Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 1

BLUEPRINTS.

OF THE.

AFTERLIFE.

RYAN BOUDINOT.

For my children.

WOO-JIN.

The world was full of precious garbage. Woo-jin pa.s.sed through it on his way home from work, scanning the field at the end of the runway for aluminum cans, bits of copper wire, rare earth elements scavenged from junked computers. He found a beer box, but whoever'd left it hadn't put the empties back in their cardboard cubicles. He kicked the box and swung a plastic bag of rescued leftovers from his finger. As a professional dishwasher he only rescued food from the trash when he was certain none of his coworkers would catch him. If they spotted the clamsh.e.l.l box on top of the Hobart washer they'd think it was an order somebody never picked up from the takeout window, and if they happened to see that the burger inside had a bite out of it, they'd think it was Woo-jin who had bitten the bite rather than it being a burger that had already had a bite taken out of it. He'd sc.r.a.ped this particular burger out of a plastic basket along with congealed gravy fries. Patsy, his foster sister, was going to want that burger, Woo-jin knew. He could either eat the burger and gravy fries now, in the field, and go home stuffed but not have to share with Patsy, or he could show up with the food and have Patsy yell at him about who needed the three-quarters of a burger the most. Patsy was always talking at him about how lucky he was with his job because of all the free food. If he showed up empty-handed she accused him of not bringing food home on purpose. The only times she was really grateful was when he'd bring home a whole pie. Usually the pie was apple, or rather rhubarb. Sometimes, when he had to decide between taking something home that both he and Patsy liked or something that only he liked, he went with what only he liked so he didn't have to share. And if he didn't bring anything home he had to start right in and cook something for her anyway because usually she forgot to eat and was in a mood and yelled at him like he was a d.i.c.k. Even though it was she who was growing p.e.n.i.ses out of her t.i.ts.

A UPS plane came down low like an earthquake riveted to the sky.

Glory hallelujah here was a can of Bud Light! He shook the remaining p.i.s.sdroplets of beer out of it and slipped it into another white plastic bag, the one that wasn't holding the food.

Did he even like his foster sister? Patsy? He never really asked himself that question, considering her as unremarkable as the clothes he schlupped to his body or the route he walked to work. Patsy simply was. What was she anyway? What did she do? While he was at work? It was like she was part house, part TV, and part something to give the plumbing to do, a way to collect money from the government in exchange for growing drugs and tissues in her plus-sized body. She was a pharmer. How it worked was this-she'd eaten herself to a size that meant she couldn't move too good, and not moving too good meant one time she hurt herself in a bad fall and permanently messed up her back, and because her back was messed up she couldn't get a regular job, and because she couldn't get a regular job she was perfect for the job of pharming, which involved lying in bed most hours and watching inspirational videos. So she got money every month that let her eat enough to stay as plus-sized as she was and not have to get a job that asked her to move around, not like Woo-jin's where the word hustle came routinely sputtering from the lips of the manager. As in hustle you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, we got the whole Elks Lodge to feed. Patsy plugged her face with food and her eyes with TV. She wobbled with anger if Woo-jin didn't feed her the food they got from the money from the checks and the extra trash-saved food items from the restaurant where Woo-jin put in double s.h.i.+fts to pay for her to eat.

Woo-jin kicked a car m.u.f.fler that was, for some reason, there. A plane took off, looked like a private jet, blowing his hair all over the place as it pa.s.sed overhead.

Woo-jin didn't feel particularly hungry. If he saved the three-quarters of a burger for later, Patsy would definitely want some and might even try to eat the whole thing. If he ate it now he'd at least get it to himself but then might get really hungry later and have something not as cool to eat, like ramen noodles with no flavor packet (Patsy liked to double up on the flavor packets, so by the end of the month the only ramens left-the ones she'd taken the extra flavor packet from-tasted like packing material). There was also the issue of the fries to deal with. Even fifteen minutes after they're out of the deep fryer they start making the eater depressed on account of the coldness. Once the fat starts to congeal, well, forget you ever lived, pal. So it was because of the threat of congealing fries and the possibility he'd never get to eat the whole three-quarters of a burger that Woo-jin popped open the clamsh.e.l.l container and sat on a piece of airplane equipment. It was like a big refrigerator lying on its side, painted green with some sticky-outy parts.

Far down the tarmac a two-seater rose wobbling into the sky. The sky was looking purply and airbrushed like a druggie band alb.u.m cover. Patsy knew a lot about druggie bands and their secret messages. She'd showed him some of the alb.u.m covers in books she got at Good News Bookstore. What kind of good news was that supposed to be? News that guys in studded codpieces were controlling his mind to make him hail Satan and abuse cocaine like a goatf.u.c.ker?

Woo-jin squirted ketchup from a packet he'd stashed in his jacket. He'd only taken one because technically it was stealing, so he had to make it go a long way. No fry could get more than a droplet of ketchup. It was a rationing decision. It bothered him that he'd dishonestly taken the packet, but what was he going to do? Eat congealed fries without the ketchup, like a mentally ill person? No thanks, guys. When the fries and burger were gone he put the clamsh.e.l.l back in its white plastic bag and proudly declared silently that he was not a litterer. In fact, he was the opposite of a litterer. Remembering the reason he'd taken a detour through this field in the first place, he looked around to see if there were maybe any redeemable cans lying around. When he looked behind the big metal piece of forgotten machinery he saw the dead girl.

Woo-jin was first all like There go the bugs-oh no there go the bugs! because three guesses as to what was crawling on the girl's face. She was an Asianish-looking human wearing a dirty white b.u.t.ton-up fancy-style s.h.i.+rt, black pants, and one black leather boot with the other foot just bare, hanging out there. Woo-jin's three-quarters of a burger and fries rose up through his trunk and horizontally departed his face. He fell to his knees on the opposite side of the refrigerator-like machine and wheezed, then slowly rose and looked at the dead girl again, thinking, Please no bugs this time, but again there were the bugs! Bugs all over!

Woo-jin stumbled west toward the frontage road feeling-what's the best word-probably bad. Not because some girl was dead with earwig accompaniment, but because now there'd be complex questions someone was going to ask him. Most likely a cop. He didn't want to talk to any of those social people. He'd grown up talking to social people, sitting in waiting areas with complimentary brochures with t.i.tles like Suicide's a Huge b.u.mmer for Everyone while the smart smiling lawyers made decisions about him in closed rooms. His ears hurt from coldness, paradoxically throbbing and hot. Patsy would have all sorts of opinions about the dead girl and would probably get him in trouble for not doing something differently. What could he possibly do? He had no phone and couldn't see the benefit of sticking around. He wished he hadn't eaten that burger. No wonder the much-appreciated guest had sent it back.

Woo-jin was twenty-five and Korean. At least in his skin he was; he'd never been to Korea. He lived in the Pacific Northwest. More specifically, he lived in a s.h.i.+thole. The s.h.i.+thole in question was some subsidized housing between the freeway and a construction storage area where backhoes and skid steers and cement trucks and cranes shoved raw material into piles at obscene hours. The trailer looked like it had been shat out of a mansion. When he showed up, shaking in his body at the door, he found Patsy where he'd last seen her, hogging the whole couch in the front room lit by TV, eating melted cookie-dough ice cream out of a gallon bucket with a wooden spoon. How much did she weigh? North of four hundred. She had a pink bow in her thin hair and was missing a front tooth. The TV was showing some action, some lady in tight, b.u.t.t-complimenting leather pants firing machine pistols with both hands as she exploded backward out a skysc.r.a.per window pursued by guys in suits with semiautomatics mouthing the slow-motion words, Tell us where the messiah is or you'll pay with your [bleep]ing life. Though he'd never seen the episode before, Woo-jin recognized this to be Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin, from all her billboards.

"What did you bring, b.i.t.c.h?" Patsy said.

"I brang nothing."

"Then what's in that plastic bag?"

Woo-jin was surprised to find the takeout bag with the empty ex-burger box still inside, dangling from his finger. "It was a burger."

"You ate my burger?"

"It was a bad one. I threw it up."

"You are so so not fair. All you get to do is eat free food and drink free soda while I grow tissues all day."

"I wash dishes, too, you know," Woo-jin said.

"You look like you saw a phantom of the opera."

Woo-jin confronted the kitchen-like area and found a gla.s.s that he filled with water. Then, he drank it. "I saw a dead body," he said, and started feeling the ennui. That's the misnomer a caseworker had used for it one time. A h.e.l.lish onrus.h.i.+ng of fanged empathy.

"I need you to lance my boils," Patsy said. Woo-jin slunk back to the living room, meaning he turned around and walked two steps. Patsy sat sweating under three flickering fluorescent tubes, her head small compared to her neck. Bandages covered her left shoulder where they'd last extracted tissues.

"I'm sorry, Patsy. I feel it coming."

"What did you say about a dead body?"

"I said I saw it in a field. It was a girl, a nicely dressed girl. Bugs crawling on her." Woo-jin picked his mouth guard out of his s.h.i.+rt pocket and slipped it between his teeth. He tried not to look at Patsy's thick and sweating face because that would make it worse, but he couldn't help it and now he started thinking about how mean he had been to eat her burger. How selfish. This meant it was building, the flying, mult.i.tentacled, and fire-breathing ennui attack. He took off his shoes, making it as far as shoe #1, aka the left one.

On TV Stella Artaud landed on the moon roof of a limo, climbed inside, and received a drink from Dr. Uri Borden, as played by Neethan F. Jordan. Who. Woulda. Thought.

"My boils!" Patsy said. "I need my boils lanced before my caseworker comes."

Woo-jin pushed back the ennui by turning his thoughts to that old standby, puppies in party hats, and fetched the boil-lancing kit from the bathroom. Actually there was no room separately called the bathroom, only Patsy's room where the toilet was. For convenience. Patsy's walls were decorated with some of the finest unicorn posters in all the land. There was one of a unicorn being ridden by Chewbacca that Woo-jin appreciated. Sometimes while taking a dump he'd wish he could ask Chewbacca for advice. Like: where can I get one of them fly utility belts? Patsy's boil-lancing kit: where was it? Here it was sitting on top of a Harlequin paperback. It looked sorta like a gun. Except instead of shooting slow-motion bullets this gun poked and sucked boils.

Back in the living room Patsy had rotated on the sofa so the a.s.s was up and the panties pulled down to show the b.u.t.t with the boils on it. No one had ever measured the b.u.t.t but Woo-jin guessed it to be nine miles wide.

"Hurry and get it over with," Patsy said. "The workers will be here soon and I don't want to get penalized again for hygiene, lack thereof."

"You're talking like a TV person," Woo-jin said, "with the lack thereofs." He pressed the gun to the first boil and squeezed the trigger; the hiss and wheeze of puncture and extraction.

"What was this dead person thing about?" Patsy said.

"This dead person thing was about me sitting there wis.h.i.+ng I still had a burger."

"You were such a liar about that burger."

"I was not a liar."

"You'll have to go to the mart later for pork rinds and chipotle ranch. What more about the girl? The dead one."

"She had face bugs. She looked like a nice person. I should call the cops, right?"

"I can't understand you with the mouth guard."

"But I don't wanna eat my tongue." Woo-jin dropped the boil gun and dug his fingers into his chest. Hyperventilating, he fell to his knees then clawed around on the carpet as if underneath it were some fancy-pants answer to his problems. Gravity appeared to be s.h.i.+fting to the left, wanting to suck everything in that direction. Woo-jin crawled against the leftward pull to his hammock. s.h.i.+vering, sputtering, blinking, he pulled himself into the netting and attempted to unwad the thin gray blanket.

One time on TV there was a show about historic animation guys who made the cartoons way back in the day. They'd draw their pictures on sheets of clear plastic and layer them like a sandwich, making the action go with the background. The ennui was kind of like that, with the world of real s.h.i.+t serving as the background layer, going about its real s.h.i.+t business while on top of it, layer upon layer, were sheets of dread, planes of condensed suffering, a thickening wall between Woo-jin's regular ole self and the black h.e.l.l of emotions. It was almost worse that he didn't pa.s.s out when he had an attack. Instead, he had to watch people looking at him, hopefully someone like Patsy who'd gotten used to these attacks, but sometimes, when the ennui hit in public, some stranger bending down low gawking at him clinging to a newspaper box, or commuters ignoring him as he writhed on the concourse of a bus station, their eyes saying, This freak's on something nasty. Sometimes cops picked him up and were p.r.i.c.ks about it until they could p.r.i.c.k his finger and get a whole history from the sesame-seed-sized droplet of blood they fed to their vampiric Bionet monitors. Oh. This guy's got an actual condition. He ain't an embodiment. After which they'd maybe toss a blanket at him and make sure he was as far as possible from respectable citizens. And all the while he couldn't make his body move through s.p.a.ce like it was supposed to, only vibrate s.h.i.+vering regardless of the temperature.

Now, in the relative safety of his hammock, through his eye slits, he watched Patsy pull up her drawers and mumble curses about burgers. Predictably her suffering was the primary tributary to the ennui. He saw her for the prisoner of her own body that she was, sensed acutely the tragedy of her not understanding her own enslavement. Then deeper. The chorus of shrieks!!! He'd seen in a magazine that one painting by that one guy, Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. The sound generated by that painting was what he was dealing with here. Like wind whistling in your ear, except multiplied, skull-rattling, sourceless. Here's where the mouth guard came in handy. Woo-jin bit down so hard his jaw began to ache. A couple times he'd come out of the ennui unable to open his mouth for over an hour. Now he rode that clattering thrill ride of skeleton bones down, down, down, fingers grinding like machines in the gray blanket, gurning his face around the mouth guard, trying to bring into his mind the calming presence of Chewbacca on that unicorn with his fly utility belt, snot jetting out of his nose, a real winner of an ennui attack here, folks, and then, most horrible of all, he found himself wearing the dead girl's face. He couldn't see it, wouldn't dare seek a mirror, but he trembled, convinced that the face was superimposed on his own, its mucousy underside squirming to find purchase on his own contorted visage.

Woo-jin whispered, "Patsy? Is my face my own face?" but she didn't seem to hear, and if she could she couldn't hear words, just squashy sounds of a choking variety m.u.f.fled by the rubber half-circle stuffed into his mouth. Besides, she was primping for her case worker Hattie's visit, rearranging the bow on her head, bored by now with this kind of activity from her trailer mate/foster brother, still smarting from her unbegotten burger. Patsy pressed her thick thumb to the remote control and changed the TV from sequences of slo-mo artillery to Fas.h.i.+on Tips for the Beautifully Obese, on Discovery. Onscreen a naked woman was being prepared for her fitting, rolls of fat obliterating any view of adult content regions. Like a rivulet of suffering feeding into the tributary, this new source of sad humanity bled from the TV into the empathetic response portion of Patsy's brain then amplified into Woo-jin's ennui attack, which had previously begun to level off in terms of the intensity. As it picked up again, Fas.h.i.+on Tips for the Beautifully Obese's host measured and marked the TV woman's arms with a felt-tip marker. Chewie, where were you when you were needed most?

Woo-jin fell out of the hammock, which was no surprise. This happened all the time. Which was why underneath the hammock there were throw pillows and gold s.h.a.g carpet into which had been ground bits of bark, hair, a gum wrapper, toothpicks, the bitey plastic clip from a bread bag. The peak of the attack had definitely pa.s.sed and he slid into a numb, thrumming part, quiet and immobilized. The door seemed to knock itself then Hattie let herself in. She was a mom-looking woman with gla.s.ses and frizzed hair, wearing a brown artificial-fiber pantsuit, enc.u.mbered by a gaudy purse overflowing with notes, nicotine gum, and half-drunk bottles of water. Her a.s.sistants, two younger guys in white jumpsuits and latex gloves whom she referred to as Thing One and Thing Two, trailed her burdened by equipment in st.u.r.dy metal cases, which they began to unload.

"Patsy! You look fabulous!" Hattie said, hugging part of the woman. Patsy got kind of quiet and blushed. It amazed Woo-jin every time that the same Patsy who gave him such ball-busting moments for cutting her toast wrong turned into this meek mouse of a gal once the extractions went down. Hattie spread her belongings out on the kitchenette dinette table, pulling out a stethoscope, cramming a VHS tape into the mouth of their VCR. "You're really going to love this week's installment," she said, pressing PLAY. As the tape started, she took Patsy's hand in her own and rubbed the dimples of her knuckles.

On the TV appeared the boilerplate intro, the same thing they saw week after week. There was a beach with silhouetted lovers hand in hand, a waterfall, a rainbow over a field where a tractor tilled in the distance. The music was solo acoustic guitar, plaintive yet uplifting. A t.i.tle materialized over an image of a grainy sunset: YOUR GENEROSITY AT WORK and beneath that the Bionetics logo. After which the music picked up tempo, into a we're-getting-things-done kind of deal. Shots of busy streets, a race car driver flas.h.i.+ng a thumbs-up, a human pyramid of enthused cheerleaders. Then into the meat of the program, the part that had been changed from the month previous. There was a dark-skinned kid playing trucks in a preschool with other kids, making the usual truck noises. Over this came recorded narration from a confident-sounding man. "Juan was born without thumbs. Many of the activities we take for granted he just couldn't do. Now, thanks to your generosity, he can open jars, climb the rope in gym cla.s.s, and even high-five his friends. No more high-fours for Juan. Thank you so very much-" Here the audio cut out for a second. Hattie's voice came on and said "Patsy." Then it returned to the man's voice, saying, "The reconstructive surgery we were able to perform with tissues you provided made all the difference. Thank you!" Then followed three or four more segments such as this, each showcasing a person who owed their new livelihood to Patsy. There was a blind guy who could now make out shapes, a quadriplegic who'd begun taking baby steps. Patsy sniffled through the reel, moved. Woo-jin had never watched one of these reels during an ennui attack before. He felt no empathetic response to this sequence of vignettes. Where he should have been soaking up these folks' suffering he felt a blankness. Different from nothing, blankness had a border around it, edges where he felt something. He circled around the feeling as Hattie rubbed one of Patsy's shoulders and offered her a tissue and Things Two and One plugged all manner of instruments and monitors into sockets and laid a tarp on the living room floor. This was all prep before the part with the blood and freaky noises, the part Woo-jin hated most. Hattie helped Patsy disrobe and sit on a fold-out carbon microtube chair. The a.s.sistants...o...b..ted her, swabbing, lifting curtains of flesh, pressing various equipment against unidentifiable parts of her anatomy. Hattie slipped in another tape for Patsy's enjoyment, a live music concert by the singer Michael Bolton.

Here goes, Woo-jin thought. Went it did. He turned to the wall, making himself not see, but his hands couldn't block the high-pitched dental whine of the saw and the vacuum's irregular sputtering. Worst was when it smelled like burning hair. As they removed kidney tissue from her knee, Patsy quietly sang along to Michael Bolton's ballad about a man loving a woman so much that he'd sleep out in the rain if that's the way she said things oughta be.

Woo-jin woke in his hammock. There were talking people in the next room. He was killer hungry. Always happened this way after the ennui attack, the ravenousness, and this time it was worse because he'd projectiled his burger at the sight of the dead girl's buggy face. Woo-jin crawled out of his hammock and peeked around the doorframe into the living room, where the Things were finis.h.i.+ng their cleanup, rolling the tarp, stuffing bloodied paper towels into a garbage bag. Hattie sat with Patsy on the couch, petting her hair. Patsy was covered with bandages and doing her usual postextraction crying bit, while on TV once-thumbless Juan was playing Wii with the best of 'em.

"It hurts," Patsy said. "It hurts worse every time."

"Oh, you dear, sweet girl," Hattie said. "You just take your medicine and think of Pegasus, riding free through the clouds."

"A winged unicorn is not a pegasus," Patsy sniffed.

Woo-jin crawled to the fridge as though his stomach was propelling him across the floor. n.o.body seemed to notice him even though the trailer was hardly eight feet wide. One Thing was saying to the other, "Yeah so like I heard this one guy down in Argentina or whatever grew a whole human head in his abdominal cavity."

Woo-jin at last arrived at the fridge and upon opening it to the jangle of condiment jars everyone's head turned and considered him in silence while on the screen commenced a racquetball tournament for recent transplant recipients. Inside the fridge were red-bagged specimens of biological valuables, a picked-over turkey carca.s.s, some Pabst Blue Ribbon, celery, a jar of Tom & Jerry's hot-b.u.t.tered-rum mix, fake sausage oddly enough made out of meat, one dead banana, ketchup, m.u.f.fins, a lone pizza roll, and what Woo-jin was really looking for, peanut b.u.t.ter from Trader Joe's. Barely able to stand, he leaned against the counter and found a spoon, then retired to his corner.

He heard Patsy say, "My foster brother never does nice things for me. He just has his attacks and eats the last of the cheese. I always tell him to bring me things from the store and restaurant but does he? All I ask for is a free hamburger or maybe a slice of pie? Something to show he cares?"

Hattie said, "It's hard to have a no-good foster brother. You hang in there and recover, lance your boils. And guess what? Next time you get to see someone special. Santa Claus!"

The medicines were kicking in and Patsy started to say something but slurred the words like a demoralized tape recorder. Woo-jin hastily ate his peanut b.u.t.ter, sticking his mouth up with it. Hattie said, "Let's get out of this cesspool," then left with Things One and Two, who carted away ice chests packed with harvested tissues. The VCR still played images of happy people engaged in healthy outdoor recreation, breathing the salty ocean breezes on a catamaran or taking in the foliage on a misty mountain trail. Woo-jin slipped in another spoonful of peanut b.u.t.ter and this seemed to represent the tipping point of his mouth's mobility. He might as well have eaten cement. He could no longer move it at all. A line of b.u.t.tery drool trickled down his chin. Patsy, for her part, had become more debilitated on the couch, her sagging and bruised form occasionally hiccuping as she settled, asleep, to dream of sea turtles and Neptune, who called to the sea nymphs with his conch-sh.e.l.l megaphone. Hattie and co. peeled out from the dirt driveway in their van. Woo-jin stood in the living room, his mouth immobilized. He knew he had to return to the dead girl.

The steady clang of machines hypnotized Woo-jin as he left the trailer that morning, jar of peanut b.u.t.ter in one hand, spoon in the other, his mind still carbonated from the ennui attack, feet taking him around the crumbling brick buildings of Georgetown to the edge of Boeing Field, where planes roared and dipped like immense predatory birds. Oh, if only some action hero of yore were to give Woo-jin a pep talk and reinforce his nerves as he walked through the gra.s.ses, retracing his path to where a police helicopter now sat, its blades spinning lazy-like, slower and slower as if the thing was nodding off to sleep. Three or four cops were gathered around the fridge-like contraption, taking pictures, spitting profanities into walkie-talkies, drinking coffee, a clump of vaguely authoritative-looking humans in nonetheless shabby police uniforms. This was like a TV version of something that was actually happening, an instantaneous reenactment in which the original experiencers of an event immediately reexperience their experiences for the cameras and fake their initial reactions. Woo-jin stuffed another goopy wad of peanut b.u.t.ter nervously into his mouth. He came to the congregation of officers-two men, one woman, a helicopter pilot smoking a cigarette-and raised his spoon-holding hand as if wis.h.i.+ng to be called upon to speak.

"Who the h.e.l.l's this guy?" said an officer with a wide head topped with a flattop. Another, a skinny tall man drinking a short coffee, nodded at Woo-jin. "You know anything about this?"

"Wooolmph mmmr," Woo-jin said. "Wwrrmmth hmmph."

"What are we waiting for?" said the skinny tall one. "Get this fellow a gla.s.s of milk!"

"I've got some milk in the bird," the pilot said, and quickly located some two-percent and a gla.s.s, which he filled with a steady hand. The gla.s.s was translucent brown and pebbly and would not have looked out of place neglected behind a sectional in the Midwest. Woo-jin nodded his appreciation, consumed the refres.h.i.+ng gla.s.s of milk, smacked his lips a few times, and said, "I saw the body last night. Coming through the field."

"That's nice," the wide-head cop said.

"I saw her when I came through looking for cans and eating my three-quarters of a burger. She had face bugs!"

Woo-jin couldn't see the body from where he was standing. It was hidden behind that big green thing. The officers frowned like they suddenly remembered they had work to do. The woman cop rolled her eyes. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that yanked up her eyebrows.

The skinny tall one said, "Well, thanks, but we have it covered here."

"But I saw her. It made me puke. Who is she? Am I under arrest?"

"You're not under arrest," said the chopper pilot. "Can I have my gla.s.s back, please?"

Woo-jin handed back the gla.s.s, now frosted with milk film.

"We've got lots of work to do here, so you best be on yer way," the woman cop said.

"So you don't think I killed her?"

Laffs all around. "Hoo boy. No, we're pretty certain you didn't kill her," wide-head snorted.

"We could book you anyway, if it would make you feel better," skinny cop said, to his colleagues' guffaws.

"Who is she?" Woo-jin asked.

"You mean the body?" skinny tall said. "We haven't gotten that far yet. We just got here."

Woo-jin said, "I want to help find the killer."

More laughter, louder this time.

"The killer!" the chopper pilot snorted.

"Find him!" the woman cop laughed.

Nervously, Woo-jin started in again with the peanut b.u.t.ter, goops and goops of it shoved at the tooth-ringed hole in his head. "Woolf," he said.

"Get the guy more milk," wide-head said. The chopper pilot refilled the gla.s.s and handed it over. Woo-jin drank as enthusiastically as before.

"Thank you. I really could help you guys find the killer."

"Get the h.e.l.l out of here," skinny tall said.

Woo-jin, upset but not really understanding why, decided to push his way through s.p.a.ce by walking. Time to go to work anyway. The ground scrolled beneath him with its broken pieces of crud, rodent carca.s.ses, pebbles, fibers, the granularity of byproducts. He crossed the oily Duwamish into the ruins of South Park, ghosts of Mexican restaurants and a store where cell phones once were sold, Sunday circular advertis.e.m.e.nts pushed along by an underperforming wind. This was the shortcut he took to the staging area in West Seattle. A cat trotted in front of him with something purple in its mouth that didn't look like food, and Woo-jin realized the thing hanging out of its mouth was part of its mouth, and the cat looked at him as if it rightly understood Woo-jin had nothing at all to offer it. Woo-jin wondered briefly about the people who used to live in this neighborhood and their broken empathies. Their absence struck him like the musty sweet odor from a discarded cola bottle. Why, by the way, hadn't the cops taken him up on his offer to a.s.sist with the dead body? They'd seemed more interested in standing around looking cool than investigating the appearance of a dead girl in a field above which airplanes screamed. Time and again Woo-jin b.u.t.ted up against the intelligence of other people, the walls of confusion from which they peered down on him and leered. In times of fresh panic he wondered if he might be even stupider than he suspected he was, and maybe these smiling case workers and librarians and such noticed deficiencies in his brain that he himself could not begin to appreciate due to the fact of his being somehow fundamentally flawed in that department. Maybe their occasional kindnesses were a way of humoring him. Maybe he wasn't even smart enough to see their secret cruelties.

There were dilapidated houses and something that used to be a gas station, structures absent of human life, remnants of foundations, charred heaps of cracked wood and bricks, as Woo-jin came to the parts of the neighborhood reclaimed by the trees. Trees pushed up through the concrete in what was once

the middle of the street, birds clinging to branches, watching. The road became a path, and the path disappeared into weeds and thicket, but Woo-jin knew the way. He emerged onto a sidewalk and spotted the revolving sign of his employer, Il Italian Joint, a hundred paces away.

Il Italian Joint mostly served the workers going to and from the New York Alki staging area and it was Woo-jin's job to make sure the pots were clean. Great quant.i.ties of soups and sauces bubbled in these pots and, once emptied, they needed to be scrubbed. The heat baked a thin, nearly impenetrable layer of food to the bottoms of the pots, which Woo-jin attacked with a number of sc.r.a.pers, wools, soaps, and picks, chiseling the solidified minestrone or marinara until the pots gleamed silver. He wondered on occasion if it was possible for the food to chemically fuse into a new sort of compound with the steel. Maybe the cooking process became so intense that it negated the difference between the organic food material and the ore-based material that const.i.tuted the pot and the only way to truly clean a pot would be to actually sc.r.a.pe away layers of metal at the bottom. His implements seemed inadequate for the task. He sc.r.a.ped and sweated over the pots and never really got one to the clean state of his satisfaction. Each pot it seemed he polished to a level of just-adequate cleanliness. He fantasized about sandblasting them.

Woo-jin's boss was this guy by the name of Sandford Deane whose eyes always looked closed. And yet he still managed to not often b.u.mp into things. He was supposed to be the guy who greeted valued guests at the door, but often ended up out back behind the grease bin smoking the cigarettes he called f.a.gs. He was supposed to be the owner of this place, or pretend to be, but everyone knew he was just some actor in a stained tuxedo going table to table complimenting the guests on their fas.h.i.+on decisions and asking if they'd care for a gla.s.s of port on the house. The real owner of Il Italian Joint was a company in Shanghai. Sandford Deane stood in as a representation of what the owner might have looked like had he been a human being instead of a collection of codes and spreadsheets, meetings, and quarterly reports in s.e.xy buildings. He was standing in the doorway next to the Dumpsters when Woo-jin tumbled through some shrubbery into the near-empty parking lot.