the corners, eroded by sandy wind. He kicked it aside and looked at the book beneath it. He read the title once and read it again.
Funny there’d be a book by another Woo-jin Kan. He picked it up and turned it over and looked at the picture of the author, a guy who looked kind of like himself but older, spiky hair gray-flecked, slightly smiling, a peaceful expression. He looked like the kind of guy who had his shit together, clue number one that this was a different Woo-jin.
He turned the book back over and opened it to the first page.
Dear Woo-jin,
This is your future brain sending a message to your past brain. For serious. Here’s what you have to do to get Patsy back. You have to write this book you’re now holding. It’s one of the only books the Last Dude has to read, so make it really good. He needs to read your book so that he can make the messages about why we got extinct. He’s writing them out in the rocks down there in the desert. You have to quit your dishwashing job and write this book. What’s the book supposed to be about? Who knows, you haven’t written it yet, but at least you have a title ha ha ha.
You think I’m joking? Since I’m your future brain I know what’s about to happen to you. You’re going to find that dead girl again. What I say is true and you really have to follow these directions. Seriously, bro.
P.S.: For serious. You have to quit Il Italian Joint and become a full-time writer.
As Woo-jin’s eyes turned from the page to the sky, his mind got sucked back through some sorta tube, flailing, a squeal of astral velocity, as if he were recoiling from the strange fact of reading something yet to be. His head went smack against the ground as the day began anew in Georgetown, Seattle. There was the women’s hosiery advertisement again, now drained of emotional oomph. Woo-jin’s tracksuit was filthy. He stood, twisting the kinks from his joints, mouth painfully dry, hair flat on one side of his head and cantilevered in perpendicular spikes on the other and sort of fuzzed-up on top. He stepped over the cinder block where the door used to be and shuffled in a direction that seemed to have been chosen for him. His legs snapped back and forth and walked him through a playground nestled between an off-ramp and some train tracks. A cargo plane scraped the wind.
Woo-jin spoke a sentence through streams of spittle. “I want to figure out what’s going on here.” Speaking aloud surprised him. Like a thought had escaped his brain through a hole in a fence, scampering out into the open where ears could pick it up. If he had a celestial head like the Ambassador, that certainly would have been convenient. He would just ask his celestial head, “Hey, fill me in on what the deal is with the dead girl and this dusty place with the campfire with the refrigerator, books, stuffed animals, and a mirror. Oh, and the tire. And Patsy being yanked up into the sky. And my future brain, who says I’m supposed to be an author.” His celestial head—he imagined him as a gap-toothed black man with an afro—would say, “Thanks for asking. Here’s exactly what those things mean, my brother,” and proceed to untangle the knot in Woo-jin’s brain that seemed only to grow tighter the more he picked at it.
Now beyond the playground and its ghost children frolicking on dirty equipment, Woo-jin came to a concentration of warehouses, inside of which were squirts and clanks and whatnot, noises supposedly connected to purposes. Coming to the corner of 12th and Vale he found the Ambassador sitting on a milk crate with his toilet brush scepter.
Woo-jin said, “You ever heard of a book called
“I don’t have time for books like that when I’m always consuming economics and political science texts,” said the Ambassador. “Unless this love book of yours is an economics book. In that case, yes, yes, I’ve most definitely read it.”
“Maybe it is about economics.”
“I thought you said you wrote it.”
“Another Woo-jin Kan wrote it. Or maybe it isn’t a real book at all.”
“In that case,” said the Ambassador, “you might try getting it published.”
“That’s a really good idea.”
Was it afternoon already? Looked like it. Soon it would be time for work again, the nightly river of flatware and crockery. A metro bus pulled up smelling of french fries, biodiesel. The Ambassador gently touched Woo-jin’s shoulder with his toilet brush scepter and said, “Someday soon you’ll witness the most epic peace talks in human history,” then boarded the bus and asked the driver if it stopped near Rite Aid.
Woo-jin walked to the lot just north of Boeing Field where the body had appeared and appeared again. His legs carried him beyond the field, through South Park and up the road to Il Italian Joint. When he came to the back entrance he found piles of dishes literally spilling out the doorway into the parking lot. Thousands of them, encrusted from lunch rush. At first he stepped over them but the closer he got to the kitchen the harder it became to not break anything. He quickly found that the best way to navigate the dishes was to get prone and sort of swim through them. In the kitchen, the dishes reached a little higher than head level. With a modified breaststroke Woo- jin was able to keep his head above the line and edge closer to where the wash station was supposed to be.
“Bahn Kan? Ben O’Winn? Pontoon?” he called. “Sandford?”
Apart from some indeterminate hydraulic hissing, the kitchen was empty of noise. Sandford Deane’s head popped up beside him from under a platter, wearing a colander for a hat.
“Thank God you’re here, Woo-jin. Pontoon, Bahn Kan, and Ben O’Winn didn’t show up. It’s up to you to turn this place around,” Sandford said, wiping a soggy crust of bread off his forehead. “I even got you some diamond- encrusted
Woo-jin paddled over to the Hobart and got down to business. As he shoved dishes through the machine the dish level slowly began to drop. Midway through his shift the dishes were only up to his calves. Tirelessly, he converted dirty dishes into clean ones, an act of prestidigitation as much as sanitization. Dinner rush came and went and by the end of the night the wash station was empty. Woo-jin dunked his apron into the laundry and grabbed his card to punch out. Sandford clapped him on the back, congratulating him on another evening for the record books.
“Thanks, Sandford. But I won’t be back tomorrow. I’m quitting right now.”
Woo-jin’s boss looked aghast. “But you’re the best dishwasher in Seattle. In the world, even. What will you do instead?”
“I’m going to write a book,” said Woo-jin. “A book about how to love people.”
Sandford shook his head and retrieved the gold medal from the Restaurant and Hotel Management Olympics then solemnly placed it around Woo-jin’s neck. It looked good with the tracksuit even though the tracksuit looked like shit. Woo-jin stood a moment imagining a national anthem, not the new one, but the old one, the one with the terrorists getting castrated in front of their weeping children. How many hours had he spent in this kitchen, blasting caked-on food off porcelain surfaces? It had been his first and only job, started almost two-thirds of his life ago. He imagined a montage to go along with the national anthem, a series of slow-motion shots of him scouring pots and scraping baking sheets, drinking soda, punching his time card. All those good times seemed a prelude to this, the decision to write a book, which apparently he was going to have to figure out how to do. On the way out past the Dumpsters, Sally the waitress hugged him and said, “Good luck, Mike. We’ll say we knew you when.”
Woo-jin had no idea what she was talking about but he didn’t let on. He walked into the backdrop of New York Alki rising amid northwestern cedars, helicopters swooping and jets crisscrossing the clouds, past trembling warehouses, across the sludgy Duwamish, into the only neighborhood he had ever loved, Georgetown, coming to the field where he had twice discovered a girl’s body. He was going to write a book! He almost skipped at the thought.
