by www. clarkesworldmagazine. com; Jim C. Hines; John A. McDermott; Gord Sellar
“We can’t fix,” she said, “what we don’t know, Max.”
It was well past time they figured it out, he imagined her saying. Well past time.
At eleven-thirty his wife sent another note. “I’m waiting,” she wrote. “Let’s get busy.”
He was already busy. His boss had phoned, said he was stopping by his son’s elementary school to see a play. It would only take an hour, his son had a few lines — ”He’s a tree,” his boss had said. “A freakin’ tree. But my wife told me she’d skin me alive if I didn’t make the effort. I’m making the effort. See, Max, I’m making the effort. You’re goddamn lucky you don’t have kids, Max. Don’t ever do it, Max. I love my son, but kids throw wrenches into everything. It’s raining fucking wrenches. It is rainy, Max.” Max heard a pause on the other end of the line. “Where are the Pickle coats?”
Max was fortunate the cell phone reception deteriorated just then.
“I’ll be in by noon, Max,” his boss said through chunky static. “Noon.”
At eleven-forty his e-mail message center throbbed again.
“Jenny,” he cursed. “I can’t.”
But the note wasn’t from her.
Your password has expired, he read.
“Big whup,” he said.
He deleted it.
His mailbox throbbed.
CHANGE, the next note said. All caps were rude. He deleted that one, too.
Lydia asked if he wanted anything from the deli downstairs. She always asked. Most days he declined. He wasn’t hungry at all. Lydia scolded him for not eating properly.
“Not today,” Max said. “Don’t get on me today. I’m getting enough as it is.”
Lydia’s mouth curved down. She wasn’t one to show her emotions, but he could tell she was hurt. She turned on her short heels and he listened as she punched the down button with more force than usual. He expected her to say, “Fine,” under her breath, the way Jenny would if he’d pissed her off, but Lydia was silent. He could have dealt with a sharp “Fine.” Silence was worse. But why should he eat when he wasn’t hungry, when he was nearly nauseous because a throng of poorly-paid Taiwanese wanted a raise and better hours? Would a bagel and cream cheese cure any of his problems?
He didn’t budge. The elevator came and went and took Lydia’s sulking with it.
The red flag on his mailbox icon waved like Old Glory on the Fourth of July. He could actually see it whip in the electronic wind. Flap, flap, flap. He remembered the sound of empty halyards on the sailboats in the harbor, the high clang of metal on metal. Walking down the steps of the Well Past Time — to the bar, to the bed, he imagined, to paradise, he listened to them clang. The dinging punctuated the whole evening. He opened the new note with the songs of vacant masts still in his mind.
Your old house on Mulberry Avenue — Mulberry1226, to us — burned to the ground last night, the message said. The police are saying the cause was suspicious but may have been faulty wiring. What do you think, Max? You loved that house. Especially the laundry chute in your sister’s room. You dropped all sorts of things down that chute. Tennis balls, GI Joes, a fountain pen. That made a mess. You’ll miss that house.
Max shook his head and read the note again. The elevator doors whined behind him. Others were going to lunch. He heard chatter. Debate about the merits of tacos versus subs.
We told you to change.
His e-mail throbbed again. The red flag waved.
Remember LeRoy2Gone? Your wife didn’t want to put that dog down. She cried in the parking lot of the humane society for twenty minutes before she led Leroy to his death. She’s never quite forgiven you, Max. Do you think she should?
Max swiveled in his rolling chair. He looked at the ceiling. He glanced to each wall of his cubicle. This was a prank. A bad prank. And the dog was dying. He hadn’t given the dog cancer. (He hadn’t been particularly sympathetic either. He knew. He regretted.) There had to be cameras. He was the victim of a practical joke. He was on some television show.
Nothing was noticeably different. The same photos of Jenny were tacked to the cubicle’s stiff fabric sides. His Sierra Club calendar. A crayon drawing of Charity’s — a two-story house with a green lawn and red flowers up the walk. Smoke wafting from the chimney. Clearly, Charity didn’t have a handle on seasons yet. Summer outside, winter inside. You can’t have smoke and flowers.
He deleted the messages and wiped sweat from his forehead, though the building was always set to a comfortable seventy-two degrees. It never fluctuated.
The elevator chimed and he spun in his chair.
“Max. My office in five,” his boss said, the tall man’s stride taking him swiftly past Max’s cubicle and to the glass walls of his private room.
“Yes, sir,” Max said.
His boss paused at his open door. “Two lines, Max,” he said, holding up his right hand and flashing a V. From anyone else it would have meant peace or victory. “Two lines. Welcome to our forest and We grow with rain and light. That’s it.” He shut the door and moments later Max watched the blinds flip closed. They swayed a bit and were still.
It was always a bad sign when the boss went for privacy.
Max’s mailbox was full again.
“It’s almost noon and if you can read this, it means you’re still at work. I suppose we can wait until you get home this evening, Max, but my temperature is just right and I feel it, Max, I feel it. Now is the time. I’m looking out the window as I type this. I hope I see your car pull up the drive. I’m watching. I’m waiting, Max. Your Jenny.”
Max didn’t delete that one. He didn’t file it in the folder marked Jenny. He didn’t know what to do with it.
Another message appeared. Unless you change your password this instant, you will never have the ability to access your incoming mail box ever again. Not ever. We promise. This is not a vague threat, buster. Without your mail, you’re screwed. See if you can get the Pickle coats now. Without us, without the power we give you, you’re royally screwed.
There was a postscript. Wise up, bub. Passwords protect.
Max smacked his armrest and sent the casters on his chair rolling. He slipped off the edge of the cushioned seat. His knee hit the edge of his plastic-and-pressboard desk and he let out a squelched yowl. He clapped his hand over his mouth — realizing that no one really claps a hand over his own mouth, not ever, except in movies, old movies, and here he was, moaning, and swearing behind his own hot palm. He was a parody, but he wasn’t even sure of what. He was an unintelligible parody. Man with hurt knee. Man with irritable boss. Man with insistent, pleading wife. Man with a million Asian dockworkers holding up his order, his order alone among all others, letting everything else go free — cheap suits and furniture and golf balls and satchels — but not his Pickle coats.
“Wretched,” he said as if it were a common curse. “Wretched.” He kicked his chair and it rolled backward to the hallway and came to rest against the elevator door.
It opened and there stood Lydia, her red mouth an O of surprise, her eyes wide behind black-framed glasses. She held a bottle of orange juice in one hand by her side. The other arm she extended. She held out a thick bagel in a thin white paper napkin.
“Max,” she said. “I thought you needed something.”
He looked at her and nodded. He walked to her and took the bagel. Bits of sesame seed flicked off the crust and onto the pale blue carpet.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.” He took a bite and walked to his boss’s office. He chewed and then turned back, his hand on the door’s handle. Lydia was leaning out of the elevator, her head floating above his chair, her chin turned in his direction.
“Thank you,” he said, probably too loud.
“No problem,” she responded.
Max opened the door and stepped inside the dim room. His boss was behind his broad walnut desk, the shiny top littered with brass: a globe paperweight, a clock, a slim and sharp letter opener. “Tell me about the coats, Max.”
And
Max did. He explained the strike. He described the delay — perhaps a day, perhaps a week, perhaps a month, how was Max to know? He hadn’t a crystal ball. Max explained and chewed his dry lunch and let sesame seeds rain on the boss’s better carpet, better than the one in the hall. A richer Berber, a better blue. His boss listened, his eyebrows poised high on his head, a pair of steep arches over his dark eyes.
“So we’ve missed this opportunity, Max,” his boss said.
“I’m afraid so, sir,” Max said, popping the last of the bagel into his mouth. “This time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” his boss said and Max understood, perhaps. The rain would end and the children would dry out and the Pickle coats would remain unsold, gathering dust in silent warehouses and on the rickety tables of discount clothing stores. Another cartoon character would hold sway over the offspring of America. That ship had sailed and Max and his boss and Bender Incorporated hadn’t made a dime. Or maybe it meant Max just lost his job. His next time was done. Max didn’t stay to find out. His boss waved his hand and Max left the dark room and closed the door behind him. The blinds swayed again.
He marched to his cubicle — someone had returned his chair, most likely Lydia — but he didn’t sit down. He bent over the gently humming machine and typed a reply.
My new password is Neveragain.
He tapped his foot and waited for an answer.
Your password must contain a mix of letters, digits, and/or symbols.
Neveragain1.
Thank you. He expected more, an insult, a threat. But no. This is what he got: That’s all we ever wanted, Max. An effort.
His finger hovered, waited, and hit delete.
His mailbox pulsed. Ah, he thought. Here it comes.
Yet this is what he read: “Dear Max. Come home. Forget why. Just…I miss you. That’s why. Your Jenny.”
Max stood straight and brushed bits of bagel off his shirt. He slid the mouse around and turned off his computer. He didn’t need any more mail.
Max was going home to make a baby. He didn’t know if it would work, but he’d try his best. He and Jenny would try, dead dogs and burned houses behind them. He didn’t know the magic words. He didn’t know the right prayer or oath or password. He only knew the question: how do you get it right? What sort of code did he need to use to get it right just this once? That was the password he needed. He didn’t know if it was love or please or now or it’s well past time, but he felt it all and would try to say it, in the right combination, whatever would work to unlock that door and let him and Jenny in: love and please and now and it was well past time.
About the Author
John A. McDermott has been a bad bartender, a worse house painter, a fairly good copywriter, and a better actor. Now he teaches creative writing and American literature at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. A proud native of Madison, Wisconsin, hes not much of a Texan, but his students understand. His stories have appeared in a variety of journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Meridian, Southeast Review, and Zahir.
“How Candle Girl and V Took On 2MB”
by Gord Sellar
It was two long months of candlelight demonstrations in Seoul.
They began on May 2nd. The only blockage the police erected then was a flimsy perimeter round the protest area. But soon, downtown Seoul would fall into a nightly ritual of lockdown at sunset: the adjacent road leading to the Presidential Blue House were blockaded with dozens of grill-windowed “chicken cage” buses from around sundown until early morning. The day protests peaked, on June 10th1, they switched to stacks of greased and sand-filled shipping containers, but this overt symbol of economic globalization egged some protesters on, and waves of ridicule convinced them to switch back to using buses the next day.2 Riot police — mostly college boys doing mandatory military service — were constantly present: holed up in or behind the buses, marching in phalanx, sometimes being pummeled by protesters, and more often doing the pummeling.3 (And sometimes, during lulls, meeting their girlfriends in nearby coffeeshops.) Decontextualized images appeared online, fruiting memes: rampant police brutality, radical demonstrator violence.4
It’s harder to describe the protesters. The rallies varied, sometimes utterly different from day to day, but they began gently. The evening of May 2nd felt like a street festival, a lively crowd chanting and singing with chotbul — candles shrouded in paper cups — in hand. Immediately, left- and right-wing media alike exaggerated the involvement of children in the movement, spinning fantasies of cynical child-exploitation or precocious futurist heroism. In reality, people from all walks of life, and of all ages — grandparents, office workers, pregnant women, and, yes, teenagers — had gathered, even on that first night. The crowds had chanted denunciations of the Korean media and their new President — beseeching both to “wake up,” and decrying both as “garbage” — but they seemed less enraged or frightened than determined and optimistic, and hopeful that their President might listen to what they were saying.
They were talking about beef imports, and concessions he’d made regarding U.S. beef import regulations. Mad cow disease was a focal concern. “You eat madcow!” they ordered the President. It had the look of something bound to fizzle out in a week or two, one among many such protests here. Nobody guessed it would last over two months, paralyzing the government, that sometimes hundreds of thousands would march, that Catholic clergy, urging nonviolence, would lead Buddhists and Protestants into the fray, or that the discussion would dominate news, the Korean Internet, and classrooms.
It wasn’t just about beef, though. This stew roiled and bubbled with political frustrations and fears. Also, certainly, a dash of nostalgia for the thrill of mass solidarity: hordes of red-clad Team Korea supporters had flooded the very same streets5 during the World Cup soccer tournament of 2002 to cheer, chant, and synchro-dance to looping techno too — though, this time, the lyrics were taken from the National Constitution, repeatedly declaring: “South Korea is a democratic nation….”
And another, subtler ingredient distinctly flavored this stew: a blend of SF and fantasy tropes, retooled for Korean society, which defined the rise and fall of this movement.
Michin So
If you want a picture of what terrified Koreans about US beef, imagine a nation with a hoof stomping on it — forever.
And then picture a manically-grinning Korean politician riding on the back of that stomping michin so (”mad cow”), wearing a cowboy hat. It’s oddly cartoon-like, this image, but it drew thousands onto the streets.
Food is a huge deal in Korean society. People talk about food all the time. How hungry or full they are; whether this or that is delicious or not; what and when and where they’re craving. One common greeting in Korean is, “Have you eaten?” Food shows are popular on TV, and no Korean film is complete without characters sharing a meal.
Traditional, essentially magical, concepts still linger. “Long” foods, like eel, are considered good for men’s sexual “stamina.” Kids are given sticky foods before tests so memorized answers will “stick” in their minds. News reports routinely boast of “scientific proof” that kimchi, the emblematic Korean side dish, can fend off everything from SARS and bird flu to stomach cancer. Part of this mythology dictates that locally-produced foodstuffs are somehow healthier for Koreans than imports. Although not universal, this belief is widespread enough to help keep Korean foodstuffs on the market despite cheaper competition, like imported Australian beef.
My point isn’t how wacky those gosh-darned Koreans are. It’s just that food has a special importance in Korean culture, one unparalleled in America. Between food and politics, there’s no contest: political apathy has spread like crabgrass since democracy supplanted dictatorship in the late 1980s. Participation in the last election was among the lowest of any since democracy was achieved here.
Soon after Lee Myung Bak was inaugurated as President of South Korea, his approval ratings collapsed
. One reason (of many) was a decision he’d made as the Seoul’s mayor — not to bother with proper security — contributed to the incineration of a major, treasured national monument called Namdaemun (”The Great South Gate”)6 by a madman, only a week before Lee took office. His characteristically callous response didn’t help matters.
As the monument goes, so goes the nation. Korean society takes inauspicious metonymy seriously. The national mood darkened; doom lurked on the horizon. Still, even then, only one thing could overcome the apathy and launch a sudden, mass political movement… a narrative about food.
Mad Cow, Mad Science, & Mad Scientists
PD Diary is a tabloid TV show, specializing in moral panic over “illicit” foreigner-Korean sex, territorial disputes with Japan , ridiculous urban legends like “fan death.”7 Sometimes, they get things right: PD Diary outed Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk, Korea’s fraudulent stem-cell researcher. But often, it’s just tabloid TV.
On April 29th, 2008, PD Diaryaired an episode8 that was a recipe for panic, combining dystopianism, SF and fantasy tropes, and urban legends to get the political stew roiling furiously. After building a (sham) case upon mistranslations and outright deceptions “proving” a BSE epidemic among American cattle, and a hidden epidemic of variant Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (vCJD) in America, they unveiled their last, horrifying piece of “evidence.” It was a scientific paper by Korean researchers led by Hallym University’s Dr. Jeong Byeong Hun that they claimed “proved” that 94% of Koreans were especially vulnerable to vCJD, because of a genetic predisposition determining how most Koreans synthesize amino acids.
It may sound bizarre, but it caught on for a reason: when Korean education was being rebuilt after the Japanese occupation, a new national consciousness was created upon a myth of racial identity.9 To this day, it echoes in classrooms: We Koreans are of one blood. We have withstood foreign invasions since time immemorial. Little surprise that the idea of a racial susceptibility to distinctly foreign contagion resonated so powerfully.