant for future services, now to be burned only for this. There are, as far as I can tell, no survivors beside myself, at least that can move. Sometimes I think I hear a moan, but it is hard to know if it is the new weight of the earth above us, or someone, still long in dying, in their home. I haven’t eaten in a time past remembering, but it matters little to me. I have burned three of these tapers. The fourth burns now, recently begun. And I find myself hoping, even here in this hell, and surely, this must be hell; hoping to live long enough to have burned the thirty tapers all. For even here my life is precious to me, precious remembrance alive in this dark. Though now I fear losing the candle to the dark before I lose myself.
3 Tapers more
I have slept. I have woken. My fever is gone. I have survived the Death but am unlikely, it seems, to survive the cure of the city. Exploring the cathedral, I found the tower. It is spoked by timber supports that wind up in the manner of a stair, and I think I can climb it. It occurs to me that there is a chance I could crawl out the top. Though I would, of course, be carrying on me the Death. As I looked up, through the struts above me, my candle jumped, which told me the air moved. A breeze.
I remember the Italian who came to the city to try and instruct us, on how to avoid the Death. He looked like Death. He wore a robe and a hook-nosed mask, and a hood. This is what we wear to avoid the Death, he told us. We laughed at him. He moved among us in the streets, his eyes hidden in the mask, but I felt, in his passing, the laughter that followed. Not of how strange he looked but of how there was nothing we could do. Looking at him, we knew, this wasn’t for Scotland. Robes and masks. We’d all be dead instead. And Italy rule the world.
It was Rome brought us this, I heard one man say, after the Italian went by. Bat I knew it wasn’t. Hand him a scythe, somebody, said another, and then there was more laughter. If I were to make my return, I suppose I could dress like that. Protect people from me. Disguise myself from those who know me to be dead.
There’s no more to it, Speck says, when he can tell that I’m done reading.
In the kitchen, where his housekeeper has left us a supper, we eat quietly at a Formica table, each looking off into separate corners. And then he looks up from his plate and he says, I’ll be leaving soon, in a few weeks more.
New York in the summer, I say.
Yes, he says. Delightful. Everyone bad leaves. All my friends are gone off to colonies and the like, and I can get some work done.
It’s the most beautiful thing in the world, I say.
He doesn’t pause. Yes, it is, he says. I thought so too.
They buried the whole neighborhood, I say.
Yes, he says. They’re giving tours now, sometimes. But it’s terribly unsafe. Won’t last. Just wait until some visiting mayor is trapped and that will end right quick.
At home, in bed, I imagine the fresco of Edinburgh from Specks ceiling on my own. Trace a tunnel down through. Before going to bed I had looked through a book of my mother’s, a guide to Scottish clans. Hunter, it said, had the motto, “I finish the hunt.” It was a dog, sitting on a crown, for the crest.
Disguise myself from those who know me to be dead. I see him crawl the timber supports. See him place the letter. Did he jump down to his death? Or did he indeed leave? Could he? In this way I keep myself awake until the morning. Blue outside my window turns to spreading white, to show me, in greater degrees, the shadow of my grandfather practicing the slow dance of his life. The colors of the morning world.
7
THERE’S A HOLE in me the size of you, from where you came through.
Edinburgh, after the Plague.
I begin building the tunnels. On a hilltop past the greenhouse where I meet Zach regularly now, to drink, I find a cellar, old-fashioned, dirt for a floor, and nothing remaining above except a few burned timbers. The tall grass hides it from the road, frames the squared-off divot here. A check with Town Hall confirms the lot is for sale but has been for thirty years. A farm here burned to the ground, 150 years ago, and nothings been built since. Until now.
I work on it through the year and a half remaining before college. I build a cross, inside the hill. Crude, but the winds move through. An interrogated hill. I work there with a spade, carting the dirt off to the marsh’s edge, my back aching, but the beauty of work is that it builds you while you build. I become stronger. I have my shovel out there now, the wheelbarrow also. Two years of shoveling makes a spade out of my back, narrow at the bottom, wide at the top. You’re really filling out, my mother says to me on a day near the tunnel’s completion.
Thanks, I say, grabbing an apple with slight exaggeration as I head for the door.
The first tunnel went by in two months of digging. The second had to wander around submerged deposits of bedrock. I pushed the last dirt aside and walked all the way through, end to end to end to end. Four corners here. I had read about the pyramids, burial mounds, but for me nothing matched my Edinburgh, my streets paved over, my city under a city.
&n
bsp; In the winter, from the hilltop, you can see through the trees to Spurwink church, a white steeple there on the corner, presiding over the road and the graves in the yard behind it, the marsh farther out. Down below, in the hill, I have set sconces in the walls, for torches, citronella to keep out the mosquitoes. The floor is slate. I go down. The secret of the king of the hill is that he rules it from underneath. In the dark, I smoke. I sing, sometimes, pretending it is the Plague years, and that I have been left here to die in the buried city, to sing songs for the dead. Other times I think of Peter.
One day I come home from Specks and my grandfather is waiting for me, smiling. You like old things, he says, right? I set my books down and follow him back to his quarters. Under his bed, wrapped in a blanket, is something preposterous. A cannon. Bronze. Unbelievably ugly. Short and thick. Where’s it from? I ask.
I get from G.I., he says. But is Portuguese. Very old. Sixteenth century. They give to Korea, to help keep Korea safe. Long, long time ago. G.I. take it, but he need something and so he give me it.
I remember the pictures of my grandfather on his boat. A very long fishing vessel. G.I.s, I was sure, probably had occasion to need a few things. You like it, he asks. Look. Have firing piece. Also, cannonballs.
Yeah, I say. Gramps, we could declare war.
He laughs so hard at this tears come down his face. And later I realize this is probably the only time I have seen him cry.
I want to fire it.
When I tell Speck about it, he laughs. Sure, he says. The spice trade. But really. It’s worth a fortune. Keep an eye on it, and don’t let him use it in any arguments.
I tell Mom. We, she says, setting out the plates for dinner, have never had a normal family. But promise me, she says. Don’t go telling anyone. Because, and she sighs. Because he didn’t ask if he could take it. Korean national treasures, she says. They are a tenacious bunch about it. Almost everything they had was taken from them. Here, she says, and lifts the lid on a pot of American chop suey. Taste this.
8
THE SURVIVOR GETS to tell the story. Have you figured out who survives yet? Zach calls me one afternoon. We haven’t spoken for most of the summer, the weeks quiet from the sound of us not calling each other. It’s over three years since the trial, three months since we last had sex. And then a night shortly after that, he had driven over and asked me, Do you think I’m gay?
He leans his head against the windshield of his car, where we sit to talk in private, in the driveway of my house. Zach’s two older brothers had been harassing him about getting a girlfriend. He’d told them to lay off. They’d told him to get laid. I roll down the window.
What we did, I say, wasn’t . . .
What?
We were kids, I say. Experiments. You know. No, I don’t think you’re gay.
You don’t.
Nope. You’re not like me.
As soon as I had said it, everything about us became the past tense. As soon as I said, did. Did. What we did. You’re not like me. When I said that, I saw that he wouldn’t be. And so I hear from him next on an afternoon when I am thinking of how we are both to leave for school soon, how I am going to Korea before that happens, to see relatives. Zach calls. Meet me at the greenhouse, he says. Tonight.
I am apprehensive. He had developed friends who bored me so quickly the protective sounds of my own thoughts swept over me and shut out the sounds of them almost as soon as they said hello. As soon as they started talking to me, I heard my own voice about them, saying things I couldn’t say out loud, knowing it would offend them. In the way a pianist won’t shake hands, my ears don’t listen, if they sense a bone-crushing squeeze lies in wait.
All right, I say. I’ll meet you there at around eight. How’s everything?
Everything’s fine, he says. Outside, the night opens above us like a whale’s jaw, a blue, deepening wedge.
In the hours before I meet him Zach takes a walk through his house. He picks a shotgun from its closet, roots through the cupboard for shells, takes the long way out of his house as he shoulders a jacket and finds his keys. He drives there in record time, parks the car far from the road. He knows where to park to avoid the eyes of passing police, and even watches from the car as a patrol car rolls by in the sunset hour. He goes to the greenhouse and sits for some time, I imagine, looking up, through the broken panes. Would he look at the sky or at the glass in front of it? He must have struggled some with the shotgun, as it wasn’t long enough for him to use his toe to hook the trigger, but it wasn’t short enough to easily pull with one’s hands. Though as I write this, I see it wasn’t one’s hands, was it? They were his, probably aided by a twig, dropped once the shells took off the top of his head from the inside out.
That part is imagined. This is what I see, once I arrive: a crow sits on his chest. The wings shoot up, defensive, as if to say, It’s dead, isn’t it? The crow blinks its black wings, folds enough air to take to the sky. On my way back to my car, to go and get the police, a fox crosses my path. He darts a look over his shoulder, and when he sees me, turns back to where he’s going, and seems to leap out into the air and vanish.
Everything can fly tonight, I tell myself, except you.
I would have to be fast. I gun my engine away, to go right to the police station. So that the animals don’t get him.
9
TO THIS DAY I can see the fox take flight. In Korea that summer, where I am sent to visit my family there with my grandparents, my grandfather tells me how the fox is the most important animal in all of Korea. My grandmother clucks her tongue as she sets our ginseng tea on the table. We are at his sister’s house in Seoul and she and his sister have been talking since we arrived. My grandfather has been quiet. Most important to you, my grandmother says, headed back to the kitchen. The fox, my grandfather continues, very clever. Eat everything. When it can. Smarter. Not most strong. Smarter.
My grandmother returns. Most important animal in Korea is here, she says, and taps my head with a kiss. This one, and then she laughs, returning to the kitchen to wait while we eat.
I’m there to do a pilgrimage for my grandfather’s sisters. Our family shrine is on Moolsan-do, an island off the coast of Korea where my family has been for generations, and so after the visit in Seoul, where my relatives complain of how thin I am, they stick us into a wide train. We take the train until the rails stop and then a cab until the roads stop and then a ferry, out to the middle of a sea so blue and beautiful it looks like God’s own tear.
Moolsan-do means water mountain. In my imagination, before my arrival, I think of Moolsan-do as being like a wave, towering in the sea, held in place forever by some arcane force, and as we arrive, the island does look like a wave at first, rising against the horizon as we approach. Up close, the real Moolsan-do looks like a mountain submerged by flood, with only a few beaches, most of the coast rocky and dark. The ferry’s in no danger of running aground, the water is deep. There’s one taxi, my grandfather tells me, as the ferry gets closer. Two teahouses, he adds, and one hotel, and 200 people, me related to approximately 110 of them. The other ninety being, by his guess, “new arrivals.” He laughs as he says this. I step one leg off the boat onto the pier and feel the steep rock of the boat as I do so. The wind pulls on me. I lean into it, and steady my grandparents as they disembark. They smile at each other as they slip past me, getting their bearings. They look like they have a secret, as if they’re being welcomed by spirits hidden in the wind pressing at us, haunted for a moment, but by happiness. I step fully off the ferry’s plank, and the tanned sailors grin and run on board to remove the cargo of baggage and food. I follow my grandparents, taking in the town at one glance down the short street by the pier. I count off everything my grandfather mentioned.
As they have regularly throughout the trip, my grandparents regard me then with furtive glances that end in a smile for me and a nod. My grandfather knows about hauntings, it occurs to me now. Here was where he knew his sisters, here was what he remembered,
every day, in his Imperial school, as the Japanese grammar spread inside him, as he learned the language of the people who took his sisters and destroyed them. All his thoughts come to him in Japanese first, his dreams in Japanese also. As they cross the wooden pier, as he tenderly helps my grandmother into the green taxi, as he laughs with the cab driver, I think of how every single thing he says in Korean comes across a pause where the Japanese is stilled and the Korean brought forward. Each part of speech a rescue.
Sunlight around my grandfather now as he waves to me, where I stand among my thoughts. Come, come, he says. Come meet driver.
I come toward him, shake the driver’s hand, and we set out for the temple at the island’s other side. He knows, the thought comes to me. He knows I cannot talk. He knows I am trying to learn how to talk. My tongue heavy from death, my words scattering off my ghosts, who can only watch, mute at what I am trying to do as everything I try to say fails.
Driver says you are very handsome, my grandfather says, laughing. Say you look like Zhe.
I meet the driver’s eye in the rearview mirror, where it waits for me, and I smile.
At the polished stone temple, we kneel and pray, leave food, enough for a small beautiful lunch, for the dead. We take turns and throw soju for them. I trace the characters with a finger, unable to read them. There’s no mounds for the sisters. My grandfather doesn’t know the day they died, only the day they were taken. He doesn’t have a single grave. Only Moolsan-do. When I take my turn to pray, I ask to be helped. And hope that prayers can arrive translated.
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