Secondhand World

by Katherine Min

  So, have you read any good books lately? (Ha, ha.) I've recently discovered Ayn Rand. You should really read The Fountainhead, Isa. It's brilliant. She believes that no one really acts altruistically, because even the desire to be altruistic is, at the core, selfish. And if we all just act on our own selfishness, we will actually be more productive and creative as a society. She says that's why capitalism works. Interesting stuff. You should definitely check it out.

  I'm going to Rutgers starting next month. Wanted to go to Yale or Brown, but the fools didn't let me in! Oh well, I'm excited. I wonder where you'll be going. The Unit didn't say.

  Anyway, I'm truly sorry about what happened with your folks. It must be tough. I wish that we were still close, but my own stubborn attitude got in the way, I guess. You're a cool kid, Isa, and I know you'll be just fine.

  Love and headin’ on down the road,

  Chris

  (Yeah, I know, using my middle name now. No one calls me

  Hero down here, and Herold is just too square.)

  It was nice of him to write, I thought. This was precisely what Louise had said. “It's so nice of Hero to write, Isa. I saw his mother the other day, and she said he was leaving for college soon. You should write him back.”

  I knew I wouldn't, though. Some silences were recoverable and others weren't, and it seemed to me infinitely false to pretend one was when it was not.

  I thought about Hero, tried to conjure his luminous body. I'd been reading in the burn literature that skin color is created by cells in the epidermis called melanocytes. When the skin is deeply burned, melanocytes are destroyed, and pigmentation defaults to an unprotected, pearlish white. The burns on my legs are this color now, with pink scars seizing up in the middle like the root system of a tree. It occurred to me that I had, in these specific spots, become albino.

  I fed Hero's letter to a Bic lighter I found in Louise's purse, letting the ashes fall into the sink, where I watered them into the disposal. It wasn't bitterness I felt, though there was cause for bitterness. Hero's letter was a little too breezy to assuage either my longing or my curiosity. Ayn Rand and the Velvet Underground. I did not recognize the person I had loved, and I suppose I was getting used to this, so what I felt was a kind of hollow familiarity, a reverberating echo that was both dense and empty.

  Love and headin on down the road. Chris,

  At least I had the satisfaction of knowing no one would ever again call him Hero.

  Cowbird Egg

  They all came back for Thanksgiving—Adrienne from Potsdam, Audrey from Binghamton, Rachel from Cooper Union. They seemed older, more sophisticated—Adrienne with her plucked eyebrows and angular haircut, Audrey in a long suede vest fringed with sheepskin, Rachel, arms drenched in silver bracelets, with kohl-rimmed eyes and iridescent eye shadow like dragonfly wings.

  Rachel, in particular, seemed changed. She had acquired an abrupt laugh, and her face had taken on a tight, skeptical expression that seemed citified to me, part attitude and part affliction. She insisted on staying in the guest room. “It's your room now,” she said, coming into her bedroom to get some clothes. She waved her hand like a monarch. “I don't live here anymore.”

  We hung out in the basement again, like old times. They talked about their lives away at college, stories about drunken escapades and boyfriends, and professors who were vindictive and only gave Äs if you slept with them. Rachel talked about the City, and how from the window of her bedroom she could look out on a hundred windows, and how once she saw two men making love bent over a chair, and once a woman doing yoga in the nude. She talked about painting and the importance of light, and the whole time her hands sketched, across her pants leg, in a small journal, in the air with her cigarette smoke.

  I played “Yankee Doodle Dandy” for them on the harmonica, a breathy, wheezing rendition that I'd been working on since I left the hospital.

  “That's great, Isa,” Audrey said doubtfully.

  “You should try something from Dylan,” said Rachel.

  Back among them I felt like a usurper, the cowbird's egg hatched in the robin's nest (the way I'd felt riding home on the bus the afternoon Stephen died). Though I had gone through the most in the last few months, I looked the least changed (not counting my burns, of course, which were hidden beneath my jeans). My face was still broad and sallow, with a mouth that slanted to the left in a smirking, judgmental way; I had the same haircut. It seemed wrong that I should live here now, while Rachel and the others came back only to visit.

  No one seemed to question what I was doing there, but no one asked what I'd been up to, either. They didn't inquire about my exploits on the burn ward, or my experience with fire and its aftermath; though Rachel, unable to control her curiosity, asked me to show her my burns, and when I did, self-consciously pulling down my pants, she winced but did not turn away.

  “They look kind of cool, actually,” she said. “Braided. Like a weaving or something. Do they hurt?”

  “Not right at the moment,” I said. “A little tingly maybe. They're sensitive to the air.”

  I remembered how fascinated Rachel had been when I'd described my mother's burn, and I wondered if this was the morbid curiosity of the artist. I remembered our last night in Utah and pulled my pants up.

  “Freak show's over,” I said.

  Rachel smiled at me. “It's never over, Isa,” she said—maniacally, I thought. “That's the beauty of it.”

  Ping

  One morning at the day-care center, Sadie Jersid greeted me with a book in her hand, the one about the duck that gets left behind on the Yangtze River. She's five years old, with sad brown eyes and black hair falling to her shoulders. Sadie liked the part where all the ducks got spanked, and was scared when Ping almost got eaten.

  “That's not smart,” she said, when Ping got caught.

  She sat on my lap and we read the book through. When we were done Sadie turned the book over to the front and placed her flat palm on the cover.

  “ ‘The Story About Ping,’“ she said, pretending she was reading. She traced the yellow duck with her index finger.

  I brought my face closer to hers. Her hair brushed my mouth.

  “Ping,” I whispered into her ear. She looked back at me. “Ping,” I said, one staccato syllable.

  Sadie reached back to stroke my face. “Ping,” she said, giggling

  Effects

  In the beginning of December I received a parcel from SUNY-Albany, a large cardboard box wrapped in brown paper, tied with twine. Inside was an accordion file bulging with papers, an address book, and a short note from Cora, the secretary of my father's department. She'd been cleaning out my father's office, she said, and couldn't bear to throw out his files, so she'd sent them to me. She thought I was the one who should go through them. She was terribly sorry, she said, for my loss, and hoped that I didn't mind her sending along my father's effects.

  My father's effects. This sounded funny to me. As though the effects my father had had could be mailed in a box. I pulled some stray papers from the file and was startled to see my father's handwriting again, those bold vertical lines so meticulous and certain. There were copies of old exams, lecture notes, grade books from 1972 {Arnold, William; Astin, G. Humphrey; Barber, James); dry-cleaning bills; pale green guest checks from Marie's Cafe, ringed with coffee stains; a couple of keys that looked like they went to a filing cabinet; torn-out articles from scholarly magazines; and a copy of a take-out menu from a Chinese restaurant near campus. One scrap of paper, ripped from the bottom of a newspaper, contained these words: ”WD-40, lightbulbs, C batteries.”

  It overwhelmed me with proof of my father's life, as though I'd discovered he was hiding somewhere and had only staged his demise. I was surprised at the untidiness of the folder, its mundane contents. These were not the kinds of things my father attached himself to, or, anyway, they were not things I attached to him.

  I found my father's university ID tucked into the file. His face stared out at me
from the laminated photograph, a solemn man with dark glasses and a high, pale forehead, his thinning hair slicked down atop his head. This man, I thought, was my father. I put everything back inside the box and pushed it under Rachel's bed.

  Lucky

  At night I rubbed lotion on my burns, gently probing the uneven surface of the skin. It seemed to me like the terrain on the moon. I imagined a moon buggy, its tractor treads laboring to climb a lumpen clod of lunar ground.

  I wore jeans all the time now, even though my scars were itchy and chafed against the denim, and when I was alone I couldn't help staring at myself, at the strange hideousness that had attached itself to me. Also, the donor sites on my backside, where they took pieces of skin to graft onto my legs, were healing in a kind of patchwork of pinks and reds. I wondered who would ever touch these places. Who would want to. And it was hard not to give over to self-pity.

  “You're a very lucky girl,” Dr. Aukofer had said to me in the hospital. “Your burns are confined to three isolated spots on your legs that will be fairly easy to conceal. Given the nature of the fire, you're lucky not to have been burned more extensively. You're lucky to be alive.”

  “Lucky to be alive.” This was the refrain I heard from all sides, the chorus of well-meaning voices that crooned conspiracy by my bedside like a lullaby hush.

  I closed my eyes and brushed my fingertips along the rough, damaged skin, and I thought, Lucky,

  Discovery

  Two weeks after it arrived, I took the box out from under Rachel's bed. I went through my father's files systematically, straightening the crumpled checks from the coffee shop, putting aside the grade books, aligning the loose pages of his notes so they made a neat stack. I threw away the Chinese menu and the academic articles; dropped the keys and my father's badge into a small manila envelope. Staring at the mimeographed exams my father had made up, the equations with Greek letters, subscript numbers, parentheses and brackets, I was like an archaeologist regarding some ancient, sacred text, puzzling over sentences I could not parse. My father seemed to reside within them. He felt nearby. The back of my neck grew hot, as though he were breathing close behind.

  While I was going through test booklets—glancing at my father's “minus fives” ringed in fiery red that seemed to all but obliterate the timid, penciled offerings of his students—I came across a blue booklet filled with his handwriting. It took me a moment to register what it was, this thin booklet in my hand, its pages lined with dark letters, straight as chess pieces. It spooked me, like hearing his voice would have. I had to read slowly, a couple sentences at a time, and then I looked up into Rachel's bedroom—at the plaid bedspread and the paisley wallpaper— and I felt lost, amnesiac. When I had read it through, I began again.

  Noona—

  After all these years I still think of you every day. I do not know if you are alive or dead, if you died in 1950, or later. If you are alive, do you have children? You would be forty-four. I wonder how war changed you.

  I live in the U.S. now, Noona. I am professor at State University in Albany, New York. I drive a big American car to work—a Buick. I come home to a nice house with a yard and big trees. My wife, Chung Hae Kyoung, who is from yangban family, dresses in latest Western fashions. We have one daughter, Myung Hee, who is completely American. We had a son, Myung Hwan, who, sadly, passed away at age four.

  And even after all this, I feel time reversed, like my life here is the memory, and what is real to me is the smell of boiling chig'ge in the dirt kitchen of Chong-woondong, our mother scolding us for not wearing slippers, or even the field of rocks when I went back to Seoul and could not find where our house once stood.

  Ah, Noonal So many men died. A quarter of my high school class. I think now what a waste of life. And for what? For the same result. The country divided as it had been at the beginning. Nothing changed except four million dead. And the question I ask is can you really live after you have seen so much death? I thought with Hae Kyoung it might be possible.

  But it turns out I was wrong. Death followed me here. History followed me here. I have begun to see that I, too, am a casualty of war, that I died in the steep pass at Chirisan, on the beach at Yangyang, on the dusty road to Pusan at Daekwolyung. Four million times I died. Everything since has been happening to a ghost.

  Noona—

  When I think of the last day I saw you, I think of a head of baechu cabbage. There was still some food in the markets, and Omma wanted cabbage to make summer kimchi. It was a week into the war and we still believed it would end soon.

  I had been in a fistfight with a schoolmate. I punched him in the nose with a right hook and sent him sprawling on the road. Ordinarily this might not have angered Omma so much, but she was nervous about the Communists, who were rounding up workers for their factories, and soldiers for their armies in the north. She was so afraid that they would take away her only son. She made me stay in and copy out “I will not fistfight in the road” a hundred times in my notebook.

  I did not want to tell her why I hit that boy. It was because he teased me about having no father. He said because I lived only with women, I was becoming a woman myself. You know how Omma always starched my school uniform so stiff and shiny, and ironed my pocket handkerchiefs into creased squares.

  I remember sitting in my room copying “I will not fistfight in the road.” To relieve the boredom, I would copy the sentence in different handwritings, starting from the bottom word to the top, then going back down again. I kept listening to the sounds of chickens scuffling in the dirt outside and running water from the pump. It was quiet because many people had fled, but I could still hear the sound of fighting in the distance. I could hear your shuffling steps as you crossed back and forth from the kitchen to the courtyard, and then you were at the window.

  “Tae Mun-ee,” you called to me, low so our mother wouldn't hear you. “I'm going to market now to buy cabbage for Omma. I will try to bring you back something.”

  “Some caramel candy from end-of-the-road ajasi?” I asked.

  You laughed. You knew these were my favorite. “I'll try,” you said, and hurried out.

  • • •

  The boy I punched in the nose, Lee Whangook, saw what happened. He ran to tell us. Omma broke down screaming, and I jumped up from my room and ran outside. Lee told me that a big truck had stopped. Two men got out and started talking to you. You tried to ignore them, but they grabbed you and pushed you into the back of the truck, where there were many others guarded by soldiers with guns. “You are pretty,” Lee overheard one of them say. “If you're a hard worker, maybe I'll marry you myself.”

  Lee swore he heard the whole thing, hiding behind the corner. You said your mother was sick, that she needed you, but the men told you to be quiet, and the truck drove off.

  I ran down the road, my shoes pressed down at the heels like a crazy person, shouting, asking the few people I met if they'd seen you. One old woman, dressed in the white hanbok of mourning, simply pointed north.

  My Aunt

  My father had mentioned his sister to me only a few times. He told me that she had the smallest feet and hands of any woman he'd ever seen. He'd cup his own hands together to indicate their tininess. He told me that she was the favorite of every street vendor and shopkeeper in the neighborhood, that she was clever and pretty and always hid her mouth behind her hand when she laughed. He told me that she loved peaches, and that her favorite color had been green. It was my mother who told me that she'd been killed in the war, along with my grandmother.

  Noona—

  A month after you were taken, Omma and I were eating dinner—rice porridge with kimchi—sitting at the small lacquer table, listening to the sounds of the war around us that were sometimes far off, sometimes close enough to shake the floor. I was wearing my old school uniform. Omma thought it would keep them from drafting me— as if either side cared about schooling!

  When she had finished her meal, Omma balanced her chopsticks on the rim of her bowl.
Pressing a hand to her chest, she burped; her dyspepsia had grown worse with the stress of the war. She took her napkin and, holding it to her mouth, burped again, crumpling the napkin delicately into a ball by her place.

  “Omoni, are you okay?” I asked. She looked pale, and I noticed she was sweating.

  She muttered something and got up from the cushion.

  “Gwaenchana,” she said brusquely.

  Omma went across the yard to the outhouse. I sat at the table and sipped the remains of rice-sweetened water. I was always hungry in those days; there was never enough to eat, and I wouldn't allow Omma to give me her portion of food. She had been gone some minutes, and I was just beginning to wonder whether I should go out and knock at the outhouse door. Remember the time she fainted in there and down-the-road ajasihad to cut out the bottom of the door? I got up and took two steps into the courtyard when there was a crack of light and a whooshing sound. I remember a flash, and a pain in the back of my head, then nothing. When I came to, our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Kang, was screaming and wailing and slapping my cheek.

  “Aiyee!” she screamed. “You poor thing, get up! Are you hurt? Is anything broken?” Then, seeing that I was all right, just dazed, with a goose egg at the back of my head, she started crying again. “Aigo, you poor boy! You're an orphan now!”

  Where the outhouse had been was now a smoking black crater with splinters of wood and a smell of sulfur. I looked into the crater, and around the charred ground, but there was nothing there. It was as though Omma had vanished from the earth. I am sorry to have to tell you, Noona, so many years later. Omma would have been embarrassed. But we cannot choose how we die.

  Noona—

  I wanted to tell you about the first man I killed. It was in the coastal city of Yangyang on the East Sea. We'd just retaken it from the North Koreans, and I remember we took down their flag with the red star and put up the taeguki. An icy Siberian wind blew sand from the beach into our eyes and noses.