Hospital.
The buffed corridors of the 121 Evac were dimly lit and silent this time of night. I tried to inhale as little as possible but the frightening smell of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant still needled its way up my nose. As I strode forward, I heard shouting in the distance.
The shouting grew louder as I approached the Emergency Room.
“Bullshit!” Ernie’s voice.
“You have to stay for testing. Doctor’s orders.” A woman’s voice. Patient.
When I pushed into the Emergency Room, a half-dozen blue-clad medics and nurses turned their eyes toward me. All of them looked tired and harassed. Ernie, still in street clothes, glanced over and continued talking as if I’d been a part of the conversation all along.
“They want me to stay overnight when I have work to do,” he said. “Can you believe it? Just a few stitches, a little iodine, a bump on the head. In ‘Nam we just patched them up and sent them back to the field, most rickety tick.”
The nurse folded her arms, not liking the fact that Ernie now had reinforcements. He was hard enough to handle on his own.
“You might have internal damage,” she insisted. “We won’t know until tomorrow, when we run the tests.”
Ernie held a bottle of pills up to the blue fluorescent light. “You gave me this shit. This’ll take care of it.”
“Antibiotics don’t heal ruptured internal organs,” the nurse said.
I put my hand on Ernie’s shoulder.
“She’s right,” I told him. “Stay overnight. Let them run some tests.”
He turned his bloodshot green eyes on me, lowering his voice for the first time.
“Where is she?”
“They’re taking her to the morgue.”
“Then I have to go see her.”
“You have to stay here.”
Ernie stood up. “No way.”
I gazed helplessly at the nurse. “I’ll bring him back tomorrow.”
She nodded, finally worn down by his pestering. “You do that,” she said. “If there’s anything left of him.”
At the front exit, Ernie tossed the antibiotics into a trash-can.
“Hey!” I said. “You’re gonna need that shit.”
“Why? Doesn’t get me high.”
Sometimes there’s no reasoning with him. Especially after his steady girlfriend is murdered.
It was past four A.M. now, so getting through the gate was no sweat. I woke up a cab driver and he was happy for the early morning fare.
I helped Ernie into the cab. He wasn’t nearly as strong as he was trying to pretend to be.
“Odi?” the driver asked. Where?
I wasn’t sure how to say the word in Korean, so I just told him to take us to downtown Seoul. He rubbed his eyes. “Where in downtown Seoul?”
I said it as plainly as I knew how.
“The place where they keep the dead people.”
As we rode through the sleeping city, Ernie started to talk.
“The son of a bitch knocked me out.”
His voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d just come off a three-quart drunk.
“Who did?”
“A big guy. Almost as tall as you, but broader. Built like a fucking wildcat on protein supplements.”
“American or Korean?”
“Made in the USA all the way. I was in the byonso,” Ernie said, “squatting over the hole. It was those damn eels the Nurse and I ate downtown.”
I remembered her telling him to send them back because they weren’t fully cooked. As usual, he’d been hard-headed about it and refused.
“Must’ve been tainted or something,” he said. “Anyway, it kept pouring out of me and you know how your knees can cramp up on you when you’re squatting over a Korean toilet.”
“Yeah.”
“I heard a sound. Someone coming in the front gate. Quiet like. I figured it was ajjima’s husband, sneaking in from a soju house, liquored up again. Next thing I know there’s a scream. The Nurse. A stick smashes against wood and glass and ajjima’s up screaming. I’m struggling to stand, pulling my pants up, and by the time I bust out of the byonso, people next door have opened their windows, yelling Dodukiya! Dodukiya!” Thief! Thief!
Ernie turned his head to look blearily at me. “You know how they do when there’s a slicky boy in the neighborhood. So I’m still thinking it’s a thief when something huge lurches out of the Nurse’s hooch, and before I know what’s happening a stick hits me in the stomach, but maybe it’s not a stick but a boot and I take a couple of punches on the way down. The next thing I know some neighbors are carting me downhill to a Gl ambulance.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Take it easy, Ernie. Calm down.”
“I’ll get the son of a bitch.” His fists clenched. “I’ll get him, George.” The Seoul City Morgue was big and made of cement, and we had to walk down a broad staircase that seemed as if it were leading into hell.
Nobody’d seen a foreigner down here in a long time-not a breathing one, anyway-and we received some surprised looks. The white-smocked attendant at the front desk was engaged in animated discussion with a well- dressed middle-aged man who seemed to be talking about the best place to spend his money to obtain the right kind of funeral for a revered grandfather. The man talking didn’t notice us behind him and the attendant apparently thought it would be unseemly to interrupt the older man just to help a couple of foreigners.
Normally, Ernie would’ve raised some hell, but he just stood there leaning on me. Green around the gills and getting greener.
The morgue workers gawked at the awkward yangnom, foreign louts, waiting at the desk, made comments to one another, and giggled occasionally.
Finally the talker finished and when he turned around his eyes grew big, taking us in. But he recovered pretty fast and strode off in a huff of posed dignity.
I told the man at the counter that I was looking for a woman. Suddenly I realized how stupid that sounded, but as I looked around no one had laughed so I plowed ahead.
I didn’t know the Nurse’s real name. I’d heard it once or twice, but Ernie and I had become so used to just calling her the Nurse that at the moment it slipped my mind. Instead I described the circumstances: A beautiful young woman, knifed to death in Itaewon.
Only one corpse fit that description.
The man escorted us down another cement corridor. Ernie limped, holding his side. With each step the air became colder. On either side were more rooms. The attendant walked into one of them, strode down a row of metal cabinets, stopped, and pulled one open.
The Nurse was completely pale, as pale as I’ve ever seen anyone, and the smooth skin of her cheeks hung unnaturally limp. Her long black hair was matted behind her head and the smooth voluptuous contours of her body lay flaccid beneath the sheet.
Breath exhaled slowly from Ernie’s body. He grabbed the edge of the cabinet and lowered his head.
I lifted the damp linen. Beyond the bare breasts, the flesh just below the center of her rib cage was hideously slashed. A knife had entered, twisting and tearing on its way in. There weren’t many slashes on the arms. Apparently, the attacker didn’t have time to complete his usual ritual.
I replaced the sheet and asked the mortician, “The knife went into the heart?”
“Yes“.
“Then she couldn’t have lived very long.”
“After that? No.”
He didn’t ask me who had done it or who I was, and I was glad for that.
I gazed down at her, thinking that she and Ernie for months had been my only family. The only family I’d known for many years. My parents were lost to me at an early age, but I still had that reverence for family that is
