Secondhand World

  I had to urinate, so I went a little way out to the dunes, not too far because there were land mines. I had been holding it for some time because it was too cold to pee, and I was scared. So I held my rifle out and had my finger on the trigger, even as my fly was down and I was pissing on the ground. It was then I saw him, crouching behind a knoll. I saw only his right shoulder and arm, and from where I stood I could detect the tension in his muscles where he gripped his rifle. I waited and he waited; he saw me, but he didn't know that I saw him. Even with the wind and the snow and the cold, I could feel the sweat down my back.

  He stood up and I was paralyzed. He pointed his rifle at me. He was a boy of no more than sixteen, with flared nostrils and red apple cheeks. It looked like he'd grown up on a farm. There was no hatred in his face, only fear. I wanted to walk over and greet him. “Jingu, ” I wanted to say. Friend.

  But of course I didn't. Instead, he shouted and fired, but nothing happened. So I shot, and he looked down, and we could both see a hole open up in his chest, high up toward his throat, and the blood that splashed out across the snowy grass and sand. His body collapsed and fell to the side.

  I knew two things in that instant, Noona. That I could kill a man, and that I was no killer. It was wartime and I was a soldier and my job was to fight, but I did not, like Lim and some of the others, enjoy it. I would not keep souvenirs of my kills—ears on a string, dog tags, ID cards. I would not boast about this in the tents later, or in the bars when we went home on leave. It is a terrible, sickening thing, Noona, what war does to a man. What it does to a boy who is only just becoming a man. Even now, over twenty years later, it breaks my heart to think of it.

  Afterward I tried to bury him, but the wind kept blowing the sand away and the best I could manage was a shallow grave. In his pocket I found four crumpled one-won notes, a pocketknife, and a gum eraser. Also, his school picture, in a black uniform with a black cap, his name written on the back. “Kwak In Ho.” He looked like the kind of boy I might have made fun of, with his crooked, hopeful smile and eyes that turned down at the corners as though he were sleepy. I put the picture on the sharp end of a stick and planted it by his head.

  It turned out his rifle had jammed because it was clogged with sand.

  The letters seemed to end there. I skimmed empty pages with blue-ruled lines. But then there was this, on the last page of the booklet, written in different-colored ink—blue ballpoint instead of black felt tip—in an uncharacteristically loose, sloppy hand.

  The truth is, more and more these days, I feel as though I died in 1953—along with so many classmates and friends—and that everything that's happened since is a dream. America is a country without death. Everything is shiny and new to make you forget such a thing exists. Here people my age dress and act like teenagers. My wife does this. No one wants to be old. Why would they? There is no past here. There is no history. And here I am, a man trapped in the past, entangled in history, wandering like a ghost.

  There is something strange these days with Hae Kyoung. I don't know what to think of it. Lately I feel she has changed. She had some trouble after our son, Myung Hwan's, death. She was in the hospital many times. Too much feeling, too much grief. Twice she tried to kill herself, but luckily both times I was able to prevent her. She is a passionate woman, and I love her very much. There is something about her that glows, a light inside. I think everyone must see it. I love her and yet sometimes I worry that it is not enough for her. Or maybe it is too much, it overwhelms her and I feel she must go away from me. Lately I am afraid

  Excavation

  It ends in midsentence, as though he'd been abruptly called away. I imagine my father in his office, receiving a phone call from a graduate student, a favor to ask, a form to sign. I picture him swimming up from the past as though emerging from the deep end of a pool, gasping and blinking, into the open air. The letters aren't dated, so I can't know precisely when they were written, but I'm willing to bet it was very near the time of his death. They have that feeling to me, the feeling of elegy, as though he were unsticking himself from the present and material world.

  As I read the letters through the first time, I started to shake, a faint trembling that made the pages I held rustle like dry leaves. My knees and ankles, too, felt boneless. I ended up crouched on the floor by Rachel's bed.

  It was a kind of furor, I suppose, a mixture of grief and incomprehension. I counted the written pages. Twelve. Twelve bound pages covered in my father's handwriting, some only half filled, some written on front and back, the words on one side seeping into the words on the other. Something about those physical pages, stapled to a light blue cover that my father had left blank, drove home to me more than anything else that he was dead. I mean, not that he was dead precisely, not in the ashes-to-ashes sense, which of course I knew, but in a fuller, more comprehensive way—that he had once been alive, young even, inhabiting the earth, sentient and sentimental, scared, tender, brave, desiring—and now he was no longer.

  For days I felt nothing but exhaustion, the tiredness that comes from excavating heavy earth. Then came spikes of fury—what deprivation it seemed, my mother, my father, and me—our lives together, jostling elbows as though we were strangers on a train. I read the letters so many times I memorized parts of them. Each time I felt something different.

  What I've come to feel is something akin to dejä vu. It makes me believe on some level that my father's history was imprinted on my DNA, a pattern in code snaking through my cells, as though I'd known him all along, had been carrying the whole of him within me without knowing.

  Here I am … trapped in the past, entangled in history, wandering like a ghost. My father had written these words, but it could have been me.

  This then was my inheritance, or so I came to think of it. After all, he had written in English. This fragment of life story, this map back to the vital point of origin—in some dim way my beginning, in some dark way his end, and in the middle, a convergence.

  Bad Dream

  I had a tremendous headache in the night, a sort of pulsing in the temples like a series of small explosions detonating inside my brain. Louise gave me some aspirin.

  Sometime later I woke to a whimpering scream. It started far away and got closer and closer, until I realized that it was rising from my own throat. I sat up. The back of my nightgown was soaked in sweat. Louise and Jerry appeared, peering in at me from the door frame.

  “Isa, are you okay?” Jerry asked.

  I nodded slowly.

  “You must have had a nightmare,” said Louise. “You screamed.”

  “You said something,” said Jerry. “It sounded like ‘mean.’”

  “I don't know,” I said. “I don't remember.”

  Louise laid a palm on my forehead. “You're a little warm,” she said. “Poor Isa. Try to get some sleep.”

  I felt my stomach buckle and turned on my side to face the wall. The moment passed. I was conscious of my breath, which sounded unnaturally loud inside my own head, labored and errant, like an old person's breathing. I strained toward the sounds of Jerry and Louise returning to bed—the twang of a mattress spring, a low cough. Dimly, in the shadows, images reasserted themselves, the vague shape of my nightmare assembling. I was conscious that I was fighting them off—these images, this shape— at the same time I willed them forward. Not a dream but a vision; not a vision but a memory; not memory but knowledge.

  Dark room. Farthest part of night. Silence has a thickness, a texture. Crouched by the side of the bed. Silhouette of a figure. Tension. Holding of breath. A container pours out along the floor. Sensation of liquid, cold, stinging. Hiss of match strike. Briefscent of sulfur. Bright day and surprise. A moment of confusion, then the clarity of pain. Womanly figures dance—flailing and contorted in the eye of the flames—purple ribbons unfurling, discarding orange raiments.

  Storm

  It was Sunday. Outside the window, snow was falling on dead leaves. I was sitting at the kitchen table, my han
ds unsteady. I felt hungover, cloudy-headed. Jerry had made me tea, which had grown cold in its cup. I had had one sip and lost interest. He sat across from me, reading the newspaper, eating toast with blueberry jam.

  I knew two things in that instant. That I could kill a man and that I was not a killer. Those lines kept coming back to me. I pictured my father on his knees on a grassy dune, sobbing over a boy he had just killed.

  Another line returned to me. Twice she tried to kill herself, but luckily both times I was able to prevent her. I knew my mother had suffered after Stephens death. She'd been hospitalized a few times, and I'd seen her, low and hollow-eyed, hunched over my brother's overalls with a pair of pinking shears. I never knew she'd attempted suicide. I tried to remember the times she went to the hospital, my father grimly stoic, guiding her to the car by her elbow, in his other hand the smallest suitcase of Black Watch plaid. My mother's expression always seemed blankest to me at these times, her beauty a mask, tight to her face, like the wig on her head covering her real hair.

  How had she done it? Pills, most likely, since there'd been no scars. Or gas, maybe, in the garage before I came home from school.

  I knew how she did it the time she succeeded.

  Jerry looked up, as though he'd been eavesdropping on my thoughts.

  “My mother did it,” I said. “She set the fire.”

  “What?” Jerry put down his newspaper.

  “I just figured it out,” I said. “I found some letters …”

  As I explained it to Jerry, I grew more convinced. My mother would have been comfortable with a burning death. She would, I was sure, have welcomed it. My mother, who believed she was a phoenix, from ashes born and borne, wondering if I'd told my father, unable to read from his expression but sensing in him a coldness, a loosing of affection; Moulten lost to her already. It was my mother who had forgotten about me. Or, maybe, who hadn't.

  “Mian is what you heard me say in my sleep,” I said. “Not me, but my mother. Mian. It means ‘I'm sorry.

  We were silent for a long time after this. We sat at the kitchen table and watched the snow. Jerry made another pot of tea and more toast. Louise came in from her morning errands, stomping the snow from the bottoms of her shoes. We told her what I suspected, and she sat, too.

  “Can it make … ?” she said, her bowlike mouth twisting. “I mean, do you suppose it makes any difference in the end?”

  “To Isa,” Jerry said.

  “Of course, to Isa,” said Louise, as though to a child. “But, I mean, should we tell anyone else? The authorities?”

  Did it make a difference? Officially? If they concluded my mother crazy instead of my father? I shrugged. “We can't prove anything.”

  “I can't imagine her doing it,” Louise said.

  “Can you imagine him?” Jerry asked.

  Louise shook her head. “Anyone,” she said.

  “I can,” I said. And it was true that I had imagined it one way, my father crouched in the dark, tender and unforgiving, a can of gasoline in the crook of his arm. And I'd imagined it the other, my mother overrun with grief, fumbling with a match, tears obscuring her vision. And, though in the end it was the latter image I believed, what did it really matter except that it had come down to this, for them—a dark night furiously illuminated?

  We sat all day at the table, watching the unceasing blizzard, while we ourselves were indolent, mindless of time. Jerry was still in his bathrobe and pajamas, his feet in battered moccasins with holes in both toes. Louise reapplied her lipstick. The rim of her mug was stained deep red.

  Eventually twilight descended, and still the snow fell, swirling in clumps and fat flakes, pink-and-blue-edged in the moon's illumination. The world had lost its definition, all its edges softening under the sculpted drift of snow, and inside the house we watched in suspended animation, as though we, too, were being muffled, soothed, covered over.

  What Do You Do, Dear?

  I sat with Sadie and the others on the orange shag rug in the narrow annex where Louise had her day-care center. Sadie's hair was divided into two sloppy braids. Adam sat next to her, dark and dreamy, his thumb tucked inside his mouth; on the other side was Gretchen, skinny and pale, with marbled green eyes.

  “‘What Do You Do, Dear?’” read Louise, holding the pink paperback high for everyone to see.

  I smiled and settled back against a beanbag chair, Sadie leaning into me, her small dark head resting on my arm. I remembered reading this book to Stephen. I listened to Louise read in a silly British accent, and the children recited along with her, breathless in anticipation of the recurring punch line. What do you do, dear?

  I looked down at Sadie and I saw Stephen. The part in her hair was crooked and white; I traced its switchbacks with my finger. It reminded me of the crack in the ceiling of our living room, the one I noticed the night my father hit me, the one I thought must go straight down to the center of the world.

  I leaned closer to Sadie, smelled the earth in her hair, and I felt a tenderness like vertigo. I had to close my eyes.

  It's a secondhand world we're born into. What is novel to us is only so because we're newborn, and what we cannot see, that has come before—what our parents have seen and been and done—are the hand-me-downs we begin to wear as swaddling clothes, even as we ourselves are naked. The flaw runs through us, implicating us in its imperfection even as it separates us, delivers us onto opposite sides of a chasm. It is both terribly beautiful and terribly sad, but it is, finally, the fault in the universe that gives birth to us all.

  Intact

  I do not know what happens next, whether I will go to college in the fall, or get a job. I'm toying with the idea of going to Korea and learning the language, maybe trying to find out what happened to my aunt. Louise thinks I should become a teacher.

  The Sunday of the blizzard—the day Jerry, Louise, and I spent at the kitchen table—that was the first time I thought I might be all right.

  “Come on,” Jerry had said, getting up, brushing the crumbs from his lap.

  “Come where?” Louise said.

  “Out,” he said, and took both of our hands.

  “But I don't have my—“ Louise protested. “Jerry! Let me at least get my—”

  “Shh,” he said. He slid open the door and we stepped out into the yard. The cold hit my face, and I felt the slower sensation of cold at my feet. We slogged toward where the garden had been. Louise and Jerry stopped, but I walked farther out, to the edge of the woods where the trees were hulking shapes. Snow spiraled around me, each flake seemingly phosphorescent, lit from within, as though by a tiny votive candle.

  I thought of my mother's favorite Christmas decoration, the carousel of golden angels that glittered as they spun. The idea of repeated motion, of angels spinning and snow falling, seemed to elongate my sense of time, made it stretch in both directions. Inside it my parents and Stephen were alive; my aunt had never been abducted; the soldier my father had killed opened his eyes and stared out to sea.

  This sense of infinite, alternate time stopped me where I stood, and I lay back in the snow. The chill made the scars on my legs pulse with a shooting pain that was itself icy cold. From where I lay, looking straight up at the sky, the snow seemed to pulse in the same rhythm. It was like witnessing the multiple birth of stars. And there in the silence, the snow, and the dark, I wept, finally, for the right reasons. Not for self-pity, or remorse, or even sadness. But in gratitude.

  Acknowledgments

  My gratitude to my relatives in Korea and the United States, who helped teach me the emotional history of Korea, and the enduring heart and strength that abides in its people. My father's wartime memoir was especially educational in this regard. Many thanks to my agent, Gail Hochman, for believing in me from the beginning; to Vicky Wilson, for believing in the book; and to Alice Quinn for playing literary matchmaker. To Liz Ahl, Levi Costello, John Dalton, Erin Flanagan, Hayun Jung, Robert Miller, Caroline Morris, Meg Petersen, Merryl Reichbach, Alice Staple
s, Zachary Wagman, and Jon Wei, for their feedback and friendship. Thanks also to Geoffrey Brock and Hayun Jung for their special contributions to this book. To the educators who inspired and encouraged me—particularly Joan Underwood, G. Armour Craig, Mary Gordon, Marilynne Robinson, and Margot Livesey. For their gifts of time and money, I am indebted to the National Endowment for the Arts; the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts; the Millay Colony, in Austerlitz, New York; and especially to the magical MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where most of this novel was written. Thanks to my brother Kollin; Kayla and Clay, the best kids on the planet; and most importantly, to Roy Andrews, for sharing the life and the dream.

  Copyright © 2006 by Katherine Min

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random

  House, Inc., New York, and Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Alfred A. Knopf: Excerpt from “Gubbinal” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by

  Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly

  Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Paul Simon Music: Excerpt from “America” by Paul Simon.