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| ISBN-13: | 9780802194749 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Sales rank: | 420,997 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
CHAPTER 1
WOO-JIN
The world was full of precious garbage. Woo-jin passed through it on his way home from work, scanning the field at the end of the runway for aluminum cans, bits of copper wire, rare earth elements scavenged from junked computers. He found a beer box, but whoever'd left it hadn't put the empties back in their cardboard cubicles. He kicked the box and swung a plastic bag of rescued leftovers from his finger. As a professional dishwasher he only rescued food from the trash when he was certain none of his coworkers would catch him. If they spotted the clamshell box on top of the Hobart washer they'd think it was an order somebody never picked up from the takeout window, and if they happened to see that the burger inside had a bite out of it, they'd think it was Woo-jin who had bitten the bite rather than it being a burger that had already had a bite taken out of it. He'd scraped this particular burger out of a plastic basket along with congealed gravy fries. Patsy, his foster sister, was going to want that burger, Woo-jin knew. He could either eat the burger and gravy fries now, in the field, and go home stuffed but not have to share with Patsy, or he could show up with the food and have Patsy yell at him about who needed the three-quarters of a burger the most. Patsy was always talking at him about how lucky he was with his job because of all the free food. If he showed up empty-handed she accused him of not bringing food home on purpose. The only times she was really grateful was when he'd bring home a whole pie. Usually the pie was apple, or rather rhubarb. Sometimes, when he had to decide between taking something home that both he and Patsy liked or something that only he liked, he went with what only he liked so he didn't have to share. And if he didn't bring anything home he had to start right in and cook something for her anyway because usually she forgot to eat and was in a mood and yelled at him like he was a dick. Even though it was she who was growing penises out of her tits.
A UPS plane came down low like an earthquake riveted to the sky.
Glory hallelujah here was a can of Bud Light! He shook the remaining pissdroplets of beer out of it and slipped it into another white plastic bag, the one that wasn't holding the food.
Did he even like his foster sister? Patsy? He never really asked himself that question, considering her as unremarkable as the clothes he schlupped to his body or the route he walked to work. Patsy simply was. What was she anyway? What did she do? While he was at work? It was like she was part house, part TV, and part something to give the plumbing to do, a way to collect money from the government in exchange for growing drugs and tissues in her plus-sized body. She was a pharmer. How it worked was this — she'd eaten herself to a size that meant she couldn't move too good, and not moving too good meant one time she hurt herself in a bad fall and permanently messed up her back, and because her back was messed up she couldn't get a regular job, and because she couldn't get a regular job she was perfect for the job of pharming, which involved lying in bed most hours and watching inspirational videos. So she got money every month that let her eat enough to stay as plus-sized as she was and not have to get a job that asked her to move around, not like Woo-jin's where the word hustle came routinely sputtering from the lips of the manager. As in hustle you bastards, we got the whole Elks Lodge to feed. Patsy plugged her face with food and her eyes with TV. She wobbled with anger if Woojin didn't feed her the food they got from the money from the checks and the extra trash-saved food items from the restaurant where Woo-jin put in double shifts to pay for her to eat.
Woo-jin kicked a car muffler that was, for some reason, there. A plane took off, looked like a private jet, blowing his hair all over the place as it passed overhead.
Woo-jin didn't feel particularly hungry. If he saved the three-quarters of a burger for later, Patsy would definitely want some and might even try to eat the whole thing. If he ate it now he'd at least get it to himself but then might get really hungry later and have something not as cool to eat, like ramen noodles with no flavor packet (Patsy liked to double up on the flavor packets, so by the end of the month the only ramens left — the ones she'd taken the extra flavor packet from — tasted like packing material). There was also the issue of the fries to deal with. Even fifteen minutes after they're out of the deep fryer they start making the eater depressed on account of the coldness. Once the fat starts to congeal, well, forget you ever lived, pal. So it was because of the threat of congealing fries and the possibility he'd never get to eat the whole three-quarters of a burger that Woo-jin popped open the clamshell container and sat on a piece of airplane equipment. It was like a big refrigerator lying on its side, painted green with some sticky-outy parts.
Far down the tarmac a two-seater rose wobbling into the sky. The sky was looking purply and airbrushed like a druggie band album cover. Patsy knew a lot about druggie bands and their secret messages. She'd showed him some of the album covers in books she got at Good News Bookstore. What kind of good news was that supposed to be? News that guys in studded codpieces were controlling his mind to make him hail Satan and abuse cocaine like a goatfucker?
Woo-jin squirted ketchup from a packet he'd stashed in his jacket. He'd only taken one because technically it was stealing, so he had to make it go a long way. No fry could get more than a droplet of ketchup. It was a rationing decision. It bothered him that he'd dishonestly taken the packet, but what was he going to do? Eat congealed fries without the ketchup, like a mentally ill person? No thanks, guys. When the fries and burger were gone he put the clamshell back in its white plastic bag and proudly declared silently that he was not a litterer. In fact, he was the opposite of a litterer. Remembering the reason he'd taken a detour through this field in the first place, he looked around to see if there were maybe any redeemable cans lying around. When he looked behind the big metal piece of forgotten machinery he saw the dead girl.
Woo-jin was first all like There go the bugs — oh no there go the bugs! because three guesses as to what was crawling on the girl's face. She was an Asianish-looking human wearing a dirty white button-up fancy-style shirt, black pants, and one black leather boot with the other foot just bare, hanging out there. Woo-jin's three-quarters of a burger and fries rose up through his trunk and horizontally departed his face. He fell to his knees on the opposite side of the refrigerator-like machine and wheezed, then slowly rose and looked at the dead girl again, thinking, Please no bugs this time, but again there were the bugs! Bugs all over!
Woo-jin stumbled west toward the frontage road feeling — what's the best word — probably bad. Not because some girl was dead with earwig accompaniment, but because now there'd be complex questions someone was going to ask him. Most likely a cop. He didn't want to talk to any of those social people. He'd grown up talking to social people, sitting in waiting areas with complimentary brochures with titles like Suicide's a Huge Bummer for Everyone while the smart smiling lawyers made decisions about him in closed rooms. His ears hurt from coldness, paradoxically throbbing and hot. Patsy would have all sorts of opinions about the dead girl and would probably get him in trouble for not doing something differently. What could he possibly do? He had no phone and couldn't see the benefit of sticking around. He wished he hadn't eaten that burger. No wonder the much-appreciated guest had sent it back.
Woo-jin was twenty-five and Korean. At least in his skin he was; he'd never been to Korea. He lived in the Pacific Northwest. More specifically, he lived in a shithole. The shithole in question was some subsidized housing between the freeway and a construction storage area where backhoes and skid steers and cement trucks and cranes shoved raw material into piles at obscene hours. The trailer looked like it had been shat out of a mansion. When he showed up, shaking in his body at the door, he found Patsy where he'd last seen her, hogging the whole couch in the front room lit by TV, eating melted cookie-dough ice cream out of a gallon bucket with a wooden spoon. How much did she weigh? North of four hundred. She had a pink bow in her thin hair and was missing a front tooth. The TV was showing some action, some lady in tight, butt-complimenting leather pants firing machine pistols with both hands as she exploded backward out a skyscraper window pursued by guys in suits with semiautomatics mouthing the slow-motion words, Tell us where the messiah is or you'll pay with your [bleep]ing life. Though he'd never seen the episode before, Woo-jin recognized this to be Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin, from all her billboards.
"What did you bring, bitch?" Patsy said.
"I brang nothing."
"Then what's in that plastic bag?"
Woo-jin was surprised to find the takeout bag with the empty ex-burger box still inside, dangling from his finger. "It was a burger."
"You ate my burger?"
"It was a bad one. I threw it up."
"You are so so not fair. All you get to do is eat free food and drink free soda while I grow tissues all day."
"I wash dishes, too, you know," Woo-jin said.
"You look like you saw a phantom of the opera."
Woo-jin confronted the kitchen-like area and found a glass that he filled with water. Then, he drank it. "I saw a dead body," he said, and started feeling the ennui. That's the misnomer a caseworker had used for it one time. A hellish onrushing of fanged empathy.
"I need you to lance my boils," Patsy said. Woo-jin slunk back to the living room, meaning he turned around and walked two steps. Patsy sat sweating under three flickering fluorescent tubes, her head small compared to her neck. Bandages covered her left shoulder where they'd last extracted tissues.
"I'm sorry, Patsy. I feel it coming."
"What did you say about a dead body?"
"I said I saw it in a field. It was a girl, a nicely dressed girl. Bugs crawling on her." Woo-jin picked his mouth guard out of his shirt pocket and slipped it between his teeth. He tried not to look at Patsy's thick and sweating face because that would make it worse, but he couldn't help it and now he started thinking about how mean he had been to eat her burger. How selfish. This meant it was building, the flying, multitentacled, and fire-breathing ennui attack. He took off his shoes, making it as far as shoe #1, aka the left one.
On TV Stella Artaud landed on the moon roof of a limo, climbed inside, and received a drink from Dr. Uri Borden, as played by Neethan F. Jordan. Who. Woulda. Thought.
"My boils!" Patsy said. "I need my boils lanced before my caseworker comes."
Woo-jin pushed back the ennui by turning his thoughts to that old standby, puppies in party hats, and fetched the boil-lancing kit from the bathroom. Actually there was no room separately called the bathroom, only Patsy's room where the toilet was. For convenience. Patsy's walls were decorated with some of the finest unicorn posters in all the land. There was one of a unicorn being ridden by Chewbacca that Woo-jin appreciated. Sometimes while taking a dump he'd wish he could ask Chewbacca for advice. Like: where can I get one of them fly utility belts? Patsy's boil-lancing kit: where was it? Here it was sitting on top of a Harlequin paperback. It looked sorta like a gun. Except instead of shooting slow-motion bullets this gun poked and sucked boils.
Back in the living room Patsy had rotated on the sofa so the ass was up and the panties pulled down to show the butt with the boils on it. No one had ever measured the butt but Woo-jin guessed it to be nine miles wide.
"Hurry and get it over with," Patsy said. "The workers will be here soon and I don't want to get penalized again for hygiene, lack thereof."
"You're talking like a TV person," Woo-jin said, "with the lack thereofs." He pressed the gun to the first boil and squeezed the trigger; the hiss and wheeze of puncture and extraction.
"What was this dead person thing about?" Patsy said.
"This dead person thing was about me sitting there wishing I still had a burger."
"You were such a liar about that burger."
"I was not a liar."
"You'll have to go to the mart later for pork rinds and chipotle ranch. What more about the girl? The dead one."
"She had face bugs. She looked like a nice person. I should call the cops, right?"
"I can't understand you with the mouth guard."
"But I don't wanna eat my tongue." Woo-jin dropped the boil gun and dug his fingers into his chest. Hyperventilating, he fell to his knees then clawed around on the carpet as if underneath it were some fancy-pants answer to his problems. Gravity appeared to be shifting to the left, wanting to suck everything in that direction. Woo-jin crawled against the leftward pull to his hammock. Shivering, sputtering, blinking, he pulled himself into the netting and attempted to unwad the thin gray blanket.
One time on TV there was a show about historic animation guys who made the cartoons way back in the day. They'd draw their pictures on sheets of clear plastic and layer them like a sandwich, making the action go with the background. The ennui was kind of like that, with the world of real shit serving as the background layer, going about its real shit business while on top of it, layer upon layer, were sheets of dread, planes of condensed suffering, a thickening wall between Woo-jin's regular ole self and the black hell of emotions. It was almost worse that he didn't pass out when he had an attack. Instead, he had to watch people looking at him, hopefully someone like Patsy who'd gotten used to these attacks, but sometimes, when the ennui hit in public, some stranger bending down low gawking at him clinging to a newspaper box, or commuters ignoring him as he writhed on the concourse of a bus station, their eyes saying, This freak's on something nasty. Sometimes cops picked him up and were pricks about it until they could prick his finger and get a whole history from the sesame-seed-sized droplet of blood they fed to their vampiric Bionet monitors. Oh. This guy's got an actual condition. He ain't an embodiment. After which they'd maybe toss a blanket at him and make sure he was as far as possible from respectable citizens. And all the while he couldn't make his body move through space like it was supposed to, only vibrate shivering regardless of the temperature.
Now, in the relative safety of his hammock, through his eye slits, he watched Patsy pull up her drawers and mumble curses about burgers. Predictably her suffering was the primary tributary to the ennui. He saw her for the prisoner of her own body that she was, sensed acutely the tragedy of her not understanding her own enslavement. Then deeper. The chorus of shrieks!!! He'd seen in a magazine that one painting by that one guy, Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. The sound generated by that painting was what he was dealing with here. Like wind whistling in your ear, except multiplied, skull-rattling, sourceless. Here's where the mouth guard came in handy. Woo-jin bit down so hard his jaw began to ache. A couple times he'd come out of the ennui unable to open his mouth for over an hour. Now he rode that clattering thrill ride of skeleton bones down, down, down, fingers grinding like machines in the gray blanket, gurning his face around the mouth guard, trying to bring into his mind the calming presence of Chewbacca on that unicorn with his fly utility belt, snot jetting out of his nose, a real winner of an ennui attack here, folks, and then, most horrible of all, he found himself wearing the dead girl's face. He couldn't see it, wouldn't dare seek a mirror, but he trembled, convinced that the face was superimposed on his own, its mucousy underside squirming to find purchase on his own contorted visage.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Blueprints of the Afterlife"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Ryan Boudinot.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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