City of Ash and Red Read online

  He stepped back into the forest. Whether resigned or simply too angry to argue with him, his wife followed.

  They had not gone far when he realized that this dense, dark forest filled with towering trees that blocked out the sky should have been called a jungle. The trees were as tightly packed as the air itself, and outnumbering the trees were the monkeys hopping from branch to branch and harassing who or whatever wandered in. There wasn’t a single other soul in sight. The guide had followed the man’s request exactly and brought them to a quiet, secluded spot. Later, after they’d made it out of the forest, he realized that the monkeys were the same species as those he had seen in zoos back home, but in the moment he could not properly make out the shapes of the countless bodies that confronted him and his wife as they made their way to the temple.

  The temple sat at the center of the forest, which was shaped like a deep U; there was no way to get from end to end without passing the temple. Other than the path, a mere line of trampled grass, everything else was covered in tall trees and dense undergrowth. The heavy shade of the tangled trees, the calling of unseen birds that filled the air, the queer screeching of monkeys that immediately followed as if in response to the birdcall, the eerie sound of wind rattling the leaves, and the cold, damp air wafting up from the ground made their teeth chatter.

  “Well, I guess we know their god is male. Why else would they build a temple somewhere this dark and wet? Am I right?”

  He only made the joke as an excuse to get them talking, but his wife strode on ahead and didn’t respond. She usually scoffed at his failed jokes. In the silence that followed, he sensed that, since entering this dark forest that could care less about them, he and his wife had been slowly leaving the world in which their lives overlapped. The feeling made him want to pull his wife, who was now several paces ahead of him, back by his side and keep her there, but he never got the chance. She screamed. A black object had wrapped itself around her face. He ran to her, but the object suddenly vanished, as if nothing more than a shadow. His wife’s sunglasses had vanished with it. A monkey. Terrified, his wife clung to his side. She clutched his forearm, but he could tell it held no more meaning than an elderly person leaning on a cane. Still, he knew he would not soon forget the heat flowing from his wife’s hand to his arm.

  That was the beginning. Their path to the temple was a progression of lost objects. The next monkey snatched his wife’s hat. That too happened in the blink of an eye. The man chased after the monkey to try to retrieve the hat. He spotted one or two other people in the distance, but they were locals, and it wasn’t clear whether they were just visiting or actually lived in the forest. They watched as he chased after the monkey, their faces suggesting that this was something they saw all the time and yet found as entertaining as ever. They looked serene, as if they had nothing the monkeys could take from them, or perhaps nothing left to be taken.

  The man gave up on chasing the animal down. It had scrambled up a tall tree and disappeared into the forest. He could have followed it into the trees, but then he would have stumbled across an entire troop or gotten lost in the dense, shady woods.

  As he was walking back to his wife, panting and trying to catch his breath, two monkeys jumped him at the same time. He threw his arms out to the side, breathing in the foul smell, the stink of urine, and something else that reminded him of wet grass coming off of the monkey wrapped around his face. He managed to pull them off of him, but his hat and sunglasses were now gone, and he had several scratches, both deep and shallow.

  He immediately regretted the decision to come there and tried to turn around. But the way back was so dark and thick with trees that he and his wife could not locate the entrance. They had no choice but to keep going until they reached the temple. They walked and walked, but there were only more trees and no temple in sight. The path seemed to lead only to deeper jungle. The farther they went, the more monkeys they encountered, and each time, they lost another of their belongings. Sometimes the monkeys emerged only to tease and anger them: one would abruptly drop from a branch right in front to scare them, or burst out of the forest and grab his wife’s ankle to make her fall, or smack the back of the man’s head with its tail and run off again into the trees, too fast to be caught.

  Just as the round roof of the temple was coming into view among the treetops and they were breathing a sigh of relief, two more monkeys attacked. They bit his arms, clawed at his eyes, and let out a bloodcurdling shriek as they took the black bag he had been clutching to his chest as if it were his heart itself. The bag contained his passport and wallet. He had pretended not to hear his wife when she had urged him to leave them in the hotel safe. Lately, the more right she was, the less he listened. Despite his frantic efforts, the two monkeys would not leave him alone. His bag was quickly stolen. He ran after the monkey with his bag around its neck and grabbed its long tail as it was about to leap into a tree. He pulled hard and sank his teeth into the wiry fur. It felt like an enormous caterpillar squirming inside his mouth. He clenched his jaw as hard as he could, his eyes shut tight, teeth bearing down through the tough, foul-smelling skin and tender bones. A crunching sound pealed inside his head. He thought he would never forget that sound for as long as he lived. The feel of those wiry hairs, the crumbling of bone, the sticky saliva trailing from his open mouth. He would not forget those things.

  The monkey’s hair stood on end and it let out a piercing scream. He held it down with one arm and fumbled with the other until his hand fell on a long, heavy fallen branch. He jabbed the tip of the branch at the monkey’s back, but it glanced off. Nothing was ever easy. Taking a firmer grip on the tail, he stabbed the monkey over and over with the branch as it screamed and struggled to free itself. Some of the blows landed on the monkey while others struck his own forearm that held the monkey in place, and some of the blows hit nothing at all. When the stick missed the monkey and pierced his thigh instead, he thought he might drop dead from the pain, but he didn’t care. He would kill himself if that was what it took to kill the monkey. Screams—were they his wife’s screams as she finally caught up to him? the monkey’s screams? his own?—slipped under and over the dark tangle of branches overhead and echoed deep into the forest.

  He did not let go until the animal lay slumped and weakened. But the moment he released his grip, the monkey that had seemed as good as dead suddenly sprang up and leapt into the trees without a look back. He watched as its red bottom disappeared among the branches. His body ached. His forearm and thigh were throbbing. He wasn’t sure, but he might have even broken a bone. A thorn on the branch must have opened a vein, because the wound in his thigh bled profusely and soaked his pant leg. Fat drops of rain began to splatter down from the dark sky, as if to scold him.

  His bag was gone, snatched up by the other monkey while he was busy fighting. Only after he had lost everything did he realize that what he had fought so desperately to save amounted to nothing. Other than his wife, he didn’t want anything badly enough to resort to biting a monkey’s tail and stabbing himself in the arm and thigh.

  He got angry at her because of that. He got angry because, here he was, covered in blood, and still he knew he could not keep her. Just as he had failed to keep his passport and wallet, he was incapable of keeping her no matter how great the wounds he suffered. And not only that, all of this had been his choice alone. What if his wife were the one who had insisted they go to the temple? What if she had told him to chase down a thieving monkey to get her money and passport back? And what if she had persuaded him to stab the monkey over and over? Then he would not have had to take up that branch and attack the monkey until he was covered in his own blood with no clue as to what he was trying to hold on to.

  On their way out of the forest, the monkeys left them alone since they had nothing left to take, and so he unleashed his fury on his wife instead. His wife took his baseless accusations in silence, as if he were talking about someone else, and her silence made him even angrier. He had to clamp
down hard on the urge to beat her. If he hadn’t injured his arm, if he could have lifted his arm or used it at all, he might not have been able to hold back.

  Later, when he recalled the events at the temple, he felt shocked at his own unfamiliar self. Grabbing a tree branch, which he’d never before regarded as a weapon, to stab a monkey to death, and gladly enduring his own injuries in the process? Confessing his paranoid suspicions and accusing his wife of being a two-timing whore just to soothe his own anger, and disparaging her sexually by unleashing bad words he hadn’t used since he was a teenager? Knowing he would have hit her if he’d had any strength left? It all kept him feeling ashamed of himself for a long time after.

  When they returned from the temple, his wife bought bandages and medicine and helped patch him up, but the next morning she took her passport from the hotel safe and left for home. Their itinerary complete, the guide left as well to lead another group of tourists. The man had to go to the hospital on his own without knowing a single word of the language, get his passport reissued from the embassy, and wait for his wife to wire him money for the rest of his travel expenses, hating himself all the while.

  After that trip, every time anger rose up in him, he pictured spidery limbs wrapped around his face, monkeys hanging brazenly from his body and blacking out his vision, giving off their odorous funk. Whenever he pictured it, his heart shivered like it was shrinking inside his chest and his head ached from the effort to bear the tremors, but what frightened him was not those horrible, marauding monkeys but rather the choices he had made when his back was to the wall.

  * * *

  He struggled to lift his eyelids, to try to dislodge the monkey stuck to his face. He was in a dark place filled with the shadows of trees. He was still there, still making his way through a forest of wild monkeys bent on looting him of everything he had. One of the monkeys, giving off a stink so vile that his stomach threatened to unload itself, slapped his right cheek, then his left. His eyes sprang open. He could not lose any more to them. If there was one good thing, it was that no matter how deep this forest was or how dark or how many thieving animals hid in its shadows, it would have to end eventually. And he knew when it would end. It would end when he had nothing more to lose. The monkey that had slapped him fell on its bottom in surprise. It grunted with displeasure and spat on the ground. Slowly the forest evaporated and a black ceiling appeared. The long-haired monkey looked him over. It grasped his wrist and lifted it into the air. The rest of his arm followed weakly, like a puppet dangling from strings, and fell back to the ground with a thump.

  The monkey said something, but the man caught only one word: “still.” He wasn’t sure if that meant he was still alive, or still not dead. Coming and going before his addled eyes were the long, salt-and-pepper hair and scraggly, overgrown beard of an old man who looked and smelled as foul as a monkey.

  As he lay there like a corpse, the old man turned him side to side to strip off his shirt. The shirt was not his to begin with, but it had fit the man perfectly and had the name MOL stitched on the front. It was much too large for the scrawny old man, but the old man didn’t care.

  The man remembered the knife in his pocket and gently groped the side of his pants. As he did so, he realized that his hand, the pants, his shoes, and his hair were soaked. He recalled floundering in midair before being tossed into cold water. The only source of running water near the park was the sewer tunnel that led to the river around the island. They must have resorted to that, since the fire would have burned out by then. They would not have wanted him coming to and rushing back to the park. His body ached in several places, as if he had hit something on the way down. Luckily, he still had the knife. He had a hunch that, though this knife had done nothing for him so far and he hoped it never would, it would eventually be the only thing that kept him safe. The moment would come in which his survival would depend on that single, blunt knife.

  He tried to sit up but bumped his head hard against a low ceiling. He didn’t know what it was at first and thought someone was shoving him back down. He thought about getting to his knees to beg his captor to spare his life, but then the old man spoke.

  “Everyone does that at first. After a few days, your head will remember. It won’t remember not to hit the ceiling, but it won’t hurt as much.”

  The man leaned back and looked around. An intricate tangle of pipes of various sizes ran overhead. The pillars and ceiling were corroded, the concrete flaking and pitted, and the walls were damp with moss and looked slippery. Water leaking down from the ceiling ended in mud puddles. A step away from where he reclined, a river of sewage, black as petroleum, slipped past.

  The old man put on the damp yellow shirt and shuffled on his knees farther into the shadows. The man sat forward, intending to follow him, but realized as he did so that he was injured. His right leg. He had hit it hard on something. He limped after the old man. The old man flinched at the sound of the leg dragging on the ground and paused. The old man probably thought he wanted his shirt back. To show the old man he meant no harm, he put on the shirt the old man had discarded. It was soiled and stinking and worn through in places, but he did not care.

  When the old man saw that the man had no intention of stealing his shirt back, he moved slowly over to a spot beneath a large pipe. The sound of some enormous machinery in motion was coming from somewhere, but it was relatively warm and the smell there wasn’t as bad. He plopped down next to the old man, who immediately began to snore. For all he knew, the old man might have been faking sleep in order to avoid talking to him.

  The drip-drip of water was constant, and he could hear a screeching sound coming from somewhere deep inside the pipes, but the noise soon died down and felt no more real than a distant echo. The dense funk of rot was everywhere, but that too was not as bad as the pungent smell of the fumigants aboveground that had burned his nose.

  Other than the intermittent stabs of pain in his leg, the night passed more or less comfortably. He could think of it as comfortable, despite lying in a sewer tunnel with an injured leg, because all cities had large sewer tunnels like this one, and as long as he was down there, he did not have to worry about being driven out. He could stay down there, free as he pleased, until his leg got better. As he realized the truth of this, he breathed easy, caught up in the pleasure of his hard-won freedom and believing that he would not be cast down into darkness a second time. But at the same time, he was forced to taste his own pessimism and humiliation for feeling so relieved at the thought that he had escaped violence and assault.

  As the man sat and stared at the sewage flowing past, it occurred to him that he would probably have to enter those dark waters again, the same way he had drifted here from the park. The day might come when he would have to dip his body beneath its dark surface and escape to the opposite shore, or a moment arise in which he would be forced to drink that water to survive. Of course, that was not the case right now. But the moment was coming.

  He wasn’t worried. The future was far too distant a thing to worry about now, and the present was filled with survival. All he could afford to think about was the past. The future was unknowably vast and colossal and so very, very far away. The only thing he knew for sure about it was that it was a time that had not yet come. As he gazed into that water as black as petroleum, he understood that time never quite did what it was supposed to. Time sometimes got bogged down in the mud and sometimes mixed with raw sewage and slid sluggishly past. Which meant the future might never arrive at all.

  Like an old man on his deathbed brooding over the days and hours of time gone by, he gazed into the black wastewater, preoccupied with conjuring up the past. The past that filled his head was all tackiness and triviality. Things that, at the moment of their happening, he would never have pegged for one day causing him to shudder with longing. A Chopin sonata that his ex-wife once played for him at the piano school on the last night of the year after all the students had gone home, the piano so out of tune that ever
y note sounded like it was on the verge of tears. The motel where they’d had sex for the first time, and the blue-winged fan hanging from the ceiling that did nothing to cool their sweat. A Ferris wheel on the beach that creaked and swayed as they rode it, long after the season had ended. The front tooth he broke as a child when he tripped while running after his friends, and the sound of his mother’s voice when she threw the tooth onto the roof of the house and sang for the birds to carry it off. As he looked up at the shafts of dusty light filtering through the edges of a manhole, he remembered sitting on a hardwood floor as the sunlight cast long shadows and his wife giggled. She was painting his toenails. They were too thick for him to feel those slow brushstrokes, but his wife’s long hair had brushed the tops of his feet and tickled his skin each time she dipped her head. He later forgot all about his polished toes until he went to a sauna with the other men from his department and was mortified when they discovered it.

  Now, in what felt like an eternity later, it all made him want to cry: The thought of that blue-winged fan that kept him wanting to embrace his wife despite how hot and close the room was. The sonata whose shivery notes delighted him each time his wife pressed another key. The broken tooth tossed onto the roof and carried away, though whether by a bird or a rat he had no idea. His red toenails. Not because he regretted having lived a life so basic and unappealing, but because he was cut off from those times, those hours spent in a reality filled with the trite and trivial. For all he knew, he would be forever distanced from them. This despair at knowing he would never make his way back weighed heavily on him. And he grew unhappy at the thought that he might never again run his fingers along the fine grain of ordinary everyday life.

  Things that hid themselves in the dark of night were revealed in the hazy light seeping in from above. When that happened, the man saw bodies moving quietly, giving off a faint glow. At first glance he thought they were rats, but they were not. They were people. They were bigger than sewer rats but no better. They, too, moved through dark, dirty places as if right at home there. The sewer was as full of people as it was of rats. Most had been there since before the epidemic began. Just as most of the people he’d met in the park had already been homeless.