by Nisi Shawl
“Bruhjack?” Saam called one last time.
They looked at each other. Pinky shrugged.
Andre followed them out of the house. Pinky knelt in the hall to run her fingers through his fur, sending tingles up his spine. His tail wagged. It’s me, he wanted to say. Your friend.
When they got to the car, Saam scooped him up and put him in the back seat. He closed the door. The car smelled of warm leather and paper.
Andre wasn’t worried. He was among friends.
“I can’t understand it,” mumbled Pinky, when they were on their way.
“Me neither,” said Saam. He sounded like he had a mouth full of syrup. “It looks like he’s been gone for days.”
“And he left his poor puppy. I knew it was a bad sign when he mailed us all his gear. Do you think something really happened to him?”
Saam turned the steering wheel. Andre felt the crunch of gravel as they came to a stop in front of the police station. “If anyone knows, the police do. Let’s see if there’s a missing person report out for him yet.”
A whiff of sunshine, tarmac, and cut grass entered the car as Saam stepped out.
“I’ll wait here with the puppy,” said Pinky. “Call me if you need me.”
Andre sat in silence for a while, staring at the trees outside the window. It was the most curious sensation, tracking the motion of wind but not its flavor.
Pinky turned to the back seat. Andre felt his ears prick up.
“We’ll find your master. Don’t worry.” She leaned over and scratched him behind his ears. “Don’t worry.” He could hear the emotion, thick in her voice. Her posture was tense and melancholy.
Andre stood up and picked his way to the front of the car. He settled in a comfortable spot in Pinky’s lap.
There was a subtle change in the air, a certain strange something that hovered right on the edge of his sharp senses. A feeling that tickled his nose and drew his ears upright. A whiff of seabreeze. The echo of a voice.
“Hmm?” said Pinky. “What is it, puppy?”
Granny Delphine whispered in his ear, soft as the sound of sunlight on the dash. His hackles rose instinctively, but her voice was not harsh. It carried regret. A deep regret, like the smell of wet oats.
Her presence was warm and familiar to him. She was no longer the overbearing tyrant she had been in life. She smelled like childhood, like a tired mother, apologetic and yet satisfied. Like someone who had just spent a piece of themselves to set a little portion of the world right.
“Merry Christmas, my grandson,” she whispered, and vanished.
Andre curled up in Pinky’s lap, nose under tail. She petted him with both hands.
“What a good dog you are. You just want to be petted, don’t you? You’ve got a good life, don’t you?”
The sun warmed his ears. Pinky’s lap was soft and smelled of blueberries.
Andre exhaled, enjoying the feeling.
Re: Christmas, Bainbridge Island
Dennis Y. Ginoza
Prof. Kim,
As you must be aware, I have never consented to an interview nor publicly spoken about my life on Bainbridge Island. I was twelve when the island fell, and my memories of those troubled times are ultimately the personal memories of a young girl, memories I’ve always feared might be diminished if examined too closely or at too great a length.
It will also not surprise you that I am especially reluctant to discuss my childhood with persons of Korean descent. This is not the product of racial animosity but rather its opposite—while I am not ashamed of my past (shame necessarily requiring personal culpability), I am keenly aware of the pain that it can evoke. I’ve lived in Nuevo California for sixty years, Prof. Kim, yet as I have learned to my sorrow, there are some wounds that simply cannot be mended by time or distance.
Nevertheless, as this lengthy reply demonstrates, I find myself unable to dismiss your email. Perhaps your contacting me at this particular time in my life is providential. Whether it is the approaching 60th Anniversary of the December Revolution or merely the onset of old age, of late I’ve grown increasingly preoccupied with memories of Bainbridge Island, at odd moments becoming utterly absorbed in old recollections, fragmentary memories stripped of context like bright tiles fallen away from their mosaic: the sing-song drone of my schoolmates as we recited the Oath, the taste of barley bread and early strawberries, the adaptive fabric of Dad’s tunic shifting from light to dark as a cloud passed overhead. (Memory is such a strange, unreliable thing, isn’t it? When I think of my father, I always see him as he was on the island—in his smart uniform with his cap rakishly tilted, his boots gleaming, freshly shaved and smelling of bay rum tonic—rather than the broken thing he became in his last years.)
Mostly, though, I think of my friend Carol. Just today, while tending my allotment at the hydro-tower, I suddenly recalled a winter evening when the two of us had walked along the esplanade at Eagle Bay. The sky was clear and the moon was full and I could just make out the skyline of Seattle across the Sound, the unlit cityscape flat and angular in the dim moonlight. Carol was crying (I don’t remember why), and I was doing my best to console her, even as her sobs exasperated me. “Somebody told,” she kept repeating, her voice tiny and forlorn. A transport barge was edging into the bay (refugees were always transported at night), its lights illuminating the dark waters. I pointed it out to Carol, but the sight only made her cry harder. A small moment, entirely unbidden, but the memory was so vivid—I can feel her small hand in mine, I can smell salt water and wood smoke, hear waves lapping the shore. (I know these are not the recollections you had hoped to elicit, Prof. Kim. I plead guilty to rambling, among other eccentricities of the elderly, and ask your indulgence.)
So, our last Christmas on Bainbridge Island.
It began as it always did, with a week of austerity. For seven days everyone ate in the enlisted men’s mess halls, our meals consisting of soy nuggets and barley bread and pitchers of distilled water. Everyone took shifts at the common gardens or the docks or the SAM batteries, and each night we’d all gather on the esplanade for an open-air service (that last year, I remember, was marked by frozen rain and wind gusts that churned the water of Eagle Bay to froth). The sermon was always the same, an exhortation to remember the history of our young nation—the fraternal violence of secession, the Korean jaenan and the two years when ash clouds blotted out the sun, the horrors that followed. It was a miserable seven days but it was a shared misery, one that welded our island community together and reminded us of the desperate times we had only recently emerged from.
Austerity week would culminate in a somber Christmas dinner and the passing around of the traditional presents (a round of 5.56 mm ammunition, a roll of gauze bandages, a steel spoon) as well as small personal gifts.
That last Christmas was very different, of course. We islanders were good at keeping secrets, but all week there had been a kind of barely suppressed mania in the air—we could all feel it, though no one spoke of it, especially to the children. Because of my father’s position on the island, however, certain details inevitably made themselves known to me.
“The Colonel and his wife are coming.”
It was a few days before Christmas. Carol and I were being naughty, skipping our shift at the common garden to spend the day playing in her parents’ bedroom, going through her mother’s drawers and dressing in her things.
“Are you sure?”
“I heard my dad talking about it. He’ll arrive on Christmas morning.”
“Like Santa Claus!” Carol was sitting on her parents’ bed, dabbing her neck with a bottle of rosewater she’d found in a closet. I was rooting through a nightstand hoping to locate her father’s hip flask of whiskey. We’d found a shoebox under the bed, but inside was nothing but old paper maps, passports, a few gold coins from Nuevo California.
“There’s going to be a formal banquet, too. And dancing.”
“Maybe Jacob will ask you to dance!”
Jaco
b Kennedy was a year older than us. He was very handsome.
“Maybe,” I said.
“You’re blushing!”
“I am not!”
“But you do like him. I see you looking at him all the time in class.”
I nodded. I did like Jacob. I liked him very much. The thought of dancing with him made my stomach do flips.
Carol was grinning. She set aside the perfume and leaned close to me. “Sera?”
“What?”
I thought she was going to tell me a secret. Instead, she tapped my forehead.
“Bink!”
I raised my arms in front of me like the Frankenstein monster and groaned, “What does Master want?”
“Brush my hair.” I did as I was commanded. We were still playing Bink when Carol’s mother came home and gave us a scolding. (I realize how awful our little game seems in retrospect, Prof. Kim, but there was no malice in what we did. As children, we had always been taught that the Korean labor battalions had volunteered to be chipped.)
The next three days seemed to pass in slow motion. Everyone knew what was happening but no one spoke about it, at least not in public. Instead we carried on with our daily lives, each person attending to their duties. Dad was spending most of his time in Seattle, so it fell to my mother to see to all the arrangements. With the help of the officers’ wives and some enlisted men, she soon had Blue House scrubbed and polished to a high shine.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, crowds gathered on the esplanade to watch the Colonel’s yacht arrive from his base in Olympia. The storm had broken and the sky was bright. I was surprised and a bit disappointed to see that the yacht was a modest thing with just a single cannon, though it bristled with antennae and satellite dishes. Two armored tugs and a dozen swift boats escorted it to Seattle where my father was waiting to give the Colonel a tour of the city.
Dad came home late that night, long after the meal and sharing of presents. I awoke to the sound of my parents talking downstairs. I couldn’t make out the words, but by the tone of their voices—my mother’s urgent, my father’s resigned—it sounded like they were arguing.
After a long time, Dad came upstairs to see me. He was very tired, almost staggering as he came into my bedroom.
“The Colonel wanted you to have this.”
He gave me a small box of candied pineapple wedges. Even in the dim light, the crystallized sugar sparkled like bits of ice.
“And this is from us.” A wan smile creased his face as he handed me a second box. Inside were a pair of silk ballet slippers, white with pink lacing. Carol and I had been hounding our parents for ballet slippers ever since we’d downloaded an old vid of Swan Lake.
“Thank you, Daddy.” I hugged him tightly. He smelled of bay rum and sweat and something like sulfur. The stubble on his chin tickled my forehead.
“Merry Christmas, love. Try them on.” As I was taking off my house socks, I noticed my mother standing in the doorway. Her eyes were red and shiny, almost as if she had been crying. She tried to smile as I did a clumsy pirouette, but I could see the strain on her face.
“Daddy got a promotion,” my mother said. “Show her your star, Frank.”
“Corry,” warned my father. His voice was low and angry.
“The Colonel named him Central Planner of Cascadia,” my mother went on. Her words were slurred and I realized that she had been drinking. “Daddy is now in charge of…well, everything. Isn’t that so, dear? Everything we do, everything we have done. Even the Labor Processing Center. You are responsible for the chip—”
Dad grabbed my mother’s arm and pulled her close. He whispered angrily into her ear, but she only shook her head.
“You are responsible,” she repeated.
My father pulled her from my bedroom, slamming the door behind him. I was shaken by all this—my parents rarely fought. Hours later, when I finally drifted off to sleep, I could still hear them arguing downstairs.
The next morning the entire island gathered downtown, this time to cheer as the Colonel’s yacht, now coming from Seattle, entered Eagle Bay. There was an armored SUV waiting by the docks but the Colonel and his wife chose to walk the three blocks to Blue House. They waved to the people that lined the street, shaking hands and kissing babies. Their guards seemed flustered by the press of people but there was no reason to worry—everyone loved Colonel Herrick and his wife Margaret.
Carol and I had been told to wait at Carol’s house until dinner. We spent the day nibbling on cookies and braiding each other’s hair. I let Carol put on my ballet slippers and she danced a silly dance for me. There was a Chinese character inked on the insole of the slippers—it was probably just the manufacturer’s name but to us it was a marvel, an ideogram come from so far away.
Carol’s mother helped us get dressed in our best aramid gowns. Carol’s was pale lavender, mine a dark green. We dabbed rosewater on each other’s earlobes and dusted our cheeks with a hint of rouge. Carol’s mother had an officer’s wife take a picture of the three of us sitting together, glasses of wine raised in a toast (it became a rather famous picture after everything fell apart, used on the cover of a popular flimsy titled “The Excesses of the Old Regime”).
At 5:00, we made our way to Blue House. My home had been transformed into a strange mix of mansion and barracks, with armed guards standing at attention beside electric braziers and ornately fluted columns (the columns were actually electronic jammers of some sort, but I didn’t know that then). We were searched and scanned several times before being allowed through the gates.
Almost a hundred guests milled about the yard, officers’ families mostly but also some enlisted men’s. The vid-skin that covered the inside of the garden walls showed scenes of tulip fields, artful arrangements of tulips in vases, tulips blooming in slow motion (the Colonel’s wife loved tulips). Tinsel and strings of LED lights garlanded the trees that edged the yard. From the balcony outside my parents’ bedroom hung a huge Cascadian flag illuminated by two spotlights.
Mother brought us cups of punch, warning us not to spill them on our dresses. She looked stunning in a blue gown of aramid and nylon, but her face was pale and her lips were compressed into a bloodless crease. She left before we had even tasted our drinks.
Carol tugged on my sleeve. “There’s Jacob,” she whispered.
Jacob was standing with a group of boys, all of them dressed in their Youth Battalion uniforms. Jacob saw the two of us staring and gave a salute.
“He likes you,” whispered Carol. I barely heard her, my heart was so loud in my ears.
A chime sounded, and the guards escorted us into Blue House. All of our family’s furniture had been cleared away and replaced with two long rows of dining tables covered in white tablecloths and matching napkins. Polished silverware and settings of bone china and crystal goblets gleamed in the warm illumination of a dozen hanging LED lanterns. The centerpieces were, I was proud to note, bowls of apples from our garden along with platters of barley bread and margarine and jars of strawberry preserves.
Carol and I were giggling about Jacob and his uniform when the hum of conversation stopped abruptly. Everyone turned their attention to a low platform that had been placed near the central stairway. A man in a dark suit sat on the platform, his head bent as he plucked at the strings of his cello.
“That’s him,” Carol said, clutching at my arm. “That’s Jeong.”
Jeong Sin-Jo was a short man, thin and slightly stooped, his hair tied back in a neat ponytail. A famous musician before the jaenan, he’d been part of the first wave of refugees to enter Cascadia after the nuclear exchange between North and South Korea. Taken from the refugee camp in New Tacoma, Jeong had served as the Colonel’s personal assistant for over twelve years.
After several minutes of plucking, Jeong took up his bow and began to play the Colonel’s favorite piece, Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G. Jeong had never been chipped—his fine motor skills were intact and he was fully self-aware—and it was fascinating to s
ee how he lost himself in the music, his face a study in concentrated joy, his hands lithe and vibrant and strong. As Jeong played, the Colonel and his wife descended the central staircase hand in hand.
Today their faces are familiar from so many holos and vids, but nothing can truly replicate the sensation of being near them, in the flesh, the Colonel with his handsome face and sad eyes, his wife so pale and elegant. I still remember the dress she was wearing, a sheath of reactive silk that shimmered and shifted like moonlight on water. What struck me most was how the Colonel rested his hand on the small of her back. Such a small gesture, yet it made my heart ache to see it.
The two of them made their way through the admiring crowd. Their gestures were languid, their smiles comforting. Everyone they spoke to seemed dizzied by their presence. It was as if a field surrounded them both, electrifying all who drew near.
As the Colonel was talking with my father, his wife approached Carol and me. Margaret Herrick was in her fifties, but she looked much younger. Her hair gleamed like polished copper and freckles dusted the bridge of her nose. When she smiled, I saw the famous gap between her front teeth. She smelled of lilacs and rain.
“Aren’t you two so pretty,” she said.
Carol and I thanked her, both of us blushing.
Margaret Herrick moved on to greet an enlisted man and his plump wife. The two of us watched her cross the room to rejoin her husband, the two of them taking seats at the center of the dining tables.
That final Christmas meal was a wonder. Trade negotiations with Canada had been concluded the month before, and we were served platter after platter of roast turkeys, smoked hams, oysters, stuffed duck, and baked salmon. The thing that most delighted us (the adults as well, though they tried not to show it) was the dessert—a thick slab of milk chocolate for each of us. I have eaten it many times since, Prof. Kim, but I’ve never matched the bliss of that first taste of chocolate, real chocolate.
To my disappointment, there was to be no dancing. Instead, after we had stuffed ourselves, the Colonel and his wife led us on a “forced march” down to the esplanade. It was a crisp, clear night and the walk to the shore was cheerful, children skipping and shouting as our parents smoked cigars (something I had never seen before) and passed around bottles of Canadian whiskey. We arrived to find that electric braziers and LED torches had been placed along the length of the esplanade and a small platform erected at its center. The Colonel mounted this platform and, after a small bow to the milling crowd, directed all of us to look across the water.