Secondhand World

  I was listless, uncooperative, dangling like a rag doll when they tried to get me into the shower, slumping to the floor as soon as they let me go. Once when Pastor Park was in the room, reading from his transparent pages, I felt a hardening in my chest, an ingot of pure despair, to which his singsong assurances only added a gilded weight.

  One day I went into the bathroom and looked at my face in the mirror. It was sallow, with chalky circles under the eyes. My lips were severely chapped and they parted with difficulty. I looked into the darks of my eyes and tried to say something to myself; I can't remember what—something like, “My name is Isa Sohn and my parents are dead“—but I couldn't manage the coordination of my mouth with my voice, and nothing came out but a dry croak.

  Time passed slowly. I tried to keep to the surface of things. The linoleum floors. The concrete walls painted aquamarine. I learned the nurses on the ward. Abby and John, whom I liked. Norah and Kristen, whom I did not. When John was there, it was night. When Dr. Aukofer came in, it was morning. If Janelle, my roommate, was watching cartoons, it was Saturday. If Pastor Park appeared, it was Sunday afternoon.

  The police report called it murder-suicide. My father apparently waited until my mother was asleep and then poured gasoline on and around the perimeter of the bed. I could imagine him, head bent to the task, meticulously meting out the contents of the red container with the yellow spout that was ordinarily kept in the garage.

  I imagined my mother lost in sleep, the only one among us who had the gift for it, lying on her side, one arm slung over her head (the way she'd slept after Stephen died). I saw my father, in his blue pajamas with the white piping, getting into bed beside her, flicking a match, and spooning up tight, hugging her to him as the room ignited into a false dawn.

  I believed this was what happened. There was no discussion, no fight. My father simply made up his mind, for whatever reason believing that this simultaneous death was what was called for, the correct answer {work not shown) to this particularly difficult and complex problem.

  People assumed I was mute from grief. They pitied me my sudden orphanhood. They recalled what had happened to my brother years earlier and understood my anguish to be only sensible given the devastation I'd suffered. Such a tragedy, they whispered. Poor, poor girl.

  It was grief that drove me, just not the type they imagined. It was hard to believe my father capable of such a thing, harder still to think that telling him the truth about my mother should have unleashed such horror. I suppose I'd wanted him to punch William Moulten in the nose, or to pay my mother closer attention so she wouldn't go wandering off. Or maybe I was just still upset about Hero, and my own bitterness made me want to destroy my mother's pleasure, her—as Jerry had pointed out—not-so-horrible crime of taking happiness when it came her way.

  But what hurt most deeply was something much more selfish. My father had given me a new watch, the only present I can remember receiving from him, and then gone off to kill my mother and himself. Didn't he consider that the fire would probably kill me too? On the eve of my graduation from high school?

  I don't think he meant to kill me. I don't think he thought about me at all. Once again my father's attentions had settled on my mother, his ministrations, loving or malevolent, focused entirely on her. I was irrelevant, a mere by-product of his obsessive love, to the end the outsider in the threesome. Not the one who survived, but the one who was left behind.

  Tall Ships

  Three weeks after the fire, the nation celebrated its bicentennial. Abby brought me a blue-frosted cupcake with a flag stuck on a toothpick. We watched the fireworks over the tall ships on TV.

  “They're so beautiful,” Abby said. Silhouetted against New York Harbor the ships were tall, stately, and sleek, but they looked strangely haunted, also—ghostly in full sail, skeletal with bare masts. An armada of the majestic dead bobbing in dark water.

  What can I say about the time I spent on the burn ward? That it was gruesome, that it was tedious, that it was not so bad. I am grateful to so many people I met there, to Abby and John; to Dr. Aukofer and his burn team; to Mike, my psychiatric social worker; to Helen, the volunteer who wheeled the book cart; to Janelle, my roommate and the bravest person I ever met; to Clive and Andy in PT, who tortured me in ways I'd thought were outlawed by the Geneva Conventions.

  The truth is that I quickly grew comfortable there. It began to feel like home. Yet when I think back on the time I spent there, it's like seeing through a veil; much of what I remember is clouded by painkillers and, when they weren't working, by the pain itself, which was like a heavy blanket that gave neither warmth nor comfort.

  Some moments I remember clearly, the veil suddenly pulled aside, the way Dr. Aukofer pushed the curtain back when he was done examining my burns. Most of these moments were unpleasant, like the first time my wounds were debrided. Or those times I would rise up out of Percocet-induced unconsciousness, the reality of my situation hitting me like a brick to the head.

  Everyone said I was brave because I didn't complain. When they hurt me with needles and bandages, I would close my eyes and count to ten. Sometimes tears would run down my face, but I would not cry out. I don't think I fully accepted the fact that I was alive. Meaning I did not believe it, did not wish for it. I felt like one of those tall ships among the choking crowds of well-wishers and tourists. The rockets’ red glare, the fireworks bursting in air; this was life, the stuff of celebration, bright and boisterous—while I felt like one of the vessels below, drifting through from a darker century, spare and serious as a plague.

  Rule of Nines

  According to the Rule of Nines, I am burned over thirty-six percent of my body. They divide the body into parts, each nine percent of the total body surface area (TBSA). An arm counts nine percent, a leg eighteen. It's a tidy system. The charts they use are of a body sectioned off by dotted lines, like the ones drawn on posters of cows to show the cuts of meat.

  There's a patch about five by six centimeters across my right thigh, and one slightly smaller along my calf. On my left leg, there is a blaze that runs from my outer thigh to the back of my knee.

  I won't pretend that it isn't painful, excruciating, like heated knives cutting into you, and then this crawling sensation like ants eating you from the inside. When they change the dressings, or try to clean the wounds, it feels like I am being burned all over again. And even now, the itching can get so intense that it becomes painful, like a hundred bees stinging me.

  But thirty-six percent is nothing. My roommate, Janelle, caught her hair on fire leaning to blow out the birthday candles on her fourteenth birthday. She's at eighty-one percent, mostly on her face and neck. Her left ear is just a hole at the side of her head, and after seven skin grafts, her face still has the texture of raw, stringy meat.

  The skin is our largest organ. In adults, it averages more than two square yards. Imagine it spread out in one thin layer, bald, irregular parchment, like a ragged map of the body. It's the boundary wall between all we are and all we are not; our defense against all manner of assailants, visible and microscopic. It is the container of our corporeal selves and the vessel for our ethereal ones. When it burns, the border is breached, and we're suddenly permeable, undefined and undefended.

  A strange paradox: after a severe burn, the body manufactures collagen to form scar tissue atop the injured area. The new surface is thicker and harder than normal skin. It has the look and feel of rope. Yet a healed scar is twenty percent weaker than the skin it replaces. It's more sensitive to air currents, to heat or cold, and even to touch. Which means, I suppose, that despite appearances to the contrary, I've grown more thin-skinned.

  Trick Candles

  One of my happiest moments on the ward was when I turned eighteen. Abby made a chocolate cake with Cool Whip frosting and HAPPY 18TH BIRTHDAY, IS A written in loopy red icing. John, Helen, and Janelle, and the kids on the ward, waited while Abby and I cut pieces of cake and scooped out ice cream. Dr. Aukofer came in, and the
cardiologist, Dr. Carlo.

  “Happy birthday, Isa,” Dr. Aukofer said, swooping down to give me a kiss on the cheek. He handed me a present wrapped clumsily in silver paper. It was a copy of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

  “I loved this book when I was your age,” Dr. Aukofer said, tapping the cover. I smiled. It had been one of Hero's favorites.

  Abby gave me a powder-blue scarf that I'd seen her knitting on the ward. “It's the wrong season, I know,” she said, “but I wasn't sure how long it'd take.”

  Janelle gave me a book of crossword puzzles; John presented me with a Hohner harmonica—a “mouth organ,” the box called it—in the key of C.

  “Hey, Isa, make a wish and blow out the candles,” Dr. Aukofer said, after Abby brought in the cake and they'd all sung “Happy Birthday” in disastrous harmony.

  “Not too close,” warned Janelle.

  I closed my eyes and blew out the candles, and what I wished for was for everything to stay the same. It was not so much that I wanted to stay on the burn ward forever, though the thought didn't horrify me as it once had; it was more that I just wanted to pause. Something about that particular tableau—everyone relaxed and smiling, leaning in to watch me blow out the candles— made me feel it might be restful, to perch inside the moment like a bird on a ledge.

  When I opened my eyes the candles had sprung alight again. Everyone was laughing at the joke of it, at my continued, vain efforts to blow them out. The candles would extinguish for a moment and then flare into flame again, over and over. And I laughed louder than anyone, because I had gotten my wish.

  Accommodation

  In the end they didn't know what to do with me. I still needed regular monitoring, but it was clear I didn't need to stay in the hospital. It took a long time, but Pastor Park was finally able to get hold of my mother's sisters in Seoul. There were five of them, married to industrialists and government bureaucrats. They harbored no apparent affection for my mother, whom I imagine they perceived as odd and undutiful. My mother had hardly mentioned them, except occasionally to warn me against their examples. “Ayoo, Isa, don't make that face; you look just like my sister Hae Ja!” “My sister Hae Soo ate too many mandu, Isa; belly swelled up like a pigs. ” None of them wanted much to do with me. Impracticalities aside—they didn't speak English, I didn't speak Korean; I couldn't move to Korea, they couldn't move here—I don't think any one of them relished taking on the American-born daughter of their prodigal sister. Halsu-eopseoyo. No way. They sent me money to assuage their consciences, and this was fine with me.

  Pastor Park and his wife offered to take me in, but their house in Scotia was tiny, and despite the ivory Cadillac, they had problems making ends meet. The memory of living with Mrs. Park for a week was still harrowing enough for me to refuse, borrowing the standard Korean excuse I'd heard my parents use many times. “Thank you so much,” I said, shaking my head. “You are too kind, but I couldn't possibly let you go through so much trouble on my account.”

  Jerry settled it by suggesting I come live with him and Louise temporarily. All the kids were away at college now except Gary who was in the fourth grade.

  “I talked to Rachel. You can have her room. It'll be perfect. Louise and I miss having a teenager in the house.” Jerry raised an eyebrow and smirked at the patent falseness of this last statement.

  I nodded, my eyes filling with tears.

  Jerry patted my arm. “Of course, you'll be expected to earn your keep,” he said. “Can't have any loafers hanging around.” He winked. “Except the ones we bake.”

  I groaned. It was the kind of very bad near-pun Jerry was always making, the kind that mortified his son and daughters and caused them to throw things at him.

  “Thanks,” I said. I had only recently started speaking again, and my voice sounded untrustworthy to me, dry and prickly in the back of my throat.

  “Denada” said Jerry, and he went off to make the arrangements.

  Damage

  So I came to reside at Rachel's. It was different, of course, with Rachel, Audrey, and Adrienne gone. The three cats, Cutie, Darling, and Princess, still prowled the premises, fat and indifferent, but Domino had been hit by a car the previous winter. Much of the vitality had seeped out of the place. It was no longer as frantic or as messy. I went down to the basement to watch soaps or game shows, enticed by old smells of must and stale pot. I found a peace symbol key chain that had belonged to Dusty, more than a dollar's worth of change, and an unused condom in the folds of the couch. Gary, who now ruled the basement, had added a miniature pool table, a small trampoline, and Donkey Kong on the TV.

  I was supposed to be figuring out what I was going to do with myself.

  “Take your time. No hurry,” Jerry assured me.

  “You're such a big help with the kids,” said Louise, who paid me for helping her with the day care. “I'm lucky to have you.”

  I deferred admission to SUNY-Albany until the following fall, but I wasn't sure I wanted to go. A lot of money from my parents’ savings had gone toward hospital bills, and I felt like I needed a job. The problem was I wasn't ready. I still had nightmares, and my legs were often in enough pain that I couldn't walk or even stand for long periods of time. Although I'd started speaking again, I found myself, even in the simplest situations, strangling on my own words, unable to articulate the rote expressions every five-year-old knows.

  About a week after I moved in, while Jerry and Louise were out, I walked around the block to the spot where my house had stood. It was marked off by yellow caution tape—a black hollow of ground with the charred remains of metal and wood. There was a NO TRESPASSING sign in the yard; beside it another sign, WORK BY BARNETT& SONS, CONSTRUCTION,but there was no evidence of work being done.

  I hadn't expected to walk so far, and my right leg (the more badly burned of the two) started to shake so violently I sank onto the curb. I was hoping Mrs. Williamson wasn't looking out her window just then; I didn't want to attract sympathetic attention. But looking at where the house had been for the first time since the fire, I was overcome.

  I felt like a bead of oil on water, sliding along the surface precariously, without purchase. I could still remember all the rooms in that house—the way the kitchen was off the foyer to the right, and the staircase to the left led to the living room, and on up to four bedrooms and a bath. There was a newel post on the landing with a wooden ball perched on top that fit beneath my open palm. It was so hard and immoveable, that ball, embedded in the rectangular post that was planted somewhere under the carpet and the floor below. I believed in its permanence, and it, in turn, had persuaded me of my own.

  But the newel post and the landing, the living room and the bedrooms, every feature and fixture of that house was gone, burned to the ground in about ten hours.

  My legs throbbed and I felt unsteady, but I got up and walked slowly back toward Rachel's house. I was angry at myself for having come to look, rubbernecking at the scene of my own tragedy. I was angry because the image I'd held of our house, the solidity of it in my mind, had been replaced by this picture of ruin, and try as I might, I could not regain the house.

  Correspondence

  I read all the time at Rachel's. Louise took me to the library and I came back with ten books, the maximum allowed, and read them all in three weeks. They were mostly old novels—I liked French and Russian best—and biographies of writers, like Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, which I found bracing and instructive. I also read all I could find on severe burn injuries and their treatment, mostly so I could ask Dr. Aukofer questions at our biweekly appointments.

  Occasionally there was mail for me. I got my diploma from IHS—a cream-colored piece of paper bordered in green with my name on it in Old English calligraphy and the stupid seal with an Indian in profile. Abby sent me a letter saying how much everyone missed me on the ward; John had scribbled on the bottom, wanting to know how the harmonica playing was going.

  Rachel sent me cards, things she'd found in secondhand boo
kstores, black-and-white photos of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building, taken in the 1940s. She scrawled a few sentences on the back that I mostly couldn't read. Something about a guy she'd met who took her to Harlem. Something about taking an art class with an old friend of Jackson Pollock's.

  One day I got a letter from Hero, forwarded from the hospital. Louise handed it to me from a stack of mail she'd been looking through; the postmark was two months old. I took it down into the basement and read it by the flickering light of the television screen with the sound turned down. It surprised me how sweaty my hands were, opening the envelope, how hard my heart pounded. After all that had happened, you'd think I would have been immune. I'd come to think of Hero as a childhood playmate, someone whom I had played with in a sandbox when I was six, or been forced to buddy up with at recess. That he had been my first lover no longer seemed plausible to me. Or, in truth, that I'd had any lover at all.

  The letter was written on a single sheet of paper ripped out of a spiral notebook. I read it twice before I realized that what was written there was not going to change.

  Dear Isa:

  My parents told me what happened. I'm so sorry. I wanted to come visit you in the hospital but the Unit nixed that idea. Not sure what their problem is. (When am I ever?) I hope that you're fine now. It sounds like you're gonna be.

  I'm enjoying school a lot more than I thought I would. Living away from home is great, and being with a lot of kids with sight issues is kind of cool. I started a new band down here called Bare Aspirin. Sort of Velvet Underground type stuff. I think you'd really dig it. I've been writing lots of new songs. Maybe I'll send you some.