The Incendiaries

by R. O. Kwon

  –

  In the dining room, we sat at a table set low to the ground, with more silk cushions for seats. A blond girl holding a tray came and left. I wondered what kind of people hired help for a six-top meal. She poured from a bottle of Malbec, the ruby pool looping into my glass. I didn’t touch it, though. I was already dizzied with what little I’d tried of the mulled wine.

  I’ll emphasize this lack of alcohol because, teetotal as I soon felt, I should be able to retrieve more of what followed. Instead, for the most part, it’s lost. I have the outline, bits of conversation. Fitful images. Wide swaths of it, though, have blurred as in old film. Is that the problem? I’ve reviewed this initial feast with them so often I’ve smudged it with my fingerprints. Pink meat bled when I cut it open, the charred bits crunching like minute bones. A torn roll steamed; butter liquefied. Oil dripped, gilding white porcelain. The waitress’s thin wrist shook as she removed a plate. I said thanks, and she flinched. Inexperience, I assumed. Teeth flashed, smiling. Of all people, I should have recognized this warmth for what it was: a bag of tricks. The fellowship, a little food. The hocus-pocus bribe of hot bread, lavish, like God: take, eat. This is my body, which is broken for you. Open curtains exposed a line of sash windows. In the depths of the glass, silhouettes, our best selves, bent and moved. I felt seen for what I wanted to be. I relaxed, and I had more food.

  * * *

  –

  Citron tarts finished, we returned to the living room. In the uncertain firelight, the cushions shone lazulite-blue. Phoebe and John Leal sat off to one side, apart from the rest of us. Each time I looked at them, he was still talking. She stared down, into her lap. Her hair draped, its fall pushing forward a ribbon headband.

  —too loyal to this suffering, you forget that others are also in pain, he said, barely audible.

  I’m not, she said, glancing up at him. I don’t think I am.

  No. I don’t think you are.

  The waitress walked around offering tea, mulled wine. Tea, please, I said. Fine hair hung loose as she tipped the pot, biting her lip. Phoebe had a handbag at her side, partially zipped, and while they talked, I watched John Leal pick it up, open it, and put his hand inside. He rifled through it, still talking. I’d held that bag for Phoebe; I knew the feel of its plush, living calfskin. I thought of my mother’s handbag, the box-shaped satchel so private I’d seen its full contents just once in my life, while she was being held in the hospital. I had to sign for the possessions, initialing each item. Hand-sanitizing gel. Labeled pills. Fish oil, aspirin. Lipstick. Jojoba lotion. Rape whistle. I hadn’t admitted to what I couldn’t help seeing: she’d have hated the intrusion, but Phoebe, unperturbed, kept gazing at his face. He dipped his fingers into the bag’s opal slit. The bright satin lining showed. I’d have liked to stop him, but she let it happen. The bag might as well have been his.

  Ill at ease, I left to find a bathroom. I returned to find everyone standing while Philip rolled in an upright piano. He pushed it against the wall, lid open. Ian carried in a cushioned bench, and Phoebe walked toward the instrument. I asked Jo what was going on. She explained that Ian usually played the piano, but he’d injured his thumb. Phoebe had agreed to fill in.

  She—, I said, but I stopped. Phoebe sat at the bench. She twisted a knob, adjusting its height. Not long ago, we’d been walking past the grand piano in Wyeth Hall. It gleamed with disuse, and I said I’d never seen anyone touch it. Such a waste, I said. It’s not a good piano, though, she said. I asked if she played. Oh, she said. No.

  The first notes tolled. Phoebe’s hands moved, pressing out slow chords, but she sat up, torso rigid, as if she had nothing to do with the music. Fingers rippled, gaining speed. The solo line of Phoebe’s right hand jumped high. She came to life. Holding the note, she flexed toward the piano. She turned her head, listening. It echoed, and I could imagine the walls of this house falling down, Noxhurst flattened, the rest of the world blown to nothing until it was just Phoebe, still holding this single, light note. She swept a hand down across the keys, and she kept playing.

  * * *

  –

  When the front door clicked shut behind us, Phoebe asked if I minded driving. I’m full of wine, she said, loud, through high wind. She pulled hair strands out of her mouth. Did you drink as much as I did? No, of course you didn’t. You exercised self-control. I used to know how to do such a thing, but I’ve lost the trick. I could call a taxi.

  I’ll drive, I said. Inside the car, its abrupt hush, I could still feel the last piano notes thrum, radiant: a faint light, haloing the quiet. I switched on the ignition. I hadn’t studied an instrument. For years, though, while eluding the devil’s influence, I’d listened to classical music. I owned piano recordings I loved. Lupu, for instance. Gould. Uchida. Wasn’t it Liszt, what she’d played? I was trying to establish bona fides. Once, while hiking with my parents, I’d watched a starling flock in motion, the confusion of birds mobbing about like nets full of fish until they’d lifted, all at once, shape-shifting into a braided coil that flung, agile, whip-tight, into the horizon. Pests, my father said—practical, as usual. But I’d thought it an astonishing sight, God’s design made visible, and that was what Phoebe’s playing felt like: the flight of notes rising into shape, a large purpose made plain. You should be onstage, I said. If I had a gift like that, I’d—

  You’d live for it, she said. You, Will Kendall, would be a celebrated pianist, a high priest of music.

  I don’t know why you’re laughing.

  No, it’s, I tried. I wanted to be a pianist. I’m not sure that’s what it is, a gift. By the time I quit, I realized I’d rather have no talent than just enough to know how much I lacked. I played tonight because he insisted. That’s all. He was telling me about his time in the gulag, and I—

  “He” being John, I started saying, my voice overlapping hers.

  I couldn’t turn him down—

  The gulag?

  Oh, she said.

  He was in a gulag.

  Oh, Will.

  * * *

  –

  In the spring, two years ago—

  (so Phoebe explained, turned toward me, a hand hot on my thigh as I sped through emptied Noxhurst streets, past the stoplights staining the night)

  —John Leal had gone to live in Yanji, a Chinese city next to North Korea. He worked with an activist group, with Americans who helped North Koreans in hiding get out of China, into Seoul. It was a long, roundabout trip that required walking through the Laotian jungle, so hazardous they relied on opium mules as guides. Then, one night, he was seized by North Korean spies who took him across the border, throwing him into a gulag. He still couldn’t talk much about what he witnessed. Lives thrown out like trash, he said. A five-year-old child hanged for stealing a little rice. Gang rapes. Everyone was starving. Deprived of rations, a man had eaten the shit-soiled rags used to wipe latrines. One corpse was found stashed in ice, his missing parts marked with human teeth. He watched prison guards kicking a pregnant girl in the stomach. She curled around the swollen belly, trying to protect it. They left the girl bleeding on the ground.

  People turned aside, afraid. John Leal, too. But then, he noticed an old man helping the girl up, and he was ashamed. In secret, John Leal nursed the girl, Mina. He applied the primitive first-aid training he’d learned from his activist group. She had lived in hiding in China until hostile neighbors alerted the police. The minute she was told she’d be sent back, she’d known what would happen: since foreign blood was believed to be a pollution, the regime aborted all babies conceived abroad. She cried for the child she’d lose. He did his best, but he couldn’t stop the bleeding. That night, Mina died, along with the unborn child.

  Five months after his abduction, he was driven with no explanation to the Chinese border, beaten, and told to cross the frozen river back into Yanji. He did: he survived, but he was down thirty pounds, his left arm br
oken. In this shape, he couldn’t help his group, so he returned to the States. The girl he failed to save, Mina, traveled with him. Each night, when he tried to sleep, she materialized next to his bed. He asked what she wished him to do, but she didn’t respond. Lips tight, she watched him. It took several nights to notice she wasn’t wearing shoes. In life, she’d owned sandals that he’d given to a shoeless inmate when Mina died. He asked if this was what she wanted, shoes. She ignored the question.

  The next morning, on an impulse, he went outside shoeless. He stood on cold asphalt, holding up a sign to raise cash for Yanji activists. From that night on, Mina’s spirit left him alone. He kept fundraising in bare feet. In time, he learned to focus his canvassing efforts on big, Korean American churches. First along the East Coast, and then the West. He was Korean, himself; half-Korean, that is.

  Phoebe’s father helped his campaign: he invited John Leal up to the pulpit with him. It was how John Leal had known about Phoebe. He’d mentioned having attended Edwards to Reverend Lin, who then talked about his own child, also Noxhurst-bound. Oh, her father’s church—she thought she’d talked about it. Oh. Well, he’d founded a church in L.A. She wasn’t the least bit religious, no. Her parents had split up when she was little.

  So, the Yanji group—it had lost a second activist, then a third. Both abducted, perhaps killed. The group then disbanded. With no fundraising left to do, John Leal had returned to Noxhurst to work at a nonprofit, a legal-aid organization advising recent immigrants. It was useful work, he said, but less satisfying. He wanted to help people firsthand. Instead, he filled in official forms. He solicited grants. The people we’d met at his house thought as he did, hoping to shape their lives around public service. Now, he was looking around, waiting to find what he’d do next.

  * * *

  –

  By the time Phoebe finished telling me this, we were back on campus, cutting across the quadrangle lawn. I didn’t know how I should respond. Fall leaves crunched, splintered with each step. We passed a bulletin board, its slats pulped with old notices. I knew about lying; I recognized its signs. Within months, I’d have to listen to still more versions of John Leal’s gulag tale, his shifting harlequin cast. The penitent assassin. The ex-trapezist, who escaped. The spy, the kingpin. He even invented a hanged child to fill out this troupe plucked from a fortune-teller’s pack of obvious lies, and I can’t recall which version I heard first. What Phoebe said gets spliced with his future inventions. I strain to pull them apart. I fail. John Leal intrudes even here, as I walk with Phoebe along the wet, short grass.

  She asked what I was thinking, but I couldn’t find a good rebuttal. I felt a nervous smile sliding up my face, the kind I can’t help using with people who believe.

  That’s incredible, I said.

  Isn’t it?

  So, John Leal found you because, he hoped to—

  Well, when I enrolled here, my father asked him to look out for me. I asked why he made such a riddle out of it, and he said, If the first thing I told you was that I’m your father’s friend, would you still have wanted to talk to me?

  A small crowd passed, laughing. Someone called hello to Phoebe; she blew him a kiss. You’re not close with him? I asked.

  He lived in L.A., too, thirty minutes from us, but I didn’t see much of him. It was complicated, the divorce. I wasn’t raised to believe as he does. I didn’t go to church at all, and his church is his life. It bothered him that I’m not Christian. I’m sure it still does.

  I hesitated. She hadn’t mentioned a religious upbringing; I knew I’d alluded to mine. I’d joked about it, I was sure. When I was a Christian, I said, at times, playing my life’s pivotal loss as a joke. Now, I told Phoebe that I’d attended a Bible college before Edwards. Up until I stopped believing in God, I said. I thought I was chosen by Christ. Hand-picked to preach His word. Don’t laugh, but I used to peddle salvation outside of town bars, hoping to catch drunks when they’d be extra sentimental. It worked, too. I was good at it. In the back of my Bible, I listed all the souls I saved.

  I’m not laughing, she said.

  I’d kept my tone light, but I felt Phoebe’s increased attention, like heat. I looked at the ground. I haven’t talked to anyone here about it, I said.

  Do you mind if I ask what made you stop believing?

  It was nothing special, I said. The usual host of reasons.

  Like what?

  Oh, the existence of multiple religions, children starving. The problem of evil—it’s how people talk about going bankrupt, right? It’s gradual, then it happens all at once.

  Trampling leaves, we walked toward Platt Hall. It must have been so hard, though, she said, expanding. She intended to sympathize, I could tell, and it was true: I’d tried not to leave the faith. I’d had such purpose, living in single-minded pursuit of the God I loved, until the afternoon I knelt in my bedroom, asking one last time for a sign. White gauze curtains rippled. I waited, but I heard nothing else. Muscles stiff, I got up. I should, I think, have told Phoebe how cut open I felt since then, with a God-shaped hole I didn’t know how to fill. If I was sick of Christ, it was because I hadn’t been able to stop loving Him, this made-up ghost I still grieved as though He’d been real. For a while, train tracks had pulled. So had guns, pills, but already I wished I hadn’t brought this up. I didn’t want Phoebe pitying me. To change the subject, I asked about the hired help, the nervous blond girl.

  Tess, Phoebe said. No, she wasn’t hired. She lives with them. They all rotate serving meals. I had more questions, but the door to Phoebe’s hall slammed open. Girls in high heels clattered out; she caught the knob before it could swing closed. She asked if I wanted to come in. I walked into the stone stairwell. Steps echoing, we climbed. We passed through the suite living room, into Phoebe’s single. Silence rushed between us. The tip of Phoebe’s tongue brightened her lips. It was the first time she’d invited me in.

  I have gin, she said.

  Do you want a drink?

  If you will.

  I can, I said. Sure.

  She stepped down from her heels. While she cracked out ice cubes, I shook off my oxfords. I wandered the small room. There wasn’t much to see: she’d left the walls blank. A tall pile of textbooks lay unopened, the plastic wrap shining. She passed me a fizzing glass with a lime slice split across its rim, then tapped laptop keys. A bass hiss drifted from the speakers. It’s a Spanish band, she said. Did I like it? I said I did, and she began swaying to the song’s loose beat. Bare shoulders rolled. She snapped her fingers overhead, imitating castanets.

  I danced with her for the length of the song, and then she unfastened my pants. She stripped me down to my boxers. I haven’t done this before, I thought of saying; I didn’t. It wasn’t until I was naked that she let me pull off her shirt, its striped, delicate fabric bunching in my palms. I unzipped Phoebe’s skirt. I’d fantasized about this for weeks, in detail. Even as I slid a nail up the ridged line of the real Phoebe’s spine, those previous versions, ghostly but alive, crowded around us. They flexed thin backs, exhaling phantom sighs while I tried to focus on this girl, Phoebe, with these specific ribs. Fingers with this exact tang of lime juice. We fell in bed. I put Phoebe’s thumb in my mouth; I lapped at taut nipples. She lowered a breast to brush my lips, then raised it again, playful. But when I tried to roll on top, she resisted.

  What’s wrong? I asked.

  Let’s stay like this, she said. She straddled me, then shifted onto hands and knees. She looked back, shoulders arched, and instructed me to keep going. Small hipbones jutted out like half-formed handles; I reached for them. She rocked back and forth, but I still couldn’t tell if she was having a good time. I heard a branch scratch the windowpane, insistent. The sound emphasized Phoebe’s silence. It was too soon to stop. I tried to think. The other night, while it rained, a gingko had fallen. In the morning, a passerby noticed a white gleam in its root ball. It turned
out to be a skull. The Edwards quadrangle had been built on top of an old burial site. Beneath the lawn, the earth would be latticed with bones. I bent low, kissing the knotted spine. I wanted to slow down. Phoebe thrust back against my thighs. It was too fast, too—she tensed at the waist. Letting go, I collapsed.

  8.

  JOHN LEAL

  The fall he returned to Noxhurst, John Leal established a habit of paying morning visits to the graves on Hilcox Street. The churchyard gates opened at dawn. He went in to keep his vigil. Tall lindens stood bare, stripped by the cold, but still they raised their limbs in hallelujah. He walked about; he examined memorial inscriptions, the etched, once-loved names fading. Frost burned his feet. Winter softened into spring, and mossed obelisks pointed on high. In the estival heat, he set his back against the cold stone of a tomb. He plucked a honeysuckle stalk sprouting from what had once been men; he sipped its bit of juice. In time, lying in the dirt, he, too, might nourish future pilgrims. If he had one petition for himself, it was this: that he be made useful.

  But he was learning to be patient. His plan stood intelligible to him, lucid as a vision. If asked, before the gulag, how a revelation might look, a heraldic blaze of light would have come to mind, the flap and gust of gale-force wind. His own dazzled, indisputable rip in the fabric of the usual. Instead, he had this: a plan. His chance. He lifted his face. Through linden branches, blue lozenges flashed like prizes he could reach up to have. His personal ambitions, though, no longer signified. He was thinking of mankind. In the months to come, when Phoebe asked about his first revelation, he’d explain it had arrived with a shock of recognition—yes, he’d thought. This was it. He’d been waiting. In fact, he said, to Phoebe, I felt like this when I first heard of you.

  9.

  PHOEBE

  I collided into a truck, she’d have said. I’m trying to imagine it: Phoebe, sitting with the group again, legs pulled in. Posture like a ball, a full-bodied fist. The others in a circle, staring while she exposes her life.