Blueprints of the afterl.., p.2
Blueprints of the Afterlife, page 2
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 shag 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 passed 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 glasses and frizzed hair, wearing a brown artificial-fiber pantsuit, encumbered by a gaudy purse overflowing with notes, nicotine gum, and half-drunk bottles of water. Her assistants, 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 sturdy 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 title 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 flashing 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 class, 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 assistants orbited 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 finishing 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. Nobody 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 carcass, some Pabst Blue Ribbon, celery, a jar of Tom & Jerry’s hot-buttered-rum mix, fake sausage oddly enough made out of meat, one dead banana, ketchup, muffins, a lone pizza roll, and what Woo-jin was really looking for, peanut butter 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 butter, 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 butter 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 buttery 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-shell 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 butter 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 grasses, 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 butter 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 wishing to be called upon to speak.
“Who the hell’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 glass of milk!”
“I’ve got some milk in the bird,” the pilot said, and quickly located some two-percent and a glass, which he filled with a steady hand. The glass 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 refreshing glass 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 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 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.
