by Naomi Foyle
She wanted to say no, to tell them why, but the words were trapped inside her, while the fragrance of the miyeok curled around her like a cat demanding to be stroked. Helplessly, in silence, she ate, her tears dissolving in the soup. The doctors and the nurse beamed and chuckled as if she were a child. Finally the bowl was empty and the warmth in her stomach was spreading through her aching limbs. The nurse picked up a folded piece of white linen from the tray and held it out to her.
“It’s a napkin.” Dr. Tae Sun smiled and pointed at his chin, just at the place where on her own face she could feel a spot of soup.
A linen napkin. It was far too beautiful to make dirty, but everyone was looking at her, waiting. Gingerly, Mee Hee dabbed at her mouth as the nurse removed the tray and bustled from the room.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“It is our honor to feed you.” Dr. Dong Sun bowed low.
“I didn’t know you had a twin brother,” she said to Dr. Tae Sun, her voice gaining in strength. “And a doctor, too. Your parents must be very proud.”
The two brothers exchanged glances. Dr. Tae Sun cleared his throat, and Mee Hee crumpled the napkin in her hand. She must have said entirely the wrong thing—what made her think she knew how to speak to doctors?
But when Dr. Tae Sun spoke, his voice was quiet and kind. “If our parents were still alive, they would be very proud and happy to know we are together at last.”
Boldly, she dared to meet his gleaming eyes, but it was his brother who continued the story.
“We were separated as infants, you see, when our uncle escaped from the North.” Dr. Dong Sun leaned against the bed frame with the air of a man accustomed to attention. “He walked across the frozen Yalu River, with me bundled underneath his coat. Our father had died, and our mother—”
“—who was very ill—” Che Tae Sun piped up.
His brother nodded briskly. “—begged him to take us both—”
“—but he couldn’t carry two babies—”
“—as well as everything he needed to survive.”
“Uncle walked all the way to Seoul with Dong Sun and when he got there, he brought him up as if he were his own son.” Dr. Tae Sun swept on. “All his life my twin was determined to find me and now, by a miracle, we have been brought together again.”
“But . . . how—?” Mee Hee gaped at the doctors, so caught up in the story she almost forgot to cover her mouth with her hand. Of course she knew of countless people who yearned to be reunited with their families in the South, but she had never before heard of it really happening.
Dr. Dong Sun brandished his clipboard in a gesture of triumph. “Our mother recovered, and she lived long enough to see my brother became a doctor—and such a good doctor that one day he was permitted to attend a conference in China. Because of this, his photo was put up on a website, where Dr. Kim, my employer, saw it. When she told me, I was so happy I thought my heart would burst, and Dr. Kim was nearly as excited as I was. She has many friends in the medical world, and so she arranged for my brother to be invited to another conference, one that she could also attend.”
Website. Conference. Mee Hee scrambled for a thread of meaning. “Did you go too?” she asked Dr. Dong Sun.
“Of course I wanted to. Desperately. But that would have alerted my brother’s colleagues; they would think that he would surely want to leave them. So I had to be patient. But Dr. Kim was on our side and I knew that if I waited, I would soon have my brother with me forever.”
The doctors’ faces were glowing, and for a moment Mee Hee was a little girl again, being told a story by her grandfather. But at the same time it was difficult to believe that anything—the room, the two identical doctors, the miracle of their reunion—was real. If she fell asleep and woke up again, she might be back in the box, or shivering in her hut in her village. She tugged the sheet up to her chest.
“Dr. Kim is the woman who has brought us all together.” Dr. Tae Sun leaned forward, his round face suddenly looking anxious. “I mentioned the scientist to you in your village. Do you remember what I said? What I asked you to do for Dr. Kim?”
Mee Hee nodded. “Yes, I remember,” she whispered, and her heart trembled briefly, as it had in the rice paddy behind her hut when she was showing Dr. Tae Sun the graves: the fresh mound covering her mother-in-law’s shrunken body, and the turtle stone above the tiny sack that held her son. There, out of sight of the village, he had explained about the food-aid truck, and offered her the chance to come away, to help him and his employer, Dr. Kim. She hadn’t exactly understood what he’d wanted, or even really believed him, and yet her heart had stirred for the first time since her baby had died.
“I know why I am here,” she said in a louder voice.
“Good, good.” Dr. Tae Sun patted her hand, and when she remained motionless, he awkwardly withdrew and fiddled with his watch.
“Dr. Kim was very brave at the conference,” Dr. Dong Sun continued vigorously.
Dr. Tae Sun nodded in agreement. “She passed me a note saying she worked with my brother, and she told me to be patient, that she would communicate with me somehow. Later, while we were standing in an elevator, she slipped her name-card and a satellite handi-phone into my pocket.”
“A what phone?” Mee Hee whispered.
“A handi-phone—the best in the world.” With a flourish, he drew a small silver object out of his coat pocket. He did something to it and it opened up, displaying buttons on one side and a colorful screen on the other. “Made in Japan, powered by solar energy. With it you can call anyone you like, from anywhere in the world.”
“Ah.” She didn’t dare touch it. He deftly snapped it shut again and replaced it in his pocket.
“My brother has also been extremely courageous,” Dr. Dong Sun announced, standing up as straight as the Wise Young Leader awarding a medal. “He smuggled the handi-phone back into North Korea and for the past two years he has been calling Dr. Kim and me from Pyongyang. Just owning the phone is illegal, so he took a great risk, and endangered his own life many times to bring you and all your sisters into China. We can never repay him.”
Dr. Dong Sun regarded Mee Hee expectantly, as if waiting for her to break into applause, but she was barely listening anymore. She closed her eyes as she leaned back against her pillow. Did she really know nothing at all? First, in the rice paddy, the doctor had told her that the ramyon he had brought to the village in the truck was not a gift from the Wise Young Leader but food-aid from the South and other Western nations. Now he had shown her what he said was a telephone, but looked like a metal clamshell, and he had happily told her it was made in the land of the kidnappers, the rapists of Korean women, the colonizers. A damp chill stole over her body. Who had put her in this nightdress? Why hadn’t they given her a yo to sleep on instead of this dizzying metal bed? And how did she even know where she was?
Fearfully, she peeked up at the doctors, half-expecting them to be grinning with the sharpened teeth of the Japanese soldiers in her schoolbooks, but instead they were nervously exchanging glances, with identical—almost comical—expressions of dismay. She loosened her grip on the sheet.
“Am I in Beijing?” she whispered weakly.
Dr. Dong Sun made another note on his chart. “She’s tired,” he said sternly to his brother. “We mustn’t strain her with our stories.”
“Yes, you are safe in Beijing,” Dr. Tae Sun declared. “You are in a small hotel, which we’ve rented entirely for you and your sisters and your caretakers. You are sharing the room with another woman from your province. You must sleep now, we’ll return later.”
Exhausted, Mee Hee slid back beneath the sheets. She was asleep before the doctors had closed the door.
4 / The White Line
All Damien wanted was a stiff G&T, but Jake had warned him on no account was he to get pissed. He had to breathe deeply instead: breathe deep. That counselor, years ago, had once said: Jessica’s still connected to you, she’s part of you: like oxygen
, like all the atoms that make up the universe. He’d done visualization exercises in their weekly sessions, which, amazingly, had eventually worked. He’d started to be able to nip his flashbacks in the bud, and one day he realized they just weren’t tripping him up anymore. Now, when he thought about his sister he imagined her just floating out there, like some black hole he’d one day get sucked into but didn’t need to worry about now. He hadn’t felt this burning, bottomless fear for a long time, not even when Dad died.
Gradually the lungfuls of stale cabin air diluted his panic and the memory emerged: hide-and-seek in the cemetery after church, Jessica in a blue dress, hiding behind a tombstone, laughing, just a bit of her blue dress visible. He hadn’t remembered any of that before. No, that wasn’t exactly true: he remembered the graveyard clearly, and he knew they used to play in it, but only because Dad had talked about it once. But he’d forgotten so much of what happened before Jessica disappeared.
Dad. Jessica. Was he thinking about them because of the argument he’d had with Mum before he left?
“You want me to pay your airfare to Korea?” she’d asked, incredulous. “Damien, you’re thirty-five years old and you’ve done nothing but drift around your entire life. When are you going to grow up?”
He’d held the MoPho away from his ear and tried to keep his cool. “Mum, once I get there I’ll be earning good money—I’ll pay you back before Christmas. Plus, I won’t be on housing benefit anymore, so you’ll have one less thing to complain about, okay?”
“That’s what you said when Gordon and I paid for that sound engineering course. A year later you were on the dole again.”
He couldn’t stop himself then. “Christ, Mum, I graduated at the start of a fucking world-wide economic collapse—which, frankly, Gordon helped cause!”
“Oh, Damien.” Here it came again: the heavy sigh, the catch in the voice, the tears and then the simmering incrimination rising to a crescendo to finish him off: “Why is it always like this? What happened to you? Where did my lovely, talented, bright little boy go? I can’t just keep giving you money, Damien—I’m not helping you, really I’m not. You need to stand on your own two feet, make something of yourself, to honor Jessica if nothing else. What would she think of you now? Wasting all your precious gifts.”
She’d never gone that far before. “Shut the fuck up about Jessica,” he’d demanded, and hung up without saying goodbye.
Damien opened his eyes. There was a reason he spoke to his mother twice a year and thought about his family as little as humanly possible. At least his temperature felt normal again now, and his stomach was back down at Quease Level 3. But Christ, no Tomb Raider, no Spore, no spirits, no lager; plus his dead sister haunting him, six double-bagged condoms of hash in his guts and a cement-filled case of self-inflicted constipation. This was going to be a fuck of a long flight.
“You like water?”
The stewardess had reappeared with a bottle of IceCap and a corn-plastic cup. He didn’t like the fact he was drawing attention to himself, but water was a good idea. He nodded thanks and took the cup—desalinated Atlantic, not his favorite H2O, but they all had to do their bit to lower sea levels.
The stewardess poured the water. “Thanks,” he mumbled as she twisted the cap back on the bottle.
“Why you come Korea?” she asked.
Afraid he would blush again, he avoided meeting her gaze—but hey, maybe a little special attention from the female of the species was just what Dr. Jake would have ordered.
“I’m visiting a friend,” he told her. Good rehearsal for the passport officer.
“Friendship flower of life,” she informed him, gravely. “Is Korean saying.”
He risked a smile up at her. “I’ll remember that.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. “Uh!” she gasped, “you look like Hu-gee Grant!”
Hu-gee Grant? Who the f—? Oh, right: Hu-gee thanks. So all his organic eco-nonsense metrosexual skincare routines had done nothing then. From beneath his floppy fringe, Damien beseeched her, “You do mean his son, don’t you?”
She giggled, just a normal laugh, nothing to freak out about. “Oh yes, you very young look.”
“Thank you.” Emboldened, he ventured, “So do you.”
“Oh no, I very old,” she said, a look of distress sweeping over her face.
He’d managed to upset her with a compliment? Christ, what was he supposed to say now?
To his relief, she recovered her composure. “You need anything, press button,” she told him.
Actually, there was something he wanted—something that would answer a few questions and take his mind off his fucked-up family. “Do you have a Korean newspaper? In English, I mean?”
She gasped again. “You want read Korean news?” So he’d made up for his disastrous attempt at flirtation, then. “I bring, right away.”
He watched her lovely bottom sway back down the aisle. She tripped back moments later with a copy of The Korean Herald. He unfolded it with pleasure—fuck iPads; reading foreign papers always made him feel like a le Carré spy, an “old hand.” And today he even had a proper covert agenda.
At Heathrow, the UK papers had all devoted their front pages to the news that the global rise on pre-industrial average temperatures had now reached one point two degrees Celsius. The Times had predicted that the World Cup would be swamped by a British monsoon; the Independent had warned of a world dominated by hurricanes, disease, crop failure and mass extinctions; the Guardian, to celebrate Summer Solstice, had sent a lifestyle journalist to interview a Druid. Damien had avidly scanned this article and bingo, there it was: “What about Lucifer’s Hammer?” the journo had inquired. “Is a two-mile-wide meteor really hurtling toward Earth as we speak? And if so, will it land at Stonehenge?”
To give the beardo his due, the Druid hadn’t risen to the bait. “Let us hope not,” he’d replied. “Our ancestors built Stonehenge after the period of global darkness that followed the Australian Ocean meteors of six thousand years ago. They needed to know that if such a catastrophe were ever to re-occur, they would be able to gauge from the stars the right time to plant their spring seeds. If for whatever reason—meteors, mega-volcanoes, nuclear catastrophe—human civilization has to start again from scratch, we’re going to need those stones.”
This bloke obviously had his solar-paneled yurt all kitted out in Wales. Damien had put the paper back in the stand, wishing the Druid luck when half the population of Liverpool and Greater Manchester arrived, ripping up the crops with their stilettos and crashing their Chelsea tractors into the wind turbines. Or whatever they called Chelsea tractors in the North—Chester tractors, probably. Though they’d be more like armored tanks when survivalist Britain’s long-simmering tribal warfare finally kicked off. Which, even if the Hammer hit the Moon instead of Earth, was going to be soon. Globally, a new drought, flood or economic crisis was reported practically every week.
What freaked Damien out though, was that hardly anyone in the UK seemed to be taking the situation seriously. The broadsheets loved an alarmist headline, but after reading the average Sunday paper one would be forgiven for thinking global warming was a cunning plot to force people to buy Fairtrade chocolate. Even the Indy believed that at worst the great British public might have to accept fewer baths and obligatory candlelit dinners. And all of them scoffed at the Hammer theorists. Is this complacency confined to Europe? he’d wondered as he’d waited to board the plane; how was South Korea preparing for the coming eco-apocalypse?
In a leisurely manner, it appeared. The front page of The Korean Herald boasted a photo of Seoul office workers sunning themselves during their lunch-break, secure in the knowledge that their country was building eight new nuclear reactors, despite national riots against them. Snorting to himself, Damien scanned the article: a government minister deplored Korea’s alarming expenditure on carbon credits from Sierra Leone; an environmental campaigner warned of torrential rains, coastal flooding, another Fukushima, vats of r
adioactive waste already sitting for years above ground because no one wanted them buried in their own backyard. In other words, Korea was a complete policy mess, just like everywhere else.
Damien stretched his legs beneath the seat in front of him. Plan Can was definitely the only game in town. When the Hammer hit and seven billion people all stampeded for safety at once, the chance of finding somewhere reasonably stable to live would be zero; cool dudes needed to take action well in advance. He still had to convince Jake to help him, but the fact that Korea, climate change-wise, was a big fat sweating duck would only make his case more persuasive.
Do they eat duck in Korea, he wondered? And what else did Koreans worry about apart from the cost of banging up thousands of environmental protestors? He flipped through the rest of the paper. In contrast to the UK news, there was very little coverage of the NATO bombardment of Pakistan; instead there were long articles on the new famine in North Korea, the Russian invasion of Estonia and the Chinese take-over of Taiwan. The famine, the worst since the nineties, had been intensified by the new leader’s rejection of international relief, while the Americans were using the two putsches as excuses to build new military bases in Poland and Pusan, on the south coast of the Korean peninsula—Pusan? That rang a bell. Didn’t Jake go there once for a film festival and end up sleeping with a Russian hooker by mistake?
Damien stuffed the paper into the seat pocket. The smell of microwaved tomatoes was invading the plane. The last thing he wanted to do was eat, but Jake had said it would be suspicious not to. He’d better get rid of the pill packet now, before he forgot.
He managed to get to the loo without fainting this time. On his way back to his seat another pretty stewardess batted her eyelashes at him. Was she also confusing him with a washed-up film star? To take his mind off this deeply worrying possibility he tracked through the music channels—rubbish as usual—then waited for his dinner, rice with hake in tomato stew. After the meal, he wrapped himself in his blanket and began to compose a soundtrack in his head: a peaceful skull-space of ambient industrial disintegration, a clicking abacus and the chiming of grandfather clocks. Throw in some Meshmass and the latest Noise Merchant mix and it was almost a lullaby . . . apart from the anvil and Hammer . . .