asleep into the routines of hideous dreams. For a while, work had pulled Woo-jin’s thoughts from the previous night’s morbid discovery, but as the dinner rush thinned out her face came to him again, floating phantom-like in the steam.
“Yo, Mike.” It was a waitress named Sally who commuted a hundred miles both ways. An older woman, she was always showing pictures of her grandson to her coworkers, who would smile and say he was cute despite the ghastly facial deformity that nobody wanted to acknowledge. Sally held Woo-jin’s shoulder and repeated, “Yo, Mike.” He looked at her. She had thought his name was Mike since she started here two years ago and no one had gotten around to correcting her, including Woo-jin. “Are you okay, Mike?”
Woo-jin glanced around at the spotless dish-washing station and the dormant kitchen beyond. Everyone had gone home, it looked like.
“I am definitely not okay.”
“Walk me to my car. I’ll give you a cigarette.”
Sally was on who knew how many painkillers and her body seemed to generate little bursts of static electricity as she walked. Woo-jin hauled the last of the trash bags and Sally locked up. From the parking lot they witnessed the erratically lit-up skyline of New York Alki peeking over some nearby houses and businesses. Sounds: distant construction banging, two guys yelling in the near distance, a piece of cellophane scraped along the asphalt by the wind. Sally took his arm and hugged it close under her own and, choked up, said, “Sometimes I think you’re the only person who knows I exist.”
Woo-jin’s guts fluttered as this old waitress’s manifold sufferings bled a path into his nervous system. She was going to tell him again about her grandson and all the cruel things the neighborhood boys did to him, how they taunted him about his facial challenge, murdered his cat, knocked his special-ed books out of his hands onto the ground. Woo-jin really would have rather avoided her by slipping out the back door at the end of his shift but nightmare visions of the dead girl had mesmerized him at his station long after the last cup had been dried and shelved.
“I don’t know what to do with those boys they’re so cruel. What would their parents think if they knew they were giving wedgies to my poor Donald? Well, they’d probably laugh, being cruel and unthinking themselves. That’s where those boys got their cruelties, I’m sure.”
Woo-jin said, “They don’t know what to do with their suffering, so they give it to your Donald.”
Sally sighed. They’d made it to her car, a North Korean something banished from a factory. “Even though you’re a retard, Mike, you have a gift. A gift for understanding all the ways people feel like crap.”
Woo-jin wanted to tell Sally about the dead body but knew she’d only nod and let the horror of it slide off the protective surface of her own woes. He found her tragic this way, stewing in the nasty things that happened to her immediate family but incapable of feeling anyone else’s pain. Sally’s eyes were glossed over almost like she was sleepwalking, maybe to prepare for her commute. But then Woo-jin understood she was looking over his shoulder at the construction rising behind them into the night.
“Doesn’t it blow your mind,” she said, “that of all the places they could have picked to rebuild New York City they picked Puget Sound?”
That night Woo-jin passed again through the grass and trash near Boeing Field. The chopper, corpse, cops, etc. had of course disappeared. The sky reeked of jet fuel. He found the big dead machine and the spot where the dead girl had been, now a dead-grass outline, a snow angel without snow. The ennui attack came fresh and out of nowhere, so fast he didn’t have time to slip in his mouth guard. Woo-jin crumpled as overhead a cargo plane came ripping down with a belly full of parcels. The air took on the appearance of a multitude of rippling threads. He was on the ground, nose bleeding, jaw clenched, jerking his torso. He spotted a Coors can through the slit of one eye and there flooded a choking series of sadnesses for its crumpled and abandoned form. An unloved, forgotten object hoping only for swift disintegration to its original elements. Wait a minute, he was feeling sorry for a beer can? The ennui attacks used to feel like they were at least showing him something; this one was like riding the tip of a thrashing bullwhip. Here then came the hallucination: a night world seen through the thermal ripples of a campfire. No longer in the soggy bosom of the Pacific Northwest, he was surrounded by desert, atop a mesa of sorts. Blood rode the breaths out of his nostrils as his twitching self in the field receded behind a curtain of perception. He peered more fully into this seizure dream and saw the campfire ringed with carefully placed objects—a refrigerator, a tire, three stuffed animals, a pile of books, a full-length mirror. He crawled toward the latter, which was tilted up to reflect trillions of deceased stars back into the cosmos. An unforgiving wind ravaged the mesa, stretching the flames like curls of taffy. His hands, cracked and covered in layers of dirt and dust, clawed across the rocks. When at last he pulled the mirror down he found it a window into the face of an impossibly old man, toothless, skin beset by sores, lips peeling, eyes cloudy and almost blind. A gust of wind came across the mesa again and seemed to push Woo-jin back into his own body, convulsing on the ground outside Boeing Field. He smelled shit. Before he passed out he reached over and touched the beer can and drew it to his chest as if he were comforting an abandoned kitten.
Noon. Consciousness and a punishing sun. Woo-jin coughed and spit blood and snot. Was it—gawd, he’d bitten his tongue. A small charter plane rattled across his vision, departing and entering peripheries. He made it up on one elbow. An ant crawled up a nearby stalk of grass and this occupied Woo-jin’s attention for several minutes. His body unpersuasively argued against gravity. He rubbed his eyes and turned around.
There was the dead girl again, lying in the grass exactly as he’d found her the first time. Woo-jin nodded and sat on the big machine.
“This isn’t real,” he said. “I’m just remembering you.” He tossed his Coors can at the body, striking it in the chest. Maybe if he looked away then looked back, she would disappear. Didn’t happen. “Oh well,” he said.
Woo-jin headed homeward, stinking, bloody, incapable of walking a straight line. Semi trucks blasted past, inches away, on the road. One step to the right and he could’ve put an end to this BS. But he wanted something to eat; the cafe smells of Georgetown tormented him. A couple tourists veered out of his way as he passed them on the sidewalk and in the window of a music store that only sold vinyl he witnessed this haggard, face-fucked-up vision that he thought must be a Halloween mask.
Woo-jin heard the helicopter as he approached his home but couldn’t formulate the thought that it might have anything to do with him. This one wasn’t a cop ’copter. It was a big lifter, like the kind they used for construction on New York Alki. It hovered over the spot of land where the trailer stood, with cables attached to the mobile home’s four corners and a man in a helmet and flight suit standing on the roof. This guy gave a thumbs-up and slowly the trailer creaked and broke free from its moorings.
“Patsy!” Woo-jin cried. He saw parts of her through the various windows, fleshy mounds of arm or back, it was hard to tell. Her face appeared in the window above the kitchen sink. She was not happy.
“You never came back to feed me!” Patsy yelled. “What the Jesus were you doing all night?”
“Patsy, where are they taking you?”
The helicopter rose, the cables strained. Woo-jin sprinted, leaped, and grabbed a dangling portion of the porch.
“You left me to starve to death!” Patsy yelled, her face red, popping out cartoon stress droplets.
Flight suit guy bent down and hollered, “You’re gonna want to let go, son! We’re only going up from here!”
“Where are you taking my sister?” Woo-jin yelled as the two-by-four he had been holding on to groaned with slippy nails and he tumbled ten or so feet to the ground. A flower pot with a dead flower in it thunked him on the head, inducing a swirl of stars and chirping birds. Flight suit guy and Patsy both yelled at him, maybe revealing Patsy’s destination, but over the chopper’s blades and head bonk confusion there was no hearing for Woo-jin. In a great whirl of dust he shut his eyes tight and did his best to cover his mouth. The helicopter headed east, toward the Cascades, trailing the trailer from which Patsy did her best to wave good-bye.
“I shouldn’t have eaten her hamburger,” said Woo-jin. He lay for some time in the dirt, wondering when he’d need to head back to Il Italian Joint for another round of dishwashing. After a time he came to feel he was being watched. Sounded like wind chimes. He opened an eye. Standing nearby was the man from the neighborhood who demanded to be addressed as the Ambassador. None who knew his real name felt compelled to share it. He was just the Ambassador, nearly seven feet tall, hair in tight dreads, wearing the primary colors of an African wardrobe, big dangly cubist earrings, and a fat ring on every finger. His scepter was crafted from a toilet brush duct-taped to
