Secondhand World

  “Yes.”

  “The one who tells students to call him Bill?”

  “Yes.”

  My father's face was unreadable. He turned to his drink. Moments passed. I had finished my whiskey, having felt need of its courage long ago. It left a burn in the back of my throat.

  “Dad?” I said after a time.

  My father grunted.

  “Are you okay?”

  He looked at me as though I were crazy. “Am I okay?” he echoed. “With the thing you have just told me,” he said, “you ask if I'm okay?”

  “I'm sorry, Dad. I just really thought you deserved to know.”

  “Deserved?”

  “I mean, you said yourself that a person who thinks he's happy but is ignorant of his true situation isn't truly happy,” I reasoned.

  My father was silent. He averted his face from mine. Finally he said, in a voice rough with pain, “I thought we were speaking hypothetically”

  Watch

  Walking out of school on the last day of classes, I ran into Rachel. Since the day she'd accused Hero of rape, we'd avoided one another. I didn't feel like we were angry at one another particularly, or that either of us harbored ill will. It was more like we were so embarrassed and confused by what had happened between us that we could barely stand to be in the same room.

  “Hey Isa,” she said.

  “Hey Rachel,” I said. “Can't believe we're finally out of here, can you? What a shithole. Still, it's hard to believe we're done.” The stupidity of my words reverberated in my head like wind.

  Rachel tipped her head to one side, a birdlike gesture, as though she were trying to see me more clearly. “How've you been?” she said. “Jerry said you stopped by the other day.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What are you doing this summer?”

  I shrugged. I had an internship at the local paper and a part-time job slicing bologna at Price Chopper. “Nothing much,” I said. “How about you?”

  Rachel smiled, a genuine smile. Her eyes sparkled like chips of malachite. She'd had her hair cut, and it suited her, curled just beneath her ears. “I'm going to Italy with my dad and step-mom,” she said, with such spontaneous enthusiasm that it made my heart sink. “We're going to Florence, Rome, and Venice.”

  “That's great,” I said. It did sound great. I imagined Rachel eating pasta in some sidewalk trattoria in a Roman piazza, Rachel pacing the Uffizi Gallery, spellbound by Michelangelo.

  “I should be earning money,” Rachel said, “but my dad says he thinks going to Italy is a better intro to art school than flipping burgers at McDonald's.”

  I nodded dumbly. Not once in my life could I remember prefacing any remark with “My dad says …” The confidence it denoted, the sense of daughterly adoration. It was such an innocent phrase, so trusting. I stood there, corrosion in my chest, and nodded for an idiotic length of time, like one of those bobbing dolls from Korea that we had in our living room.

  “Well, good luck,” I said. “If I don't get a chance to talk to you at graduation, have a great trip and a great time at Cooper Union. I know you'll do really well.”

  “Good luck to you, too, Isa,” she said. She started to walk away, then turned partway back. “Uh, there's a graduation party at Dusty's house on Friday night if you want to come.”

  “Oh, what time?” I knew she was just being polite, but I was touched all the same.

  “I don't know, things'll probably get started around nine, nine thirty.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Maybe I'll stop by.”

  “Good,” she said, nodding. “Well, see you maybe.”

  “Yeah, see you.” I had to turn away because I felt the salt sting of tears.

  The night before graduation, my mother laid my dress out on the bed like she used to when I was in first grade. On the floor she put the pink sandals we'd bought to go with it.

  “I hope it doesn't rain,” my mother said. “So pretty, this dress, these shoes.”

  My mother had ironed my black graduation robe, which hung like a boneless carrion bird on the back of the closet door, along with the mortarboard with the green tassel that I knew disappointed my parents, who had expected me to wear the gold tassel of the National Honor Society.

  The truth was that I'd come to loathe the pink dress with the large white flowers that seemed to creep from the back like a viral growth. Pink was not a color I felt an affinity for, and I was surprised by the dress, which I never would have consented to wear if I'd been paying attention.

  “Wear stockings tomorrow,” my mother said. “This color with your dress.” She rummaged in my drawer and brought out a flat package. “And Isa, don't walk too fast. Let Daddy take your picture. And remember to smile, Isa. You always look so serious.”

  When Stephen died I'd felt silence spiral around our house like the thornbushes in a fairy story. Silence descended upon us once again after I told my father of his wife's infidelity. Only the quality of the silence was different. When Stephen had died, my parents were mute, literally shocked into speechlessness by the sudden and terrible way their son's life had ended. I looked to them with reverence and fear, struck dumb by their voicelessness, waiting to hear the reassuring sound of words, to have them explain Stephen's death in ways that would make sense to me, the way my father could explain how a water pump worked or what made the moon wax and wane.

  This time I was the silent one. My mother chattered in a voice that was unnaturally high in pitch, alternately cheerful, cautious, and imploring—or not alternately but all at once. My father was quiet, but only marginally more than usual. I could tell by the way that they continued to treat one another, cordially, following routine a bit more formally perhaps, that my father had not confronted my mother and that my mother did not yet know I had told him.

  When my mother left my bedroom, I cleared the dress from the bed and pushed the sandals back underneath it. There was a knock on the door, and my father came in. He entered my room so infrequently that, seeing him framed in the doorway, I was momentarily frightened. He looked haggard, tiny lines cross-hatched into his face, the pouches under his eyes gray and slack. I thought of the plastic surgeon, Dr. Cheon, and his immaculate face, taut with unnatural smoothness, and how much better my father looked, despite the evidence of his age and sadness. It was a face that betrayed its history, of stoicism and pain, and the strenuous disavowal of emotion; the cost paid in the flinching corners of his eyes and the deep crease in his ridgelike brow. It seemed incredible to me that I had never noticed this before, how my father's face was not, in fact, like a mask, stern and concealing, but like a map, containing the roadways of his suffering.

  “Myung Hee,” he said, his voice hoarse from disuse. He had a small, narrow box in his hand, black with a gold bow. “We wanted to give this to you tonight. So you can wear tomorrow.”

  He handed me the box. I took it, the “we” conspicuous by my mother's absence from the room.

  “Should I open it now?”

  My father nodded.

  I lifted the cover from the box. Inside was a gold Seiko watch with a delicate chain wristband.

  “Look on back,” my father instructed.

  I took the watch out and turned it over.

  For Myung Hee 6/11/76 was inscribed on the flat gold surface.

  “Wow, thanks, Dad,” I said. I wound the watch, and my father put up his own so I could see what time to set. I put it around my wrist and he reached over to do the clasp. He rarely touched me; the feel of his fingers against the inside of my arm was cool.

  “It's beautiful,” I said. I hugged him awkwardly. He leaned over and patted my shoulder.

  “Okay” he said, straightening. “Big day tomorrow. Get good night's sleep.”

  It was the last time I saw him.

  Conflagration

  The night before graduation, I lay in bed, vaguely apprehensive and excited about the next morning. There were parties all over town. You could hear the squeal of tires as cars of rev
elers sped from one house to the next, an occasional cry of drunken exuberance fading into the night.

  Rachel had invited me to Dusty's party, and I had thought about it but could not bring myself to go. When I saw Rachel, I could not help thinking about Hero and the night in the hotel room in Utah, which marked the closest I had felt to either of them, but also the moment we began to lose one another entirely. I remembered the weight of her arm on my hip, the way she'd kissed me on the mouth, her lips hot and sweet, tasting like cotton candy. I had loved her and she'd bewildered me, with both her response and her withdrawal.

  If Rachel remembered, she gave no sign. She treated me, that day outside of school, like we had never stopped being friendly, but also as though we'd never been particularly close. “Hope to see you there, Isa,” she had said, smiling that newly acquired, unironic smile, her voice similarly uninflected. She'd changed so much, this strange, grinning creature. But then, so had I. Only I couldn't help feeling that while Rachel had elected to change herself, simply by turning on a switch somewhere, I had had change foisted on me like the laying on of chains.

  That night I did not wait for my father's cue, but crept downstairs sometime around midnight to pour myself a glass of Jim Beam. This was something I'd started doing at odd moments of the day and night, stealing a swig of gin or a mouthful of vodka. Just something to warm me and make my brain go dim. I was beginning to think that these persistent feelings I had—a loneliness that would not go away, a heartbreak that would not heal, a righteous anger that would not forgive—were not rites of passage, or hormonal changes, but permanent character traits that I would struggle with forever, the calcification of personality, a readied response to a world I had only recently come to know and mistrust.

  I drank the whiskey neat, raising the glass to myself in a mocking congratulatory toast. As I sat at the kitchen table with my glass in the air, I felt a momentary confusion, as though I were my father—sitting at his place, drinking his whiskey, looking out into the dark, not in any true sense of thought or consciousness but in a way more of feeling—the Korean concept of noon'chi, which was like a gut instinct or hunch. I felt I knew what it was like to be my father, to be wakeful in the night in a country far from home, lost in memory, musing on a past that had accumulated most densely so long ago but that caught up to him here occasionally, under the cover of a foreign darkness.

  He had tried to teach me, not about his personal past but about our collective history. “This is important, Myung Hee,” he'd say. “It is your heritage. Aiee, how can I make you understand? Look at you!” He'd thrust out his hand, palm up, his face wildly disapproving.

  “Okay, so the Yi Dynasty lasted until the Japanese occupation in 1909?” I'd say, parroting back something he'd said earlier.

  “That's right, from 1400s to 1900s. That's why we speak of the ‘ban of five hundred years.’ You understand ban?”

  “That thing you say Koreans feel? Kind of like regret?”

  My father twisted his mouth in frustration. “No real translation in English,” he said. “It's a kind of sadness, or longing. A sense of loss. So much suffering, so much oppression. From China, Japan, from our own Korean kings and governments. Political corruption. Violence. Brutality. To understand Koreans, Myung Hee, you must understand this concept of ban. We learned the hard way that one's individual will cannot overcome external forces. Some factors are too large, too overwhelming. You Americans don't feel this, I think.”

  “You say ‘we Koreans’ and ‘you Americans.’ Which am I?” I asked.

  My father was caught off guard by the question. His brow furrowed as he regarded me for a moment. “Too soon to tell,” he said. “Wait and see.”

  Now I rinsed my glass out, dried it with a towel, and replaced it in the cabinet. I went back upstairs and fell into what must have been an astonishingly deep, if not restful, sleep.

  I dreamed that it was summer and Stephen and I were in the yard playing hide-and-seek. He stood next to Isatree, his hands over his eyes.

  Then, in the strange, fluid logic of dreams, it was autumn and we were raking leaves into piles. I buried Stephen under the brown, dead mass, where he lay perfectly motionless. I enticed our parents over and he jumped out, laughing, hair adorned with debris, like a demented jack-in-the-box.

  I smelled leaves burning on the curb. My father made us stand back as he brought the burning flame to the crackling piles. Stephen and I were mesmerized by the sweep and bend of the fire as it flared and was driven by the wind. Ribbons of orange entwined with black helixed upward and fell, the crackle and snap of twigs like tiny fireworks expelling sparks and jewellike embers. Standing on one side with a clear view of the fire, we were suddenly teary-eyed with smoke.

  I remember the solidity of my brother's body next to mine, standing there with the wind and the smoke and the immolating leaves. My father stood with the rake in his hand, one arm around my mother, who had a sweater around her shoulders and her arms hugged to her chest. We all looked into the fire, at the ridge of flame that lined the end of our yard.

  My eyes began to burn with tears, from the smoke and the fire and the dried leaves that spiraled to ash in the hot air. I could no longer see Stephen standing next to me. I tried to open my eyes, but the smoke stung too harshly. I felt panic hit me, like that day in the elementary school woods, fear coming on like a seismic shaking. The smoke was entering my lungs now, cutting off my clean, unburdened breath. I shouted Stephen's name, but I was blind and choking and could not pursue him.

  It took a tremendous amount of will to rise up from the bottom of that unbreathable, smoke-clogged drowning. It was as though sleep and fire conspired to weight me down, to hold me under that murky happiness. I coughed and woke. It took me several seconds to figure out where I was. I thought for a moment that I'd overslept graduation and that the heat I felt was a blazing noon.

  I struggled to get out from under the bedsheets. The air in the room was dense and black. A figure appeared to stand beside me—I gave a lurch of fear—but it was only my graduation robe hunched on its hanger. There were loud snapping sounds, sirens, and voices outside my window. I went to the door, but it was hot. I stood there, coughing through my hand, too stunned to panic. I saw yellow flame licking the underside of the door, and it occurred to me that I should do something, but I didn't know what.

  “Cover your face!” I heard a man yell, and then a crash, and an ax handle smashed through the window, shattering the glass and splintering the casement. I looked down and saw that I was on fire.

  Survivor

  Iwoke in the ICU. I say “woke,” but it was more like a drifting in and out of wakefulness; I was heavily sedated and was being treated for smoke inhalation and severe burns on my legs. For a while I was plugged into a ventilator that made me feel like an elephant breathing through a reed.

  After a week I was transferred to the adolescent wing of the burn ward. Doctors came and went, as well as nurses in blue uniforms with no hats, looking like girls at a pajama party. My sense of smell wasn't good, but I do remember jolting awake once to the odor of burnt popcorn wafting from the nurses’ station.

  On the eighth day they told me. My parents were dead, killed in the fire, which was still under investigation. The policeman who told me this was grim. He asked about next of kin, and I could only swallow stupidly, the back of my throat burnt and raw.

  The fact of my parents’ deaths didn't register at first. I must have been in shock, or maybe it was the opposite—maybe instead it held a terrible clarity. My high school class sent flowers, as did colleagues of my father's, and the contingent from Berkeley. Mrs. Williamson came briefly, with Mrs. Benoit and Mrs. Sanderson, standing with pitying looks on their faces, placing their Whitman's Samplers on the bedside table.

  Pastor Park, of whom my father had been dismissive, visited every week. He would sit and read the Bible to me in Korean, from a book with pages as thin as rice paper. I marveled that the words from the other side didn't bleed into the wo
rds he read, wondering, as I listened to his fervent, cantabile prayers, if he was reading both sides of the page at once—some biblio-equivalent of speaking in tongues.

  Jerry and/or Louise came every day, Jerry with loaves of rye bread in rumpled paper bags and jars of homemade jam and pickles. Louise brought a Plexiglas box filled with a thousand origami cranes in all colors that she and her after-school kids had made to wish me luck on my recovery. Rachel sent a postcard of Betty Boop, and Audrey sent me a get-well card from Bingham-ton, where she was studying music.

  For weeks I could not speak. The doctors found nothing wrong with my vocal cords. Still, when I tried, I could manage only a rasping breath that sounded like the bleating of a sheep.

  I had nightmares about the fire every night, but in the transfiguration of dreams it was the fire of my mother's childhood that I dreamed of, the celluloid fire with the smell of kerosene and the crowded room of panicked children.

  Sometimes my father would be cast in the role of the faithful servant, smothering the flames that danced on my mother's head like a crown of light, bending down to scoop her up in his arms. I would watch in the corner, my view obscured by smoke, thinking to myself that he would come back for me, that he would notice where I was and return. But he never came back, and like the ajumma whom my mother had described to me, I looked down to discover my dress ablaze, undulating with fire like a wave, lapping upward, more a drowning than a burning, if you could discount the singed odor and the overwhelming heat. While I burned I turned into one of the Christmas angels that revolved on our living-room coffee table when I was young, a small, fixed figure chasing after flame.

  I woke from these dreams bathed in sweat, panting, the bed-sheets twisted and kicked off the bed. Sometimes a nurse would happen along and try to comfort me, patting my forehead and making soothing noises as one would to a wounded animal; sometimes there would be no one and nothing except a sterile hospital room in moonlight, and I would lie back in bed and think how I deserved every nightmare, every disquieting memory, every terror and punishment.