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 glass back, please?”
Woo-jin handed back the glass, 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 butter, 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 glass and handed it over. Woo-jin drank as enthusiastically as before.
“Thank you. I really could help you guys find the killer.”
“Get the hell out of here,” skinny tall said.
Woo-jin, upset but not really understanding why, decided to push his way through space by walking. Time to go to work anyway. The ground scrolled beneath him with its broken pieces of crud, rodent carcasses, 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 advertisements 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 assist 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 butted 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 quantities 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 scrapers, 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 constituted the pot and the only way to truly clean a pot would be to actually scrape away layers of metal at the bottom. His implements seemed inadequate for the task. He scraped 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 bump 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 fags. 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 fashion decisions and asking if they’d care for a glass 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 sexy buildings. He was standing in the doorway next to the Dumpsters when Woo-jin tumbled through some shrubbery into the near-empty parking lot.
“I’m early I think,” Woo-jin said.
“You’re early every day. You could at least use the time to do something useful, like masturbate,” Sandford said.
“But I’m a dishwasher,” Woo-jin said, slipping past his boss, snatching his apron off a hook by the back door. “I figured out the ultimate pot scrubbing device.”
“What’s that.”
“Diamond-coated steel wool.”
Sandford nodded. “That, or we could start scrubbing the pots with lasers.”
“Lasers.” Woo-jin clenched his eyebrows at the thought, pushing his way into the kitchen’s greasy yelling and clanking. “Lasers.”
The wash station looked like it had been hit by a car bomb. Three guys from the previous shift were standing basically gaping at the pile of dishes, spraying a bowl here and there, overwhelmed by the madness of it all. The three dishwashers were Pontoon, Ben O’Winn, and Bahn Kan, fellows comprised of scraps of ethnicities, doused in food particles, and enduring some kind of experiment in sleep deprivation. Waitresses screamed at cooks, something burned on a stove, and a couple sauciers were trying to rescue one of their kind who’d gotten trapped in the walk-in freezer. Pontoon held out a spatula with something black stuck to it. Ben O’Winn trembled and whimpered from the stress. Bahn Kan scratched one sideburn, the only one he had, and said something in a language that sounded like Vietnamese but with a lot more sighing.
“Sometimes maybe you guys could do a better job with the dishes,” Woo-jin said sadly then started telling them what to do. Pontoon hauled a pile of clean dishes back to the prep area. Ben O’Winn snuck to the edge of the dining room and commandeered the bus carts. Bahn Kan fetched Woo-jin an orange soda. Woo-jin roughly counted the dishes in their precarious stacks, assessed the number of pallets on the dishwasher, considered the time of day, anticipated the rate of new dirty dishes arriving, then let the part of his brain that washed dishes for a living kick in and do its shit. He almost felt like he was sitting back and watching a robot do the job. He was the best dishwasher in the world and he had the gold medal to prove it, from the previous year’s Restaurant and Hotel Management Olympics. The medal hung spattered with grease and soap on the wall behind the washer. Often, when feeling discouraged by the rate of dirty dishes coming in, Woo-jin glanced at the medal, smiled, and recalled how he’d defeated the Red Lobster regional champion in pot scrubbing by point-nine seconds. Sometimes dishwashers from out of town showed up at the back door of Il Italian Joint, hoping to watch Woo-jin work. Tonight the champion’s arms wheeled over the mass of forks and coffee cups, fruit rinds and disintegrating napkins, smears of Bolognese, ramekins, cigarette butts, hardened macaroni and cheese, the fossils of burgers and fries, and steadily the pile shrank in the curling steam. By midshift the pile was obliterated and the three ineffectual dishwashers skulked home to their television sets and prescription medications, with sitcom theme songs stuck in their heads, falling
