by Jimin Han
“What are we going to do? You think he knows who I am? It’s not just you he’s following?” My heart was jumping out of my chest. Where was the man Lloyd said was following him? I pulled Lloyd’s arm off me finally and tried to be discreet about examining the people around us. We were behind the dining hall now, heading toward my dorm.
“I’m sorry, did I hurt you?” he asked and moved his hand toward my head, but I jerked away before he touched me. “I know it’s scary, shit, I was scared, but you can’t let it show. You know what I mean? You can’t let them know you know,” he continued. Then he put his hand on his jeans and rubbed it hard. He cleared his throat. “What’s wrong with you? Why’re you mad at me?”
“I’m not.” I was busy looking around. Were we actually in danger?
“Okay, he’s gone,” Lloyd said. “Slow down.”
“How do you know?” I picked up my pace.
“Hey, he’s gone. Slow down, will you?”
I stopped abruptly and caught my breath. “We’ve got to tell the police. Campus first or go straight to the town police? Which?”
“Police? They won’t believe us. I tried that in the city. They locked me up and called my parents.”
“They can’t do that. Why would they do that? When did they do that?”
“Keep your voice down. Yoona, they looked up my record, but it was dumb. It wasn’t for anything, but they locked me up. Trust me, they won’t believe us.”
“What record?”
“You know, community stuff. Forget it; we’re on our own.”
“Community-activism stuff?”
“Yeah, like that. Hey, Daiyu’s always getting hurt, why is that?” He chuckled. I stared at him. Lloyd seemed completely at ease now. He paused. “I thought I saw her just now, that’s why.”
I let out a breath. I was exhausted, and he must be too. I’d been certain we’d be found under the desk in Dean Olin’s room, and I’d be expelled. “She’s uncoordinated,” I said, answering his question about Daiyu. In front of us, in the doorway of one of the dorms, was an Asian man who looked older than the undergrads. He had on a white button-down shirt and khaki pants. He was smoking in the doorway. Was he one of them?
“They know who we are. The man in the blue hat, one o’clock.” Lloyd’s voice lowered. A boy I recognized from my Intro to Asian Lit class was staring at us. He always wore a Yankees baseball cap. “He’s a student here,” I said to Lloyd.
“That’s what you think,” he returned.
“Where do you know him from?”
“He might have been in the car with us, with me and Jaesung.”
“Wait, you said you were in separate cars.”
“For part of the trip. They made us switch outside of Seoul.”
“You never told me that. You and Jaesung were in the same car for part of the time?”
“I got it. He followed me the first night I got here. The one with the baseball hat.”
“You sure about the guy in my Asian lit class? You sure he’s the one who’s been following you?” I said.
“The first night I came up here.”
“You said no one followed you.”
“I lost him. But that was him. I remember that hat.”
“A hat? You think because he was wearing a hat?”
He looked confused. Then he nodded. “You’re right, we’ve got to split up. I’ve brought them right to you, and now you’re in danger too.” He covered his face with his hands.
“Stop, Lloyd, stop, please. We should go to the police. They’ll see we’re right. They’ll see the man outside my dorm. We’ll talk and figure it out. Come on, not here,” I said. He followed along as if on a leash, his head hanging.
I heard laughter behind us.
It was Daiyu and Faye, holding napkins full of sweet rice cake in their hands. Lloyd fled, and I watched him go with a nervous knot in my stomach. Even as Lloyd’s story started to unravel, I told myself he was nervous, that they’d scared him. He’d been through a lot. He was the last one to see you, and you had to be alive. I still wanted to believe you were alive.
73
The sound of helicopters overhead in the distance fills the room. Lloyd’s mouth opens, broadcasting bewilderment. Faye starts screaming, “They’re coming, finally, oh my god.”
“Shut up, Faye,” Heather says, but Lloyd doesn’t react. The helicopter engine grows louder still.
“Lloyd, what’s happening?” I ask and take a few steps toward him.
GET BACK ON THE BED, OR ELSE. He’s snapped back. I do as he says. He pockets the handgun and stretches for the shotgun leaning against the wall.
“It’ll be over soon,” I say to myself, but I must have said it aloud too, because Faye agrees and says, “Thank god, we made it.”
74
There’s a hard knot inside my chest, and it says, as it has said when I’ve helped my mother after one of my father’s rages, Don’t forget this. And it makes me look at Lloyd now at the window with the same kind of disgust and resolve. I will never put myself in this position with a crazy man again. And there’s not even room for you. I’m angry at you for making me vulnerable to someone like him. “He didn’t mean any of this,” you would say. I know. You would forgive him even this. That day after the blowup at the mandu place, you’d said to me, “We all need to be loved in our own way.”
“He can’t take out his anger like that,” I’d replied.
“He’s never known real love, Yoona. But he’ll get there. He just needs to know he’s loved no matter what. We all need that.”
I didn’t agree with you, but I didn’t want to tell you either. I couldn’t admit to you then that I was more like Lloyd than like you.
And this? All this today? Love? Lloyd isn’t capable of love. He can call it what he wants, but it’s not love. Yeah, I’m sick of it too. The word: love. You and love and love and love. I hate it now because of Lloyd. I hate the word too. Yes, love. He’s ruined all of it by constantly using that word. Love? I’m sick of it.
75
My mother sounded concerned when she called. “Your classes going well?” she asked. I didn’t tell her I’d been looking for a job and that all of them were minimum wage, which would not be nearly enough for two plane tickets to North Dakota.
“How’s Dad?”
“Fine, work is fine.”
“Did he get that promotion he wanted? He’s not stressed?”
“No. But don’t you worry about it. He’ll be happy to know you’re doing well in your classes. You sure you’re doing all right? I mailed you some money. It’s not much, but your father insisted I send it. Your father said whatever you need for school. He’s very concerned about you, he told me.” I couldn’t quite believe my father expressed concern, but my mother sounded earnest.
“I love you, Mama,” I blurted out. I hadn’t planned on it, but there was this feeling, rising over and over, waves of premonition that I’d never see her again.
“What’s wrong? Are you sure?”
I steadied my breath. “I miss you, that’s all,” I said.
“Wait, Willa just came in, she wants to talk to you. Be careful, Yoona, the flu is going around. Rest up,” my mother said.
My sister had stopped talking as much about converting me to her religion. She was taking classes at the community college and was hanging out with a boy we both knew named Albert Park. An old friend of ours, actually. The son of a family friend. I didn’t like his mother, because she used to look at my mother so pityingly when we ran into her at the grocery store. How many times can someone break her arm? her eyes seem to be saying when my mother had yet another cast. But I didn’t mind Albert. He wouldn’t lure Willa to some fanatical religious sect. She had said she’d never date a Korean guy, so I didn’t suspect it was anything more than a friendship. Thinking of Lloyd, I told her I was glad she had a friend. Friends are important, I told her.
Lloyd was up early the next morning, standing watch at the window looking over the parking
lot. “There’re two of them: the man in the blue hat and another in a red sweatshirt.”
I joined him at the window. I didn’t see anything but the usual cars in the lot. “Where?”
He pointed to a black sedan. “They’ve been out there all night.”
“But how could they watch us from there? We’d go in and out through the other side—”
“Because they’re watching that door too. They’re closing in.”
I couldn’t make out any figures in the car he specified. “I’m going to fail, but I have to show up for my art history test today.”
“You can’t leave,” he begged. I didn’t see anyone other than students walking hurriedly to their classes.
“No one’s out there,” I said.
“They’re spies, Yoona. You can’t tell when you’re being followed by professional spies.”
“I’ve got to take this test,” I said. “Daiyu and Faye will walk with me. Heather too.”
“Don’t stay too long,” he said. “Come right back. Eleven o’clock.”
“He can’t do anything to me with people around. And that boy in my Asian lit class, I’ll ask him directly what he was doing last night,” I told him.
“We know what he was doing. He was out looking for me.”
“Maybe he won’t even be in class,” I said. “I have to see.”
For the next three days, Lloyd refused to leave my room except for short trips to the bathroom. He didn’t shower, and he didn’t eat unless I brought him food from the food truck. The boy in my Asian lit class had vanished. I reasoned he could be sick with this flu Heather said was going through her chem lecture. “Half of the class has been out sick for the whole week.” I still went to the library to check on the news in Korea and had coffee with Serena each day. I made sure to ask what she’d heard about the political unrest in Korea from her father.
“You see her every day,” Lloyd said.
“She’s my friend, and maybe she can help us. Her parents travel back and forth to Korea a lot. I’m hoping she can help us.”
“Maybe they work for the government. Maybe she was sent to this school to spy on you. She’s not your friend.”
“Lloyd, stop it. What are you saying, really? She says the same thing about you,” I said in a moment of hopelessness.
“I’m saying this is bigger than we think.” He crawled under the covers and refused to talk to me anymore.
On Friday, October 4, I convinced Lloyd to go to the clinic to see a doctor about his headaches. We walked together, and as we waited for a nurse practitioner, I saw signs warning against pregnancy, STDs, and AIDS, and saw boxes full of condoms for the taking. I was reminded that my own period was late. As of Thursday, it was two weeks late. Still, maybe I’d skip this month. It had happened before when I was stressed, and this month I couldn’t shake the flu. When Lloyd refused to go in for his appointment, saying he noticed someone looking at him oddly, I let him go back to the dorm, and I took his place. He agreed I should. “You look worse than me,” he announced. It was probably the flu. The waiting room was full of students who were hunched over with congestion and misery.
The nurse reminded me of Willa. I could imagine Willa as a nurse someday, which she wouldn’t want to hear from me. She thought nurses were the lackeys of doctors. In her brisk, no-nonsense way, though, the nurse was knowledgeable and thorough. I felt comfortable enough to cry in front of her when she told me the news.
I trudged back to my room and went right under my covers. “That bad, huh?” Lloyd said from his huddled post on the floor under the window.
I don’t know why I called your house again. Maybe I was just grasping at straws because the news the nurse had given me felt like nothing was in my hands anymore. Lloyd was making less and less sense and scaring me. I had to know what your uncle and your parents knew to make them believe you were dead. I didn’t have any new evidence that you were alive. I just needed to hear it again from someone who loved you. So I could let you go. Your father answered the phone.
“You’re cruel, Lloyd,” I said to him after the call. I’d gathered all his things and stuffed them into his backpack, and I held it out to him. I didn’t want him in my room a minute longer. “It was cruel of you to do this to me.”
He was waving his hands, signaling for me to stop. “Yoona, wait, I’m not done. Give me a chance to tell you.”
“Tell me what? You said you had something different from the official story, so what is it?” I threw his backpack at his feet. “Get out.”
“If you give me a chance, I’ll tell you,” he said.
I walked to the door to my room and held it open for him. “Out.”
“Jaesung wanted to go to this meeting,” he began again. “Tongsu Cho, from the kitchen at the camp, remember? Tongsu and his brother. Do you know he had a brother? His brother looked just like him. Like they were identical twins. We talked to him about another meeting—Jaesung met him a bunch of times. I didn’t go to all of them, but that night, on the twenty-first, we left together in the same car. Other cars followed us out of Seoul. Four, five, as many as ten, maybe. I saw the lights of the city behind us, and we drove for a long time.”
“You said you were in different cars. Jaesung’s father said it was the same car. He said you were driving, and you feel guilty because you were behind the wheel and you had been drinking.”
“There was an accident. The car behind us, which didn’t have me or Jaesung in it—are you listening? That car was hit broadside, not mine and not Jaesung’s. His car was in the lead with two guys we met before, mine was in the middle, and the one behind us got struck at an intersection. It was remote, and it was weird because there weren’t other cars on the road, and out of nowhere a dump truck clips the car I’m in and slams the car behind us, and that car gets knocked off the road and turned on its side. We all stop. All three cars. I tried to get out, but I couldn’t budge the door. The men on the other side of me, two guys, get out of their side and shut the door, and when I go after them, the door is locked. And that’s when I knew something was really wrong. I’m locked in. My door isn’t jammed. I bang on the divider up to the front, but there’s silence. I figure he must have left the car too, and then I think, as the car on its side starts to smoke, that I’m going to die in this car.”
“If there’s a divider and you’re in the backseat, how do you know the first car stopped? And where was Jaesung?”
“You’re right. I don’t know. But then I heard sirens right away, firemen opened the car door and helped me out, and they told me my friend is dead. But when I look around, there’s no car up front, just mine and the one behind me on its side. And the body they take away on a stretcher that’s burned, with a cover thrown over it, that body isn’t Jaesung’s. I saw the arm hanging off, and it was a suit jacket arm, black. The smell was horrible.”
I felt empty. “Of course it was his. It could have been burned black.”
“I know it’s hard to believe. We were taken in the same car for a while, but then they separated us. It was their plan. They only needed one of us. That’s what must have happened.”
“You should go. I want you to leave.”
“It wasn’t him, Yoona,” Lloyd said. “The car was smoking, but there wasn’t a fire. Jaesung was wearing short sleeves like me, you remember that day? It was so hot. I saw it clearly. An ambulance came, and the paramedics forced me to go to the hospital even though I said I was fine, but it was weird. I’m telling you: it wasn’t Jaesung. When his parents came to the hospital to talk to me later—that’s the other thing, they wouldn’t let me leave right away—”
“You were injured. That’s not hard to understand.”
“But that’s the thing: I wasn’t. Nothing was wrong with me, but they gave me drugs to make me sleep, and I swear it was like they wanted to confuse me.”
“How would you know? You said the truck clipped you.”
“I’m telling you I was fine. Nothing was wrong with me, but they
kept me for days in that hospital.”
“For your parents to come and to make sure you were all right.”
They’d kept him for two days in the hospital. I believed they were right; something was wrong with Lloyd. My hopes for you were fading. Tears pricked my eyes.
“You don’t believe me,” he said.
“You had a head injury. Jaesung’s dad said you had swelling in your brain.” It was hard to speak. I felt like I was being strangled.
He threw up his hands and shook his head. “That does not mean I didn’t see everything. I know what happened. How can you not believe me? I thought you, of all people, you would know I’m telling the truth.”
“You think you know, but you were unconscious for two days.”
“Why would I lie about this? Don’t forget there were fire trucks but no fire.”
“There was a fire. You’re confused. You had a head injury.”
“He’s alive, Yoona. Jaesung didn’t die in that car.”
“I can’t listen to you anymore.”
“It’s a conspiracy—they’ve convinced Jaesung’s dad. I don’t know how, but I’m going to find out.”
“Just leave me alone, Lloyd. Please. Go home.”
I could feel him staring at me for a long minute, but I refused to meet his eyes. Finally, he left, and I curled up on the bed and tried to sleep.
The nurse said it was normal that I felt nauseated, that it was just the stage I was in, but I didn’t wholly believe her. To my mind, everything in me was rejecting this pregnancy. I was woken hours later by Lloyd’s voice calling from the other side of the door, begging me to let him in. “My legs, Yoona, my legs are cramping on this cold floor. Yoona, let me in, let me in.”
“Go home, Lloyd. Just go home.”
“Don’t do this, don’t shut me out.”